joe suburbs is the post modern sub urban hyper rural anti hero, and vertiginous surrealist

I’m sitting on an airplane. 4 November 2019. One of my least favorite things in the world. I’m flying from San Diego back to Chicago. My father is dying indoors.

A number of years ago, I designed a book my friend Buck Tilton wrote called How to Die Outdoors about all the mishaps that could occur in the wilderness.

I have extensive experience hiking and camping in places where it sometimes feels as if no one has ever been there before. The grim reminder is you can see their cigarette butts in the fire pit and their micro trash pretty much everywhere else.

I just thought of this one. What do they call a mountain wilderness in Switzerland?

A restaurant.

In 2002, I spent 16 days on a solo hike from Maysville to Leadville on the Colorado Trail. Frequently, I was hours and hours and hours into the San Isabel National Forest. I was so far into the San Isabel National Forest that at one point I surprised a parent bear and several cubby bears. This is how it happens. I’m walking along a high mountain mesa, coming around the corner of a meadow where it meets back up with the forest. As I turn the corner and start back up into the forest, I surprise them feeding on the grasses at the edge of the meadow.

This is one of the ways to die outdoors. One minute you’re out hiking in the wilderness and the next, you’re getting eaten by a bear and you’re die.

So, not wanting to die quite yet, I back away as slowly as possible which, if there were a drone over head it would look more like a dead run. Somewhere in there, I trip and fall on my butt. I roll over to get up and there, at the edge of the trail is the detritus of an old Dentyne gum wrapper amid many different boot prints. By the time I get myself back into a standing position – which involves taking off my backpack… …the bears are gone.

Sigh of relief.

And now I have to put my backpack back on. Thanks for nothin’ my father would say.

But that’s how it is in the wilderness.

Without warning, you find yourself in a place where there is no sign of Mankind. At that point, it’s easy to look at the spruce trees, the lodgepole pine, the Aspens, the meadow grasses, the underlying fauna, the mountains in the distance, chalk cliffs in fact and it’s easy to think, “Yep. I’m the first person ever to come this way.” But then, a bevy of boot prints and a Dentyne wrapper.

Everybody goes into the wilderness for their own reasons, but there’s one thing about going out into the wilderness that you have to be aware of before you go trying to conquer your first 14-er. And that is, it’s the wilderness; you could die. 150 different ways or more. We’ll talk more about conquering 14-ers later on. That’s a whole different story.

But dying outdoors… It’s not like you’re going to die because you’re around trees and impossibly blue skies and chalk cliffs and fresh air. The most likely cause of death outdoors is how long it’s going to take you to get to medical care.

Several years ago, I was hiking east of Lake City, Colorado. So here’s the order of events. Number one, we drive west through Gunnison, Colorado on highway #50. Then we turn south. Several hours later we get to the motor camp in Lake City. So we’re already hundreds of miles into the mountains. Three hundred some miles southwest of Denver if that helps geographically.

Number two. We drive up the 4-wheel drive roads to what they call a trailhead. A trailhead is basically a parking lot with a bathroom in the wilderness. So now we’re another hour further in. Then we start the hike. When you start walking from a trailhead in the wilderness; now it’s called, ‘the hike.’

Later, you’ll tell stories about, ‘the hike.’

When you start the hike from a trailhead in Colorado there’s a one hundred percent chance you’re going upwards. And by upwards, I mean oh-my-god-this-is-so-steep upwards. The word I would use to describe hiking from a trailhead in southwest Colorado is, relentless. You have to be able to hike upwards because the trail is relentless. Up. Up. And then, up some more until you come to a place where it’s up, up, and up on last push to the saddle. Well talk about the saddle later on when we talk about 14-ers.

Where we are now is mountain goat territory. That’s how far away you are from civilization. You’re in mountain goat territory.

So here’s a question for you. How many mountain goats do you see at the hosptial. Not many. That’s because they’re all too far away. They have a good union and good insurance, but they just can’t get there from where they live. You’ve heard of food deserts in poor neighborhoods… the mountain goats live in a hospital desert in the wilderness.

So up we go. Up and up and then some more up. Have I mentioned we are walking upwards? The trail is relentless.

Up, around and through and across, and back across, and always up.

Blue skies and Aspen trees with little quakey leaves. Spruce trees shimmering in the light winds. Grasses lightly waving. Layers and layers of growth as the trail goes up. And the sky… I’m telling you the sky is the color of blue oil painters have been dying to mix for a thousand years. That’s a hundred decades of dreaming about the perfect blue sky on canvas.

So we’re roughly following a little streamy-stream up in the foothills. And, there’s something about the sound of a little mountain stream as it flows downhill… it’s magical, mystical and seraphic. It’s peaceful, calming, soothing and inspiring all at once. And no matter when you look, it’s always different. Even if you stare at it all afternoon, it’s always different.

So after a couple of hours we get to a spot where there’s what they call a waterfall. This is a place in the wilderness where the topography drops down dozens or hundreds of feet all at once and the little streamy stream, following the contour of the land, shaping the contour of the land, flows with it.

We get to this waterfall that’s much smaller than it used to be. You can tell it’s much smaller than it used to be because it is surrounded by huge boulders on every side. The boulders used to be rocks under the earth the stream washed away.

So we’re walking south on the east side of the stream as it’s flowing north. So, about a hundred meters north of the waterfall I go down a rocky embankment, across the little streamy-stream and then I make my way up the boulders to a nice spot in front of where the water is falling down. I set up my tripod, mount my camera on it and start clicking away. I’m trying to get the exact right perfect shot when all of a sudden, I commit one of the worst crimes you can commit when you’re in the wilderness. I forget where I am. I take a step backwards to adjust how I’m looking at the waterfall and there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there because I’m standing on a steep embankment.

I fall and land a pointy boulder the shape of a mountain. For a minute I’m sure I’m about to pass out. I can hardly breathe. Every breath hurts. And that’s the good news. At least I can breathe. But every breath hurts. Then, the next thing I remember is an intense, throbbing pain the likes of which I have never experienced before. Something like a relentless seven on the ten-point pain scale. Something between very intense and utterly horrible. Definitely into the territory of excruciating and bearly bearable.

So here’s what happens next. I have to get myself up. I have to pack up the camera, the tripod and get it all back into the backpack and onto my aching back. Then I have to reverse the process… Down the embankment, across the stream, and then back up the embankment – all while I’m in so much pain I’m ready to barf at every step.

Next is hours and hours and hours of painful hiking down, down, down. Each breath a new adventure in pain. I’m trying to write this without profanity. So, you’ll have to just imagine how profanely painful this was.

We finally get down to the trailhead and then we have to drive back to town. And that’s another hour or so of four-wheel drive dirt roads, round and round and down and down.

Here’s where it really gets scary, if it had been a spinal injury and I had not been able to undertake the hours of downward travel on my own, they would have had to carry me out. Nan and Barb. Though they are both great hikers, they could not have carried me down in less than five or six hours — if at all. And that is how you die outdoors. It’s not because the injury is immediately life-threatening, it’s because you cannot get medical attention quickly enough. And here’s the deal; you don’t want to be stuck above 10,000 feet after dark without your tent, your sleeping bag and your sleeping pads. If it’s just you and your jacket and your camera tripod… …you die outdoors.

The search and rescue team finds you and the one WEMT says to the other, “DRT.” And the other one just nods.

Dead right there.

Turns out it was a paraspinal injury which is very painful and debilitating but not quite as debilitating as a spinal injury. All these years later I remember that even with the pain meds, my back ached for weeks.

But I’m all better now.

That’s what Rosabee used to say when she was sick and we told here we were going to see Dr. Wolkov at the Gunnison Valley Hospital. “I’m all better now.” I don’t have to go to the doctor and be poked and prodded a get a shot.

So that’s one way you can die outdoors. Two if you count the encounter with the bears in the meado.

That’s like half a death outdoors because they retreated as quickly as I did.

Later, we can talk about the tide on Long Beach in Portland, Oregon. That’s actually two stories. The outgoing stream that we stepped over on the way out in the morning, and the incoming stream we swam across on the way back late that afternoon. That’s one. Then there’s the stop for lunch while the tide is coming in and climbing the knotted rope up the bluff to avoid being smunched by timber rolling in on the incoming tide story.

There’s also the time I lost the linch pin on my water purifier in the San Isabel National Forest, and there’s the time we lost the same linch pin on the same stupid water purifier while camping at the North Lake Desor campground on Isle Royale. Note that Isle Royale is closer Canada but which by dint of pork barrel politics was traded back in the olden days to Michigan by Ohio… if you can follow that line of reasoning.

Eventually, we’ll get back to how to die indoors. Hashtag aggregation camps and dialysis.