[pct-l] In Censored's own words...

[Eric Lee]

Censored wrote in her journal:
>
So why did I hit 911? It's difficult for me to answer. I was scared, that is
for sure. I was scared shitless. It seemed to be my last line of defense; I
had tried to make shelter, and fire- it didn't work. It seemed like if I
were to die, it would be dumb NOT to have hit 911. It was almost 4:30 pm by
the time I hit 911- only 3 hours from when I first realized I was in a snow
storm. That's how quickly things deteriorated for me.
>

That's something that's really hard to understand unless you've experienced
it first-hand: things can go bad FAST.  You're motoring along thinking
everything's fine, then there's a couple of minor-seeming changes, then
everything cascades on top of each other and the next thing you know you're
pondering whether you're going to die.

I haven't had very many close calls myself, but I did have one experience
several years ago that hammered the point home for me.  I was out for a solo
dayhike and decided to scramble up a rocky knob at the top of the peak.
There was about a foot of new snow on the ground.  Everything was going fine
on the way up and I was fixated on getting to the top, but just before the
summit I stopped and looked down.  I had inadvertently worked my way partway
around the knob to a point where my fall line was straight down a 3,000 foot
avalanche chute.  I hadn't realized what I was doing until it was already
done.

Believe me, I did a whole lot of pondering on my mortality right then.  Here
I was, alone, in winter, on top of a mountain, in the snow, perched at the
top of a slippery, unstable avalanche chute, with no climbing tools of any
kind.  I still don't know how I managed to get myself into that situation
because it was so *obviously* stupid but somehow I didn't even notice as the
danger got progressively worse and worse.

Thankfully I survived to tell the tale (it involved inching back down very,
very slowly, combined with lots of prayer) and it served as a very vivid
lesson for me in how things go bad without your even realizing it.  I'm
certainly not immune to dumb mistakes these days but I'd like to think that
I pay attention to my surroundings and condition a little bit more than I
did then.

For anyone who finds these kinds of topics fascinating, I highly recommend
the book "Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why" by Laurence Gonzales.
The author discusses a lot of medical facts about how our brains are
hardwired to behave and react, interspersed with amazing case studies of
wilderness survival (or the lack thereof).

One thing Gonzales talks about a lot is how we often don't pay attention to
our world as it is *right now*.  We operate under old, now-faulty
assumptions about how the future was supposed to unfold.  I was supposed to
get to the top of the knob and have a great view.  Censored was supposed to
make it to Trail Pass.  We get fixated on what was supposed to happen and
start discarding new facts about our situation because they don't fit with
our imagined future.  By the time the facts become impossible to ignore,
it's often too late to do anything about them.  It's amazing how the human
mind can delude itself.

Eric