Tent-Bound

There were 3 of us in the tent. It was big enough, just, but when you have to while away all the livelong day as well as the night, it gets old fast. The weather was crap, it snowed every day, and this was the middle of summer! One day merged into the next. I mean, how long can you stay in your sleeping bag? There were forays outside to pee and to shovel snow off the tent, but the weather rarely lent itself to going for a walk to stretch your legs. This picture was typical – the tent in front was used to store all our gear, while the one in back was where we lived.

Will it ever stop snowing?

After 7 days of this, we called it quits – enough was enough. We buried a huge cache of food and fuel in the snow, then marked it with flagged wands for any who would pass by. It took 3 more days to get down off the mountain and back out to the trailhead. We had given it our best shot, but the foul weather on the mountain had won.

That’s Some Wind!

In the midst of a months’-long journey through South America, I one day found myself in Chilean Patagonia. On a day-trip with a small group of tourists from several countries, our driver had stopped near the Río Paine so we could see the Salto Grande up close. It was incredibly windy – I could safely say that it was the strongest wind I’ve ever experienced, including all of the high mountain storms of my career. Nearby, the wind whipped huge sheets of water off the surface of the river, created waterspouts and even pushed large waves along the surface. As we walked along the path, a mighty gust of wind came out of nowhere and hurled a woman bodily against a tree, cutting up her back and blowing her eyeglasses away (we never found them). We picked her up off the ground, but she was terrified and couldn’t wait to get back into the van. Clouds swirled around the summits, and the view changed by the minute. The power of the Patagonian wind had to be experienced to be believed.

Planning

It can be easy to become infatuated by a climb. Sitting in the comfort of your home, you can study topographic maps and satellite photos; you can read any available write-ups of others who have gone there before. However, the juiciest climbs are the ones nobody has done, or ones for which there’s no available information. In a case like that, you try to picture the details of what you might encounter if you go there. Maps and satellite photos can be very deceiving, though – many are the times I’ve planned the daylights out of a climb by map and photo, only to finally set foot out there and find cliffs I can’t scale, or a canyon I can’t cross. A 40-foot contour interval on the map won’t help you much when it comes to a 30-foot cliff. And no map or photo will show you an impenetrable bushwhack, or a locked gate along an access road you’ve chosen. Some climbs, especially the really big ones, you might ponder for days, weeks, months, or even years. Countless climbs have been planned over idle snowy winters (or idle summers in the case of our low desert heat). It’s nice when it all comes together in the end, though.

Drug Runners

While I was sitting on top of the peak filling out the register I was planning to leave, a sound drifted up to me from the canyon bottom 400 feet below. In the remote desert, the only sounds you might normally hear are birds and the wind, but this was different. There it was again, and I would have sworn it was a human voice. How was that even possible? No climbers ever came here. Even the wildlife refuge folks at their office had never set foot out here – I knew that because they asked me to report back to them with any information I found about a remote water-hole in this area.

I strained to see anything out of the ordinary down below, and then I thought I saw a tiny human figure moving along – it was about 1,500 feet away. There were probably at least two of them, unless he was talking very loudly to himself. What should I do? Shout out and let them know I was here and go down to meet up with them? No, probably not a good idea – chances were pretty good that they were working for one of the Mexican drug cartels. I took this picture with my little digital camera, zoomed in as far as it would go. If you zoom in on your computer and look really carefully, you can actually see 4 men, each with a large box-like bundle on his back.

The 4 smugglers

They were moving very quickly, much faster than I would go. By the time I descended the peak and reached the canyon bottom, they would have a good hour’s head-start on me. Yes, I was going the same direction as they, but there was no chance I’d ever catch them up. Once down, I took my time heading north in the sandy canyon bottom. Can you guess what happened? Not 2 miles later, I walked right into their resting-place beneath a large mesquite tree on the side of the wash. Shit!! There the 4 of them sat in plain view, a hundred feet away. Things were not only about as bad as they could be, but a great deal worse.

Breadbox

If you play the game Twenty Questions, at least if you’re my age or older (I was born in 1947), one of the most obvious questions you might ask is “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” History shows that the origin of this question was in 1953, when Steve Allen asked it on the American game show What’s My Line? Actually, you could ask the question of someone anytime when trying to get an idea of the size of something. Nowadays, nobody has a breadbox, but it was a common kitchen item way back in the day, before bread was filled with preservatives. They could be made of metal or wood.  They were big enough for 2 loaves at most. The average size was about 8 inches high, 9 inches deep, 16 inches wide. My sister doesn’t remember if our mother had one, but I think she did. Believe it or not, you can still buy one online today – check it out.

My First Job

It was the summer of 1958. We lived in a small town, out in the country not too far from Montreal. School was out, I was 11 years old, with nothing but time on my hands. Each morning, the milkman would make his rounds, and with 4 young kids in my family, our house was one of his regular stops. One morning, I met him as he stopped – I asked him if I could take the milk from his truck to our house. This was back in the day when all milk was in glass bottles. He let me. The next day, I met him on our street and asked him if I could do that again, and maybe the neighbor’s house too. Sure, he had no problem with that. Well, things progressed, and before long he asked my mother if I could accompany him on more of his route – he would tell me what bottles would go to each house, and I would deliver them. We just left them outside by the front door.

I guess I turned out to be a good little helper, and he paid me a quarter each day I went with him. That was a lot of money for a kid my age – my weekly allowance was a dime, so a quarter each day was great. For some reason, I tired of this after a week or two and stopped helping him. He must have realized that he had had a good thing going with my help, because one morning shortly thereafter, he rang our doorbell and asked my mother if I could start helping him once again. He said that if I could accompany him on his entire route, he would give me 75 cents each day – yes, you read that correctly, Folks – SEVENTY-FIVE cents! I agreed, and very early each morning, I would walk across the large field across the street from my house to the dairy on the other side and meet him there at his truck. It wasn’t far, maybe a quarter-mile.

Customers could have either pasteurized or homogenized milk, in pint or quart bottles. We also delivered cream, chocolate milk and butter, as well as other things, but mostly milk. Now here was, in my opinion, the best perk of the job. Each day, around lunch-time, our truck would meet up with the bakery truck on the edge of town where the two routes coincided. Everything in both trucks was fair game, so we would chow down on donuts, cakes and other baked goods, and drink milk or chocolate milk (always my choice), as much of anything that we wanted. I’ve always had a sweet tooth, even as a child, so I was in seventh heaven. I think the free lunch meant more to me than the money. Weeks later and the summer ended, and with it my job as milkman’s helper. I still think back fondly on that, my first paying job, the summer I turned eleven.

Found Money

I was ten years old, and one day as I was walking home from school, I found a five-dollar bill in the snow. I was so excited, I ran home and showed my mother. She said it wouldn’t be right to keep it, so she walked me over to the local police station and made me turn it in. She was convinced that the poor soul who had lost it would certainly also show up there and report that they had lost a five-dollar bill. The policeman at the front desk politely took my name and our phone number and said that if nobody claimed it within so many days, I could keep it. Well, do you think I ever got it back? No way. My mother was a staunch Catholic and was probably guilt-ridden over the very idea that some poor soul would go to the police over a lost fiver.

The Star Weekly

Like a lot of boys when they were young, I had a paper route. We lived on an air-force base, and most of my customers lived in base housing. The paper I delivered was called The Star Weekly, which was a weekend supplement to The Toronto Star. Every Friday the bundles would be dropped off at our house, and on Saturday I would make my rounds. The cost was 15 cents, and 5 cents of it was mine to keep. Sometimes a customer was in a generous mood and gave me a quarter and said to keep the change. I collected the money in person every time I delivered the paper. Because I had a hundred customers, I was making five bucks a week, which was pretty outrageous for a 13-year old kid in 1960.

One time the paper had a contest – if you added so many customers to your route, you could win a prize. I was up for the challenge, and won a transistor radio. That was life-changing, and it accompanied me everywhere. My friends were jealous.

Chopper Flight

One summer back in the days when I worked as a geologist, I was flying with our helicopter pilot. We were a couple of thousand feet above the forest and he asked me if I wanted to take the controls for a bit. Sure, you bet, what an opportunity! It had dual controls, so I could use the lever and the pedals – he showed me what to do. Well, after a minute or so, he announced that I had brought the chopper to a complete halt – we were hovering in mid-air and not going anywhere. No harm was done, and I quickly relinquished the controls back to him. So much for my first, and only, lesson in flying a helicopter.