The Banff Mountain Film Festival began with a montage of glimpses of all the gorgeous places we would savor at greater length throughout the evening. Tucked into one of the highest and farthest rows of the State Theatre, I felt a painful yearning on behalf of everyone who was not currently skiing the back country, biking a knife-edge ridge or kayaking over a waterfall: What on earth are we doing here, all of us, in our little offices with our little slips of paper and bits of data?
Then the individual films began and the longer I watched, the less I hated my life. An alternate title for the Banff festival might be “Meet the Adrenalin Junkies.” Each of the protagonists was doing an activity that we consider recreation – a thing done just for the fun of it. But their version of the activity was so extreme that, like substance-abuse addictions, they seemed to offer flashes of euphoria between bouts of white-knuckle terror and cold-sweat misery.
If you ask adrenalin junkies if the rush is worth the risk, I suppose they’d say life without these sorts of experiences would not be worth living and that there could be no better death than dying while doing what you love. I think I get that. Old as I am, it’s not fear of dying that stops me from venturing forth to the wild places. It’s dread of pain and discomfort – that, and a lack of prowess.
I write this on my porch here in the temperate zone, a screen protecting me from wasps and bees, a seat cushion protecting my tender rump from the hard wicker of my chair. Lulled by a gentle breeze, soft light and the conversations of robins and cardinals, I’m trying to work up the ambition to go for a 45-minute bike ride on a paved path. For that matter, I’m trying to work up the ambition to get out of my chair every so often so I don’t turn into one of the earthlings in “Wall-E.”
An adrenalin junkie I am not. Yet I share the adrenalin junkies’ craving for euphoric moments in exquisite natural environments. I’m even willing to pay the price of a strenuous hike to attain such moments (though at the end of the strenuous hike I’d much rather sleep on a feather bed than on the hard, cold ground).
The other day, though, I was reminded that one does not, in fact, have to journey to the ends of the earth to experience the sublime. Strolling through the Penn State Arboretum, we entered the “room” formed by the rectangle of poplar trees, lay down on the grass and looked up at sky.
The upper branches of the poplars swayed in the breeze like undulating sea plants. Their leaves sparkled in the sunlight. As the treetops bent and straightened, they appeared to unfurl like ferns in time-elapsed photographs. I was mesmerized. I was as happy as I get.
All this – dismissing adventurers as lunatics, finding beauty close to home, writing about the Banff more than a month after the films came to State College – I recognize as ways of letting myself off the hook for not living a more exciting life. When I look up the word swashbuckle, I like all of the synonyms: daring, dashing, adventurous, bold, fearless, dauntless. I still wish I were all those things even though I long ago acknowledged that I lack a swashbuckler’s temperament.
My teen self yearned and burned for the glorious life that awaited out where the buses don’t run (as we used to say in New York). Reading Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” I wrote “yes!” over and over in the margins of the poem.
“I cannot rest from travel!”
“I will drink life to the lees!”
“Much have I seen and known!”
“I am a part of all that I have met!”
“To sail beyond the sunset!”
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!”
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes!
The poem also offers the obverse vision of the life a passionate kid would want no part of:
“How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! / As tho’ to breathe were life!”
But then Tennyson tells us oldsters “’tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
This is why the Banff Mountain Film Festival haunts me. I want to be content to putter around the house and yard. I want to believe that the adrenalin freaks suffer from an inability to enjoy simpler, quieter, more local and domestic pleasures.
But I remain restless. If the adrenalin junkies’ flashes of euphoria are bracketed by bouts of white-knuckle terror and cold-sweat misery, mine are bracketed by boredom. At such moments, I wish I were a swashbuckler.
