This afternoon, in my usual reading period which is after lunch and before feeding the pets their dinner, I was reading a fascinating essay on "avalanche mediation" when the phone range. A nervous friend called. He has been preparing himself for radiation (beginning Monday) for state 2 prostate cancer and he was worried that something involving the coronavirus would cancel his treatment appointment. I told him that when I am worrying and I can't seem to control it, I divert myself with reading.
In this time of self quarantine, many of my friends are going what they call "stir crazy" not being used to spending days alone at home. Most of my friends are extremely active and out EVERY day without exception. The most active are the ones I got to know 20 years go when I joined the Outdoor Club, and we stayed friends, but I have other friends with very active social lives and who work part time and do a lot of volunteer work. Personally, I don't do well with too much socializing or too many days out and about. I need interspersed days of solitude and quiet and I look forward to my unscheduled days withe delight and relief.
I told my friend that I read to divert my mind from pointless worrying and in fact when he called I was entirely engaged by an essay on "avalanche mediation" in a place in the US West called Alta. I was reading how their daily monitoring of snow conditions determines whether or not to bring out the explosives and bring down the snow that is in danger of bringing itself down in huge crushing slabs without warning. The author was just beginning to tell me about his trip to Switzerland to attend the Snow and Avalanche Research Institute in Davos, when the phone rang. Just as well, though, because I had put some small cheese ravioli on to boil for my afternoon meal and the very reading that diverts me from worry diverts me from duty and I smelled the burning! I got off the phone and was able to save about 75% of the ravioli.
Aside from my decade or so in the Outdoor Club, kayaking, hiking, camping and exploring, I have not been an outdoor person, but I have had a lifelong fascination with stories, books, and documentaries about the outdoors. I watch mountain climbing movies though I have, myself, only climbed 2 small peaks, one in Vancouver, Canada, one in Palm Springs, California, both of them day trips. I also read voraciously about surfers though I don't even like to go in the ocean ever and have a suspicious fear of the dark water and what lurks beneath I used to subscribe to Outside magazine and a few outdoor adventure journals like Lonely Planet and Granta.
That makes me wonder why I, a city born and bred child, who matured in the suburbs can be so instantly hooked and transported by stories about the wild outdoors. Speaking of wild outdoors, one of my favorite recent books was WILD, by Cheryl Strayed. Also the essay by Jon Krakauer about the young man who died stranded and alone in an old school bus in Alaska, which became both a book and a riveting movie.
When I try to go back to the beginning, I find myself in the company of Jack London. Again, the early days in Philadelphia when my most ready access to books, aside from the classics my good and saintly mother bought me, was the lost, dusty, forgotten bookcase in my Grandmother Lyons'' basement where I found Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan. Among the classics my mother bought me was White Fang, Dog of the North. The Luck of Roaring Camp was in the basement. These books and the trilogy of Men Against the Sea opened a portal in my imagination that helped me escape from my hometown both physically when I reached 18, and in my mind from the moment I opened the book covers.
Now than I am no longer able to kayak or hike, I can still visit the mountains via great writers and I never fueled bored at home as long as there is a good magazine like the New Yorker (Cold War, pg. 19 James Somers - the avalanche essay) or a book.
Happy Trails, both inside and outside
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
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