I once had a multi-hour argument on the difference between the ideas of “History” and “The Past”. As usual, I have no idea what I was arguing about or what point Sean was trying to make, but I interpret History as a description of The Past, where The Past is the set of all possible true Histories. Circular definitions are fun.

History := partial description of The Past
The Past := set of all possible Histories

History as a word is most commonly used to describe the common set of descriptions about The Past. For the purposes of brevity, we’ll call these descriptions Statements.

History := a collection of Statements regarding The Past
The Past := set of all possible Statements

If you had a burning desire to know about The Past, you would subsequently want to collect as complete a set of Statements as possible. Seems pretty obvious, but formal logic tends to end up that way. You spend all this time and energy to derive something you already knew. And of course that’s assuming your axioms were true in the first place. On the other hand, it looks nice.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, historical censorship. Any writer that doesn’t lie is a historian of sorts. They document a thought or a moment, and people days or years later can relive that thought through words. The more words, the clearer the picture. And conversely, the fewer the words, the fuzzier the picture.

I recently read a letter I wrote to my grandmother when I was in the 8th grade. Written most of the way through my first year of public school, I wrote in great detail about the “great day” I had just had. Apparently I was in gym and impressed the girls at badminton, and someone whom I remember had great hair commented “Man, he can do math, he can play sports, what CAN’T he do?” This justifiably made me very happy. However, later in the day I asked a girl I fancied out to what would end up becoming my very first date, and there existed perhaps a superfluous number of exclamation points after the section detailing her immediate afirmative answer.

If I didn’t want anyone to know about that day, I never would have written it down. If my mother had never wanted me to remember what it was like to be barely 14, she never would have left the letter sitting on my dresser when I came to visit. If I was really that embaressed, I never would have brought it up.

The enjoyment of reading that letter is probably what made me start writing again. What I write, I’m able to remember. What I don’t write is quite easier to forget. Of course, what I don’t write you will never even know existed. That can sometimes be a wonderful and tragic thing.

You. Yeah, you. Go write something. Read it later. It’s fun.

One fateful day in the ides of May, 2001, my family left me to drive to Salt Lake City. I traveled around, went to college, got a job, and at several points visited the Great Salt Lake. However, visiting home isn’t the same as living at home, the difference in time spent causes the experiences to be incredibly different. Though you might recognize the house, you’ll never grow to know the hills like a resident.

This is why I claim the bottom spot of my families skiing ability (the ranking includes only active skiers, sorry Mom). My dad has been skiing since high school, and although my two younger brothers gave up skiing and picked up snowboarding somewhere along the line, they are both much better than me. Add in the fact that although I claim to play soccer once a week, it’s really not enough to put me into a physically optimal condition (cough).

So I ski. And I’m humbled. And it’s good.

There are a lot of situations where I have had the opportunity to humble someone else. Their reactions all very, ranging from anger (“I hate this game, I’m never playing again.”) to curiosity (“Why did you know to make that move?”). It’s easy to be the humbler. You walk taller than anyone in sight and people ask your opinion on how they could become more like you. You sit on a golden throne and eunuchs spread flowers before you as you walk. Your bed is always filled with buxom maidens, and your stomach is always full of the finest cut of meat. But I digress.

It’s a lot harder to be humbled. You’re the one who always wants to stop and take a break. You’re the one who isn’t up for another run or another game. You’re the one people explain the rules or technique to, even though you know them. It sucks, but it’s good. Its one thing to be the loser when the winner is gracious and helpful, but it’s entirely different when the winner is haughty and full of his or her own ability. That’s when you get angry and stop trying. When you like playing games, it’s a skill in itself to both win and keep your opponant willing to play again. You’ll never know how until you lose.

Stand on both sides of the fence. Neither is healthy as a home.

However, the greatest humbler of all has never been humbled by me. She continues to shock and awe as I run around like an ant. I stood on the crest of a 12,000 foot mountain and felt the force of a god scream in the wind and whip snow across my face until it burned with pain. She made my hands so cold they went white, and I had to hide in a shack with a hand dryer for ten minutes before I was able to unzip my fly. You can feel mighty tall riding in your car in the valley, but I’ve never felt shorter than when I’m standing in the clouds.

Mother Nature, the great humbler. For the record, I’m taking notes.

Several weeks ago I was preparing to do my radio show in the basement studios of WRUW. Techno and hip hop blasted for short seconds before being skipped 30 seconds into the future, and then skipped another 30 seconds, then to the next track. Such is the breakneck pace that I set when previewing songs.

Calvin got in early today for one reason or another, and started setting up the turntables that his guest DJ’s use for their live sets. I watched him for a moment in the middle of a snaring break beat trip throttling my senses, and then snapped out of it and ejected the disk. This will get played.

I was about to walk out of the room when I noticed the guy on the other side of the window. Each studio at WRUW looks into the production studio via a large pane glass window. On the other side of this particular window was a 25 year old male, very pale, with large coke bottle glasses and long hair. He was previewing music, and it looked like there wasn’t a thing on this planet he would rather be doing right now.

“You know him?” Calvin asked.

“No, who is he?”

“That’s Steve Who’s Living The Dream.”

Apparently it wasn’t just a Calvin thing. Steve was widely known at WRUW for Living The Dream. You didn’t quite need to ask what that meant, most people intuitively knew, but I asked anyway. It was as I suspected.

Lived with his mom. Didn’t have a job. Just hung out, listened to music and played records on the radio.

I understood his moniker to mean two things that at first I thought were different, but I’ve come to understand are the same thing.

1st: He’s a loser.
2nd: He’s doing exactly what you always wanted to do.

Whenever the meaning of life comes up, I’m always pretty comfortable sitting on my cookie cutter answer of “The meaning of life is to be happy.” Ask me what the meaning of happiness is and it gets a little fuzzier, but I don’t think it unreasonable to say it’s up to the individual. If I am only happy knowing I have a successful career, with a beautiful wife and lots of money, then I’ll have to work for that happiness. But if I’m happy just playing records and hanging out, well, why don’t I?

I didn’t ever really attract Steve’s notice, but that didn’t seem to really upset him at all. When I left he was still playing records, scribbling notes on a piece of paper, and generally looking more content with himself than anyone I’ve noticed in a while.

Our requirements for happiness are often a lot more complicated than we would ever like to admit. I’d love to say that the joy of hiking in the wilderness does it for me, but I’d be lying to say that when I’m out there I don’t miss mp3’s, the internet, and Cleveland. Of course, when I’m back in Cleveland all I want to do is run away with a backpack and some sandals and live on a beach somewhere until I run out of books.

I don’t think happiness is something you can ever attain. You can get close, but there is always something that puts that twinkle in your eye. Maybe that’s what happiness really is, the twinkle. Every day spent looking towards the next mountain, the next project, the next radio show. Living may be loving the parts, but happiness might just be falling asleep and waking up again.

Last night I stared out my window for a long time. While I hadn’t noticed, the leaves on the trees outside my window had fallen, and for the first time I could see past them. The view leaped out over the hill I was on top of, down to the massive hospital and campus. I could see where the lights ended at the lake, I could see where I walked each day, I could see so much I was mesmerized.

I’ve told people that I can handle it, being this busy. I can handle it because it’s not hard I say. This is all just a game, I tell them, all you have to do is play calmly and know what needs done. I tell them this, some agree, some laugh, and some don’t say anything.

This semester is the busiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, easy. I have my fingers in a lot of pies, and I always feel like I could be doing more. I skip my classes to go to meetings and make phone calls, to do homework and learn things from the week before.

I went out with this really sweet girl. She doesn’t talk to me now I think because I couldn’t do anything; I was always off in some other state at a conference, at some meeting, doing some homework.

The leaves changed and cleared the view from my room while I wasn’t looking. I sat here on this cursed computer while the trees peeled back to show me the life I was missing. I promised myself when I came here I would connect, but I never thought about being able to let go.

It was fairly innocent. My brother Ed and I had just bagged the second peak on the ridge, named Monte Cristo, which was knife edged at all sides but our route up. We couldn’t sit on the peak because of the dreadful flies that seemed drawn to the pinnacle, but we found a nice place on the ridge between both of the peaks to eat lunch. Between Mount Superior and Monte Cristo you get a fabulous view of Alta and Snowbird, to the point where my brother was pointing out all the ski and snowboard runs he’d done, and ones he wish he could do at Alta, even though he was a snowboarder who wasn’t allowed in. We decided to start back, as we didn’t have a whole lot of water.

Coming up to Mount Superior, we decided to not climb it and just traverse around, as we only needed to make it to the continuation of the ridge. We ended up on a path leading into a ravine, with no obvious exit other than down. It was either climb down with no ropes or helmets, or walk quite a ways around then up to the peak, something neither of us really wanted to do. I made the decision to continue, Ed wasn’t going to make it for the both of us. We could have turned around, probably should have, and in the end I wish we did.

It was a series of steep inclined steps, leading down in a staggered side to side fashion for a couple hundred feet. On either side were some decent hand holds, but footholds were lacking in any consistency. Everywhere, on every nice piece of rock, were little chunks of rubble that had fallen down the ravine from the peak above. Once we had committed to the descent, it dawned on me why I felt deja vu.

During the summer of 2001 my best friend Justin came out to visit me for a month in Utah. My family had just moved there a month previous, so I was all giddy about exploring the mountains. Justin, my littlest brother Monty (age 12) and I left early one morning to go climb a mountain. We picked a moderate one, one with a view, maybe 8 miles round trip with a couple thousand feet vertical. Getting on top was easy, but we decided to go a different way down. We must have dropped five hundred feet on scree fields that were so loose we couldn’t go back up. It could have occurred to me I was going exploring with my little brother and my friend who had never really been climbing before, but it didn’t. Our options of descent ran out when we found ourselves on top of a cliff. A single sinuous ravine stared at us as the only option other than hours upon hours of toiling to climb back up the scree field.

I told them to wait as I scouted, and I went down what I thought was about a quarter of the way. It was steep, but had handholds and was narrow enough to cross with relative ease. I stood at the bottom as Justin, with surprising ability, climbed down the series of rubble covered angle steps. Monty started down clumsily, and every moved knocked multiple rocks down that accelerated to high speeds by the time they reached me. In the absence of a helmet or a place to avoid it, I resorted to using my backpack to deflect the fist sized rocks. No amount of coaching would convince Monty to do anything different than what he thought was right. Every move was a goof, and I couldn’t get him to see his carelessness wasn’t safe for any of us. I continued down the ravine and saw it didn’t get any easier. The layout was a chute ending in a shear cliff. At the end of the chute there was a small climbing route to the side making the ravine route still doable. Monty knocked another rock down, and it narrowly missed my head. He had nearly slipped. I looked at the cliff again, and watched the rock fly off into the void below the chute. A slip that ended in a slide down the chute would result in death by twenty five foot fall onto jagged rocks.

The point when I realized this was the single scariest and depressing point of my entire life. I felt like I had single handedly brought my best friend and my youngest brother into a life endangering situation that only I was able to safely get out of, and for the sole reason of wanting to explore. I thought of sprinting down the mountain to the town in the valley, screaming for someone with a cell phone so that they could wake Monty up from his eye-open stare at the bottom of the ravine after slipping.

I thought of the phone call to Justin’s parents, who were planning to let me stay at their house when I got back to Pittsburgh, and that I would have to tell them Justin wouldn’t be able to ski anymore, because he was paralyzed from the neck down, the result of breaking his back on those horrible jagged rocks.

I don’t know if they knew I was as scared as I was. I continued to direct them down the ravine, explaining moves to make, chiding Monty for standing up on such a slippery slope. We made it down the mountain in one piece, although ironically Monty slipped on some rocks near the flat section at the bottom next to the trail, scrapping his leg enough to make it bleed. I didn’t explain to my dad how scared I was, because he is an expert mountain climber, and I subconsciously wanted to impress him with my ability to not get fucked up on a simple day hike.

Back to the more recent climb. When it occurred to me what I was remembering, I stopped climbing to watch Ed climb. Ed is a good climber, by now much better than me, but as we descended he kept kicking rocks down accidentally. As I looked up, I noticed two men standing on the peak watching us. One yelled down “You guys all right?” It occurred to me then I wasn’t the only one who noticed that we weren’t skilled enough to descend safely. I yelled back “Yeah, thanks for asking!” He replied to his buddy in a voice I could still hear, “I don’t think there’s anything we could do for them anyway.”

Ed hadn’t been paying attention, and was doing a move along the edge when he knocked some rocks down again. One rock was so big it started a mini-rockslide, taking a couple hundred pounds of mountainside pummeling down into the valley. We edged our way slowly down the ravine, scouting for safe ways out of an unsafe situation. It took us a long time to finally get back on the normal trail, and exhausted, we collapsed into the shade of a tree along the ridge.

They say you should do something every day that scares you. Endangering your brother’s life shouldn’t be it.

Mountain Fall Kills Former Publisher

On September 4th, Daniel Rector fell nearly 200 feet to his death off of the approach to Monte Cristo, a 11,132 foot peak. He was an experienced climber and died of massive head injuries.

He took the same route we did.