Artistic Footprint

[View with PicLens]

12►

Either you love what you do, or you make enough money to do what you love. The latter are sold on the sloppy seconds of the realities of those who live how they want. The product being the escape from their chosen reality instead of the life they naturally gravitated to. Those who book time off work to enjoy their weekends are the statistical income of those that barely survive on their daily transaction. I’m speaking of course about mountain life. The tireless backstage hands of these mountains that are built by, operated by, and maintained by, but never prepared for, the people that breathe its existence. I’ve come to realise that there are some things that you cannot choose in life, passing events that seemed inevitable from the start. I gauge my life by the moments that seer the flavour of “I can’t believe I’m here right now” into the deepest parts of my memory. The feel of being on the edge of nature versus man is what fuels that fire, where you’re at its whim or you’re haunted by its power, you can either exploit it or have your mistakes glaringly unveiled, but there is no room for pride, only appreciation of that boundary. And at the end of the day, the heartrate drops and the beers are cracked to the sound of folk music as I write the day’s resolution as a mountain employee.

The life of a ski bum. Foamies, kraft dinners, wild cats, hostels, and hitchhiking aside, I’ve never felt at a loss when I’ve finally reached the summit of my destination. Consider that lifestyle and relate it to the industry as a whole; nobody gets into starting a resort with the idea of making money. Even the evil conglomerates of intrawest are on the verge of bankruptcy since birth. Not to mention half of their staff is there for the free pass and feels no guilt calling in sick after a dump. As a survival tactic, all mountains have incorporated the concept of invoicing every step you take from gas to parking to lodging, beer, food, lessons etc. Us bums have watched this happen and learned to skirt our way through the fine print with covert thrift.

But unfortunately we keep knocking shoulders with the overwhelming crowd of weekend warriors. I remember glimpsing the freedom that all mountains brought – the rustic vibe of rotting mouldy improvised shacks, local riders who knew the secret trails by referral only, and the shops that hooked you up with sweet deals. All replaced with shiny new highspeeds, uniformed tacky jackets and standard operating procedures. The Wal-mart effect of bringing more people to the industry, albeit people only more disassociated with the mountains, forcing the die-hard cabin-sleepers to fight over the scraps of the rich tourists. My soul needed to be free of this silent assimilation, and I started to understand the true costs of fresh lines.

So I migrated from the corporate skiworld, the highspeeds, apres-skis and lattes. I found myself patrolling on privately owned Mount Seymour, with its 12 minute chairs powered by 50 year old electric motors maintained by some sleepless gnarly staff. Once used to the ricketty 2 seaters, I quickly realised that those chairlifts don’t get you to the start of your run, they get you close to the best runs of your life. Because they drop you off at the trailhead to freedom, where you strap on the snowshoes or slap on the skins and seek out a line that you can name your own. Where every gasping sweaty breath you suck in makes every second of downhill feel that much more worthy of your exasperation, and every sip of beer at the end of the day taste that much more real. In a world where time is the most precious resource, the fixed-chair makes the earth spin slower.

Mount Seymour is a special place. Its rarity comes from a fire inside that sparks ideas through necessity and improvisation. Seymour’s history runs deep, riddled with old trail cabins that mark it’s past. It was one of the first places to permit snowboarding on its hills and has since led to the development and creationism from pro riders like Roberta Rodgers, Devun Walsh, Sean Genovese and Kevin Sansalone. Now it boasts a park that rivals that of Snow Park, yet remains quietly unheard of. Amongst the goings-on of mountain ops one can immediately see the loyalty that some have for this mountain. Not just the forever staff like Alex and Bob who are never shy to chat about the way things used to be, but still those seymour locals on a quiet day pop out of the trees for another ride up. These people complacently and without hesitation hide in solitude at the foot of a mountain, never seeking fame or fortune, but the harmlessly conceded satisfaction of daily runs between jobs as a barmaid or skitech or 40 year old paperboy. This is the quiet army of people the magazines write about but rarely ever find. They are your mountain locals, and they’re the ones who are probably still drunk and disorderly on the chair above you or interrupting your business call with the inviting phrase of a rambling “Hey dude welcome to Bakerrrrr….” or “wanna hit of somea this dude?” But they’re well connected, exemplified by the “get-some’s” to the nicknames of those dropping cliffs below. They are friendly enough to stammer through an awkward ascent and stoked to just not be hung over that morning. Consider these folks as the near-extinct and magesticly duct-taped wild animals. They will reward your patronage with secrets of the true hidden stashes so that you can experience the real mountain life – even for a day.

These hills are like the drive-in theatres of yesteryear; a dying breed of history that should never be lost. A place where we can associate our toes and fingers with the realities of appreciating their existence by the snapping in of bindings or the grasp of a skipole through cold fingers, and the pitter-pattering of feet as we leer over the edge of a sudden drop into a cloud of fresh. We did not choose snow, snow chose us. Sounds rather deistic, but thats the only way I know how to explain it. That white fluffy stuff that falls from the sky under immaculate conditions is what keeps me glued to the forecasts, radars, and general 6th sense of unstimulated giddiness. And upon the light of first chair I awaken to the grasp of seat and cable as I rise to the heavens, and come to rest upon the potentials of gravity. Never awaiting the invitation of crisp mountain air infused with the wretched stench of anticipation, accompanied by the torque of adrenaline to calm last nights hangover and the fear of a self-destructive motivation to huck.

Being in the Shit.

For most, the phrase is usually referred to as “welcome to the suck” I call it: “Being in the Shit.” It’s a randomly confused desire to find yourself in places most wouldn’t want to be. It could be sleeping at the edge of a forest in a hurricane, or shoving Meals Ready to Eat covered in K.I.F.E (krap I find everywhere) down your throat with ash and mud caked hands. It’s endless physical training that doesn’t make you look or feel any stronger, only toughens you up for the coming job.

I’ve spent plenty of my time training. Not training like where you have professors or quirky instructors, but training like paramilitary “when I was your age” hand-me-down, applicable know-how. It’s the kind of training that theorizes what your body should do and then repeats it over and over again until it is automatic. Two years in the army, a year of firefighter college, and now through some fucking messed up smokejump training, I feel ready to perhaps explain what goes on in paramilitary training.

This education takes a person and turns them into a machine. It’s a type of shock doctrine that wipes you clean of who you are and what you value. Its tough to lose these things, to morph into a clean slate, but you also lose the things that hold you back. The little voice that says you should turn around is silenced. And once you are this vast, empty, spongy carcass, they have a huge canvass to paint tactics and operations-level sequences into the deep crevices of your mind, and it truly is an art.

First and foremost, the first thing that must appear is your inherent enemy, be it an insurgent in a window, the moments before a backdraft, an avalanche, or a crossover in the forecast. In training, you can’t get any of those things, so they must be created. Enter your instructor. His or her job is to symbolize that force. They call you maggot, laugh at how you stumble, threaten you with exertion, and re-inform you of how easy it is to go home.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way. How else do you remove doubt from a rookie lined up to do something immeasurably dangerous? How do you make him trust his training, equipment, and peers? That’s how it must be, because if you can’t handle the stress of training, then get the fuck out man because you sure as shit can’t handle the job. The physical training is scenario-based to stir your conscience more than ripping your muscles and blistering your feet. In parattack, their P-T sessions are hourly secretive missions that have been nicknamed things like “the mind-fuck run.” They must sit down and plan workouts to remove as much hope as possible, and redefine what you think of as “all you’ve got”

The point is that you’re training for a job that puts not just your life at risk, but the lives of your team, trainer included. My first time sitting in a wooden box shaped like an airplane for my first exit drill, I was shocked by how much focus and drive were in the eyes of my instructors as they demonstrated the procedure that I initially thought was so trivial. Because the job’s not about you. If you exit an aircraft too soon or all fucked up, you could end up tangling yourself in your stickjumper’s parachute lines, or throw yourself miles from the dropzone causing unnecessary rescue risk. Thus if you fail, your team fails. Which is why if one person can’t make their suit-up time, all of your rookies do pushups, because in reality, the whole crew loses because of your fuckups.

What they’re looking for isn’t the strongest, brightest, stellar applicant. What they care about is what you’re willing to put yourself through for the job. They just provide the opportunity. They want to see you sweat buckets, they want to see what point you decide to fail at. And I can tell you that the only time a recruit is giving it 100%, balls to the wall, point of no return effort, is when an uninspired roar or growl screams from their dry, blood-tasting throat. When all their energy is sapped, but they keep running on empty. Because they have no intention of cutting you from the program, they want you to drop out yourself. It makes for a whole new ball-game when you realize that it is truly up to you. From the moment you enrolled to your graduation day, you decide whether or not you will survive, because they will make you eat your own words, the ones you sold during the interview.

On examination day, it’s clearly obvious you aren’t putting pen to paper, you can leave your calculators at home. This exam is by no means a scholarly effort. But consider this: in jobs like this, it all comes down to the seconds. It takes seconds to jam a rifle, find yourself thumping off the fuselage of an airplane, or a storm front pushing your fire out of your control. The task to fix it can never be hesitant. It must be an instant and immediate, automatic fix. The problems are real and are guaranteed to happen, you need to be that kind of person that doesn’t falter, but remain calm in shit-myself situations, and remedy the task with staggering efficiency.

And after all the bruises, blisters, crusted-eye mornings, and throbbing muscles, what are you left with? The keenest, most badass and capable motherfuckers in the service. You realize that you went through all that horrid bullshit because the veterans before you did, and they can only trust you and put their lives in your hands if you survived it. Camaraderie grows as you and your team hit the dirt together and bonds through tough failure and valiant success, a friendship that builds on incidence.

Your personality can grow back, you can reunite yourself with society, and bring with you an endless novel of stories that really can only be interpreted properly by the ones that were there.

The regiment had an amazing smell of rotting  canvass, mouldy rubber rainjackets, cured timber, and boot polish. It possessed an eerie sound of ancient echoes in the drill hall and taps of steel-toes on the immaculate concrete floors, amongst the hum of printing machines and typists. You know this building never sleeps and somewhere in the basement there’s a ghost sorting out kit amongst loud signs and posters behind a cage and counter. Entering the mess hall you can place your friends amongst the plaque-mounted walls and barstools, their beer resting loyally in their hands. In the calm before the storm you can take a moment to feel the awe of history like being in the presence of an old statue with determined expression. You feel a strong yet reserved essence of pride as you glimpse the sunrise of membership, and respect for the ones that wore the same uniform you do now, and hope to project an encouraging image with that badge sewn to your shoulder.

I’m a few days away from my first jump, here’s my first thoughts on the upcoming day: The Jump.

[View with PicLens]

If you’ve got some time to kill, I highly recommend the following lectures, mostly found from Ted.com’s best of the web.

some of these are pretty long, but totally worth your time, and are rated by me as “Life Changing”

A beginning link between atheism and corrupt religiousness

Rick Mercer interviews a kamloops crew I met while on deployment in chetwynd:

Rick Mercer Interview the Ice Pilots in NWT, whom I met shooting the history channel’s Dam buster episode in Mackenzie, BC:

Another great Ken Robinson animation about shifting education paradigms

Naomi Klein searches for outside the box methods to alter our perspective and motivate our resolve for climate change activism

Marcus Buckingham and the Truth About You

Rachel Maddow talks about Right Winged closed circuit Media Universes and explains “false facts”

A.J. Jackobs abides by over 700 rules set by the bible for a year

Sam Harris: Science can Answer Moral Questions

Robert Sapolsky: The Uniqueness of Humans

Douglas Adams: Parrots, the Universe, and Everything:

Elaine Morgan: An Old Woman’s lifetime acheivement of proving that humans evolved from Aquatic Apes, yet to be embraced by the scientific community:

Vilayanur Ramachandran: On Phantom Limb Syndrome and how humans learn by watching.

(search for more from Vilayanur. This guys on to something.)

Christopher DeCharms: Invents a realtime MRI that allows the brain to relieve pain and “program ourselves”

Noah Feldman says Politics and Religion manipulable technologies

Barbara Egnrenreich: Teaches us about how optimism masks our true necessary response

And Check out this clip from Season 5 episode 5,  of Rescue Me from FX networks, Sheila Keefe played by Callie Thorne, a NYFD firefighter’s widow after 911.

I haven’t been a patroller for very long, nor have I seen incidents of severe trauma on any significant scale. But here’s what I’ve learned from what I have experienced so far:

First and foremost, I don’t need a paycheque to motivate me to help people. I applied for this job because I enjoy being in the shit. The constant state of readiness, the jump-to as the radio goes, the booking it up a mountain on a sled. It’s a rush. I like the challenge of assessing and diagnosing and… well to put it plainly, “not killing your patient.”  But the barebones of it is that people come up here and spend a lot of money to ride. I want them to keep coming back and earning a love of the sport.

The first thing I can say about it is that training, the years of simple to more complex courses, the practice, the protocols, the scenarios, the extrications… It all goes out the window when I get to a call. Which of course is why the training is so important.  When I learn, the information just sits atop my skull, slowly seeping into my brain like a water into a sponge until it’s something that comes natural to me. And that way, when I arrive at my patient, I don’t have to think about what to do, I just do it. (try to) it may not always be the right thing to do, but it’s better than nothing at all. I’ve been to a few calls where I somehow did follow every procedure I learned in course, but I don’t remember doing it. That is what I define as good training.

I would consider assessing a patient to be like drawing a flow chart in my head. You ask questions, get some answers and go down a road, crossing off the things that stop you, and making note of the things that are important. “Is he breathing ok?” “how far did she fall?” “How is this person reacting?”

But I guess most importantly, I’ve only spent like 4 weeks in training how to “save lives” but really, I am only capable of sustaining life until a real paramedic gets there. The trick for me, is stimulating self-repair. The human body is actually a pretty stupid fucking thing sometimes. For example anaphylaxis, or an allergic reaction, is the body “killing itself trying to protect itself” It opens up all your veins to dump blood into your tissues and swells around your trachea… eventhough things like peanuts aren’t damaging it at all. Or shock – the body reacting to a frightening or traumatic event. Like if you were to fall on your ribcage (may or may not have happened to me) your intercostal muscles tense up, effectively “spinting” the damaged bones. Little would your body know that it was “splinting” your ability to breathe. Not necessarily the most strategic plan when trying to keep yourself alive, but is also an explanation for why spinal patients can get up and walk around, and wind up a paraplegic the next day, because their muscles splinted their affected vertebrates.

So I think that the most important, and most influential intervention happens in the first 10 seconds of a call. The first thing I try to do is speak in a confident, upbeat, and often comical voice, even if I’m shitting myself. Because as soon as the patient sees that red jacket and someone who is competent (or at least is pretending to be,) Immediately they go from deterioration to improvement. The dread, worry, and pain levels drop just because you’re there.

The next thing I do is I usually give them a white lie. Another thing that stimulates self-repair and helps them relax. I downplay their injury, tell them I’ve seen worse or that it’s not as bad as it feels. I remember getting to one call at the bottom of the bunny hill where a foreign girl had just fallen on her ski. She said that her leg felt “wet” and that she just needed a bandaid. “Pretty easy call” I thought. But I remember asking her if her pants were normally red, which they weren’t. I rolled up her pant-leg seeing more and more blood until I reached her knee, which, to be honest, was a shocking and horrifying sight (it was my first, alright??) What happened is that her knee was bent, her skin taught when she landed on the edge of her ski, which split the flesh like ripping a tent. The subcutaneous fatty tissue was cauliflowering outwards. But I didn’t flinch. That’s how I knew I could handle blood and gore. I didn’t look away or make a gross face. I remember my head went towards her knee to get a closer look, and my hands immediately when to cover the 4″ gash that went as deep as it could go. Her surrounding friends immediately put hand-over eyes and gasped and “oh-my-god-ed” And thats when I knew that the first thing I should do is cover the wound and to tell her that she can not look at her knee. For all she knew, it was just a little cut. The skin was cut so cleanly that only a few nerves were severed. Hell she went for another run before calling me! But had she been able to see the damage that had been done, her reaction would have been far more sobering and far less humble.

That’s the other interesting thing about the body. How the Nervous Systems interacts with the body and each other. The Sympathetic Nervous system is an automatic system that works with your heart, stomach, bowels, and gland secretions. In Traumatic events, such as confronting a giant bear, or accidentally finding yourself in a knife-fight, your body is stimulated by this nerve in something coined as “fight or flight” – as in get the fuck out of there (although of course we all know not to run from a bear) or stab that dude first before he stabs you. The Parasympathetic Nerve system is the exact opposite. It’s the one that stimulates the secretion of dopeamine and the craving of grabbing a beer after a long day of work. The “Feed or Breed” system. What’s most interesting is what happens when you get an owie. When that happens, your homeostasis, the harmonious “ecosystem” that is your body, is threatened. Your blood pressure will go up or down as your arteries and veins contract or relax, and you’ll feel the effects of things like endorphins or adrenaline. When you snap your tib-fib (lower leg bones) and you can’t handle the pain, your sympathetic nervous system may shock the neighbouring Vegus nerve which causes you to vomit or piss yourself, which indirectly helps you relax (I mean come on we all feel better after we puke or after dancing to the bathroom). At the same time, if you’ve broken a limb and you’re helpless, hours away from any form of help, the endocrine system in your body has the ability to turn pain off as a survival tactic by flooding the spinal cord with endorphins. People have been known to shatter their lower limbs and yet crawl, days away to safety and not scream in agony until the moment rescue arrives.

I was first on scene to a woman who had been smacked in the side by a reckless tuber, snapping her humerus. Not so… Humerous for her…  Not a significant injury, she still had blood flow to her hand (most of the time, if she would have just relaxed a bit). But she was just howling in pain. A very low pain tolerance which made the call a lot longer, louder, and more emotional than it needed to be. We made the call of entonox (laughing gas) and for an ambulance to meet us at the top. It literally took about 2 hours to get her from the bottom of the tube park and into the patrol hut, still howling away in my ear beneath the entonox inhaler (which of course she wasn’t getting any of because she was hyperventilating)… probably scaring people in the parking lot. One thing I noticed is that when the paramedics arrived, regardless of how caring and patient they were with her and her obsessive teary screams, I instinctively watched over their every move in a protective way. Something about being with her for so long, and eventhough it was only a limb-at-risk, part of my treatment seemed to fall on the fact that outside forces could hurt her more – including the paramedics. (which of course was not the case at all, they were far more professional than I was)

Overall I’m not going to lie. I get paid in bad weather and have been known to pray to promethius for fire and Ullr for snow. I would love it if every day people came up here and royally messed themselves up and kept me busy and happy. So if you are reading this and are not a close friend or family member of mine, ie a valued reader of this website, please come up and throw yourself off cliffs so that your graciously donated corpse can be my specimen. I will try my best to keep you alive. For everyone else, wear a fucking helmet.