A Good Bad Idea
When someone says it'll be a walk in the park, make sure to ask, 'Which park?'
“There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some.” — Edward Abbey
Every now and then, I find myself confronted by someone who wants to know about the very worst moment that Pete McBride and I endured during the year we spent together inside the Grand Canyon, and I’m forced to explain that addressing this query properly is no simple matter. So many horrible things happened to us down there, I point out, that it’s almost impossible to single out just one because, really, any of them could have qualified as the most wretched and intolerable of all.
There was, for example, the afternoon I tripped and fell into a cactus and the night I unwittingly unfurled my sleeping bag atop an anthill—which happened to be the very same evening that Pete and I toppled into the Colorado River with our backpacks. Or the morning after the snowstorm when I was trying to thaw out my frozen shoes with
2,300 words to go
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