The Weather

They’re selling t-shirts around town for those of us who survived 100+ inches of snow this winter, a winter which has managed to flatten the affect of the entire city. And it’s been a lousy spring thus far. When it’s warm (and by warm I mean in the mid-40s) it has rained like crazy with big wind. When it hasn’t been raining, it’s been cold with wind chill in the 20s. I heard on the news that we’re eleven degrees colder than average for mid-April.

I could live with all of this if I didn’t have this sneaking suspicion that we’re going to have about a week of temperate, spring-like weather before we get 80+ degrees and stifling humidity in May. Spring and Fall are just rumors around here as Winter and Summer boss the place.

Trying to figure out who is getting relegated from the Premier League
Look, a week ago I would have put money on Derby, Fulham, and Bolton going down. That trio is still where the smart money is, but I think it’ll go down to the wire. Wigan, Reading, and Birmingham don’t look safe in the slightest bit after wins by Bolton and Fulham. Fulham are now four points (well, five due to goal difference) from safety. That’s only a couple of wins and they looked pretty damn good against Reading this weekend. Of course, they need the teams above them to stop winning period, but that’s not out of the question.

Things are only slightly clearer at the top as for about 6 minutes on Sunday, Man Ure’s march to the title looked under threat. Happily, the Ars* folded completely and now it’s official: they will not win anything this year. Man Ure have not been their imperious selves as of late, and while it seemed utterly impossible for Chelski to catch them two weeks ago, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Would I bet on it? No, but the point gap is only 3.

Movies
We watched Into the Wild Saturday night and didn’t like it much. I read the book back in 1998 or so and remembered the story more or less, but for some reason I thought the guy was wandering around in the late 70′s early 80′s rather than the early 90′s. My opinion of the man is summed up by the Alaskan park ranger Peter Christian (via WikiPedia):

People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.”

When living in Seattle, I remember being surprised by how infrequently wilderness-related deaths made the news. I listened to a ranger at Mount Baker on NPR saying every year they pulled at least a couple of bodies out of the snow in the backcountry, avalanche victims wearing brand spankin’ new snowboarding gear. One year a ranger told me about a kid who got killed hiking the Olympic Coast because he didn’t have a tide table and presumably got dragged out to sea. The Discovery channel has a show called I Shouldn’t Be Alive, and the common denominator with a lot of these folks is that they’re woefully unprepared.

A lot of media has a profound disrespect for wilderness, possibly because there is so little of it left. The aforementioned deaths are the result of people not understanding that the natural world does not care about you enjoying it. The ironic thing is that with the vast amounts of information available to us (even in the early 90′s) being unprepared is unforgivable. With today’s gear, backpacking is less about a struggle for survival and more about the struggle for comfort, as long as you’re reasonably prepared. Not having a map? That’s just dumb.

Regarding the movie, I mostly objected to the romanticization of the life (though Amy thought the movie made him seem like an idiot.) For instance, there’s nothing carefree about dodging getting a permit to kayak the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. Is there a bureaucracy surrounding that particular stretch of river? Absolutely. But it’s because there is roughly one kajillion people wanting to use it. Permits, while annoying, perform a function. They help regulate the flow of people so we don’t love our few remaining natural resources to death. They also give rangers a chance to tell you what not to do, things like throwing food scraps in the water, which a remarkable number of people do even after being told. Not to mention the whole safety factor. Had McCandless drowned in the Colorado, would they have made a movie about him? Probably not.

The other thing is that McCandless didn’t even put himself in that deadly of a situation in Alaska. Why didn’t he bring a fishing pole? And had he learned to properly learned to cure meat then the moose he shot would have provided him protein for a long, long time.

In the end it’s a sad story but one that doesn’t elicit a lot of sympathy for me. Could I have provided for myself in those same conditions? Probably not, but then again I wouldn’t put myself in that situation without a little prep work. And with that prep work, I think the answer would be: absolutely.

My thirty minutes of procrastination is up. Back to my review of scholarship paper…

Current Mood: Okay |