LONG TIME NO SEE. Seriously, I don't even know who comes here anymore.
Here's what I've been up to the last couple months, my video application to the BYU advertising program.
Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVJiizwy4xQ
In the Rye
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
My near-death experience on Mt. Timpanogos
It's been a while! To get back in the groove of things, I thought I'd post my final Non-fiction essay for my Creative Writing class. Enjoy and I'll have some more up shortly.
Timp
Sometimes
I feel my brain recording. In an important moment I feel the back part of it
fill with blood and the edges of my world lose reality. The moment is
permanent. No other moments are so real. Other moments I can feel pass me. They
pass so stealthily that I can look back and see them in the valley below, but
when I look forward I’ve already forgotten them.
A
skin. White and clumpy and defeated on the mountain. At first I don’t recognize
it, it seems like a movie prop, an alien species dumped in my path. As I get
closer I start to make out hooves and horns protruding from the clodded fur. A
goat.
A
full fog has moved in, it’s actually a cloud considering I’m about 10,000 feet
high on the world. A wetness covers everything. I am hiking in a tiny world
inside of the humidifier that my mom used to put in my room when I was sick. I
used to place my open mouth near where the new mist came out and feel a dew
coat my insides. Back on the mountain the air doesn’t blow or make noise, it
rolls past on it’s way east. The cloud moved quickly but I felt no wind, heard
no wind. I only heard the skin in front of me, and the peak beyond it, to my
right I hoped. I imagined that beyond my line of vision is a wolf or some
undiscovered predator watching me watch the animal it just killed.
Their
mossy faces have seen the fate of this animal and thousands before. They will
watch me walk up and run away. I had never seen a mountain goat up close, and
considered it a lucky sight, and a good omen. I love wild animals. A dead goat.
I smiled and turned right.
In
my room was a backpack with all the supplies I thought necessary to hop a
freight train. The morning I planned to leave my mother greeted me with a smile
and kind words that have long been lost. It would kill her not knowing where I
was, when I’d be back, if I was warm. She already couldn’t sleep at night when
worried about how I was doing at college, or where I was every night after
coming back home. I couldn’t. As much as I wanted to hurt her and my father, I
couldn’t that day. I got a new backpack, a smaller one, and filled it with
hiking supplies, just enough for a day.
I
entered American Fork canyon in my gold Toyota and slowed down at the guard
station, when I got close enough I saw that there was no one there. The road
was empty as well. The cliffs served as reminders of how tiny I was in my car,
nothing compared to the solid rock watching from both sides. As I circled the
back side of the mountain, climbing and curving, and looked out upon the wet
orange and gold aspens and dark pines I wondered when the suburbs would sneak
through the narrow passage or climb over Mt. Timpanogos and settle on the other
side. I hope I’m dead first.
The parking lot had
only a couple other cars.
It
was early October. I looked left over a valley and smiled. Rain. The trees were
shining, I took one picture of the
glistening forest 40 minutes up the trail and my camera’s battery died. A
forked trail. A waterfall. Deer. I got lost for about an hour before finding
the trail and a people again.
“It’s hailing at the
top.”
I know.
They
passed me and stared at my bare legs, clad only in running shorts, and my
t-shirt. I was doing it. I didn’t need anyone or anything. I was in control.
Another poncho wearing couple came up suddenly. I heard them before I looked
up.
“It’s really cold up
there.”
I’ll be fine.
4
or 5 hours later, past the switchbacks, past the goat, I reached the bend, the
saddle. Where one crosses over from the back side of the mountain to the front.
To the sky.
Summit
fever is typically defined as the dangerous state of mind in which a person fails
to notice dangerous weather, route conditions, physical exertion or refuses to
take them into consideration in a desperation to reach the top.
I almost brought a
Watermelon Prime-time.
“When
you get to the top of a mountain, on the peak, and just look out over
everything and light up one of these babies. If you smoke one time in your life
that would be the time.” Chad eyed me and rolled one in his fingers. I wouldn’t
be leaving my home, my job, and my studies to go to Brazil in a month. A single
puff would stop it. Oops.
40
minutes later I might as well been on top of Everest, I could see nothing. Only
the rocks closest to me and the tin hut at the peak. Inside was a small bench
and a single black permanent marker. The walls are a collage of dates, hearts,
names, and phrases. Hidden among them is a marriage proposal of a couple I
know, though I didn’t look for it.
“I’m grateful that I
could do this before my mission. Drew Botcherby.”
I
laid the marker back in it’s place on the bench in the middle of the shack. My
pre-mission life was closed in that signature. Accomplished. I’d proved to my
parents and everyone else what I could do alone. It was over, the climb, the
resistance, and the anxiety that led me to pack a hitchhiking survival kit and
made me want to smoke. A reconciled past and an independent future. As the
mountain crunched under my boot and felt strong. I took 5 steps out of the
shack and everything was light.
Lightning. Thunder. Angels.
It hit everything
around me.
In
high school I ran track. Feet crammed into size 7 shoes with screwed in spikes.
Silk shorts that made our legs glow and our testicles sweat. Running on those
tracks is youth. Feet are weightless, legs are free. We knew we could cut
anyone with our screwed in shoe-spikes. That our elbows could be the difference
between a win and a loss. Every time I ran in my life it was with my eyes
forward, elbows locked, I was running towards something. I didn’t know what it
was like to run away.
The
crack of the lightning was a starting gun. No one else was lined up; there was
no lane to follow. I was gone, but with none of the skill and form I had
mastered, no competition in my eyes. A mad scramble from something I couldn’t
race or fight.
The storm had been
waiting behind the fog, I felt it at the dead goat and now I knew what it was.
Hail
hit me sideways, from below, and occasionally from above. My left side was a
swarm of needles. Time did not exist. It’s ok to die. A painless lightning
strike and a tumble. Unprepared. Unworthy. I didn’t care. God or something
would decide if I died and it would be out of my hands. No more mission, lies,
faking. College, wife, family. Decisions. Over. I breathed deep. Just keep
running.
Every
time I expected to see the curve, the loop to the other side, the safe, green
side behind the mountain’s shield, I saw fog and the trail. Until it was gone.
The sky was an upside-down northeastern ocean. The lightning was in front,
behind, above, and under. Spires. Purple and white. Falling.
The
trail wasn’t the way I remembered it on the ascent. I was climbing, descending,
scrambling on the mountain face. No time to think. Just run. Get down. I
finally realized that I wasn’t where I should have been when I hit a dead end.
I was suddenly on a table of stacked rocks, surrounded by man-sized spires, a
30 foot drop. A look back, the first since I left the shack, and there was no
way out. A crumbling precipice from one edge to the other.
An altar. Blood on my
left side, face, arm, and leg.
“God, please, God, God, God God...”
A
dying prayer. Two words repeated. The rocks cut my knees. Circles, paces, sobs.
It didn’t seem so easy to die anymore. Not stuck like an animal on a rock.
I
got down from the precipice, I don’t remember how, but I was still on the front
side and the clouds grinded on my skin. I needed to cross over. The slope was
now covered in 3 inches of hail. The trail was a white 2-foot wide strip. I
could make it out because of the rock points peppering the slope above and
below. Soon the difference became less obvious. Eventually I wasn’t on the
trail. Desperation. Exaustion.
I
slipped. It felt like a death sentence. I could have stopped myself. Down the
ice. Down and down.
Pine
saplings. The only living things on this side of the peak. 3 or 4 clustered
together. I slide to them and lied down. Shelter from the hail but not the cold
or the pain.
The
911 operator called me honey. I told her I was going to die. My dad stayed with
me until the phone battery became too low for non-emergencies. What he told me
has long disappeared from my memory, if it was ever recorded. A team was
coming, then a helicopter, then the weather was too bad it couldn’t find me.
I’m near some trees, the only ones. Trees. My feet rested on their wrist-thick
trunks, keeping me from sliding farther. There were no more trees below.
“Stay
where you are.” I thought I heard it slicing the air far away, but it could
have been the sky. By a couple trees, in the middle of rocks. When the low battery
sign blinked and the calls stop I was alone with my thoughts. Death came back.
My phone died. I later took a look from the valley and could see no trees in
the area where I was, they must have been looking lower.
Naked
on rocks. A wet t-shirt frozen to skin. Pressed against the earth by sky that I
could no longer see. Shakes. First small, then incredible, forceful spasms.
There is no elegant way to describe a seizure. In the moment I could feel
everything. My body, mind, and spirit being grated against a pile of rocks by
the heavy sky. I watched the muscles in my thighs bulge and misfire. Like
bubbles popping. Red. Then white. I felt my energy retract into my torso, my
limbs were beyond my feeling and beyond my control. The helicopter would never
come. The hikers would never find me here. The snow piled up on my body and
clothes. Dippin-dots. 2 hours or more passed.
“I’m
going to die.” Again. This time the operator wasn’t there to hear me. My legs
were warm now. I turned onto my stomach and strained to look up at the mountain
above. There were at least 50 meters until the top, I thought, though I
couldn’t see it. I debated whether it would be safer to climb back up, or to
continue down the west face, where there were no trails. I have to move. Though
I had long stopped thinking straight I chose to climb. Remembering my track and
field days I climbed. Losing some ground as the rocks slid under my feet,
clawing at the gravel so steep that standing without my hands was impossible. I
don’t remember the climb, it was erased and left behind by the sight that met
me at the top. Below, on the other side. White speckled with sharp grey knives.
Below, far below. I clung to the cliff and lowered myself as far as I could. I
dropped. 15 feet later legs buckled on impact and my butt hit the rocks. I
screamed. Crouched and slid. I dragged myself forward by catching the rocks
ahead of me with the heels of my shoes and bending my legs.
At
least an hour later, I hit flat ground running. My legs were far beyond
feeling. I fixed my eyes forward this time. Towards, not away. Under the top of
mountain peaks there always seems to be a plateau. Where hikers are given their
last flat land to stroll around and get lost and look at the peak. Always a
mountain upon a mountain. When I came up it was green and promising, Scotland
in the mist, now it was white and dead. There was no trail, I ran right and
down.
Where
I found the goat was the start of this plateau, after the endless switchbacks
the goat rested at the entrance, offering a rest. The hiker was given time to
think about the climb, look back at what he has done and look forward at what
he will do. It is a dividing point. The lip of a groomed ski run that drops
into the slope.
Dropping
into the switchbacks was leaving the danger behind. The goat, the peak, the
voices, God couldn’t follow me as I began to hear my feet again and ignored
every technique for running that I had ever learned, my numb legs pounded
against the dirt and slid and tumbled like a boulder crashing down the mountain
without thoughts or emotion just gravity. Unconscious flight.
A
Baptist man couldn’t sleep and decided to hike the mountain in the middle of a
storm at night, the night before he was going to move to Kansas. He didn’t know
why and knew he wouldn’t make it to the top. He felt that he should bring an
extra pair of clothing and extra food. The clothing was his son’s. I stumbled
into him, unable to speak, and he escorted me an hour down the mountain until
we ran into the rescue team. I don’t know his name.
“You Mormon’s believe
your works will save you.”
A
mess of beards under orange ponchos. Faces obscured by sharp headlamps. Radios.
A man called of the other team that was climbing the peak from behind. I ate a
snicker’s, my favorite candy bar, coughed up water. They tried to get me to
smile and laugh along, but I couldn’t speak.
My
foot shook on the brake pedal. My voice shook without even opening my mouth.
The headlights made me feel like I had tunnel-vision I’m not sure I didn’t. One
of the volunteers on the Search and Rescue team, a young man in the passenger
seat in a baseball cap with a toothy smile, tried to keep me awake, or
entertained, or reactive. His friend in the back did not. I imagine he looked
out the dark windshield in front of us, thinking about his wife and shower at
home. Asking himself why kids did this. Why they made him climb mountains in
the rain.
“They
told you to stay where you were? You can’t do that, you have to keep moving.
They told you to stay? You could have died. That wouldn’t have been smart.”
These old men don’t know what they’re doing. They told you to stay. I didn’t
bother telling him that it was the 911 operator. I was just glad he was mad at
someone that wasn’t me.
A
man who said he was the Sheriff was waiting with my family in a trailer down
the canyon. They never asked me to talk about it.
Marbled
purple with dead lumps of white and living red stretched from the backs of my
knees upwards and got worse at my buttocks. After a couple days Chad, my friend
who had offered me a Watermelon Prime-time, saw my leg. He laughed, said I was
stupid for going up alone, and changed the subject. Hot blood blurred the
vision at the edges of my eyes. I turned my head, looking back into the valley
of my memory for almost the last time, and when I looked forward it was gone.
Monday, April 1, 2013
I am a BYU student. I have facial hair. And I am surprisingly not judged for it. A few years ago, I would not have gotten away with it so easily. One of the first things I noticed upon returning to BYU after more than 2 years was the number of men with facial hair. There are lots of them, as I write this in the library I see three.
I am proud of my fellow students and professors for not staring at me, not judging me, and not questioning my worthiness.
This article (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56042739-78/beard-beards-byu-church.html.csp) in the Salt Lake Tribune is excellent, it's everything I wish I'd written. It chronicles the Mormon beard's descent from encouraged to shunned. It made several good points:
1- Missionaries used to be REQUIRED to grow beards, it was considered more mature.
2- Jesus and God have quite the beards according to most Mormon art and accounts! So they would not be accepted as temple workers.
3- The standard only changed in the sixties when beards equaled hippies. This is no longer the case.
Hugh Nibley said in 1973: "The worst sinners, according to Jesus, are not the harlots and publicans, but the religious leaders with their insistence on proper dress and grooming, their careful observance of all the rules, their precious concern for status symbols, their strict legality, their pious patriotism... the haircut becomes the test of virtue in a world where Satan deceives and rules by appearances."
Hopefully whoever makes the rules at BYU will come around one day! The students and faculty are already way ahead of them. Happy bearded Easter!
I am proud of my fellow students and professors for not staring at me, not judging me, and not questioning my worthiness.
This article (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56042739-78/beard-beards-byu-church.html.csp) in the Salt Lake Tribune is excellent, it's everything I wish I'd written. It chronicles the Mormon beard's descent from encouraged to shunned. It made several good points:
1- Missionaries used to be REQUIRED to grow beards, it was considered more mature.
2- Jesus and God have quite the beards according to most Mormon art and accounts! So they would not be accepted as temple workers.
3- The standard only changed in the sixties when beards equaled hippies. This is no longer the case.
Hugh Nibley said in 1973: "The worst sinners, according to Jesus, are not the harlots and publicans, but the religious leaders with their insistence on proper dress and grooming, their careful observance of all the rules, their precious concern for status symbols, their strict legality, their pious patriotism... the haircut becomes the test of virtue in a world where Satan deceives and rules by appearances."
Hopefully whoever makes the rules at BYU will come around one day! The students and faculty are already way ahead of them. Happy bearded Easter!
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
My class went to the cafeteria this morning to observe the eating folk.
Here is the result:
Your brown sack lunch
folded over with such perfectly straight lines
and your huge gut
folded over your belt with heaving curves
funny that the same food
in just one instant
can leave it's bag of order
and enter an inflatable jump-castle
Here is the result:
Your brown sack lunch
folded over with such perfectly straight lines
and your huge gut
folded over your belt with heaving curves
funny that the same food
in just one instant
can leave it's bag of order
and enter an inflatable jump-castle
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
BYU Honor Code Exposed
At last! Public proof that the BYU honor code is ridiculously out
of touch with students. I love BYU, don't get me wrong, but I like free agency
better.
Heard of the
Facebook page "BYU-I Secrets"? The idea is that students can send
secret thoughts and actions anonymously, to be posted to the now over 3,000 people who have liked the page.
It's an honest and
sometimes painful glimpse of the sexual frustration, social repression, and
sometimes depressing state of BYU Idaho's students. People criticize or comfort
each other, act self-righteous or rebellious, and all around expose the disfunctional
and Orwellian idea that a University, even if it's the Lord's, can control the thoughts and actions of it's thousands of very different students. Take a
look if you dare.
https://www.facebook.com/ByuISecrets?fref=ts
BYU Provo has one
as well, though it is less popular.
https://www.facebook.com/ByuSecrets?fref=ts
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Recife #2 - Traffic
I miss the buses
constantly passing and making me feel like there was something enormous going
on. Streets in the US aren't the same. They are sterile, planned.
Obnoxiously accurate turns and angles make the thrill of driving feel like
math.
In Recife they are veins. Full of humans, horses, taxis, buses,
pedestrians, and life, twisting their way through buildings, across bridges,
past beaches, over and near the ocean. Buses give window to an array of human
life, standing. It’s so different to stand as the world flies by. I don’t think
any Americans really know what it’s like to look around as they travel, with no
control, no hand on the steering wheel and no reclined seat.
That said, at least I
don't have to wait 2 hours in traffic anymore :)
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