My older brother wanted to stop our four-day, 28-mile hiking trip after a mile and a half. He said his feet hurt.

鈥淵ou鈥檒l feel better when we get to the lake,鈥� I said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just an easy mile or so.鈥澨�

It was two miles, all uphill.听

鈥淚 won鈥檛 feel better,鈥� Don said. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think I鈥檒l ever feel better.鈥�

We stood in a shadowy clearing, surrounded by moss-covered subalpine fir trees and the twittering, rustling, and sighing forest sounds that I had hoped might provide the soundtrack to a fraternal late-midlife adventure. Don stared at the ground. I shoveled a handful of trail mix into my mouth. My feet hurt, too. I worried that this trip might have been a huge mistake.听

Don was 64, recently divorced after 24 years, recently retired from a long career as a law partner and CEO. His only child had graduated college two years earlier and moved 2,500 miles away, and Don was spending a lot of time in his four-bedroom house in Portland, Oregon, alone, lonely, plagued by shoulder pain and acid reflux, and deeply committed to what he was certain was a reasonable survival strategy, namely, 鈥淚 just need to get used to the idea that I鈥檓 closer to death and the world is meaningless and there鈥檚 a good chance I鈥檒l never find anything worthwhile to do.鈥澨�

Slightly alarmed, eager to help, and always up for a trip听in the outdoors, I had broached the idea of a hiking vacation together. I was 62, single, childless, technically unemployed (I鈥檓 a writer), renting a studio apartment in New York City, and suffering from recurrent gout. While generally resistant to the idea that a toasted marshmallow could change anything profound in anyone鈥檚 life, I was still desperate to believe that it might.听

I told Don on the phone that the hike听would cement our brotherly bonds and reconnect us to the wilderness where we had spent significant chunks of our young adulthoods. I told him we might find听something like peace in alpine meadows and under starry skies. I told him the trip could be life changing, that it would provide us both a much needed reset.听

鈥淣o thanks,鈥� he said. Don had never been one for big speeches.

鈥淲hy not?鈥澨�

鈥淲hat鈥檚 the point?鈥�

鈥淔un? Exercise? Living in the moment?听Leaving our comfort zones?听Getting some clarity and perspective? Rediscovering purpose and connection?鈥� I鈥檓 a talker.

鈥淪pare me the inner-life mumbo jumbo,鈥� he said. 鈥淵ou have the luxury of dabbling in that stuff, since you haven鈥檛 had a real job in decades.鈥�

I reminded myself that Don was in a dark place, that he needed my support.听

鈥淵ou love hiking,鈥� I told him. 鈥淵ou always loved hiking.鈥�

鈥淚 can鈥檛 hike. My Achilles tendon won鈥檛 allow it. I鈥檒l never be able to hike again.鈥�

鈥淒on, you can hike. Take an Advil. You hike every day听when you walk to the coffee shop.鈥�

鈥淭hat鈥檚 not hiking, that鈥檚 walking.鈥�

鈥淪o when we鈥檙e on the trail, pretend like you鈥檙e going to the coffee shop.鈥�

鈥淎t least at the coffee shop听someone makes me coffee.鈥�

Three months later, I flew west, and we drove four hours south and east until we arrived at the Middle Rosary Lake Trailhead,听smack in the middle of 听on the eastern side of the听Cascades. It was August 9, 2 P.M. At 3 P.M., we had covered a mile and a half. That鈥檚 when Don announced that his feet hurt.

We shared a bedroom until we were six and eight years old. Don collected rocks. I hoarded seashells. Angelo the barber gave Don a crew cut on the third Saturday of every month. I sported a Princeton. Don worked hard. I tested well. Don was tall, with slim hips and broad shoulders, and he won every 60-yard dash and pull-up competition in grade school. I had to wear husky pants. Don spent his allowance on comic books featuring听Superman and Batman, champions of justice who, like Don, kept their own counsel. I was more partial to the Silver Surfer, the conflicted and somewhat blabbermouthed defender of earth, who said things like, 鈥淢y fate is of little consequence 鈥� if it can save the world that gave me birth!鈥� When frustrated听or stymied, Don stewed, plotted, and then acted (often, it seemed, against me). I tended to cry, frequently听and loudly.听

When I was 11 and my mother, for the third year in a row, couldn鈥檛 locate the present I had bought for her birthday (a gift inspired after one night I bore witness on television to the gadget鈥檚 incredible slicing and dicing powers), Don pulled me aside after a trip to Angelo鈥檚, and he laid an already muscled forearm across my naked, flabby, soft, and, as I remember, slightly quivering neck. 鈥淪teve,鈥� he said, 鈥渄o you really think mom is losing all those Veg-O-Matics?鈥澨�

鈥淲ow,鈥� I exclaimed. 鈥淎mazing!鈥澨�

Don grunted.听

We stood upon the edge of a gleaming green jewel of a lake (named, coincidentally enough, Green Lake). It was听day two, and we had climbed about 1,000 feet and covered four miles, moving alongside Fall Creek, past waterfalls, into and out of dense forests of red pine carpeted with clover. The fact that Don had not spoken for the past hour wasn鈥檛 unusual, but combined with the 鈥渃loser to death and the world is meaningless鈥� stuff, it unsettled me some. I had mentioned听to Don听more than once听that perhaps his perspective was clouded, by retirement, by divorce, and that maybe with time he would see things more clearly. Maybe, he allowed, but probably not. He doubted he would ever find love. He suspected that lucrative, fulfilling work was out of reach forever. And really, weren鈥檛 those who had found love and satisfying work doomed to lose both?听

鈥淗ow about a quick dip?鈥� I said.听When I worried about Don, which I often did, I suggested things he might do to feel better. Over the past few decades, I had suggested that he see a therapist, consider听the latest emotional-retreat weekend workshop I had recently attended, and/or think about joining听a Kundalini yoga practice that took place in a salt cave. I had heard good things about salt caves.听

鈥淵ou go ahead,鈥� he said. 鈥淚鈥檓 going to take a pass on the hypothermia.鈥� When Don worried about me, which was often, he suggested I get married and settle down听or at least stick with a regular girlfriend听or, if I couldn鈥檛 manage it, that I maintain a semi-regular writing schedule听or, if that was too much, that I at least make an attempt to get out of bed before 10 A.M. more often.听

Also, that I might 鈥渞eroute some of the money you鈥檙e spending on your inner child into a SEP-IRA.鈥澨�

We stood at the lake鈥檚 edge. The water lapped.听

鈥淵ou should take off your boots and soak your feet,鈥� I said. 鈥淚t will cheer you up听and make our return hike go faster.鈥� I stripped, dove in.听

Don slowly crouched, stuck the ring and middle fingers of his left hand into the water, used his right hand to shade his eyes as he studied the horizon, still bright and blue.听

He stared at something only he could see. 鈥淭he return hike is going to be the return hike,鈥� he said. 鈥淔our miles, at least two hours. Unless someone falls. Harder on the knees, going downhill. Lots of dirt. And tomorrow鈥檚 hike is going to be longer听and steeper. But enjoy the swim. I think I鈥檒l conserve my energy.鈥�

Don showed me that by holding my pillow next to the air conditioner on summer nights, then running back to bed with it, I could keep my head cool.听He taught me that when Wolf, the neighborhood German shepherd, jumped on me, I should knee him in the chest and frown. Over the years, he has coached me before work interviews, reviewed contracts, counseled me through professional disappointments and breakups, fixed me up on dates, and made sure I wasn鈥檛 alone on holidays. When our younger sister, at the time living by herself and raising a three-year-old and an infant, told me that she was having trouble getting out of bed and was crying for hours every day, I told Ann that she should let go of her anxiety and embrace gratitude and joy. I told Don about our conversation, and the next morning he flew to Colorado, packed her bags and those of her two children, flew them all back to Oregon with him, and then, with his wife at the time,听cooked for Ann and the kids, babysat, and generally nursed her back to health.听

He favors button-down shirts and lace-up shoes and travels with his own pillows, plural, because 鈥渂etter to carry a little extra听than to be surprised.鈥� He listens to albums on his turntable, reads the print version of The New York Times, watches network news, naps every day at precisely 4 P.M., and has erected some sturdy and clearly defined personal boundaries, especially when it comes to our mother. For his 60th birthday, he hosted a small gathering, to which he invited Mom. When she asked if there would be cake, he replied in the affirmative. When she asked what flavor it would be, he asked why she needed to know.听

I like听hoodies and听Hawaiian shirts, have occasionally lied about my age on dating sites, and have, in the past ten years, inspired by infomercials, purchased fake thumbs that lit up when activated with secret buttons, a Bowflex Xtreme 2, and something called the Owl Optical Wallet Light, which contained a magnifying glass and a reading light. Actually, I bought two of those. I answer any and all questions from my mother, then deal with my resentment and guilt by eating Entenmann鈥檚 Devil鈥檚 Food Crumb Donuts and Ben & Jerry鈥檚 Chubby Hubby ice cream until I am sick.

For years, Don had been telling family members that they needn鈥檛 give him gifts on holidays or for his birthday, but if they felt compelled, they should only shop from a list he distributed, and that first we should check with each other to avoid duplication. I decided that his energetic efforts to control the world masked a terrible interior sense of chaos, and that a surprise might psychically jolt him into a more relaxed, happier state. So听one winter break, I carried home from college and presented to Don a 13-pound听authentic 鈥渃ountry-cured Boone County Ham,鈥� along with printed instructions for scraping off the ham鈥檚 mold with a stiff brush, washing it, then soaking it in cold water for 12 to 24 hours before roasting. He read the instructions, then stared at me. 鈥淎re you fucking kidding me?鈥� he said.听

Day three, and I have accepted the impossibility of either of us finding peace by eating toasted marshmallows. There have been and will be no toasted marshmallows, because after discovering that the only campsite available on our first night sat next to a dumpster, we听decided that, for the remainder of the trip, we could bond just fine without sleeping on the ground or having to urinate outside. So we鈥檝e been sleeping in lodges and cabins the past two nights.听

We have been watching downloaded movies, treating ourselves to pancakes and scrambled eggs in the morning, and spending most of our daylight hours hiking. Today, climbing through a dense hemlock forest, we have been discussing knee pain, shoulder pain, love, divorce, cortisone, our parents, physical therapy, Don鈥檚 child, our sister鈥檚 children, our childhoods, yoga, and real estate. I have been doing most of the discussing.听

Just as I was weighing the relative risks and benefits of therapy under the influence of psilocybin, we popped out of the forest and onto a rocky, almost lunar plain. Jutting up along the horizon were the granite, snow-veined South Sister and Broken Top Mountains. Between them and us,听though we couldn鈥檛 see it,听lay , which听a website I鈥檇 checked called听one of the most beautiful mountain lakes in the area.

鈥淚t sounds incredible,鈥� I said.

Don consulted his map, cross-checked with his compass. 鈥淚t always sounds incredible on a website,鈥� he said.

He has never shied from straight talk or hard truths. The supermodel girlfriend a young cousin once听brought to a family wedding? 鈥淪uper skinny is more like it,鈥� Don said. The newest four-star Manhattan restaurant where we celebrated a birthday together? 鈥淣oisy. And overpriced.鈥� The three-story, five-bedroom Florida house we snagged one Thanksgiving? 鈥淗ave you been monitoring red-tide levels?鈥澨�

When we made it to the lake, I immediately began disrobing. Don consulted his watch, the map, the sky, his watch again, the compass, then the lake. I walked in, up to my knees.

鈥淐鈥檓on!鈥� I said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 great.鈥�

He studied the sky again.听

鈥淲hat are you doing?鈥�

鈥淭hinking.鈥澨�

Ten years earlier, when Don was a CEO, the chairman of the board鈥檚 secretary told Don on a Monday that he needed to be in the chairman鈥檚 office that Friday听at 4 P.M.听for a private one-on-one meeting. Don told me it could only mean one thing: he was going to be fired. I told Don he had been sure he was going to be fired many times before, that he would be happier if he spent less time worrying and more time focusing on the present. Instead, Don spent the next week imagining all the missteps he might have committed in his tenure and jotted down explanations for each. He also worked on an elaborate, technical, and airtight legal document that, if necessary, he would present to the chairman, demanding a two-year severance package,听with stock options. Just in case.听

When Friday arrived, the chairman said he wanted to discuss the company鈥檚 annual holiday celebration. That was it.听

I pondered all the time my brother has spent planning for catastrophes that don鈥檛 happen.听

鈥淒id you learn anything from that experience?鈥� I had asked Don.

鈥淵eah,鈥� he听said. 鈥淚t pays to be prepared.鈥�

Stories about mental illness and growing old can be amusing, even hilarious, especially before you or someone you know endures either. So this might be a good place to mention that, about two years before our hike, doctors had diagnosed and begun treating Don for depression. Until then, for the most part, I had viewed his occasional grouchiness, frequent pessimism, general dismissiveness (especially toward me), and ever vigilant posture toward the world as merely elements of his personality.

Then again, until I had been diagnosed and treated for depression myself, a few years before Don, I had considered my romantic difficulties, binge eating, binge sleeping, binge crying, and binge Veg-O-Matic and Owl Wallet Light purchasing as elements of my nature. But couldn鈥檛 we change? Our hike in the woods coincided with a point in our lives when we were trying to ascertain exactly which of our not entirely welcome behavioral patterns might be malleable and subject to our best intentions and which ones we were simply doomed to endure. In other words, our hike happened right around the time听we were getting ready for Medicare.听

Pudgy gray clouds scud across a sky so blue it looks painted. Pine trees above us quiver in the soft breeze, while the deep, clear Metolius River flows below. Today, our last hike, is a gentle five-miler, flat, mostly shaded.听

It鈥檚 a narrow trail, and Don walks ahead. The wind picks up.听

鈥淗ey, Don,鈥� I say, 鈥渢hanks for teaching me how to handle Wolf the dog and showing me the cooling-the-pillow trick.鈥�

鈥淯h-huh,鈥� he says.

Across the river, clear water gushes from a spring, turning the meandering stream to churning听whitewater. We enter a winding canyon, bordered by old-growth ponderosa pine. Broods of goslings paddle next to us. Bunches of bright yellow tanagers hop in the shrubs lining the banks.

鈥淎nd I appreciate your breaking the news about the Veg-O-Matics to me,鈥� I say, 鈥渆ven if it hurt my feelings at the time.鈥澨�

Don grunts.听

We have two miles left in our trip. I wonder if they鈥檒l be done in silence.

鈥淚 should have kept the Hanukkah ham,鈥� Don says.

鈥淗耻丑?鈥�

鈥淚 just couldn鈥檛 get past the mold. I can see now that it was a mistake. You wanted to surprise me, and you thought it would help me. I appreciate that now.鈥�

I feel something dislodge in my chest. I don鈥檛 know what to say. So I say what I have been saying for the past 55 years or so.听

鈥淢y fate is of little consequence 鈥� if it can save the world that gave me birth!鈥�

I can hear Don sigh, even over the wind.听

鈥淩ight, Steve鈥� he says. 鈥淥f course.鈥�

We鈥檒l survive the hike to the trailhead, the drive back to Portland, the unpacking. We鈥檒l survive family vacations. We鈥檒l survive family drama. (Don will tell me that if I write about our trip, 鈥淧lease quote me as saying the story will be incomplete听and mostly true.鈥�) We鈥檒l survive the next two years, a time when Don will meet a woman, and they will move in together, raise chickens, and plant a garlic patch. He will visit his son in Brooklyn many times, and in Portland he鈥檒l join a lawyers鈥� support group, and when another man in the group says that he has been experiencing crippling despair and paralyzing anxiety听and has decided that in order to improve, he needed to imagine the future he hoped for and pray to a power greater than himself, Don will ask, without meaning to be funny or mean, 鈥淛ust in case, do you have a plan B?鈥�

He will add a hot bath to precede听his daily nap, and accept positions on the boards of three Portland nonprofits: one that helps adults suffering from mental illness, another serving homeless youth, and a third dedicated to preserving the Columbia Gorge. As a volunteer, he鈥檒l take the adults on hikes and the teenagers to a boxing gym owned by a man he has helped with legal issues over the years. He will find meaning听and purpose听but will continue to worry. I will continue to assure him that everything will be OK, to which he will invariably reply, 鈥淪ure, unless it won鈥檛.鈥�

I will cut back on the Chubby Hubby and the Devil鈥檚 Food Crumb Donuts. I will save enough money to rent a cabin in the woods for a month in the summer, where I will host my mother, sister, and nephew for two weeks. I will divest myself of all but three Hawaiian shirts, as well as toss听the Bowflex Xtreme2 and both Owl Optical Wallet Lights. I will take the seven sets of Lightup Magic Thumbs from their special box on my bookshelf only on special occasions.听

Except for a set of Perfect Pushup Rotating Handles, which are, after all, health related, I will cease infomercial-inspired shopping.听

But all that occurs later. At the moment, there is only the two of us, and the trail, and the wind, and the scudding clouds, and bright blue sky. Brothers. I stop, tilt my face to the warming sun.听

鈥淎 perfect end to a perfect trip,鈥� I say.听

Don stops, too, lifts his face to the exact same sun. The river, deep and cold, surges past. He shades his eyes, He studies the sky.听

鈥淭rue,鈥� he says. 鈥淓ven if it rains.鈥�

The post A Love Letter to My Curmudgeonly Big Brother appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

THE FIRST TIME HE TRIED IT, the vomiting started after 67 miles, and it didn’t stop until six hours later. The last time, his quadriceps cramped at mile 75, so he hobbled the last quarter of the course. But Kirk Apt is a resilient, optimistic, obsessive鈥攕ome might say weird鈥攎an who describes experiences like being trapped on an exposed peak during a lightning storm as “interesting,” and that is why he’s here, in Silverton, Colorado, cheerfully tucking in to a plate of pancakes, eggs, and bacon at 4 A.M., discoursing on the nature of fun while he prepares to take on, yet again, the most punishing 100-mile footrace in the world.

85 MILES DOWN, 15 TO GO: Hardrocker Ken Jensen makes his way over Grant Swamp Pass after surviving the course’s hardest climb, in the San Juan Mountains.

Aggh, That’s Cold: A color-coordinated runner wades through the Uncompaghre River.

It’s called the Hardrock Hundred Endurance Run, even though it’s actually 101.7 miles long, and is known to the small and strange band of people who have attempted it as the Hardrock 100. Or, simply, the Hardrock. In 1992, the first year of the race, just 18 of 42 entrants finished.Today, nearly half of the 118 men and women who set off into the mountains will quit or be told to stop. Based on medical opinion, history, and statistical probabilities, death for one or two of them is not out of the question.

Apt could not look more pleased. “Enjoy yourself,” he says to a fellow racer, a man staring fearfully at a strip of bacon. “Have fun,” he blithely exhorts another, a pale woman clutching a cup of coffee, clenching and unclenching her jaw. Apt says “have fun” frequently enough to sound creepy. Even among other Hardrockers鈥攎any of them sinewy scientists from New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory who tend to describe themselves with staggering inaccuracy as “mellow”鈥攖he 39-year-old massage therapist from Crested Butte, Colorado, is known as Mr. Mellow.

It’s race day, the first Friday after the Fourth of July (the 2001 Hardrock will start on July 13), and Mr. Mellow is working over his pancakes at a worn wooden picnic table inside a caf茅 hunkered at the northern end of the only paved road in town. Silverton, population 440, is encircled by peaks, nestled at 9,305 feet in a lush mountain valley in the southern San Juans, at least an hour by way of the most avalanche-prone highway in North America from fresh vegetables, a movie theater, or a working cell phone. If you didn’t know about the 15 feet of snow that falls here every winter, or the unemployment rate that’s four times the state average, or the knots of bitter, beery ex-miners who gather at The Miner’s Tavern toward the southern end of the paved road most every night to slurrily curse the environmentalists they blame for shutting down the mines and trying to ban snowmobiles downtown, you might think that Silverton was quaint.

国产吃瓜黑料, the sky is a riot of stars, the air clean and cold and so thin it makes you gasp. Inside the caf茅, it’s warm and cozy, a perfect place for Mellow to break bread with Terrified.

“The most important thing about the race,” Apt says, “is to remember to make sure to enjoy yourself.” Yes, there can be crippling cramps and hair-raising lightning bolts鈥攂ig smile鈥攂ut there are also remote, deserted vistas, long and lonely treks up mountains and across ridgelines, precious hours spent alone among old-growth forest and fresh wildflowers.

It sounds cleansing. If you didn’t know about the dozens of unusually fit people who every midsummer collapse into near-catatonic, weeping blobs of flesh, their faces and hands and feet swollen to grotesque balloons because entire clusters of the racers’ capillaries are breaking down and leaking (more on that later), you might think the Hardrock was fun.

Apt unfolds his six-foot-one, 168-pound frame from the caf茅’s picnic bench. Broad-shouldered, long-legged, clear-eyed, and, above all, mellow, he strides out of the emptying restaurant. He won the Leadville 100 in 1995, and though he’s completed six Hardrocks, he’s never finished first. Maybe this will be the year. Maybe not.

Big, big smile.

“How lucky are we?” he says.

FIVE MINUTES BEFORE SIX, the sun still not up, the competitors are turning in small circles on the gravel road outside Silverton Public School, taking in the surrounding peaks, scanning the distance for answers to questions most people never even consider. “Will I be hospitalized before sunset?” for example. They will spend the next day and at least one sleepless night in the deepest backcountry, almost constantly above 10,000 feet, climbing, sliding, wading, hiking, staggering, limping, and occasionally running. (Unlike other 100-mile racers, the fastest and most fit of the Hardrockers will jog no more than 60 percent of the course.) They will face five mountain passes of at least 13,000 feet and one 14,000-foot peak. Those who complete the loop will climb and descend 66,000 feet (more than would be involved in climbing and descending Mount Everest from sea level, as the race organizers like to point out). A large number of racers will vomit at least once. One or two might turn white and pass out. The slower runners will almost certainly hallucinate.

One of the most horrifying Hardrock visions is often all too real. It occurs when a race official informs a racer that he or she is moving too slowly to finish within the prescribed 48 hours. Getting “timed out,” whether at mile 75 or at the finish line itself, is a bitter experience. Just ask Todd Burgess, a 32-year-old newspaper-page designer from Colorado Springs. Five-foot-ten and 175 pounds, Burgess is cheerfully cognizant of his limitations and aspires only to finish and to enjoy himself along the way. So last year he snapped pictures, meandered in the wildflowers, gamboled through the old growth. But toward the end of the race, he saw that unless he hurried, he wasn’t going to make it. He sprinted. He stumbled. He panicked. And when he crossed the line at 48 hours, three minutes, and 35 seconds鈥攚hich means that, officially, he didn’t finish at all鈥攁nother racer told him, “It’s gonna suck to be you for the next year.”
It was a cruel thing to say, but, as it turns out, somewhat prophetic. For Burgess, the last year has been one filled with doubts, fears, and horrific training sessions鈥�12-hour runs and 50-mile practice races and Sunday-morning sleep-deprivation workouts. While it has sucked to be him, it would suck more to be timed out again this year.

It’s been said that recovering alcoholics and bulimics and drug addicts are disproportionately represented among Hardrockers, which is tough to confirm, but it makes sense if you consider that addictive tendencies and compulsive behavior would come in handy with the training regimen. It’s also been said that full-time Silvertonians tend toward the same kind of ornery optimism and obsessive, clannish, and sometimes perversely mellow brand of masochism exhibited by many of the racers. That’s equally difficult to nail down, but having spent the better part of two winters here, I can vouch for the general soundness of the theory. It’s no surprise that Silvertonians and Hardrockers tend to get along.

A few dozen townspeople have awakened early this morning to see the racers off, partly because three Silvertonians are entered, including one of the Hardrock’s most popular hard-luck cases, 52-year-old Carolyn Erdman, who has tried and failed three times to finish. Also at the starting line is the only Silvertonian ever to complete a Hardrock, Chris Nute. Nute, 33, will be pacing Erdman the second half of the race. He is not entered this year largely because of his wife, Jodi, 30, who is with him for the start and whom no one has ever accused of being mellow, especially when it comes to the Hardrock.

The year Chris Nute ran the Hardrock “was the only time I ever thought we might get a divorce,” Jodi says. “I couldn’t understand wanting to do that. The training time sucked. And it made me feel out of shape. It totally gave me a fat complex. I had a [terrifying] vision of the future: that I was going to be married to an ultrarunner.”

Dawn. Race director Dale Garland yells, “Go!” and about 50 Hardrock volunteers and spouses and Silvertonians watch as Apt, Burgess, Erdman, and their fellow racers jog and walk down a gravel road, turn southeast, and then head into the mountains鈥攁nd toward the cold and dark and pain.

SOME 100-MILE RACES ARE more famous. Many are more popular. Most have more corporate sponsors. None approach the Hardrock’s brutality.

“This is a dangerous course!” warns the Hardrock manual, a fantastic compendium of arcane statistics, numbingly detailed course descriptions, grave warnings, and chilling understatement. When it comes to the temptation to scale peaks during storms, for instance, the manual advises, “You can hunker down in a valley for 2 to 4 hours and still finish; but if you get fried by lightning your running career may end on the spot.”

Though a 44-year-old runner with a history of high blood pressure, Joel Zucker, died of a brain aneurysm on his way to the airport after completing the race in 1998, no one has perished during a Hardrock. But, according to the manual, “It is our general opinion that the first fatality… will be either from hypothermia or lightning!” (A Hardrock-manual exclamation point is rare as a Sasquatch sighting; one suspects typographical error, grim subject matter notwithstanding.)

“There’s a reasonable chance somebody could die,” says Tyler Curiel, 45, a Dallas-based doctor specializing in infectious disease and oncology who’s run eleven 100-milers and “50 or 60” ultras (any race longer than 26.2 miles). “I’ve fallen into ice-cold water, almost been swept away by a waterfall, walked six hours alone at high elevations in boulder fields,” he says of his Hardrock experiences. “Had I sprained an ankle then, I might have been dead. I almost walked off a 2,000-foot cliff in the middle of the night once. Two more steps, and I would have been dead for sure. And I’m fairly competent. So, yeah, there’s a reasonable chance.”

By late afternoon, after ten hours of climbing and sliding and “EXPOSURE” (the manual lists dehydration, fatigue and vomiting as “minor problems,” so racers tend to take capitalized nouns seriously), the fleetest and most fit of participants are a good five hours from being halfway finished. At this juncture鈥攖he fifth of 13 aid stations, Grouse Gulch, mile 42.4鈥攐ne would expect the appropriate emotion to be grim determination. So it comes as something of a shock to onlookers when a slender young man named Jonathan Worswick skips through a light rain, down a narrow, switchbacking trail, and across a stream into Grouse Gulch at 4:27 P.M. He is smiling. The 38-year-old runner from England is on pace for a course record.

The Hardrock old hands are unimpressed. These are retired runners, longtime observers of ultrarunning, in demeanor and worldview much like the leathery old men who hang around ballparks in Florida and Arizona, sneering at the fuzzy-cheeked phenoms of spring and their March batting averages. The old hands have seen young studs like Worswick before. Seen them tear up the first half of the course, only to be seized later by fatigue, cramps, nausea, and a despair so profound they can’t even name it. Besides, the promising dawn has turned into a chilly, wet afternoon. And this is Grouse Gulch. Dangerous things happen at Grouse Gulch.

It doesn’t look dangerous: a wooden yurt 12 feet in diameter, a canvas elk-hunters’ shelter with three cots and a propane heater, and a telephone-booth-size communications tent where a radio operator hunches over his sputtering equipment, all hugging the west bank of the fast-flowing Animas River.

But if you’ve just trekked more than 40 miles, climbed 14,000 feet and descended 10,000, confronted Up-Chuck Ridge (“ACROPHOBIA”), which is nearly three times as steep as the steepest part of the Pike’s Peak marathon, tackled the 14,048-foot Handies Peak (“Snow fields, altitude sickness, fantastic views”), where through a freezing rain you looked out upon the world and pondered the sleepless night (or nights) and the long hours that lie ahead, and now you are staggering down rocky switchbacks through pellets of freezing rain…well, then Grouse Gulch is danger itself. And nothing is more menacing than its banana pudding.

If there is some Higher Power watching over Hardrockers, urging them on, then surely there is a corresponding demon, tempting them to stop. What the fiend wants is for them to taste the pudding. Not the oatmeal, or soup, or mashed potatoes, or individually prepared breakfast burritos (meat or vegetarian)鈥攖hough all are tempting. No, the pudding, whose scent floats along the riverbanks and up the mountain slopes as easily as the Sirens’ lethal song wafted over the wine-dark sea.

The pudding itself is creamy, smooth, not quite white, not quite brown. (The recipe is absurdly prosaic: one large package of Jell-O instant vanilla pudding mixed with four cups whole milk and three fresh bananas; makes eight servings.) But for the weeping runner who has been slogging up and down talus slopes and through marshes for 15 hours or so, the pudding… for that person, the pudding whispers to them.

“Stop,” it whispers. “Rest.” The rush of the river blends with the hushed static from the radio equipment, but the pudding won’t shut up. “Don’t go on,” it whispers. “Have some more pudding.”

Worswick wolfs a vegetarian burrito鈥攈e won’t even look at the pudding鈥攁nd leaves ten minutes after he arrives. Fourteen minutes later, Kirk Apt strides across the bridge, looks around the aid station, sits down, changes his socks, and frets. Things are taking too long; he’s wasting precious minutes. By the time he is ready to go, Mr. Mellow is thoroughly agitated. When he leaves Grouse Gulch, he starts too fast, realizes he’s too “amped up,” and has to breathe deeply in order to regain the calm he regards as essential.

Apt spends less than ten minutes at Grouse Gulch.

Todd Burgess had planned to be here by 6P.M., but at 10 he is still struggling down the mountain, thighs burning, tentative, taking baby steps, fearful of falling.

He enters Grouse Gulch at 10:12 and leaves at 10:28.

Carolyn staggers in at 10:30, loses sight in her left eye, then leaves at 10:36, two minutes ahead of her planned 43-hour pace.

Others鈥攕wifter, more accomplished, less tortured鈥攁re not so strong. Scott Jurek, 27, who two weeks ago won the Western States 100-miler, hits Grouse Gulch at 6:05 P.M. and takes a rest. He will not go on. Eric Clifton, who has won thirteen 100-milers since 1989, walks into the aid station two minutes later, and also stops for good.

Soaked and cold and exhausted, other racers hear the rushing river and the steady drizzle and the devilish gibberings of the Pudding Master, and they feel the propane heat, and then they cast their weary eyes on the cots, soft as dreams.

Twenty-three Hardrockers quit at Grouse Gulch.

VOMITING, CRAMPING, collapsing, whimpering hopelessly before the devil’s pudding, and/or surrendering to that despair so profound that it’s difficult to name, are all variations, in Hardrock parlance, of bonking. Typically, when a runner bonks, he or she also quits the race, as Apt did when he couldn’t stop puking in 1992. Sometimes a runner bonks and keeps going, and even finishes, as Apt did when his quadriceps cramped and he trudged the last 25 miles of the course in 11 hours in 1999. To continue after bonking earns a runner enormous respect among fellow racers, most of whom have bonked at some point in their running careers. These people appreciate speed, but they revere grit.

When male Hardrockers bonk, they tend to quit. This is accepted wisdom among the racers, as is the fact that women bonkers, in general, do their best to finish. A racer can bonk without timing out, and he can time out without bonking. All things being equal, it’s better to have bonked before being timed out than the other way around. Non-bonking runners who are timed out鈥攅specially late in a Hardrock鈥攕uffer the fate of Todd Burgess (it sucks to be them).
THE OURAY AID station, at mile 58 and an elevation of 7,680 feet, would provide an excellent place to quit. Though there is no pudding of any sort here, nor heated tents with cots, next to the aid station is a parking lot, and next to that, a highway. Silverton is less than an hour’s drive away, in a heated car.

But there will be no quitting here for Jonathan Worswick, who arrives at 7:42 P.M., still leading, and leaves at 7:56. Not for Kirk Apt, who arrives at 8:20 and leaves at 8:27鈥�”psyched,” he says, “but in a relaxed, calm way.”

Neither will there be any quitting for Todd Burgess, who trundles toward the aid station the next morning at 5:14. His pacer, Fred Creamer, urges Burgess to run the last mile or so to the aid station, but Burgess wants to conserve his energy until he eats something. He’s sure that a meal will give him the boost he needs for the second half of the course. In Ouray he takes a bite of warm roast turkey, a long pull of Gatorade, and vomits.

Creamer asks Burgess if this has ever happened to him during a race, and when Burgess says no, Creamer considers ending their journey. But Burgess says he feels great. He does feel great. Creamer feels grave concern. They continue.

Like Burgess, Erdman approaches Ouray in the predawn darkness, moving fast enough to finish in less than 48 hours, but just barely. No one鈥攏ot the aid station volunteers and not pacer Chris Nute鈥攅ntertains the slightest suspicion that she might quit in Ouray. Not that they wouldn’t welcome such an event.

Erdman entered the race for the first time in 1997, when she was 48, eight years after she quit smoking and one year after she and her husband left their cattle farm in Wisconsin and moved to Silverton. Nute paced her that year, and she made it 85 miles before race organizers told her that she was moving too slowly and that she was done.

In 1998 she entered again. Four weeks before the event she ran a 50-mile warm-up race in Orem, Utah. Three miles into it she fell and scraped her left knee. There was blood, and a little pain, but she thought it was no big deal. By the time she finished, she could see her patella; she was shocked at how white it was. The doctor in the emergency room told her she was lucky he didn’t have to amputate the limb. She spent a week in the hospital with intravenous antibiotics. Surgeons operated on her twice.

In ’99 she was timed out at mile 92.

Erdman has long gray hair that she wears in a braid, the lean body of someone half her age, and brown eyes that sparkle with an intensity peculiar to religious leaders and Hardrockers. She runs ten miles a day, more in the midst of Hardrock training, through rain, snow, and blistering sun. Her dedication has unified Silvertonians鈥攍ike many residents of small mountain towns, notoriously resistant to unification unless it involves railing against silent black helicopters and the craven jackbooted federal thugs who claim the choppers don’t exist. But they’re worried about her. Will she endure too much, just to finish? What if she doesn’t finish?

Nute knows that Erdman would sooner end up on an operating table than quit, and that’s one reason he’s agreed to pace her. They’re friends. He wants her to finish, but he also wants her to live.

After 13 minutes at the station, they walk along the Uncompaghre River out of Ouray and onto a dirt road, which they climb steadily through thick forest. The air is moist with dew and sweet with pine; birds are starting to sing. Though Erdman is falling further behind her 43-hour pace, and hasn’t slept for a full 24 hours and won’t for another 24, the approaching dawn invigorates her鈥攆or about two hours. Then she wants to take a nap.

Not a good idea, Nute tells her.

Leafy undergrowth and lush, grassy ground beckon. Just a few minutes lying in that pillowy green would be so nourishing, so healing. It would make her go so much faster.

Really not such a smart thing to do, Nute says.

She pleads. She whines. She begs.

Pacers are valuable precisely because they warn their charges not to surrender to their worst temptations鈥攍ike gobbling fistfuls of ibuprofen and taking ill-advised naps. But Nute is also Erdman’s friend, not to mention a fellow Silvertonian. OK, he says, one nap. They settle on seven minutes.

She nearly cries with happiness. She spreads her jacket, makes a pillow of her pack, and lies down in a perfect leafy spot. But it’s not perfect enough. She picks everything up, moves to another leafy spot, and lies down again. Nute watches, looks at his watch; eight minutes have passed. She doesn’t like the position of the pillow, so she adjusts it. Then she adjusts her jacket. Then her body. Three adjustments later, she sighs. It is a pitiable little sound.

“Go!” she chirps to Nute, who is sitting down, staring at her. “Start timing.”

This is when Nute starts to worry.

BACK IN SILVERTON, Jodi Harper Nute is worried, too. She has watched over the past week as Chris has helped with various Hardrock tasks, handing out literature, signing in runners, helping pace Carolyn. Jodi watched him chat with other runners. She watched him study the course map. She watched him huddle with the old hands, doubtless revering grit.

And what she feared has come to pass. Just last night Chris told Jodi he wants to race again. (The couple has since moved to Durango, where less snow makes it easier to train.)

“Goddamit,” Jodi says. “I can’t believe this.” Pause. “Yes, I can. I was wondering why I’ve been so pissy the past few days. Now I know why. Goddamit.”

While Jodi worries, Hardrockers trudge 10.4 miles and 5,420 feet up to Virginius Pass (elevation 13,100 feet), then 5.3 miles and 4,350 feet down into the aid station at Telluride. They have traveled 73.7 miles and have another 28 to go. Soon they’ll have to tackle Oscar’s Pass, 6.5 miles away and 4,400 feet higher. “Basically,” says Jonathan Thompson, editor of Silverton Mountain Journal, the local biweekly, “straight up a friggin’ mountain.”

After Oscar’s (“Acrophobia, exposure, cornice”), surviving runners will face Grant Swamp Pass, the most difficult climb of the course, a murderously steep scramble over boulders and loose scree (“rock and dirt that will slide back down the hill with each step you take”). It would be daunting on a day hike.

Erdman has been awake, racing, for 31 hours. It’s now one in the afternoon, and after she wolfs a slice of pepperoni pizza, she and Nute leave town, climbing, straight into the zone where Hardrockers too proud, too foolish, or too dense to quit often get themselves in danger. In 1998, as two-time Hardrock champion Dave Horton was ascending Grant Swamp Pass, a melon-size rock dislodged by a runner above fell and struck his right hand. “A little later,” Horton, 51, wrote in his account of that race, “I noticed that my glove was soaked through with blood.” After finishing (of course), he realized that it was a compound fracture.

Many runners ignore puffy faces, hands that have ballooned like boxing gloves, feet like clown shoes, telling themselves it’s merely a lack of sodium or some low-level kidney failure. Probably not fatal. They’ll try to ignore the moist rattling they hear with every breath. Chances are the swelling and rattling are the result of damage to the body’s capillaries. High-altitude races tend to starve capillaries of oxygen, which makes them leak fluid, which pools in the racers’ hands and feet. “The danger,” says Curiel, the doctor from Dallas, “is that one of the largest capillary networks is in your lungs, and when those capillaries start leaking, you have difficulty breathing. Pulmonary edema. In a really bad case, your lungs can fill up with water and you’ll drown.”

Digestive problems barely merit consideration. Jonathan Worswick left Ouray still in the lead but vomiting every few miles and suffering stomach cramps and diarrhea. Mr. Mellow stalked him during the climb, enjoying the view, confident in his uphill power, even more confident that Worswick had expended too much energy too early. Just before passing Worswick and crossing Virginius Pass, Apt recalled later, “a mental shift occurred for me. I knew I was in this race, and really had a good shot at winning.”

Worswick overtook him on the downhill to Telluride, but Apt was having fun. Just after beginning the brutal assault on Oscar’s, Apt told his pacer he wanted to “get after it.” Minutes later they blew by Worswick, who was too sick to fight anymore. He bonked. But he continued.

Burgess hasn’t puked since Ouray, and though by midafternoon he’s suffering fatigue, muscle soreness, chills, and a slight loss of motor coordination, he’s still in the race.

Erdman? She regained her sight near Telluride. But three miles later, she begins to gasp.

She turns to Nute. “I’m not going to make it,” she says.

Nute knows she might well be speaking the truth. He’s been monitoring his watch, worrying as Erdman has slowed to a 40-minute-mile stagger. He’s been despairing that she’ll never make it out of the next aid station, Chapman, at 83.1 miles, before the cutoff time. But Erdman is the one who inspired Nute to run his first and, depending on Jodi, possibly only Hardrock. Plenty of people have told Erdman to stop. Nute’s not going to be one of them.

“Let’s sit down for a minute,” Nute says. “Let’s just process this. Let’s do the math.”

But what calculus of the spirit can take into account years of training, hours alone, broken bones, and the taunting of the devil’s pudding? Has an equation yet been written so elegant that it can encompass impossible dreams?

They sit, and they sit some more. They peer upwards, above tree line, where the skies are black with monstrous storm clouds. Lighting crashes.

Erdman does the math. Instead of a number comes a word.

“All I can think,” she says, “is why?”

She doesn’t bonk, and she isn’t timed out. But after 77 miles, Erdman drops out of her third and鈥攕he says鈥攆inal Hardrock.

TEN MILES FROM the finish, Todd Burgess forgets how to walk a straight line. Counting, he decides, will solve the problem. If he can put eight steps together, one ahead of another, without wavering, and name the number of each step, he won’t swerve into the wilderness and be lost forever. He is sure of this. He counts aloud for an hour.

When he steps onto the abandoned rail bed that will take him the last two miles to Silverton, Burgess can see the gentle, aspen-covered hill ahead. Once he climbs that, he’ll be able to look down into the town. He’ll be able to see the finish line below. He knows he’s going to make it. Only one thing can stop him.
He knows it’s a silly fear, most likely the result of exhaustion and chills. If he knew about leaking capillaries, he might ascribe his anxiety to that. But Burgess’s attempts at rationality won’t banish a dreadful notion, born of sleep deprivation, or cellular rioting, or the desperate, fearsome need to finish under 48 hours:

“This would be a terrible time for a nuclear bomb to fall.”

BURGESS ISN’T THE only one losing his mind. Gigantic june bugs wriggle from the soil and onto the damp and wobbly legs of Hardrockers unlucky enough to find themselves on the course after dusk on the second day of the race. Ghostly condominiums waver on top of mountain passes. Severed elk heads bob in the arms of grinning aid-station volunteers.

It’s probably not capillary leakage. The visions seem to visit the slower runners, the ones who have been awake the longest.

“We know that people who have been sleep deprived have been noted to have visual, auditory, as well as tactile hallucinations,” says Dr. Clete Kushida, director of the Stanford Center for Human Sleep Research. “They can also suffer irritability, as well as changes in memory, focus, and concentration. And psychomotor deficits.”

That’s one way of putting it.

After 40 hours, phantom Texans in ten-gallon hats walk beside the sleepiest Hardrockers at 13,000 feet, drinking beer and laughing. Grass turns to snow, rocks morph into Chevy Suburbans, plants transmute into Gummy Bears and bows. Before he died, Joel Zucker saw Indians.

Burgess finishes at 47 hours, 41 minutes, and three seconds, the 58th of 60 finishers (none of them Silvertonians). Then he sits on the ground.

Race Director Dale Garland walks to Burgess and asks if he would mind turning off the digital clock when it hits 48 hours. “I think this is good therapy,” Garland says.

Burgess sits next to the clock and stares at it. At 48 hours he pushes a button, but the clock keeps going. Burgess keeps sitting, staring at the running numbers.

Jonathan Worswick finishes sixth, at 30 hours, 46 minutes, 16 seconds.

Kirk Apt wins in 29 hours and 35 minutes鈥攂eating the course record by more than 35 minutes. His legs tremble, and he weeps. Some onlookers get teary, too, even a few of the old hands. They don’t like to talk about it, but they know that some of the fastest finishers are the most patently competitive, the loudest, the least liked, and the most likely to quit when outright victory seems impossible. Then there’s Apt, who bonked and walked the last 25 miles of the course last year, enjoying the scenic vistas and the lonely ridgelines. Cramped. Limping. Having fun.

Local newspaper reporters gather round the champion. It’s almost noon, clear and sunny. Apt tells one note-taker that he consulted a nutritionist before this year’s Hardrock and that his “homemade goos” (various combinations of blendered hard-boiled egg, potato, tofu, avocado, rice, yogurt, salt, honey, and chicken liver) helped him stay the course. He tells another, “I’m really not that competitive, but I saw I had the opportunity to win, so I thought, Why not?” He mentions that he ran about 60 of the 100 miles鈥�”the flats and downhills, and I ran a few uphills, too.”

The reporter from Durango has one last question.

“What interesting things happened in the race?” she asks.

Interesting things? Mr. Mellow grins.

“The flowers were just amazing.”

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I don't mind that you took my little sister to Mexico three hours after meeting her in a coffee shop. And it may not be my business that she got pregnant on that trip or that she had the baby in a yurt with a midwife named Sunshine (we'll get to that later) or that you were in another country when my nephew was born or that your first response upon learning of impending fatherhood was to ask, “Is this going to interfere with my rock climbing?”

Even though we haven't met yet, I feel like I know you already鈥攜ou and your van full of topo maps and empty beer bottles, your carabiner key chain and your telly skis and your fast-twitch response to smooth rocks and rough winters, especially when the alternative is diapers and a job and filing your taxes and the gray skies of marriage and holidays with in-laws. I too have called in sick, snuck out early, gotten lost and stayed lost. I feel a kinship with you. It is not a good feeling.

Oh, you must be a smooth-talking devil to have pulled my sister out of that coffee shop and onto the highway; also, judging from the single photograph of you I have seen, longhaired and clear-eyed and well-muscled and worry-free. I study that snapshot of you and my sister with your arms around each other next to your lime-green 1978 VW microbus with the Grateful Dead stickers and I feel a soul connection. It's a very bad feeling. Certainly you will settle down and grow up. So why can't I stop my recurring daydream in which your Capilene-clad body gracefully executes an unaided, free-solo, airborne descent into some bottomless gorge?

Is it because of your occupation, or hobby, or whatever it is you call your progression from law student to investment banker to Web site designer to part-time carpenter?

Is it because, before your fateful stroll into the coffee shop, you had spent five years climbing and skiing in Aspen, a period I might have enjoyed doing the same had I followed the sybaritic and shiftless impulses that tempt my own slacker soul?

Is it because, shortly after your week of love and tacos, you moved in with my sister, which I at first thought bravely romantic until my older brother, a lawyer, told me you were hiding from the immigration people? (“The INS is turning up the heat in Aspen,” he explained.)

I don't suppose I can criticize you for turning your back on your law degree and your MBA. Hey, I've left jobs myself. And the fact that you're from Scotland doesn't bother me, beyond the run-of-the-mill ancient gut hatred I feel toward any strange man snatching one of my tribe's females. (It's the same unpleasant vibe I have felt directed at me by the brother and father of my girlfriend, especially after the time she came home early with a broken wrist from a snowboarding trip we took together, and I stayed for the entire week. Fresh powder. You understand.) That you were here without the necessary documents did concern my father. I persuaded him to hold off on the private investigator, at least until after the baby was born, and suggested that he start referring to you by your given name, rather than “the illegal alien.”

“Do you have any idea why the illegal alien's having such a hard time getting a visa?” my father asked me when my sister was eight and a half months pregnant.

“These things take time, Dad,” I said.

“It's because he lied on his application. It's because the illegal alien has a felony conviction.”

As your future brother-in-law, I must tell you that getting caught stealing a sleeping bag as a teenager is one thing. Lying about it鈥攖o INS officials, to employers, especially to fathers with pregnant daughters鈥攊s quite another. Neither is it particularly wise to offer, when confronted with your past, the following defense: “A friend of mine was really burnt on this lame job, and we were stoked for this awesome wall, but he couldn't go without a bag, and it was just bloody fiberfill anyway.”

I sympathize. Really. When I was young and foolish I might have lifted a daypack or two myself. But I'm not so young anymore, and neither are you, and if ever there is a time to accept responsibility, this is it. Which does not mean, when the father of the woman you impregnated says, “It's time to grow up,” that you respond, “Well, dude, your daughter hasn't grown up yet.”

And Dude? Calling my dad “Dude” is not, under any circumstances, a good idea.

Like him, and I suppose like you, I love my little sister. I love her generous spirit and adventurous soul and the way she has fashioned a living in sun-kissed little mountain towns where women gather to drink herbal tea and chant at the full moon and where men leave for days and weeks to climb and hike and ski. It's the men I don't love so much, especially the ones she loves鈥攑articularly the poet/blacksmiths and waiter/filmmakers and struggling musicians and “any interesting guy, as long as he doesn't have a job or own more than two pairs of shoes,” as my mother describes them through clenched teeth. No, I don't love these men, but I was learning to accept them as my grown sister's choices.

And then you came along. And then she got pregnant. And then, the yurt. Your son entered the world on a mattress on the floor of a cinder-block sphere while a longhaired woman in bare feet shook a piece of sage at him and muttered charms. I visited soon after, when your son was a newborn and you were stuck without papers back in Scotland. He had big blue eyes and a pug nose and thick forearms: a climber. Didn't focus much, though. Or do babies focus? “That's his look,” my sister replied. She meant you.

Your son is now five months old and you're back in the States at last, with a freelance Web-site颅 design gig. No need to thank me for the immigration lawyer's fee; I already told my sister she doesn't have to repay me. If at any time I said, “When that peak-loving bastard returns, maybe he can pay me himself” or mentioned that “Even Yvon fucking Chouinard works for a living,” no offense intended. Now I'm told that the two of you are engaged and, thanks in part to the nuptial plans, you even have a visa. My sister told me when I called last week that you've never seemed happier.

“With fatherhood?” I asked.

“Well, sure,” she said. “Plus it snowed.”

You happened at the moment to be skiing an avalanche chute with your best buddy, an accountant turned part-time baker who has been spending a couple hours a day trying to get the baby to address him as “Uncle Crack Ho.” My sister was happy too. Just the other night she hiked up to the town witch's house with a group of girlfriends to celebrate her birthday. It was a full moon, so naturally they chanted. You actually stayed home that night to take care of your son. I learned later that you invited Uncle Crack Ho over and that the two of you spent hours on the floor in front of the wood-burning stove, drinking beer and imparting to the child the language he would need to unlock the mysteries of the world.

“Bitchin'!” you said.

“Killer!” Uncle Crack Ho said.

“Area skiing is for pussies!” you exclaimed.

“Little dude's not a pussy!” Uncle Crack Ho cried.

“Little dude's not a pussy!” you said. “Little dude is not a pussy!”

“And what did little dude say?” I asked my sister when she recounted the story.

“He just gurgled and laughed. Then he puked,” she said, adding, “I'm training him.”

She meant you.

After writing this letter, Esquire contributing editor Steve Friedman flew to a small mountain town in southern Colorado, where he attended his sister's wedding.

听

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