My Awful Confession

So, I really like the outdoors. I like my Outward Bound trips, I like forests and rivers and mountains, I like the wide-open permeable feeling you get after being outside for seven days straight. I feel healed, I feel right. I think that's also true for all of us and the whole world.

Anytime I make these jaunts into the natural world, I come in contact with people who who have organized their life around it. I hang out with wilderness guides, mountain climbers, kayakers, wilderness rescue crews, campers, hikers, etc., etc.

But I have an awful confession to make.

Here it is:

These outdoor types are BORING.

Boring to talk to that is. I like how they can take me into the wild, which makes their actions interesting I suppose. But their minds and their words are BORING.

I don't know how to explain it exactly. You might know the type. They wear Patagonia and fleeces and have tons of camping equipment and wear sandals with wool socks. They're never, ever mean to anyone; they're laid-back and easy going and know a lot about the outdoors.

But it's like they're psychologically 10 yards away from you anytime you converse with them. They never seem to quite register the real you that is trying to talk to them. They have no edge, they have no irony. Their highs and lows are flattened into a white noise of a personality. They seem interchangeable. You can feel your own sharpness depreciate when you talk to them.

But they're not dumb. In fact, most of them were usually pretty good students. But their words never seem to cut into anything, and there's never a shortage of things that need cutting.

Of course I feel like a jerk saying it. Like comedian Patton Oswalt said, "I never realized how desperately I depend on negativity and cynicism just to communicate with the outside world."

Maybe these outdoor types lack irony because they're kind of happy and satisfied with life. And that shouldn't be a bad thing.

Maybe I was hoping to export my interest in philosophy and literature and the like INTO the natural world. To be hiking and paddling WHILE ALSO talking about Heidegger and Orwell would be some kind of heaven.

But those two interests never seem to coexist.

There are eleven other students at this wilderness first responder course. They can talk all day about the mountains they climbed . . . and yet, how much is there to say? What else besides, "yep, I climbed that mountain. All the way to the top. Then I came back down."

Not a single one of the students brought a single book with them. For an 8 day course.

My wilderness first responder teacher is a 55 year-old guy with an amazing history of outdoor experience. It seems like he's climbed every mountain, plunged through every rapid, weathered every kind of injury. He pioneered the snowboard craze in the 90's, he started his own outdoor gear company, and he's rescued hundreds of people in his 30 year career as a search and rescue expert.

And his sense of humor as he lectures in class? It's no more developed than the noises 6 year-old boys make. Fart noises ("ppppffffffttt"), falling down noises ("badoom!", "kerplunk"), or engine noises ("vvvrrrrrooooommmmm!"). He'll start to use weird voices (of various characters I suppose) that have no point, make no jokes, have no irony, and go nowhere.

I know, I'm just a pompous jerk elitist who plans to read Anna Karenina this summer. But I've heard if you climb to the top of one of the tall Tolstoy mountains, you might have an interesting thing or two to say when you get back down.