Fire Part 1: A Story

This ended up being way longer than I planned, so I split it up.

In the summer between Freshman and Sophomore year of high school I went on a ten-day, eight-person canoeing trip to Boundary Waters in Minnesota. It was an amazing trip, but there was one day that almost ended in disaster.

First, some back-story.

Part of going on a long canoe trip is the difficult process of portaging between lakes. This involves emptying out the canoe, loading all your gear onto to your boat-mates' backs, flipping the canoe onto your shoulders, and then slogging through the mud and rocks to get to the next lake. Ending up with the canoe on your head means you must have gotten the short end of the stick (paddle?). A three-person aluminum canoe weighs about 110 pounds, all of which is placed squarely on your shoulders via a wooden yoke that doesn't do all that much for comfort. I weighed about 150 lbs (or "a buck fifty soaking wet" as my granddaddy would say) at the time, so a hundred-pound canoe was quite a load.

Even worse than the sheer weight of the canoe was balancing it. A canoe's mass is pretty evenly distributed across its 16.5 feet in length. Balancing it while standing still is a chore in itself, but walking with it over any sort of uneven terrain is a nightmare. Add to that knee-deep (sometimes waist-deep, once armpit-deep) mud, soggy tree stumps, and little boulders you can't see because the freaking canoe is blocking your vision, and it's easy to see why avoiding portages was a major goal in our trip planning. The default measurement for a portage is the "rod," which, conveniently enough, is the length of a canoe. It makes sense because every time you get another 16.5 feet along the trail it feels like a huge accomplishment.

I only made one or two portages the entire trip without dropping the canoe. Whether it was a collision, lost footing, exhaustion, or impossible terrain, there were many things standing in the way of a clean run, and making through a whole portage without the canoe leaving your shoulders was a triumph. One of my most vivid memories is of the second longest portage on our trip, where I had the canoe and was determined to make it through in one go. There wasn't much mud, and the route was fairly straight- the only real obstacles were a series of oblong rocks jutting out all over the trail. Usually you walk behind and in front of someone carrying gear who can help you avoid protruding intruders like rocks and stumps, but this time there was some sort of problem with one of the packs that was slowing everything down. I was really bent on making it through this portage without dropping the canoe, so I hurried on ahead in a bid for a perfect run.

I hit my first rock. *gongggggggggggggggggggggggggg* Hitting a rock at high speed with your head in a metal canoe is of the loudest, most infuriating sounds in the world. You know the feeling of getting whacked in the nose, or stubbing a toe, or hitting your head on something sharp? The pain is annoying, but even worse is the sheer anger you feel at whatever caused the sleight. And there are very few things in life that aren't made significantly worse by having a 110 lb canoe on your head, and in this case it was many, many times worse because your head would ring as the initial peal faded into a minute-long metallic sigh, which made you feel like the canoe was smirking at your troubles for trying to make it fly through the air in such an unnatural way. In my mind the canoes always had a haughty French accent, which might have been due to the French Voyageur theme of the base camp. "Put me down to silly American, don't you know zat I was made to sweeeeeeem? Sweeeeeeem like the feeeeeeeshes. Let me sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemmmmmmmmmm."

Without my guides to help me avoid the rocks, I got gonged over and over again. Each time I got closer to losing my balance; each time my shoulders were burning a little bit more; and each time I hated that canoe just a little bit more. Finally, after one last collision with a rock I would have sworn wasn't tall enough to be a problem, I stumbled, regained my balance (just to assert my dominance and control over the situation), shouted "fuck you canoe," and threw the boat off of my shoulders. That act of violence and anger brought immediate relief, but it didn't last very long. Without my guides to tell me about the trail, I also had not been able to gauge how far I had left to go. I looked up, and not more than 100 feet from my discarded canoe was the shore line. My rage immediately came back, but it quickly faded into stupid numbness at how close I had been to conquering the second-longest portage of the trip, only to give up out of sheer spite. I remember all of my anger and frustration immediately sublimating into disappointment and defeat. I don't think I finished a perfect portage for the rest of the trip.

Errrrrr, I really didn't plan to write that much there, but the moral of that story is that portaging sucks... really, really hard. Anyway, one day on our trip we came to a set of long but relatively tame rapids leading from one lake to another. The portage would have been a far one and been made more difficult because a decent rain  had been building throughout the day, meaning more mud and slipperier footing. Our planned campsite was on the lake beyond the rapids, making the prospect of a tough portage seem even more painful, especially since there was an alternative. The rapids were too rough to take safely with our fully loaded canoes, but, our guide explained, we could walk our canoes through the rapids instead of portaging around them. This process is pretty much exactly how it sounds- everyone hops out of their canoes and slowly guides them through the rapids by hand. It was something new to try and obviously anything had to be better than lugging canoes through the mud in the rain, so we decided to go for it. This ended up being a mistake.

The water in Minnesota lake country, especially running water on a cloudy day, is extremely cold, even in the summer. It was cold enough that I remember my toes going numb about halfway through the rapids, which was a problem since walking through rapids is not something you want to be left-footed about. We made it through, though, and quickly got back in our canoes to reach our campsite in order to warm up and, hopefully, dry off a bit.

There were eight people on this trip sharing three 3-person canoes. This meant that at any one time two people would not be paddling. After the rapids these two people just happened to be two girls named Betsy and Kaylin (it was a co-ed Venture Crew). While the no-paddle position was usually coveted as a chance to relax and enjoy the ride, on this particular day is was not a good spot to be. After getting soaked in cold water, then battling rapids, and then having to sit still in a wet boat on a sunless, rainy day, Betsy and Kaylin ended up getting very cold. By the time we set up camp, Kaylin was visibly shivering, so we told her to sit and rest while we set up a place to dry off and warm up. But by the time we had set up camp, Kaylin had slowly gotten quiet and then stopped responding to her surroundings all together. Kaylin was a outspoken, outgoing person and not the type to sulk, so when she wouldn't even turn her head when you talked to her we knew something was very wrong.

Kaylin's body temperature had fallen enough after the rapids that she had become hypothermic, which had the potential to be a serious problem considering that we had no immediately available source of heat or dryness. It was still raining, and it is the nature of a canoeing trip for everything you own to eventually become permanently damp. The "dry socks and underwear" bags we all kept were our most prized possessions towards the end, and even those were fairly moist. The nearest medical attention of any sort was miles away, and the nearest real hospital was probably at least 25 miles as the crow flies. If the situation got more serious than our combined first aid knowledge could handle, our last resort was an emergency radio we could use to call for a helicopter medivac, and that belonged to our guide, who, by the way, was on his very first excursion.

While were assessing the situation and getting Kaylin into the handbook-prescribed dry sleeping bag with another warm body, we had overlooked the other girl who had been a no-paddler, Betsy. When we had settled down a bit from the first spell of concern about Kaylin, we noticed the Betsy was just standing out in lake. Someone shouted to her, "Betsy? What are you doing out there?" She responded, "Trying to stay warm," which should have been the first sign of trouble. However, Betsy had something of an odd sense of humor and we were all so worried about Kaylin that we brushed it off and told her to come and help start a fire. She walked into camp, came across a clothesline and just... stood there. She stood there for a good few minutes, staring at it without moving while we finished setting up camp. I asked her why she was just standing there, and she said without inflection "I.... can't figure out... how to get around... it." At this point we knew Betsy must be developing hypothermia as well.

Having 2 out of 8 people in a crew get hypothermia is a scary thing. Each sick person essentially needs another person to share body heat with, leaving four of us to start the fire, which we needed in order to get some warm fluids into the hypothemic bodies to help raise their core temperatures. Another person coming down with it would have left only two of us, not to mention the teenage awkwardness of having to have mixed-gender body heat sharing (obviously not a huge deal if it's medically necessary, but to a 15-year-old, never-been-kissed mind about as terrifying a prospect as dying of hypothermia). We decided that if anyone else even started to show symptoms, or if either of the two girls didn't start responding soon, we would immediately call for a medivac. Meanwhile, we set about building a fire.

If you've ever built a fire from scratch, you know how delicate of a process it is. Even in ideal circumstances, you want to start with the thinnest, driest, most delicate tinder, and the process of getting that to light your kindling is often gingerly and painstaking. Now imagine it's been raining for half a day and your success might determine if your crewmates will have to be airlifted to a hospital or not. It should have been an extremely stressful hour, and looking back on it - the whole situation was pretty scary. But at the time I observed that my mind was completely calm and at peace.

It is a hard thing to explain why panic seemed so easy to keep out. It has happened a handful of other times, and thing that has tied those experiences together is the fact that there was simply nothing else to do but what I was doing. The only thing I could do at that moment to have any effect on the situation was to help build the fire, so that's what I did. Our Venture leader was in charge of the fire, and luckily for us he was incredibly skillful at it. He would tell us what he needed and we would go find it. "Go find a big tree stump, rip away all the wet parts, and find me some dry bark, or maybe some fuzzy moss or lichen from the dry side of a rock." or "The tiniest, driest twigs you can find." Eventually we got to the point of "I need really green twigs, pine if you can find it." and "Some sizable branches, no wetter than moist." It took a while, but eventually he got a decent fire going and we had collected enough fuel to keep it hot for a few hours. The whole time my mind was completely calm, empty aside from whatever fuel I was looking for. When I noticed how quiet my mind was compared to how it "should" have been, I vaguely worried that I was getting hypothermia. But all my mental faculties were checking out fine. It was just some sort of zen-like state I had slipped into because it was the most useful place for my mind to be at that moment.

Once the fire was going and Kaylin was responding and drinking warm Tang sludge- that was when my brain turned back on and all of the appropriate, stored up emotions came rushing in. I suppressed them, of course, since the last thing we needed was somebody panicking or freaking out, but it was a very different thing from what I had felt (or not felt) earlier. Now I was feeling things and pushing them aside as unproductive. Before I had simply not been feeling anything at all. I felt a bit guilty later, because I realized that in some strange way I had very much enjoyed that feeling. Not the danger, or the teamwork, or the importance of my task, just that blank state of mind that seems impossible to bring about on demand.

I wish I had something more insightful or explanatory to say about that state of mind, but I don't. I just find it  strange that one of my "favorite" memories from the trip involved such a miserable set of circumstances. I bet that that state of mind is somewhat similar to one sought by practitioners of mediation and its related disciplines, but I can't say for sure, because it was such a negative (in the very literal 1a sense of the word) experience for me.

Kaylin and Betsy recovered fine. Kaylin ended up with a 2-3 hour gap in her memory, starting even before we got to camp. Betsy seemed to very hazily remember most of it. By night-fall the rain had stopped and both of them were completely healthy. We stopped walking through rapids after that, and decided to switch out no-paddlers when it was raining to keep everyone warm.

I don't have a very good ending so I'll just say it was on that trip that I saw my first moose in real life. Also, a friend from college was in a scouting troop that had stopped sending trips to Boundary Waters because two scouts had died, from separate causes, on the same trip. I had started to think I had been overestimating the danger Betsy and Kaylin were actually in until I heard that.

Part 2: A Metaphor soon.