Chemistry of Fire Read online

  In seconds, you can get to going thirty miles an hour or so, a frighteningly dangerous speed when you’re on your butt on a high ridge. Fear adds more stress, which confounds good judgment. With clear thinking completely out of the picture, reflex will take over, and you’ll put your feet down to stop yourself. With or without crampons, your own momentum will flip you, and then you’ll go cartwheeling a very long way indeed. If you’re lucky, this will merely snap one or more of your leg bones. In the pack room in the basement of the Appalachian Mountain Club, a traditional meeting place, I had noticed numerous young people walking around with leg braces on. Now I knew why. Some aren’t so lucky as to be walking around in braces. “After a rain, we get fatalities on that route,” Wilcox noted.

  McKinney had been listening to our conversation. He poked his head into the office and said, “Yeah, if you want gear, go up to the bottom of Lion’s Head Trail Monday morning. Lion’s Head is definitely the scene of the most accidents.”

  “What we need is education, respect, and common sense,” Wilcox said. He pointed out the window to Cathedral Ledge, which offers great rock-climbing from easy to advanced. He said he could predict the accidents there like clockwork. In fact, some of them are the work of clocks.

  “When they change the clocks in the fall, it starts getting dark at five,” he explained. And every year several people do the same thing. They start climbing with their heads in the old time, get benighted on top, and decide they can tough it out, because when they began it was sixty-five or seventy degrees. They make it to nine or ten o’clock, when it gets down to about thirty degrees, and start yelling for help—that’s how close to civilization they are. The base is a fifty-yard walk from a hotel parking lot. “It’s only three hundred feet, two rappels. But we have to go up and get them.” He threw his hands up in the air and shouted, “Can’t you see the sun going down?”

  The top of Cathedral Ledge is in the town of Bartlett, but the bottom is in the town of Conway, and one day when someone fell off and died, the police got into an argument over who had to clean up the mess. One of them finally shouted in frustration, “Well, he was fine when he left Bartlett!”

  Climbers do notice the dark coming on, of course. But it is difficult to believe how quickly and efficiently stress can short-circuit rational thought and allow your body to take over and simply keep you moving in the wrong direction. Like Couper and Lattey, they may know the right thing to do in an intellectual sense. But reason becomes a small, far-off voice, while their bodies tell them that if only they finish the climb, they’ll be fine. Rest and hot chocolate lie ahead. Keep going.

  Wilcox said Couper and Lattey “had this incredible failure to change their plans, this do-or-die attitude, even after spending four or five hours on the first pitch—and that’s after the debacle of leaving the rope behind.” But it’s more subtle than that. The word “attitude” implies thinking. They were done thinking. They were effectively zombies.

  Our fate is fashioned out of more than simple mistakes. However stupid our actions may seem to others after the fact, no one sets out to be stupid. In fact, everything we do makes sense to us at the time in terms of the sum total of what we have learned. And that learning takes place in the body, beyond the reach of consciousness. Couper and Lattey’s biggest mistake was never having experienced the worst weather on Mount Washington. By the time they did, it was too late to learn.

  We know what happened to Couper and Lattey when they reached the top. Long years of experience have shown that people follow a pattern of behavior shaped by physiology, psychology, terrain, and natural forces. “People won’t walk into the wind when they’re lost in a whiteout,” Wilcox says. “They arrived there after dark. Now they’re faced with no visibility, wind over a hundred miles an hour right in their faces from the direction they should be going, and they decided to hunker down below the lip, where it’s sheltered.”

  We can safely speculate that they thought of the tents and sleeping bags and clothing they could have brought with them. Rick Estes agreed. “Rule number one, especially on Huntington, is that you should always be prepared to spend the night out.”

  By dawn on Sunday morning, there were thirty-three high-angle rescue climbers, including Comeau and Wilcox, at the base of Huntington Ravine. As they began working their way up, the wind reached 127 miles an hour. Soon everyone was back down in the trees. They couldn’t work safely in those conditions, which have been known to freeze eyeballs.

  “The accident happened on Saturday,” Comeau told me, “and it wasn’t until Tuesday that we got to them. The wind stays for days here. People always think that if something happens, someone will come along. But we don’t always come along.”

  Monday morning the wind reached 128 miles an hour with temperatures down to minus fifteen degrees. Comeau, Wilcox, and the other searchers had to crawl on their bellies to keep from being blown off the mountain, which would have meant falling two thousand feet. Wilcox surmised that Couper and Lattey had started to spend the night together as early as five o’clock. Lattey had decided to go for help but was turned back by weather and terrain. He was crawling back up when he died.

  It was Comeau who found Monroe Couper. He was frozen, leaning up against a cairn with his hands reaching into his pack, as if trying to get his stove to make something hot to drink. With all the wind, it took Comeau some time to realize that Erik Lattey lay close by. His face was in the rocks, his arms reaching up toward Couper. “They were ten feet apart,” Wilcox recalls. They were also only a quarter mile from an auto road and a way down. They had no map or compass.

  Most of our actions, most decisions about what to do next, take place without conscious thought. Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist famous for his research into how the emotional system works to generate behavior, has concluded that for the most part, we do things and then make up stories to explain what we’ve done so that it seems consistent with our view of who we are and what our lives are like. That sounds ridiculous if we think of ourselves as fundamentally rational creatures. But brain research dating back to the early 1970s is leading inexorably to that conclusion. So-called implicit learning or emotional learning is more powerful than conscious intellectual learning because it drives behavior. It is all the more powerful as a motivator of behavior because it is unconscious. We make decisions based on it all the time. Part of the proof for this is that people who have suffered damage in the areas of the brain that mediate emotional learning can’t make decisions at all.

  LeDoux writes, “In modern life, we sometimes suffer from the exquisite operations of this system, since it is difficult to get rid of this kind of conditioning once it is no longer applicable to our lives.” That is why having a lovely experience in a place that can turn horrible may set a trap for us by shaping the way we unconsciously make decisions. It’s like winning on your first visit to the casino. It will forever after seem like an attractive place, whereas in reality, you are certain to lose.

  In other words, we have developed an adaptation to one environment, and we fail to take into account the fact that some environments—such as the seas and mountains and canyons and stock markets of the world—are subject to huge and sudden changes. At the same time, we give too much credit to our intellect and overestimate its power over the real learning we possess, which is buried within us: the emotional learning that resides in the body.

  Many other scientists (such as Michael Gazzaniga, John Krakauer, and Antonio Damasio) are involved in related research. This new research has far-reaching implications, especially regarding hazardous environments. It suggests that conscious, rational, stepwise thought is not the giant we take it to be. It is instead a ghostly companion to our bodily behavior, only vaguely and imperfectly guiding it. Under stress or in high emotional states, it becomes a faint echo that is all too easy to ignore.

  Certainly, the mind’s ability to plan ahead is a useful and efficient tool. But in that very utility is a trap. We have to be able to continuously review
plans in the light of new developments. We have to remain flexible.

  Wilcox notes that he lives in the shadow of Mount Washington. Any day that the weather is nice, he can get up there in a short time, hike or ice climb, and “be home for beer call,” as he put it. Thinking about Couper and Lattey and numerous others whose bodies he’s retrieved, he adds, “They’ve been planning this for months. To them, it’s the big trip, a once in a lifetime thing. Like Everest was for me.”

  Once the plan has become unshakable, it’s easy to ignore new information or to unconsciously interpret it as favorable to that plan. For example, instead of interpreting “iffy weather” as meaning that it might be bad, you’ll interpret it as “It’ll probably be okay.” Making matters worse, Couper and Lattey underestimated the severity of the cold they faced. Their lack of equipment (no down parkas, mittens, or tent) testifies to the fact that they had not experienced such extreme weather, had not had that crucial opportunity to let the body learn. Monroe Couper was a smart guy. A composer, he was also an associate professor of music at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. But an inflexible plan—which had developed through stress, bodily innocence, and a few miscalculations—left him and Lattey vulnerable in an environment where everything they’d learned was wrong. They were operating in an imagined world that no longer existed.

  Before I left Mount Washington, I sat in the lobby of the rundown Eastern Slope Inn in North Conway with Rick Estes, recently retired from the rescue service. Estes was a powerfully built man with the brush-cut moustache of a previous generation of outdoorsmen. He had the philosophical demeanor of someone who’d spent way too many years watching way too many people hurt themselves in the same predictable and avoidable ways.

  Despite all the efforts, from public relations to legal remedies, the same accidents continue to happen year after year. “We had so many in 2000, I don’t remember them all,” Estes said. “We were running out of funds. Thanksgiving Day we ran out of volunteers. There were just horrendous cases.”

  The Falling Waters Trail leads up from Franconia Notch State Park to the summit of Little Haystack Mountain. The gradient is steep, and the drop-off from the trail is a long one. A favorite viewpoint is at a place called Shining Rock, a two-hundred-foot granite ledge kept wet and slippery by springs coming out of the forest. Estes recalled for me a guy and his girlfriend who were hiking up during that bad year. The girl got tired and decided to go back down, while the guy continued on up, taking his camcorder so he could show her what she’d missed. “He beat her down,” Estes said. “We picked up his brain in a bread bag, which was all we had with us.”

  Estes watched the tape from the shattered video camera. It showed the man’s feet on the green wet slime that covered the rock from which he’d slipped. Then: nothing.

  The forest is littered with such stories, and most of them lead us back to simple principles. Estes and most others I talked to believe that as a nation, we have made ourselves less self-reliant by creating what he calls “magic wands,” such as GPS and cell phones. But everything in our culture, from warning labels on McDonald’s cups that coffee is hot to personal injury lawsuits, encourages us to hand over responsibility to someone else. In his novel 1984, George Orwell called it “protective stupidity.”

  “You usually find people with brand-new packs and a stove that’s never been started,” Estes said. “They call and say something like ‘I’m lost, but I can hear the cars.’ What do you say to someone like that?” Estes had recently retired from the Fish and Game Department, which oversees search and rescue activities. He sighed, thinking over his career.

  As long as there are moody places in this world, beaches and mountains and canyons and forests that can go from paradise to hell in minutes, there will be people lost and hurt and killed in them. In the larger system that puts millions out there each year—a complex system that arose from the availability of transportation, the inducements of advertising and hype, the money that allowed people to get there, and the proximity of people—there’s no way to stop the accidents from happening. But we can stop them from happening to us.

  2

  Change Redemption

  THE LARGEST HUMAN penis in captivity hangs just off the lobby of Caesars Palace among the shops displaying Italian cowboy clothing and jewelry for the blind. It hangs from an immense reproduction of Michelangelo’s David, and anyone passing through the vaulted hall of mirrors known as the Appian Way is suddenly confronted with David’s mammoth toes on their pedestal. By reflex we look up: our view slides quite naturally skyward along the towering muscle-bound column of wax-white marble, and there, six feet up, illuminated in a spotlight diffused by smoke, hangs La Tremenda, the greatest pinga on earth, gently supported on the clement pillow of that stone-cold scrotum.

  It’s a shock. I know. But this is no place for shame. This is Las Vegas, home of Liberace, whose red-white-and-blue-sequined hot-pants tuxedo made Elvis Presley look positively Amish.

  I checked in on a Friday. The room had Doric columns. The bathroom had a jacuzzi and glass walls, parts of which were transparent and translucent but none of which was quite opaque enough for a midwestern sensibility. When it comes to outhouses, we lean toward wood.

  I do not try to hide the fact that I am an adrenaline junky. I like shape-shifting and rapid changes in altitude. But this whole thing—the giant penis, the glass bathroom, the guy on the house TV channel explaining how to play baccarat—made my hair stand up. Already I understood that sex and gambling were connected, that sex was the voltage that ran Las Vegas. The act of gambling tapped into something primal. Freud, who believed that it was a subliminal ritual of masturbation, spent a great deal of time analyzing Dostoevsky’s obsession with gambling and how it seemed to propel his literary powers. When Fyodor would lose everything, he’d write real hard to pay his debts. There was nothing mystical or even symbolic about it.

  For years I have traveled to exotic places to write these essays. For years I have asked my friends to join me on my trips, but few have accepted. There’s always an excuse: family, work, obligations, inertia. When I said I was going to Las Vegas, my friends Jan and Don, who have a chain of bookstores, bought their tickets immediately and made our reservations at Caesars Palace. I happened to mention my travel plans to fellow writer Larry “Butch” DuBois, and he said without hesitation, “I’ll drive over from Salt Lake City.” When I asked him about the lure of Las Vegas, he said, “Gambling is the most powerful drug in the world. Second only to pussy.”

  When I told my Los Angeles movie agents, Rich Green and Howie Sanders, they said they’d meet me there and we could go over my screenwriting projects. Important agent-client bonding time, they called it. Tony Bill, another good friend, a producer and director from Los Angeles, flew his Cessna 310 out. (“The last time I was here,” he said, “was at the Tailhook convention, and Helen got her butt pinched.”) Fellow screenwriter David Klass (also a client of Rich and Howie) hitched a ride with Tony. A Rick and a second Don used some frequent-flier miles to join our growing group. Everyone I talked to about Las Vegas said, “Oh, I hate Vegas. It’s too—tasteless. I hate it, I just hate it . . .” Before the weekend was out, there were ten of us gathered there, throwing dice and playing blackjack and giving away to slot machines dollars that we wouldn’t have given to a beggar.

  Caesars Palace was one of the few places left in the grand old tradition, booming at midnight the week before Christmas, jammed cheek by jowl with Cubano-smoking gamblers on a Sunday morning, while the cellar Christians were off to the catacombs to kneel and whimper. Caesars is a high-rolling casino for adult gamblers with a private casino upstairs for the highest of rollers who want quiet and privacy. The $7 million dollar suites are legendary. They are not for rent at any price. They are saved as comps for certain very special people who bet a great deal at the gaming tables, such as a Middle Eastern prince or a great sports star.

  As the elevator opened we were hit by blinding light and deafening noise. Jan
and Don and I entered tremendous rooms of urgent concentration, vast sweatshops of citizens, rump to groin, bent to their tasks amid the stridor of singing machines, the clattering implements of their labors. They sat hunched over the radar screens of electronic poker like a thousand air traffic controllers guiding the airmail through Andean winter storms. There were no smoke-free environments in Las Vegas, except perhaps the intensive care unit, and a tawny pall drifted like a tapestry of seine nets through the measureless arena and was caught in the sheaf of beams descending from spotlights in the ceiling and twisted in them, breaking slowly into curlicues like tallow being squeezed out by these very animal labors at the hands of this seemingly impossible industry, in which the workers pay the proprietors for the privilege of their toil. And rising above it through the murk, a sign said, “Change Redemption.” It struck me as an oddly spiritual concept in the midst of all this avaricious compulsion until I realized that it was referring to coins, not souls.

  Don approached a pit boss surrounded by his fortifications of blackjack tables and waved him over. A moment later this clean young man in his good suit, like a maître d’, brought Don a plastic clipboard with a carbon form to sign. They no longer call him a “pit boss.” The word “gambling” is no longer in use. It’s “pit manager” and “gaming.” So this middle-management fellow signaled to the nearest dealer, who gave Don a single yellow chip.