There's A Hole In My Bucket-List.

I did something this past weekend I've been wanting to do for nearly twenty years: I took a three day Advanced Wilderness Life Support course.  It was eye-opening.

It opened my eyes to the fact that bucket-lists should be revised from time-to-time, to keep up with the changes in body and mind that come with age and experience.  When I first added an AWLS class to my bucket-list I was obsessed with mastering the wild places and feeding a hero-complex.  Most of the 38 students in the class last weekend fit that same mold; lean, hungry, happy, playful, young doctor-gods dreaming of medical triumph, drivng Subarus and Jeeps draped in bikes & boats.  I, on the other hand, am a pudgy, middle-aged, shy, cynical, slightly neurotic male nurse dreaming of napping and solitude, driving an 11 year-old truck with an REI sticker on it.  I realized I'm a wanna-be who no longer wants-to-be.  If you fall of a cliff while hiking, you had it coming, you knuckle-head; I'm not going to save you - it's too much work and you'll sue me anyway.  This runs counter to the philosophy of the Appalachian Center for Wilderness Medicine, the sponser of last weekend's class, whose actual motto is "Disrupting Natural Selection Since 2007".  It's run by some pathologically optimistic doctors who literally vibrate when they're forced to stand still, hands still curled around imaginary kayak paddles or bike handles, eyes darting toward the mountains and woods like opiate addicts in line at the pharmacy.  They reminded me of Henry Benton's wild creatures, "finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations".  Some people's bucket-lists include visiting other nations: mine does not.  I've already been to other nations, they're lawless and smelly.  As I proceeded through the course I concluded much the same thing about the "victims" I was supposed to rescue and was shocked by the realization that 1.) I already know how to do this stuff, 2.) I have an extremely low desire to actually do it.  The self-image I'd spent a lifetime cobbling together fell apart. The other nations are thrumming to fanciful visions of heroism, this one has been unspooling a strip of ribbon wire at the 38th parallel and shutting down the grid. Other than that life-altering observation, it was a great weekend.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go scrub out my bucket and put a patch on it, so reality won't leak out.