Top 3 To Read (Slowly)

Did y'all know there's a new movement for "slow reading"? Which basically just means reading a book. Because peeps are forgetting how, can't sit still long enough, can't focus on something for more than 10 minutes without scrolling. Reading books is my thing! But I'm a victim, too. That shit takes me waaaay longer now. But I'm still doing it! You should, too.

Without further ado, I give you my top 3 favorite non-fiction books. All of them wild with adventure, of course.

North To The Night, by Alvah Simon: About a dude who winters alone in the arctic darkness on a tiny sailboat. See, he sails up there with his wife and cat (!!!), but she (the wife) has to leave, and he's left frozen there for months with his boat, with his demons, with polar bears, with the Northern Lights, with the storms, with the crushing cold.

The Man Who Walked Through Time, by Colin Fletcher: Mom sent me this book, so it's special. The author walked the entire length of the Grand Canyon in the 60s, all alone, and then wrote about it. Mom read it 30 years ago. Now me. An interesting cycle. Anyway, a quiet, relaxing text with much lovely language describing the hugeness of geologic time, the nature of beauty in the wild, and such: "Beyond shadow that still belonged to the night, a day’s incoming sunlight streamed across the rock reefs. Noon pressed down onto the Esplanade, hotter each day, more ponderously silent. Evening came, and a softer, richer silence.”

 Jacque Cousteau: The Sea King, by Brad Matsen: “He didn’t particularly care about money as long as he had enough, and his chief financial tactic was simply going out and getting more cash when he ran out.” You see, Cousteau was down for living only in the now—no rehashing things past or backward-looking. “The road to paradise is paradise,” he said, quoting an old Spanish proverb. Anyway, a bit of a womanizer, but a true adventurer, through and through, Cousteau pioneered the modern-day scuba tank by trial and error with sketchy homemade setups. He's fucking crazy! So much could go wrong!

Grand Canyon Passage

Every so often, Tricia and I get it in our minds to go somewhere. It's nothing too thought out or planned out. I have a list of things I gotta do, not on paper, more like in my head, but these trips are usually a way to cross items off of this.

Anyway, last time it was Hawaii. The big island—jungle hikes down to secret snorkel spots and roasting on the beach. This time, the Grand Canyon. You go there like going on a pilgrimage, looking down into the pit and contemplating it solitarily—kinda like staring into a pile of burning embers. But the thing is, seeing it from the rim is a whole lot like just looking at the photo. There's a haze in the distance between you and it, and you are very, very far away.

So, we climbed down to the bottom, stuck our feet in the cold-ass Colorado River (just like John Wesley Powell did, I'm sure). Then we hoofed it back up. Even a mile down the trail, we both agreed that this was the only way see the canyon. You get a sense of perspective, inspecting layers of rock first-hand as you stumble past them and feeling like an insignificant spec as you sneak by looming cliffs wearing the stains of the ages.

It was an amazing trip, kinda cosmic. In fact, the Grand Canyon is a cosmic place—where us non-"devout" folks go to appreciate the mysteries of the universe.

Sure, I'ma nerd. But I'm about to hike 4,500 feet down and back up again in two days. I could barely walk for days. So sore.

Yeah, take the burrows, you pussies. We're gonna walk.

A new set of thunderheads rolled through every hour ... we could see 'em coming.

Down, down, down, keep going down.

At last, the Colorado River, and a quiet beach to rest our weary selves.

But what't this? A thunder-hail extravaganza on the way back up? A good excuse to sit the fuck down.

We camped out half way up the canyon. The next morning, after torrential rains in the night, the chasm was shrouded in cloud.

And it was time to climb out. Yeah, all the way to the tippy top of that cliff up there.

Sedona sunset later that evening, dog tired and readier for a cocktail than I've ever been in my life.

Dirty, tired, sore—but we made it. Yep.