Last night, I
watched the movie Free Solo, which is a
National Geographic documentary film about Alex Honnold's successful free solo
climb of "El Capitan" in Yosemite National Park. The film has been
positively reviewed elsewhere, and I won't do so here. My short review of the
film can be summarized as follows: Free Solo
is a wonderful film for people who have familiarity with rock climbing or the
rock climbing community, while non-climbers may find the pace of the movie a
little slow and will almost certainly miss out on some of the technical details
of the climb. This movie is not merely "guy does amazing thing," it
is specifically "guy who is an amazing
climber does an amazing climbing
thing." The better you understand climbing, the better you will appreciate
the movie. That said, my wife enjoyed it, and she knows nothing about climbing.
Beyond the element
of rock climbing in the movie, the film jolted my memory about a great many
things I haven't been in touch with for a very long time. Watching the film, I
was impressed by the rock climbing community, people who hang out at the same
national parks and wilderness areas, pursuing the same outdoor hobbies, with a
sort of similar attitude toward nature and toward technology. It's not merely a
rock climbing community, it's a subset of the broader "outside"
community.
This is a community
that surrounded me as I grew up. It's impossible to avoid this community in
Utah - or at least, it was when I lived there - because Utah is such a
wonderfully special place for outdoor sports. In addition to featuring bar-none
the best skiing in the entire world, Utah is home to impressive red rock
formations that attract rock climbers and mountain bikers from all over the
world. The northern part of the state is home to some of the best single-track
mountain biking trails in the Rocky Mountains, along with plenty of limestone
climbing routes, national and state parks, mountains for hiking and ice
climbing, rivers for kayaking and fishing, reservoirs for boating, and endless
routes for trail-running, camping, caving, and exploring. In short, if an
outdoor sport exists, there are many beautiful places where you can do it in
Utah. I am not sure that any other place in the world has so many great,
world-class outdoor sporting locations as Utah does.
Consequently and
unsurprisingly, the outdoor sporting community thrives there, so much so that
when I moved away I slowly had to adjust to the fact that people who live in
other places don't necessarily do something.
In Utah, everyone does something. Some
fish, some bike, some run, some climb, some ski, some camp, and some do more
than one of the above, but everyone does
something. Outside of that world, though, a lot of people don't do something. Outside of that world,
it's not uncommon to meet people whose only real hobbies involve watching TV
and eating. The point I'm trying to make here is that I literally didn't understand this until I left Utah, because I
had never really met such people when I was there. The outside community is
everywhere there. I hadn't realized how much I missed it until I watched Free Solo.
This outside
community is an interesting group. They're a people who like to spend the
majority of their time in nature, doing very low-fidelity things - they're campers, not glampers
- but who are also extremely tech-savvy. In fact, the outside community has
their own thriving world of gadgets and gizmos that many people don't know
exist, but again, this is all in support of fundamentally low-tech passtimes.
These are people who eat extremely healthy diets, and yet who are also
stereotypically passionate about beer and coffee. They're among the most
physically fit people in the whole world, and yet they spend little time in
gyms and don't tend to bulk-up like body-builders. (Indeed, one of the more
impressive things about Alex Honnold is how incredibly strong and muscular he
is, despite his somewhat gangly appearance. That's not something you'd
encounter in your average gym rat.) The gear they need to do their thing is
horrendously expensive, as anyone who has tried to assemble the most basic,
fundamental rock climbing kit can attest, and yet they are generally not a
community of people who exude affluence or wealth.
Stepping into this
world means stepping into a world of people who have made it a point to spend
most of their time outside, and who have figured out the means to do so. Why
run on a sidewalk when there is a trail available? Why take a car when you can
take a bike? Why eat indoors when you can eat outdoors? Why sleep under a roof
when you can sleep under the stars? It's a romantic world, borne out of the
community's close proximity to the kind of wilderness that is capable of being
enjoyed. That is, you're unlikely to meet a great outdoorsman living in the
Sahara desert; you're much more likely to meet one at the foot of Mount
Rainier. Like people who live on the coast and cannot imagine life in a place
where one can wander miles without seeing a drop of water, so the outside
community lives in places where there are copious trails and fun things to do
outside, and they cannot fathom what it might be like to live in an urban
center, or a flat, sprawling suburbia like you find in the South.
It's a great world,
and I miss it. I like living in north Texas, but it would be nice to be able to
transport my lifestyle and resources from here to a place closer to the
community of people I grew up around. Maybe a better choice would be to make
small changes to my own life, to see if I can enjoy a little more of that
lifestyle than I otherwise would.
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