Rambling Man

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For half the time, we were wading and for half the time walking along the shore. It’s a really steep canyon, there’s not a lot in the way of sand bars or gravel bars or anything. But the water’s warm and it’s a beautiful day, right? So we’re walking along, it comes time to camp. We set up camp on this gravel bar, maybe three or four feet above the water, with Marty’s tent a little upstream from mine. It’s pretty low, but there’s nowhere else to camp. The sides of the canyon are steep and all grown over by jungle.

So we go to sleep. I don’t look very good in this story, because I was really stupid [laughs]. This was back in the days when I used to sleep like a baby. Nothing would wake me up. Nowadays, that’s not the case. A lot of that has to do with this flash flood.

So there I was, lying in my tent, completely asleep, and I had taken off my pants. I was just wearing a t-shirt because it was a warm day. All my stuff was like strewn about the floor of my tent. So, nothing is really ready for instant evacuation. I’m laying there, I’m sleeping, and I hear this voice calling me. At the same time I’m kind of thinking, “Uh, what?”

Water’s in the tent. And there’s getting to be more water in the tent. My stuff is floating away. And here I am—I don’t have any shoes or socks. I don’t have any pants on! And all my stuff is going downstream: my glasses, my knife, my bag, my money belt with all my valuables, my airplane tickets, the passport, the works. My sleeping bag is all soaked; it’s like this mass of sog and feathers. I start ripping down my tent to try to lug it who knows where. I didn’t know where I was going to go.

Fortunately, Marty was a little more alert. At the very last minute he makes this grab at my backpack and throws it up on the bank. The water just kept rising and finally we had to get out of there, so we scrambled up the bank and we got the tarp off my tent and we wrapped ourselves in the tarp and we sat there shivering. The night had gotten really cold. We were saying things like:

“Where’s all our stuff? Where’s all our stuff?”

“You don’t have any pants on!”

“No! I don’t have any pants on.”

It was pretty funny. So I’m sitting there, just kind of shivering, flustered by this whole experience and in my mind I’m making a list of all the stuff that is missing. Where are my pants? Where are my shoes? Where are my knife and glasses?”

These are all goodness knows where, probably in the Pacific Ocean. And then I say out loud, “And the stakes for my tent!” Marty shouts at me, “The stakes for your tent? You want to know where the stakes for you tent are? You don’t even know where your glasses are! We barely have your plane ticket, and you’re worried about the tent stakes?” To this day we can’t mention tent stakes without laughing.

We didn’t sleep much that night. In the morning, the water had gone down and Marty had a treasure hunt. I found my glasses and my knife. We peeled the plane ticket apart and set it out to dry and stuff. And it turned out right. But I had to walk out in my socks, because my shoes were gone. I guess my shoes floated better than the glasses.

Have you been in any other floods?

No. The closest was in a city park in Venturo, California. I was sleeping on a picnic table and the sprinklers came on at one in the morning.

What were you doing there?

I was biking from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I had gotten to San Francisco biking from Eugene, Oregon, with a friend. And, we didn’t pay a dime for lodging the whole time. We slept under bridges and in parks.

Have you gone on any other cross-country bike trips?

Some time later, I still had the bicycle bug in my system and I wanted to go somewhere there was like a warm ocean. So I decided to go to Baja. I rode the bike across the border and entered the world that is Mexico.

It’s a different world, especially when you’re traveling by bike and you only have a rudimentary grasp of the Spanish language. Then there was emerging every morning with a new flat tire from wheeling the bike off into the cactuses. The Sonoran desert is an amazing place.

It turns out that the highway doesn’t go anywhere near the warm ocean, so after three weeks I took a bus back.

What is the worst injury you have endured in your travels?

It was December, I was in Olympic National Park on the coast of Washington—not the best place to be in December. I was walking this boardwalk, and I slipped and fell. I ended up wrecking my knee. I had to get driven around back to my car by the ranger. I could hardly bend my right knee.

I ended up being holed up in a motel room in Forks, Washington, for about three days. So that was my Christmas: sitting there with a wrecked knee in this motel room watching the history channel, ordering takeout pizza and feeling sorry for myself. After three days in the motel, I decided I couldn’t take it any more and decided to go home. I may as well convalesce in the warm embrace of my family.

But my leg wouldn’t bend. Luckily I had an automatic transmission car, because I had to drive with my left foot the whole way. My right leg wouldn’t bend, so I put it up on the seat. It was uncomfortable and I had a few thousand miles to drive. But the knee got better.

I had some practice driving with my left leg. Earlier that year I had planned to spend several weeks down in the Grand Canyon. The first night I camped on the ledge. Something must have stung me when I stepped out to find a tree during the night, because in the morning my right foot was swollen and I was feeling woosy.

I drove home that day, although I did have to stop in an emergency room along the way to get some meds.

Tell me about losing the dogsled team.

This was one of the earlier times I went out mushing. I had my big heavy over-mitts on. These are made from beaver fur. They’re warm, and they’re great when you’re on the sled, but you can’t really do anything in them. I was trying to hook up the sled, which is always an ordeal.

It was early in the season. The dogs hadn’t run all summer and they were just frantic to go. There I am on the back of my sled, I got these six dogs raring to go, I have the over-mitts on. I don’t know why I didn’t take them off. I’m trying to pull untie the sled from the post, but I guess the knot had pinched or something. Finally, it comes undone, but it comes out of my hand. I fall off the sled.

My boss Carol is there. She makes a grab for the rope…Carol’s like 57 years old [laughs]. She’s a tough old lady. She almost got it, but they pulled it out of her hand, and the dogs are off.

They finally wound up in the yard of one of our neighbors that lives eight miles away across the lake. That was the one time that I lost my team badly. I lost it a couple times for short distances. Sometimes I was able to run up and catch them. And other times I lost them. You don’t want to ever lose your team.

How is it you were in Alaska, dog-sledding?

I was working at a lodge in Alaska. Marty and I had run into it by accident when bush-whacking the summer before. The beginning of that trip is a good story, too.

We got flown out and dropped off at Ripsnorter Creek, just over Mystic Pass. It was probably 300 miles from the nearest town of any kind. Our destination was the Yukon River, many hundreds of miles to the north. We planned to hike about 80 miles until we reached some rivers that were on the north side of the Alaska Range that we could begin floating down.

Then I notice something important is missing: the ends to our oars. So there we are without oars. After considering making new oars out of caribou shoulder bones, we notice a plastic bucket in an old hunter’s camp. We sat down and we thought long and hard like primitive Neanderthals, scoping out a way to craft some new tool.

We needed to have functional oars, by golly, and it needed to happen somehow. We cut the bucket into fourths and sewed pieces together and with the .22 rifle we’d brought for hunting food, we shot holes in the ends of the oar handles, lashed it on there good and strong.

Do these sorts of accidents still happen to you?

Not much. I used to make a lot of stupid mistakes. I am older now.

Joshua Hartshorne grew up in the peaceful American Midwest. Since graduating high school, he has not stayed in one place more than 9 months. He writes regularly for travel and culture magazines and in his travel log, edwardtheplant.bloghorn.com.

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