Category: Chapters

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.

I hadn’t talked to him in about a year. We had been friends in high school, gone to the park at midnight with girls, played in gym, been high school boys. I went to college, he joined the Air Force.

Teke is getting married.

In college I felt as if I was maturing, as if I was learning things my other friends hadn’t. I felt like I was slowly turning into the real Bacon, the man who could handle things that were thrown at him. Planning concerts, parties, dorm events, tutoring, joining a fraternity, I was busying myself in ways I hadn’t ever done before. But in the back of my mind I knew I was faking it.

Teke invited me to his wedding.

He joined the air force, been through basic training, learned how to fix any aircraft, and is the crew chief for C-130’s at Braggs air force base in North Carolina. He was engaged. He told me he was going to the Middle East in a couple of months.

I was invited to Teke’s wedding.

He had a career he loved, a woman he loved, and a future. I had memories of dorm parties that few people came too, of failed relationships, and a slight dread of working. I told him I felt like a child talking to a man. He said he gets that a lot.

Someone is marrying Teke.

I’ll be 20 in December, finally shedding the binary digit that has been with me for almost a decade. I will no longer be a teenager, and become by definition a young adult. But talking to my friend with his career and his wife to be and his future made me feel younger than I have felt for a long time. Suddenly all the soap operas I have been involved in recently have seemingly melted away, and my mental priorities have been slightly rearranged.

Teke is getting married . . .

. . . and I’m tired of being a kid.