Sporting Life
John Moore takes a walk on the wild side
When we bought a house in Squamish back in the early 1990s, three people I worked with immediately hit on me about my garage, seeking storage for wind-surfboards, hang-gliders and kayaks. Plus the guy who asked if he could park a trailer with twin Ski-Doos in my side yard under a tarp. They all lived in apartments in downtown Vancouver.
“Why did you buy these goddamn toys if you have no place to keep them?” I felt like screaming, but I already knew the answer because back then I was scratching a living by writing outdoor adventure features for local periodicals. They bought them so that for one or two days of the week they could play at being someone who doesn’t live in a 500-square-foot shoebox in the claustrophobic density of Vancouver’s West End or Yaletown, while still being able to drive their Stupid Unnecessary Vehicles back from Whistler in time to make the scene at some bistro in mud-spattered togs for a round of crantinis and pre-dinner bragging.
At that time, small companies had begun offering guided “wilderness experiences” that combined physical challenges with a supposedly non-intrusive, more spiritual experience of the natural world. Mostly run by people trying to make a living doing what they loved, they were usually happy to take a journalist along in exchange for the publicity value of an editorial feature—about 10 times more effective than a paid advertisement of equivalent size none of them could afford. I bluffed my way into sea-kayaking, rock climbing, paragliding, rafting river rapids, mountain biking, avalanche survival and winter camping courses, the whole bag. Often I was treated to lunch and more beer than was good for me. Then I got paid to write about my experiences. For a writer, this is as good as it gets.
Time is a D-8 Cat that scrapes away the vacant lot where you played baseball and flattens the woods where you built your tree fort. A scant dozen years later, even the wisdom of turning wilderness areas into adventure theme parks for weekend warriors and tourists to defray the cost of their “preservation” now seems problematic. We’re more aware that any kind of development shrinks the planet, and the so-called “eco-tourism” and “adventure tourism” industries have turned out to be fraternal rather than identical twins, with very different agendas.
Eco-tourism purists object to snowmobiles and ATVs spewing gasoline fumes and wildlife-spooking noise into the pure wilderness they’ve promised clients. They deplore the harassment of cetacean mammals by powerboats over-laden with seasick whale voyeurs spewing vegan lunches into the pristine waters. The wider and more boisterous adventure tourism fraternity, which has spun off whole sub-genres of Xtreme sports, sees these criticisms as party-pooping and maintains that getting people out into the wilderness by any means is justified by the end of making them more sensitive to the plight of embattled Nature.
This Jacob and Esau cage-match will probably be a headliner for decades to come, but despite its internecine tensions, the outdoor recreation industry and its Xtreme sports spin-offs have already caused a fundamental paradigm shift in our culture. The postmodern zeitgeist has caught up with sport. The modern age of the passive-ironic “disinterested spectator” in both the arts and popular culture is over; we have become a culture of participants.
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“Just Do It”
—NIKE slogan from the 1990s
Nowhere is this shift more apparent than in the only “global” cultural event our species has managed to produce: the modern Olympic Games. I stress the word modern because when the Olympics were revived in late 19 th -century Europe, we’d already become an industrialized urban culture of spectators. McGill University architecture professor and culture critic Witold Rybczynski notes in his history of leisure time, Waiting for the Weekend (Viking, 1991), that the shift to corporate-sponsored team sports played by professional athletes had occurred 100 years earlier, led by pub owners who noticed that they sold more ale and pies when the local farm boys got up a game of cricket on the nearby village green. In no time, players were on the payroll of the breweries, the green fenced on game days, and admission charged. Sport became something you watched while consuming large quantities of beer and junk food. Plus ça change...
But watching the 2006 Winter Olympics on TV (lager and Cheezy-Poofs at hand), I couldn’t help but suspect that the whole Olympic Idea might be on the verge of core-level marketing failure. Except for a few moments, like when the freestyler shot his bindings on a jump and nailed his landing without skis, or when the Netherlands bobsled pair took the bottom half of the run upside down, the Turin Olympics seemed, well, let’s be honest, kind of dull.
Seeing a bunch of people “race” on cross-country skis or on skates—not even allowed to thump or trip each other like Rollergirls—can’t help but under-whelm TV viewers accustomed to watching people with double-digit IQs drive ATVs off sheer cliffs or try to jump bikes to the top of apartment buildings from home-made plywood ramps on Real TV programs like the Max X List, never mind the sadistic stunts contrived by Fear Factor.Who wants to watch a pair of girls in modest maillots do synchronized swimming once you’ve seen a 42D-cup bimbo in a Malibu bikini (or some buff young stud in a Speedo) undo padlocks underwater in a clear plastic tank filled with giant pinching crabs for a $50,000 jackpot?
Yet the real problem with all Olympic events isn’t their lack of appeal to cathode-lobotomized sofa lizards. Such people are no longer a dominant majority. For the first time in history since the classical age, many of the people who make up the audience for the Games are themselves weekend warriors—amateur athletes who regularly engage in Xtreme sports that that would give a pampered Olympian the yellow squirts. If you spend your weekends para-gliding, base-jumping, wind-surfing, ice-climbing or riding a bike down steep mountain trails at top speed, it’s no wonder you’re a bit blasé watching some coddled “star” flit down a pre-set engineered course to a “victory” measured in hundredths of a second.
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As kids, we do things our parents warn us against to define ourselves as individuals—chicks that no longer cower in the nest waiting for Mom and Dad to hork up pre-digested social values. For my post-WW2 generation that came of age in the 1960s, this took the form of risky politics, risky drugs and risky sex. The acid test of any form of rebellion is whether or not it gives you what psycho-neurologists try to quantify as an endorphin/adrenaline high—the feeling you got when you climbed to the top of the forbidden cherry tree, rode your bike no-hands down the steepest hill in the neighbourhood, or played Knock On Ginger on the meanest old man on the block and he chased you with a flashlight and a nine-iron.
The sand pit was a place we were absolutely forbidden to play, a big semi-circular hole dug out of the side of a ridge not far from Cleveland Dam in North Vancouver. From up in the hot resinous shadows of the scrub firs, it was about five times higher than the roof of your house, as kids measure. The trick was seeing that halfway down, big slopes of pure soft sand would break your fall, cushioning your slide to the bottom. You just needed the jam to take that first screaming step off the edge to slide down to glory and shake a bucket of grit out of your jeans.
Today’s guided adventures and Xtreme sports depend on the courage to take that step: to launch yourself out the door of the plane at 10,000 feet, turn your kayak or canoe into whitewater, stretch for the hand-hold that gets you around the overhang, stay on your bike when the trail dives down a shale slope of plus-45 degrees. Make one split-second decision to hang in and the rest is reflex, will to survive, and the perversity to brag about seriously hurting yourself when you do.
The adrenaline rush of fear, then relief, is a high-colonic for the brain. Portrayal of this kind of risk-taking as “a healthy active lifestyle” masks the discovery that adrenaline and endorphins appear to be the body’s natural cocaine and heroin speedball—improving performance, blunting pain and producing delusions of invulnerability. Like all good things, this enzyme junk is addictive, even potentially lethal. It can also lead to reality-TV madness like the annual international Eco-Challenge race, in which teams of annoying over-achievers from around the world pay obscene amounts of money to whine about undergoing the kind of hardships that in wartime would result in atrocity trials.
Nostalgia for the euphoria of risk has become a billion-dollar industry. Every time baby boomers roll over in bed, some clever dick invents a new technologically enhanced mattress and makes a bundle to stick under it simply because there’s so many of us with so much money that even a moderate market share of any product sector translates into mass sales.
When our parents hit their 40s, they accepted middle age gracefully, taking up low-impact social sports, like curling and golf, which involve a lot of innocent fibbing in plush cocktail lounges. They adopted cardigan sweaters and elastic-waist slacks and skirts that looked vaguely sporty while taking into account the natural state of the human body in its pre-senile phase.
Not us, man. Maybe we did transfer out of that Creative Ceramics major into an MBA program, or drop out and write the Securities & Exchange Commission exam to become a real estate agent or stockbroker. That doesn’t mean we sold out. When some Jurassic rock radio station plays The Who’s “My Generation,” we crank up the sound system in the Volvo wagon and screech along, “Hope I die before I get old!”
So when we find ourselves still alive and looking five-oh in the mirror, we won’t abide any polyester polo-necked golf shirts or Sansabelt slacks in our walk-in closets—bigger than family apartments in some parts of the world. We’re jogging, running marathons, doing triathlons, mountain biking, rock-climbing, para-sailing, spelunking and deep-sea diving, white-water or sea kayaking, cross-country skiing—anything that will give us back the adrenaline rush of youth our generation assumes is an inalienable human right—and our closets and storage lockers are stuffed with over-priced gear to prove it.
Most X-sports require physical courage, but no special moral or political commitment. They’re just the natural organic version of the vicious sex, dangerous drugs and hedonistic head-banger music of the late 1970s and the money-and-gluttony worship of the odious Decade of Greed that followed. We’re fitter and we get more fresh air, but it’s still just all about Us Having Fun.
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Yet outdoor adventure tourism and Xtreme sports bridge what was called the generation gap in our wild youth. Not just a boomer fad, they’re hugely popular with young people who still set the cultural tone and now even have their own X Games. X-sports are the participatory physical incarnation of postmodernism: they embody the now, the instant of being intensely alive in the moment, and through the postmodern aesthetic of playful radical juxtaposition they create new activities, taking a technique or piece of equipment originally designed for one purpose and adapting it to another.
Look at the reincarnation of the bicycle as an all-terrain vehicle. Invented in the late 19 th century, it was a mechanical pony meant to reduce the vast daily tonnage of horse-shit fouling city streets at a time when automobiles were still hand-built toys of the rich. It was a contraption meant for paved or graded roads: a cheap, clean mode of urban transportation. When bikes began reappearing in traffic as ecologically sound rides, I approved in principle, but as a hiker and dog person, I was appalled when they left pavement. Bikes may be eco-friendly in the city, but in the woods they rapidly degrade trails, creating mud-wallows in the low spots and eroding the edges.
Mountain bikers also had serious attitude problems where safety and courtesy were concerned. In the late 1980s in lower Mosquito Creek where I walked my dog, I was nearly de-gendered by a spandexed biker hurtling out of the salmonberries. I caught his handlebars in time to stop him from giving me a free vasectomy and dumped him in the brambles accompanied by strong language. As I stalked off, ignoring his attempted apology, he recovered enough to shout, “By the way, I’m not an asshole.” Chain leash wrapped around my fist, I offered to introduce him to the concept of obedience training. White-faced, he remounted and pedalled off, no doubt convinced he’d encountered one of the mentally ill our provincial government had recently expelled from supervised care facilities in order to save young urban stooges enough tax money to spend on $3,000 trail bikes.
Wind-surfboards gave the traditional Hawaiian sport, which went global as a subculture in the 1960s, new life by marrying it to quick-response sailing that is still a tradition in coastal Europe. The latest twist is kite-boarding, which combines a para-glider wing with a snowboard-length surfboard to maximize the aerial and aquatic thrill factors. As for a “sport” like street-luge—putting wheels on the one-man bobsled to run downhill races on pavement—the first time I saw this on TV I instantly recalled the kamikaze crates we used to rig from a single plank, two-by-four axles, wheels pried off a stolen shopping cart and a short rope for steering. Frills like soapbox coachwork and brakes were overlooked in our haste to launch down hills, praying posted lookouts were sharp-eyed and that none of the wheels would fall off. Just to survive with nothing more than bruises and the loss of a few yards of skin made you feel like an indestructible superhero.
Enhanced by contemporary materials like Kevlar, the ancient Inuit kayak is an ideal craft for up-close exploring and low-impact adventuring in coastal waters. An Inuit hunter might approve of new sea kayaks on the basis of improved materials, but the idea of running any kayak down class-five river rapids would strike him as typically insane white-man behaviour. Rivers are full of rocks. Discovering them at high speed, upside down when you’re busy drowning, may interfere with the appreciation of your newfound intimacy with the riparian environment.
True mother of all X-sports is the parachute, invented in World War I to give pilots and balloon observers a marginal chance of survival and later used to drop spies or troops behind enemy lines. Those pilots and paratroops would never have imagined that in the second half of the 20th century people would pay to jump out of planes and deliberately prolong free-fall to do mid-air stunts—including riding and flipping on snowboards, a sort of air-surfing that may be the ultimate Po-Mo sport.
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Even traditionally conservative recreational activities like mountaineering have been transformed by the postmodern zeitgeist. Originally practice activities for the final acts of peak ascension, rock-climbing and bouldering detached themselves and became a separate sport during the latter half of the 20th century in the North American southwest, where Dali-esque rock formations and monotonously fine weather let climbers free the body from bulky clothing and packs to push the possibilities of climbing technique the limit.
There’s nothing especially postmodern about a specialist skill-set becoming a separate sport. What is supremely Po-Mo is the increasing number of climbers who learn their basic skills indoors, in climbing gyms that began to appear in North America in the early 1990s. Goofing on artificial walls, top-roped for safety with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon booming out of a dozen speakers may be a blast, but it doesn’t prepare you for real rock that turns cold and slick when the weather changes, numbing your fingers after a few moves; or the brain-poaching effects of the sun if you start a pitch at the wrong time of day; or horseflies that chow down on your calves when an instinctive slap at them will cost you your hold and probably your life.
When I took a rock-climbing course on the Smoke Bluffs in Squamish, the instructor turned up with a couple of ropes, slings and a handful of hardware he casually tossed on the ground. His modest gear cache did not impress a couple in their early 40s, clad from neck to ankle in matching superhero lycra. The guy in particular kept casting covetous glances at young rock-rats on neighbouring pitches whose chests were crossed with Rambo bandoliers dangling every nut, chock and widget in the catalogue. I made a point of asking, in front of everyone, “Does all that stuff really help?”
“It helps keep Mountain Equipment Co-op in business,” the instructor answered with a smirk, provoking a scowl from the guy who’d been eyeing their racks. “Special gear is only useful if you already possess excellent basic climbing fundamentals. If you don’t, having all that stuff is actually dangerous. It gives you too much to think about and it can make you think you’re a better climber that you actually are. That’s how you get hurt.”
In the postmodern century, we no longer sell things on the basis that they make you look rich enough to afford them. We sell things, from cars to computers to sports gear, on the premise that they make you appear competent to use them. Replacing the image of wealth as the dominant status mode of our culture, the image of competence socially disenfranchises those who acquire wealth merely by the windfall of inheritance, luck, or even the kind of acquisitive drive worshipped during the 1980s. Thorstein Veblen, the early 20th-century economist who coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to explain the need of the rich to be seen to be so, would understand the necessity of buying $250 “trail shoes” to go for a walk in the woods.
This paradigm shift is one of the eccentric shortcuts by which something resembling “progress” in human culture occurs. Competence is harder to fake than wealth. Just buying top-of-the-line gear won’t cut it; you have to learn how to use it or look like a horse’s ass. And no matter how odious I personally find some X-sports like can have life-transforming effects for large numbers of people, regardless of income. This makes them much more inclusive than the passive supposed solidarity of a whole nation watching televised Olympic events restricted to an élite of athletic champions.
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Adventure tourism and X-sports have morphed into more than recreational activities. Like the hippie movement of the 1960s, they are a form of non-confrontational social revolution for a culture so terminally disgusted with politics that “taking it to the streets” means grinding bikes and skateboards or doing free-form gymnastics off public structures, and “dropping out” entails an abrupt loss of real altitude.
In the 19th century, mountaineering was a subculture of eccentric amateurs, some inherently rich, others not so, who spent every free moment among the cliffs, crags and snows. Many people still climb in that spirit, taking low-paying jobs in the hospitality industry, which offers portable skills. They work as little as they need to, enabling them to travel from Squamish to Joshua Tree to the Dolomites—wherever there’s steep rock and fresh challenges. Like the so-called surf bums who follow the sun around the world or ski bums who follow the snow, they’re actually more than a bunch of drop-outs marginalized by a passion for a particular physical activity.
Today’s eco/adventure tourism and X-sport destinations are the moveable gymnasia of the Global Village, places where the young and quick meet kindred spirits, some old and wise, from all over the world, making social and philosophical connections, spawning sub-cultures with networks that may be possible models for future supra-national societies. We ought to be grateful for these signs of sanity in a younger generation, instead of whining because they’re too smart to be loyal to corporate employers who treat them as members of an untouchable caste on principle.
Our society, too, often evaluates cultural phenomena on a balance sheet, but even in those terms it’s obvious that outdoor adventure recreation generates far greater long-term economic benefits than any number of Olympic blowouts. Proliferating variations of postmodern sports are all characterized by the investment of large amounts of money in lessons, specialized equipment, and branded clothing that identifies the user as blessed with the status of a high disposable income as well as that of a supposedly serious athlete and adventurer. Add on the entrepreneurial opportunities for niche-market services like instruction and guiding, the manufacture of clothing and gear, factor in the travel and tourism spin-offs, and you’ve got an industry. Not a closely held, hierarchical, traditional heavy industry, but possibly the new business model of a quiet social revolution these sub-cultures are engendering.
Some forward-looking nations (Belize, for instance) have staked their economic future on guided eco/adventure tours and X-sports, mainly because of their minimal environmental impact. Even the most egregious of these activities remain things post-millennial yuppies do on weekends—things that don’t take you too far from an ATM and a good restaurant. Since those engaged in them don’t penetrate wilderness areas permanently or to any significant depth, the worst damage they do is the equivalent of dog-earing the pages of a library book.
Cranky purists (don’t look at me like that) may question the authenticity of the experiences offered by eco/adventure tourism. As a survivor of a wide random sampling, I have to admit that these experiences are no more authentic than the guided African safaris of the 1950s written up by Ernest Hemingway and Robert Ruark. But “authenticity” is often a reactionary concept that appeals to an idealized past, a supposed “golden age” that frequently proves to be more fabulous than fact.
When Hemingway and Ruark were affirming their manhood at the expense of big game on the veldt, they may not even have been aware that their Great White Hunter and native guides were discreetly covering them in accordance with Rule 1 of the adventure tourism industry; Don’t Let the Client Get Killed. The Africa they described was a beautiful fiction of magnificent beasts and noble savages—a place that existed only in their writing, Hollywood films, and the animatronic Riverboat Ride attraction at Walt Disney’s first theme park. The real Africa of their time was a continent-sized slave-labour camp perpetuated by febrile colonial administrations and global economic factors long before the term Third World had been coined.
That was the story a generation of writers completely missed, and it’s a cautionary reminder that writing can be wonderful even when it’s unintentionally describing a creature by looking at the wrong end. When a friend read my breathless report of spending a couple of winter nights in an emergency shelter I’d built out of snow, he sent me a copy of Ernest Shackleton’s excruciating saga of survival after the failure of his Antarctic expedition. Humbled, I took his point. With appropriate postmodern irony, guided adventures and X-sports often trivialize the original activity that inspired them. White-water rafting and kayaking turn the death-defying river voyages of explorers like Simon Fraser and Alexander Mackenzie into jolly day-trip outings to scenic water-park attractions.
But is it reasonable to value these experiences against a revisionist and possibly fictional notion of “authenticity”? Every human experience is unique to its time and place and thus authentic, in a sense. If somebody rides down the Thompson River rapids in a fat guided raft on some inane corporate team-building outing and has a life-changing experience, should we dismiss it because they weren’t in brigade canoe piloted by indentured, toqued, suicidal voyageurs? Surely it’s the ultimate result that counts, the long-term effect on human beings and the way they see themselves in relation to their own culture.
The gratuitous aspect of X-treme sports, their postmodern, self-conscious novelty, makes them fun to watch, even fun to try, but don’t expect many of them to become Olympic events. The inclusion of snowboarding in the Olympics in the 1990s was a cynical marketing attempt to appeal to a younger generation who think the discus competition is just a really lame Frisbee event. But while the playful silliness of most X-sports may mark their cards as ephemeral fads, by the time the International Olympic Committee gets around to even considering them, whole subcultures of weekend warriors will be long gone, off to some global adventure play park or doing something else, instead of watching the tube.