Authentic Experience

It Took a Punch in the Arm

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As I stroll the frozen river path behind our home, I keep gingerly touching my left shoulder. It seems like there should be a bruise there. It feels like I got slugged— hard. It wasn’t a punch, but there is a battle going on under the skin of that arm. My body’s white blood cells have deployed and are frantically creating antibodies to defend against an unwelcome visitor: the poison tetanospasmin. The pain I feel is sort of like seeing black smoke rising from a distant battlefield— dramatic things are happening over there. And while I don’t endorse violence or pain as a way to crystalize one’s intentions, oddly this aching left arm seems to have helped me turn a certain corner on my next project.

For two years now the professional side of me has been extremely turned on by my mission to make a film in Bhutan. I’m heading over this April with a hand-picked cast and crew for an adventure on a wild, unexplored, threatened river. It’s got all the stuff my career thrives on: intriguing characters with deep passion and fascinating stories; a crew I trust but who, like me, seem a bit humbled by our expedition; a destination that awes the imagination and challenges the intellect; and— for me— an audacious leap out of my comfort zone.

It’s as if I’ve piled up all I’ve done before, climbed atop this unwieldy mound, and then stretched my arms and launched off. What is this sensation as I take to the air? The band Drive-By Truckers once crooned: “I’ve been falling so long it’s like gravity’s gone and I’m just floatin’.” Am I falling, floating, or flying now? Some days I’m not sure if I’m headed for a faceplant or a swooping arc through the air, but right now it feels like flying. And all due to this aching left wing.

The drops of poison in my arm are actually pretty benign. While they get a big response from my immune system, they won’t actually make me sick. But if clever scientists hadn’t pulled out their teeth, these drops of tetanospasmin would be marching toward my nervous system with bad intent. In about ten days I’d have lockjaw—tetanus—and would probably be fighting for my life.

Step into the wilds
Yesterday’s morning stroll felt like I was a character out in nature, not a guy working to film it for others.

This tetanus shot boosts another one from nine years ago, which, in turn, boosted an arsenal of vaccinations before my last trip to India. I’m getting shot up because the remote places where we’ll be filming are a long way from medical help and may well be teeming with the sort of invisible creepy crawlies that make us sick in really cinematic ways. But that’s not exactly the drama we want our cameras to capture.

I continue running my fingers over where the needle went in and ponder further. While I’m not exactly a thrill-junkie, I do get some excitement out of this physical reminder that I’m going there; way over there; deep, deep, deep into the way-over-there. And this, unlike the professional enthusiasm that has carried me through the two years of research and preparations so far, feels personal and intimate.

It takes me back to summers as a nature center staffer at Scout camp. I recall the “bear-foot” section of Mr. Bear’s Nature Trail where kids had to feel the moss between their toes to proceed (when building the trail, I had plucked the sharp rocks and thorns out myself by finding them with my own bare feet). I recall the tingle of excitement surrounding our rigorous scientific studies to determine if thirteen-lined ground squirrels and chipmunks prefer Froot Loops to Cheerios (they don’t, if I remember correctly, but perhaps John Gunther can double-check me). I can still feel what it was like to lead “night owl” hikes through deep forests using all of our senses except vision (and, in my case, without a sense of direction with which I was never gifted). Those things, from moss to chipmunks to near collisions with 100-foot spruce trees in the dark, were all experiences in nature that I could feel under my skin. And I suddenly find myself more excited for my own experience into the wilderness than for all the potentials of this film to reach others. Not that those other potentials went away, but this is what I’m feeling most right now.

I rub my arm again, wince, and, to Josie in my doctor’s office who administered the shot, I think: “Thanks, I needed that.”

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Greg

Photos by yours truly

A New Ambivalence

The Pulsing Wall

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I lay awake with eyes closed and slowly opened my eyes into the dark. I watched what I knew to be the near wall, only sensing it there in the blackness, but then it became subtly visible. It faded back into dark, but pulsed back into view seconds later. Then it was gone again. In and out, rhythmically, my night vision seemed to be subtly asserting itself as if coming in waves.

I realized it was connected to my breathing. At the apex of every inhale, my night vision returned, only to fade away through the exhale and beginnings of inhale. Wow, how cool, I thought: apparently when my lungs are full, all that extra oxygen fuels a pulse of improved eyesight. If we calm ourselves, tune into our natural cycles like breathing, perhaps we could hone this principle into a sort of superpower, a sixth sense.

My mind drifted to nebulous philosophies that felt important in this oxygen-energized state. I pondered the sometimes cynical concept of history repeating. Do we go round and round, retracing the same steps, like Winnie the Pooh lost in the forest? I didn’t think so. It felt like history accumulates. Some say “it’s all been done,” but every time it’s done again, well, there’s another one for the history books, for our memories, for the lore of all time.

Good and bad accumulates. We hear often of the state we’ve put ourselves in: 350.org* tells us how we’ve left a stink trail of environmental degradation that does not float away— we are mired in the bad choices of the past. The things we presume to be throwing away are actually piling up and causing trouble. We aren’t going round-and-round, many environmentalists say, we are spiraling downward.

I agree that we aren’t going round-and-round, but I question if we’re only heading downward. I believe that good things accumulate too. The little good deeds; the things we fix; the people we help, inspire, or even just lend an ear to. Restoration biologist Christopher Wills, in his excellent new book, wrote:

“We have drawn on our intelligence and our technology to exploit the world, but we have only just begun to explore our potential to heal the world as well.” Green Equilibrium: The Vital Balance of Humans and Nature (2013)

Through these thoughts, my pulsing night vision was a soothing rhythm, as if I could lay my head against my chest and ride out the undulations of my lungs. Just gazing at a murkily lit plain wall was plenty of stimuli for my eyes as my mind followed its track around a bend.

It felt like we are scrabbling up the scree field of history, this towering mound of debris from everything people have done throughout all time. Some of the rocks are loose and treacherous, we avoid them or we accidentally set them free and allow them to tumble down and away. Others are firm hand- and foot-holds and we climb upwards on them. On the shoulders of those who came before.

If you think of the mass of stone and junk that makes up this talus field, it might seem overwhelming and wasteful. All this debris from hundreds, thousands, millions of years of life just jumbled up here and useless. It is in our way.

Or is it piling toward something?

How else would we get this high up without the stuff of the past?

. . .

I heard a noise and sat up, looking toward the other side of the room. It was nothing, or nothing very important here in the wee hours. But as I sat there looking toward my laptop, I realized the source of my pulsing night vision. My computer was in sleep mode: the little white power light pulses on and off, rhythmically, illuminating the wall ever so slightly. Clever Apple, I thought, mimicking the human respiratory cycle with a simple little indicator light. They have made technology human-like: friendly and soothing.

I close my eyes and drift off.

 

Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Greg

*Actually, if you visit the link above, you’ll learn that the good people behind 350.org— while they’re certainly perturbed with the state of things and our alarming trajectory— are actually making positive steps forward and upward.

Photo by a sleepy version of yours truly

Flickering Images

Way to Go, Bonk! Thank you, DB.

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When I got snowed out of attending his memorial service, I imagine DB would have had a succinct assessment for me. Let’s imagine together what it might have been. For those who don’t know Warren Miller’s first hire Don Brolin, I’ll try to give a sense of the way he spoke. If, for instance, he had handed me a warm beer from his filing cabinet—as he so often did in our days at that office—and I had protested (which I never did), he would have said:

Warm beer is infinitely colder than no beer at all.

If my picks had somehow won the weekly football pool:

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

If assessing that shrill woman at the focus group:

She had a voice that could shatter a beer can.

If it was too dark to film:

It’s darker than the inside of a football.

If everything was too snowy for the camera to capture any contrast:

It’s like two white mice swimming in a bowl of milk.

If a film segment ran on too painfully long:

It’s like a big guy standing on your toe.

And, of course, there was DB’s usual homage to Warren’s film narration, say when a beginner skier has somehow escaped a fall only to be hit in the head by the chairlift. Because of the frequency of these sorts of shots and quips in each film, around the office this was a daily DB utterance applicable to any circumstance:

Way to go, Bonk!

DB’s witticisms could be full of real knowledge. For instance he taught me about the real meaning of my favorite pro football team’s colors. While wagering a side bet on that week’s matchup, he asked why an Oregon kid would root for Philadelphia. I said I’d chosen the Eagles very young, based on their team colors. For me, they resembled my home state’s pallet of green trees and perennially grey skies. DB told me this was interesting, since the team colors did indeed have significance. After I failed to guess, DB shared that Philly was the site of the country’s first mint, and thus the Eagles were painted in the colors of money: green for dollars, silver-grey for coins. Pony up, nature boy, he said, and put your money where your loyalty is. I lost the bet but gained a little piece of knowledge (likely apocryphal, which only adds to its value).

I had really wanted to get over the pass and the Continental Divide last Friday to be there with DB’s wife Colleen, my old coworkers, and all the people whose lives were touched by DB. It’s tempting to list excuses about blizzards and risking the lives of people I love to drive through the night on nasty roads, but I picture DB listening to such excuses patiently, nodding, then summing all his thoughts up in something that might well begin with:

Sure as there’s an ass in a cat …

So while I continue to find the right DBism for this occasion, allow me to share a memory that still shines as brightly as his eyes that day at Kurt and Ali’s house.

It had been several years since I’d seen DB and I admit I’d feared the worst after hearing rumor of some serious medical troubles a while back. Standing in the kitchen clutching a beer, I had turned in the crowd to face someone I didn’t immediately recognize. Fit and trim enough to belie 70-some years of life, with brighter eyes than I’d ever remembered, a transformed DB stood there before me. Only his wry smirk told me this was the longtime Warren Miller Films head of production, that droll buddy to staffers of all ages.

He took my hand with an unexpectedly firm grasp and his eyes and smile radiated an enthusiastic lust for life that took me entirely by surprise. I suspect I made some comment about his hands being without a beer and must have offered to fetch one. He stopped me and went on to share the last few years of his life in something other than the snarky DBisms I would have expected.

Doc had said stop drinking or you’re dead—or something to that effect. It turns out, he told me, that he’d been sucking down something like a case of beer a day. So on his doctor’s advice along with what must have been some clear protests from his body, mind, soul, and loved ones, he quit drinking. Since then, he told me with growing verve, he’d channeled those energies and calories into bicycling.

He’d lost massive amounts of weight, built up muscle and endurance, and given his internal organs a much-needed break. Now his greatest frustration was that—closing in on his 80th birthday if I recall correctly—he was frustrated that he couldn’t quite achieve the qualifying time trial to ride on Boulder’s new velodrome.

Roughly eight decades old and here was a man showing me that it’s never too late and you’re never too old to get healthy and make the most of life. I can get feisty when people say they’re too old or it’s too late or it’s too difficult to even try. That’s because, to me, DB will always stand as a shining example that:

  1. It’s never too late to make good choices.
  2. You’re never too old to change your ways for the better.
  3. Every day is a good time to appreciate the people we love and the life we have.

Perhaps you can help me find the right DBism for the occasion (and perhaps lots of wrong ones that make us chuckle) in the comments below. In the spirit of the idioms he so aptly borrowed and reapplied throughout his life, I’ll wrap up as DB did so many times at the conference table:

That concludes my prepared remarks.

Rest in Peace, DB. Way to go, Bonk.

Greg

Photo by Flowizm via Compfight cc