Jeff Casebolt was a Colorado Outward Bound instructor. He embarked on a three and a half year trip that involved paddling from Alaska to Vancouver and then cycling to the tip of South America. (See Heron Dance issues 11, 14, and 16). He told me of the influence on his life of Willi Unsoeld, a legendary figure in the outdoor education field and the first American to summit Everest.
"Every summer, Evergreen College holds an academic fair to help students select their courses. The professors sit around a large lounge area and you can talk to them about their classes. One table had a particularly large group around it and so I went over to see what it was about. There was a man sitting there with a white beard and blue sparkly eyes. He was sitting there telling stories. He had lost nine toes on Everest. Everybody was entertained. I was just fascinated by this guy and decided to study with him. He was Willi Unsoeld. He ended up having a major effect on my life.
"That winter, twenty of us climbed Mt. Ranier with Willi. We got close to the top, made a summit bid and were weathered off. A huge storm came in and dumped snow on us for twenty-four hours. Three feet of snow. While we were waiting the storm out, I went to Willi's tent. We talked about our experiences on the climb. I told him that I was learning about taking risks with people. I had started to get closer with my tent mates. I was shy at that time, and quiet, so starting to take some risks, and then connecting with people I did not known well, was a real step for me. Willi was delighted. 'That's wonderful,' he said. 'That's a wonderful realization to have.'
"'But, Willi,' I said, 'I've had to learn this over and over. I wonder how long before it sinks in.'
"He slapped his knee, laughed and said 'The important lessons you have to learn over and over.' In the decade since then, I've found that he was right. I've had to learn the important lessons over and over.
"During the night, the wind and snow started to rip some of the tents. We were running low on fuel. And so despite the fact that the avalanche conditions were extreme, we decided to descend. We broke up into rope teams of three and four, five minutes apart. Willi's team headed down first. As we were dropping down a huge gully called Cadaver Gap -- an avalanche chute -- the slope fractured. Willi and his team were carried about five hundred feet. My rope team was third. When I got to the fracture line, I really didn't know what had happened. The fracture line was about four feet high -- huge.
"As they were swept down the mountain, both Willi and the student right behind him in his rope team, Janie Diepenrock, were completely buried. While an avalanche is moving, it's fluid and you can move around. But you get disorientated and it is difficult to know which direction is up. Within a minute or two after the avalanche stops moving, you can't move. It sets up like concrete. The third person in Willi's rope team was buried almost completely but he had shoved his hand up through the snow. The fourth guy was buried up to his waist. He managed to work loose and help the third guy. They followed the rope to Janie, unburied her and started giving her CPR.
"I skied down. I couldn't see much -- we were in a blizzard with gusts of sixty miles an hour - but I could hear cries for help. Willi hadn't been uncovered yet. We followed the rope to Willi and started CPR on him. We were unable to revive either him or Janie.
"The weather was too extreme to do anything with the bodies. We marked the site well and got ourselves to Camp Muir. When the storm abated two days later, the Park Service sent a rescue team to escort us down. Myself and another member of our party went up with the Park Service to find the bodies. We were unable to find them. Subsequent avalanches had obliterated the site. Eventually the Park Service went in with a hundred people, probes and big guns, blasted everything down and found them.
"Willi was buried March 4, 1979. I was twenty years old. I could see that it would be easy to fulfill the American dream, go to school, have a family and mow the lawn. But I decided that before I died, I wanted to experience something more. Willi's death was the catalyst. Willi would talk about having your face rubbed in the reality of mortality. I have a clear image of that. He would say to us: 'Its better to die young of a life fully lived than to live to an old age without ever taking risks.'
"I agree, but at the same time I don't want to die foolishly. There are a lot of things I want to do. Projects. Trips. There are awarenesses that I have that a lot of people don't. I think I can make a contribution. I think I can touch people in ways that are important."
Other excerpts from our interview of Jeff Casebolt:
Early in our conversation, Jeff talked of an image from early childhood that was, in part, the inspiration for the trip.
"When I was five years old, my family took a boating trip in the San Juan Islands. I clearly remember seeing two kayakers who had come down from Alaska. They had big beards and were very weathered. It was clear they had come down from somewhere. From the edge of the universe. Over the years I became more and more captivated by that image--something I had seen at the age of five. Some part of my imagination was fired. When I think of that experience, I think about the mysticism that underpins all religions. It has to do with the imagination, the unconscious. What we are moved to respond to. That is how traveling the inland passage became the first leg of the trip, even though neither my partner nor I had any sea kayaking experience."
The trip was to take Jeff two and a half years. He started out with a friend, but during the first summer the friend dropped out and Jeff did the rest of the trip alone. When he was considering the trip, he talked it over with his father, who gave him some advice that helped:
"Clearly, the scariest part was committing to do the trip. It's a different kind of fear than the fear I felt when I got run off the road by a bus in Mexico with a precipice off to my side. That kind of fear you can't plan for. You deal with it as it happens. Then there is the fear of making a commitment to do a trip during which you know you are going to encounter parts of yourself that are completely unknown, that will challenge you on every level. I struggled deciding that this was what I wanted to do--that I was willing to face those kinds of unknowns.
"My dad told me that when he was in the Army, he and a friend were going to buy a sailboat and sail from Seattle to the Panama Canal. `But,' he told me, `instead of just doing it, we decided to postpone it, and then I met your mom, and you know the rest of the story.' He said if I postponed my trip, I would probably never do it. That is some of the best advice he ever gave me....
"Most people want to have hard and fast rules--black and white. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to tolerate ambiguity. To break out of the systems we set up for ourselves. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to walk away from the rules you've lived by and walk towards what you really want. To, for instance, sell the house and buy a sailboat, pull the kids out of school and sail to the Panama Canal. Or whatever you decide to do. There is not a lot of support for that. You come up against other people's doubts in themselves. They project those onto you.
"Its always disheartening to meet someone who tries to discourage you from your dream. I ran into many, many people as I was planning my trip, and when I was actually traveling, who doubted that I could succeed at it. They didn't hesitate to tell me that I would fail. Told me that I was crazy and stupid. I remember a guy in California who just laughed at me. He didn't believe I was going to succeed at it. I don't think he even believed that I had already completed about a third of the trip. That was more a reflection of him.
"Having enough of your own inner momentum to blow those people off is one of the big challenges in life. To listen to some degree, but to be discriminating enough, and strong enough in yourself and clear enough about your own direction to be able to say that that person doesn't think that I can do this but this is what I am doing.
"There are talkers in life and doers. A lot of people talk about their dreams and don't follow through. I knew that I didn't want to talk about this trip and then not do it. I needed to make a very clear commitment to do it or not even to play with it.
"You have to consult with your heart. That doesn't wash over very well in a society that needs empirical evidence for everything. "What are your rational reasons for doing this trip? For making this choice." A lot of the most important decisions we make aren't rational. I'm coming to appreciate that more and more. Sometimes, when you get to higher levels or deeper levels, things become less and less certain. You run out of facts and figures and you have to turn inward and really consult your sense about what is right and what is true for you. This trip will serve me all my life in terms of allowing me to be more of an individual. Freer from social rules about what is right, about what I should do. Honoring my truth, even if I can't articulate it.
"That two and a half years changed me. It's so challenging internally to travel day after day by yourself. And have to face yourself day after day. To have to stew in your own psyche and your own loneliness. You are forced to look at yourself. You are forced to look, look inward. Who am I? What's here? ... It's something that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. A journey like that is both external and internal. I experienced the most incredible range of emotional highs and lows from this trip. I confronted the most incredible existential loneliness. The trip expanded me on every level. My desire for spiritual depth and awareness was one result. I encountered amazing people--encountered highs and lows within myself--that I could not have otherwise accessed. The trip was a glacier that gouged internally. The marks are indelibly inscribed in my soul.
"Meeting people who had nothing, who would take the shirt off their back to help me, taught me just how greedy we are. How people who have lots of money and lots of resources don't know how to be generous. People who have nothing but who have a real connection with themselves and with the land realize that what it's all about is the connections and love that we create and give each other."
Jeff also talked about his ambivalent feelings towards the end of his trip:
"During the last couple of weeks, I was thinking every day about getting to the end -- a town called Ushuaia. When I got there it was a monumental disappointment. It was raining. There were potholes on the road. Some part of me was hoping that angels would come out of the sky and a marching band would appear, but Ushuaia was just a sleepy little fishing village. I walked into a bakery to buy some stuff and someone there saw that I was on a bike. He asked me where I had come from, and when I told him he bought me the bread and sweet rolls. So someone did acknowledge my efforts. I spent a couple of days there, had a lobster and wine dinner and finally started back out. I was going to hitch-hike out to Buenos Aires but couldn't get a ride so I just started pedaling again. I think that we are all searching for inner peace. An inner kind of place that is more peaceful.
"Charles Darwin said something like: Psychology as a field is tremendous, but what about courage? We each have tremendous potentials inside us waiting to be tapped. We have potentials we have no idea of -- things we can do, places we can go, kindness and compassion we can extend, resourcefulness that we have no conception of. Not having the courage to cross barriers is like receiving a letter and not opening it.
"When I got down into Lima, Peru I met an anthropologist/photographer named Peter Frey who was getting ready to mount an expedition to visit the Elkas in eastern Ecuador. He invited me to go along with him, and I did. We stayed for a week with them. They live on a remote river and have virtually no contact with civilization. We took a bus, then flew five hundred kilometers and landed on an abandoned airstrip that had been put in by oil companies years ago.
"It's a hunter/gatherer nomadic culture. They move four or five times a year following game. They don't wear clothes -- it's a temperate climate, they don't have to. ...I was really struck by how much touching they do. I can remember sitting with a group of three or four men. It was hot. We were all sweating; you would think you wouldn't want physical contact with people. At first I was very uncomfortable with it. Especially since these guys didn't have clothes on. Here are these little dark skinned Indian men who hunt with blow-guns and poison darts and spears. They were sitting next to me and one guy would put his hand on my leg. At first I was very uncomfortable with that. But by the end of the week, I got to where I really liked it. I'm convinced that people are very touch oriented and I give and receive massage now. I find that it's incredibly healing to be touched. That's an aspect of western culture that is absent. We lack physical contact. That has damaging ramifications. We have lost a form of contact with each other that is incredibly vital and healing. It really feeds our soul. After being there for a week, tears were streaming down my eyes -- I realized that I was probably never going to contact a culture like that again. The other thing about their culture that struck me was that they laughed. They were people who liked to tease each other and they liked to laugh. We couldn't communicate with them at all because their language is so esoteric."
