Efficient Wanderer
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Well?:
How was Edinburgh? Did you get up Arthur's Seat? I regretted not doing that but I was sick when I went. Stupid cough. Congrats on your graduation also!
Sunday, June 06, 2004
On climbing:
On Saturday, Will, Sudeep and I went to Starved Rock State Park, downstate a couple of hours from Chicago. The park itself consists of miles of paths, most of which are generally the sort of over-marked, boring things designed to protect the state park district of Illinois from lawsuits.
However, if you look a bit, there are infinitely cooler paths, beaten by others who hated the park ranger's processed paths as much as we did. Sure, technically using these cooler paths isn't 'legal' in the strictest sense of the word (since the park did have big signs threatening various punishments for those who ventured off the marked trails), but clearly we weren't the first. So we spent an afternoon scrambling up cliff faces and pulling ourselves up sandy mountains with giant tree roots, choosing places where we probably wouldn't die if we fell, though possibly convincing old ladies otherwise.
Will raised an interesting question, though. Would this have been as fun if it were legal? I was pretty sure not, though I was never afraid of being caught, so I don't think we could have felt that sort of thrill. I think it was more because had the climbing we did been legal, we would have known that it was perfectly safe. No state park is going to let a couple of dumb kids climb up a cliff without making damn sure that it's as safe as walking a level path of raked gravel. So we were courting danger a bit, but not the danger of getting caught; rather, we were in danger of hurting ourselves, a much more satisfying thrill.
This is tied into why roller coasters don't really do it for me. I'm not particularly afraid of heights or speed, and I know that riding in a roller coaster is about a hundred times safer than driving a car down the interstate. Why should I find it thrilling, then? My thrills need to involve some sort of fear, that moment when the horse I'm galloping loses his stride for half a second and I wonder if he and I care going to fall in some desperate mix of human and half a ton of horse, that moment when I'm windsurfing (which I haven't done in far too long) and I hit the funny wave and go under and my board's over me and I have to struggle to the surface, or that moment when I'm climbing a cliff and realise that my footing's precarious and I can't see a good way up from there, but I can't go back down either. I can't feel that way on a perfectly safe roller coaster.
