Part 4, Beyond Postcards: Drowning in Earth-Cracks

It was an odd and pleasant experience to walk into the "breaks" near Socorro, NM; and of course that means I have to try to explain it. After all, if I don't think about and write about odd and powerful experiences, what should I write about?

I don't know if most readers caught it, but during the discussion of my last post on this topic, history was quietly made: one of the outdoors-blogosphere's most notorious and incorrigible optical-sybarites (grin) admitted that a breathtakingly beautiful, 1200-foot-high, sheer vertical, redrock cliff is not necessarily 1.3333 times as breathtakingly beautiful as an identical cliff that is only 900 feet high.

It is time to be a good sport and move on. I will nobly resist the tendency to be greedy by also trying to get him to admit that:

• We should stop calling things beautiful when they are just freakishly large, and therefore have been made into a national park.
• The freakishly large is certainly entertaining, but only in a cheap and vulgar sort of way. National parks are "beautiful" in the same sense that a 16-year-old boy, looking at porn, thinks that a certain human body is "sexy" just because it has anatomical parts that are freakishly large. 
• The true outdoorsman and nature-lover should play "Gulliver's Travels" on his outings.

In fact I have reread about half of Gulliver's Travels since realizing that was partly responsible for the fun I was having walking up those neck-high, slot canyon-like arroyos. 

But there was another effect that benefited from the topographic features being the same size as the human body. The effect would have been weakened if those slot canyons were drastically smaller or larger than the human body. In that sense, it was almost an anti-Gulliver-ian experience.

Walking into those slots, upwards towards the mountain range, was like "drowning." Ahaa, that's it! Perhaps, as a youngster, the reader has had the experience of walking out into deeper and deeper water in a lake or ocean. It wasn't such a big deal until the water was up to your mouth or nose. Then you became fearful of every small wave that assaulted your safety. Your feet were still touching the lake or ocean floor, but there was so little force on your feet that you really could not move along anymore.

Something similar happens when you are sea kayaking. Let's say you are in one of the Great Lakes on a windy day. The waves might be only 3 feet high from trough-to-crest, but your eyes are only that high above the water. So, in the trough, you look around you and see only a wall of water -- all sight of the shoreline has disappeared. You are so puny compared to the immensity of the energy in all those waves. It can be frightening for a landlubber.

This example illustrates how important it is to outgrow the nature-porn of national parks (and other tourist traps) and focus on your mood, your susceptibility, and the intensity of the subjective experience when you're adventuring outdoors.