“The Only Thing I Can Do Is Talk About This the Rest of My Life”
(They are kind of like my sons. They are kind of like my little brothers. They are mostly my sobrinos these days…the little nephews. I’d be lost with out them, the sons of my ex-husband. I would be like the lone conifer at the Saugatuck State Park.)
So Jake and his brother went out west (”army of two”! was the theme phrase of the trip, it appears) and climbed Mount Ranier. They ran out of water on the first day. A ranger gave them purification tablets and they took her photograph. For food, they took forty pop tarts. It was the worst experience of his life, Jacob said. Absolutely the most miserable thing conceivable. His brother, all boot camp buff, scrambled up the mountain like a flea. Jacob said all he really wanted to do was turn back. And not fall into a crevasse. He likes saying crevasse. (We all do.)
“I’m going to be talking about this a lot,” he told me the day after he got back. “It’s all I will talk about for the rest of my life. Talking about how horrible it was is the only pleasure I can wring from this nightmare. Milking it now. And getting ready for it. That was good, too. But the thing itself? Horrible.”
I just love this so much. It’s the artist’s way. We have the experience, but eh…it’s just the experience. It’s after, mediating the experience, shaping and dramatizing and going over and over the experience, making it into a thing that will last, that can be carried around–magical super power art. Knowing the experience is so much better, often, than the experience itself.
The trip’s theme question (prompted by a visit to a big cat ranch) was which would kill you faster, a lion or a tiger shark?
“Jr. [shark] talks a lot,” Jacob [lion] said. They fought about it. Lion, tiger shark. For four days. At the top of the mountain, they talked about it. The photographs show lunar despair. And kids in goggles with pop tarts.
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