Pecked to death by ducks (40 page)

The commercial did not claim that the knife slices, dices, or makes hundreds and hundreds of julienne fries in just seconds, but it was pretty clear that the distributor was selling survival in the manner that others sell kitchen aids. Clearly, the concept—or more precisely, the fantasy—of self-sufficiency and survival in the wilderness has become a salable item.

The same fantasy accounts for the popularity of James Fenimore Cooper's Leather stocking Tales in the early 1800s; or the blizzard of newspaper stories about Joseph Knowles nearly a century later. In 1913 Knowles, a part-time illustrator, stripped naked in front of a phalanx of reporters and strode boldly into the Maine woods. Two months later he returned, presumably none the worse for wear. "My God is the wilderness," he told the newspapers. "My church is the church of the forest."

We like to think that the rigors of this wild land shaped the national character. We believe that in the ability to survive there is nobility and grace. And for ten bucks you can buy a knife that will ensure your survival. Carry it through the mosquitoes into some woodsy noble church and you're prepared for all eventualities. Or so the commercial seemed to imply.

It is a dangerous dream, I think, the fantasy of the knife. There is an unsupported supposition lurking in the subtext of the sales pitch: that survival is a matter of owning the proper gear. In point of fact, owning such a knife is rather like eating chicken

soup to cure a cold: It can't hurt, and maybe it'll help. Just so. Toting the Amazing Survival Knife into the forest won't turn a novice into a competent woodsman, just as owning a fine set of tools doesn't necessarily make a man a good carpenter. We need to practice survival skills, to draw lessons out of early failure.

I had used my cheapest and most sissified piece of high-tech camping gear—a ninety-nine cent butane lighter—to build a small fire, which was now sinking into the snow with a satisfying hiss. The two hours' supply of wood I'd collected from a nearby creek bank was stacked in such a way that I could feed the fire without rising from my wilderness recliner.

In the distance the snow was no longer snow. It was a dirty silver cloud that completely engulfed the eastern mountains, and it lay like a blanket a thousand feet above the valley floor. Directly above, the sky was an impossible cobalt blue, that bright, soaring, clear blue color that comes in the aftermath of a storm.

And now, to the east, the sun—which had been a small silver disk feebly glowing behind the cloud—burst above the snow and weather. It caught the edge of the cloud for a moment so that its full light was momentarily broken and prismatic pinks played across the wall of cloud. Sunrise at noon.

The fact that I had finally succeeded in building a proper snow cave somehow enhanced the view. I had turned a longtime fantasy into reality, building on three successive failures. Nobody ever wants to tell you that you must pay for your fantasy, and that the price is early failure and frustration.

It was still cold—ten below—and there was snow in the air under the blue sky. Tiny diamond crystals, remnants of the night's storm, were drifting about on the wind and catching the sun's light so that, in the valley, above the blanket of cloud, dull pastel rainbows formed. I thought about all those collapsed snow caves, about the Amazing Survival Knife and the failures of fantasy, while the sun and snow made kaleidoscopic patterns in the sky.

Ike TomfooUky ^acto*

When a jackass flies, no one asks how far or how fast. When a jackass flies, people stand amazed. Follow me through on this. One day last October I played my harmonica hanging from a half-mile-long rope anchored at the top of El Capitan. Even though absolutely no one was there to stand amazed, the jackass had sprouted wings. I am absurdly smug about this accomplishment.

The rope had been rigged by a group of rappellers I had once worked with in the southeast, led by a man named Dan Twilley. El Cap is one of the longest overhanging cliffs in the world, and this was the second-longest free-fall rappel ever made on a single rope: 2,650 feet to be exact. The longest was a 3,280-foot drop made in 1980 off Mount Thor on Baffin Island, also led by Twilley.

The rappel was wonderfully terrifying fun. The whole of Yosemite Valley was spread out below me, and as I'd chosen to make my descent just at twilight, I owned half an hour's worth of sunset. Somewhere toward the bottom of the cliff, about three hundred feet above the tops of the trees, I tied off for a few minutes and played some slow and slightly breathless blues.

These blues were not committed on pure impulse. In fact, I had planned it all out ahead of time, had put my harp in a shirt pocket where I could get to it easily, and had even practiced the solo I wanted to play.

It should be understood here that I'm not really any good at the harmonica. People who've heard me often offer such helpful advice as "Shut up with that noise." It's not really my fault, of course. I figure that if I had a nickname, my playing might improve. Hard-blues players all have nicknames: Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Magic Dick. Some people probably go to hear Norton Buffalo play for his name alone. Buffalo is an incredible harmonica player, no doubt about it. And those who think they can play harp will, after attending a concert by Mr. Buffalo, go home contemplating suicide. I mean, Norton, I admire him— but has he ever played harp in free-fall rappel?

I think I can safely say that my harp solo was the very best ever played while hanging from a half-mile-long rope.

This is the sort of attitude my friend Rick Ridgeway calls rank tomfoolery, defined here as the urge to perform essentially civilized acts in uncivilized or extraordinary places. Some people, for instance, have played Frisbee on glaciers, wearing crampons; and a hot campfire topic among climbers has always been the highest-known performance of the sex act. (Ridgeway's estimate of the current record is twenty-six thousand feet.)

Incidentally, I don't count marriages performed in unusual places as tomfoolery. Those who have tied the knot in free-fall while skydiving, for instance, may seem to fit the definition. This is, after all, a civilized act committed in a hostile environment. Marriage, however, is a chancy endeavor. Presumably, the skydiving couple has some experience in free-fall relative work, and reason, history, and experience all conspire to inform them that they will land on their feet. There are no such guarantees about the marriage. It is risk incarnate.

No, tomfoolery doesn't put a person at any emotional risk. On the contrary, I think the impulse is an antidote to fear, and some small comfort in a situation where comfort is hard to come by. It

is a form of pioneering, a way of making a hostile environment your own. And in my case it may have something to do with incompetence: Those who lack great skill in some human endeavor—say, playing the harmonica—are spiritually buoyed by the fact that perhaps no one else, ever, has committed this particular act under these exact circumstances.

For some reason golf lends itself to the cold comfort of perennial tomfoolery. I suspect this is because it's a game that daily slaps people in the face with their own incompetence. "The game may frustrate me," people seem to say, "but I'm the only person in the world to be frustrated in this precise spot." Yvon Chouinard, for instance, once played a short game at the base of Fitzroy, in Patagonia.

Probably the height of tomfoolery—the highest-known incident —occurred in February of 1971, when Alan Shepard swatted a golf ball. He had a dusty lie, his swing was cramped, bunched up, and he missed the sweet spot. The guy really didn't connect well. No big deal—the point is not that it wasn't done well, but that it was done at all. Shepard played golf on the lunar highlands, in temperatures that stood near 230 degrees Fahrenheit. It was sublime tomfoolery.

True, the force required to drive a golf ball three hundred yards on the earth would translate to a milelong drive on the moon, but a space suit tends to hamper the swing. The longest drive ever recorded anywhere in the universe was an entirely earthbound effort. In 1962 an Australian meteorologist named Nils Lied teed off just outside Mawson Base in Antarctica and drove the ball about a mile and a half across the ice.

Rick Ridgeway is also guilty of some astounding tomfoolery in Antarctica. I'm thinking specifically of the time he went water-skiing just before winter closed down the continent. "We were staying at this Argentine base down there," says Rick, "and those people treated us like kings. Well, we wanted to give them something, but we were traveling light and didn't have anything of material value for them. The only thing we could do was provide a little entertainment."

Ridgeway and his companion, Mike Graber, rigged up a sixteen-foot rubber raft with a twenty-five-horsepower Evinrude and tied a rope to the raft. This left the problem of finding suitable skis. Somehow they'd forgotten their water skis when they'd packed for Antarctica. "We finally decided to try our cross-country sleds," says Rick. 'These were fiberglass gadgets, about eight feet long, and instead of runners we had plates of Teflon on the bottom."

Ridgeway piloted the raft, while Graber attempted to ski in between the icebergs. "I don't think he'd ever water-skied before," explains Ridgeway, "and it took quite a while before he got up and we got the sled up on plane." After some private practice Graber and Ridgeway decided they were ready. "We knew the Argentines always ate lunch in front of a big picture window that looked out onto this gorgeous bay. So there they were when we came roaring into view at full throttle. Graber had on a dry suit, but he was wearing a rain jacket and pants over it, so it looked like he was skiing out there in a light jacket and pants. The water temperature was twenty-nine degrees. It wanted to be ice, but the salt content was still a tad too high."

Ridgeway remembers the Argentines coming out of the lunchroom "hooting and hollering, cheering. . . ."

They weren't cheering because Graber had dazzled them with his display of virtuoso waterskiing technique. He wasn't even very good. They were cheering the impulse, the ingenuity, the beautiful absurdity of the act. They were cheering baldfaced incompetence and the pioneering spirit. They were cheering a couple of jackasses in flight.

Xke ]>AH

"You understand why we are holding you?" the British police officer asked.

I was standing before a large desk in a police substation just outside Bristol, England.

In the background several officers were discussing my belt and glasses. I could, perhaps, in a fit of remorse over having watched three guys in tuxedos safely jump off a bridge on elastic "bungee" cords, find myself so filled with remorse that I might hang myself with the belt. Break my glasses and cut my wrists.

"We'll have to put you in a cell with one of the others," an officer said. "Do you have a preference?"

"I don't know any of these guys," I said. "Except Mr. Kirke."

"Mr. Kirke," the officer said. He said it as if he'd heard that name before. He said it as if he knew about all the previous arrests: as if he knew about the giant inflatable melon ball that smashed into a huge pylon and blacked out an entire town; as if he knew about the helium-filled kangaroo that crossed the English Channel at ten thousand feet and had commercial pilots shaking their heads in disbelief. Maybe the officer knew about the grand pianos on skis, or the Kirke-piloted baby carriages ca-

reening down hillsides, or the bridge jumps and catapults. Or the giant pink elephants skittering across the surface of Loch Ness. Maybe he knew more than he wanted to know about Kirke and his friends—gentlemen in morning coats and top hats, ladies in formal dresses—thumbing their noses at convention and having entirely too much fun.

"Mr. Kirke," the officer said again. He said it as if the knowledge of this name made him tired.

My cellmate was named Bill, and he was nineteen years old. Bill had not jumped off the bridge, though he was implicated in the jump in that he served champagne to the jumpers and had been wearing a gorilla suit and did help retrieve the elastic cords after the jumpers had lowered themselves on separate climbing ropes and escaped in a boat waiting below. The police had arrived at that time and stared down at the boat, 160 feet below, where the three jumpers and two boat men, all in tuxedos, toasted them with brimming champagne glasses and roared off down the Severn River.

It was this final gesture, I think, that irritated the officers, and comparatively innocent spectators, like myself, were arrested. Bill, as a gorilla, had offered the police some champagne. Now, they had his gorilla suit in the property room—evidence!—and he was in this little cell, five steps long by three wide, and the two of us were sitting on either side of the single cot in the cell. The door was heavy metal, six inches thick, with a single latched window the size of a book in it. The window was shut.

Seven hours later, about four that afternoon, I "helped the police with their inquiries" in the squad room. Officers had diagramed the morning's antics on a blackboard, the way you see TV cops list the clues in a serial-killing case. There was a category called "jumpers," and a description of three men: "first off, blond, 30s." Beside that was the word "boat," followed by more descriptions, and then a section titled "on the bridge," where my name appeared followed by a description, "beard, US."

A courteous officer sat across the table from me. The English officers were so courteous, in fact, that I imagined I was dealing

with a very refined form of sarcasm. I glanced out a barred window. David Kirke was sitting on the grass out there, waiting for me, I hoped, and smoking a cigar. He was free as a bird. Kirke had a lot of experience with this sort of thing and had phoned a lawyer in London immediately.

The officer followed my gaze and said, "We released Mr. Kirke without charge." He sounded courteously disappointed about this. "Could you tell me, please, where you met this David Kirke."

"In a pub, north of London, yesterday afternoon."

"And he told you about the Dangerous Sports Club?"