The Male Flaw

Somewhere along the path of human evolution the male brain developed a flaw—a sex linked mistake requiring men to suffer and inflict pain on themselves. The flaw makes them embrace discomfort, makes them starve, freeze, burn themselves with cigarettes, wail at their God and howl at the moon. It also facilitates their journey to manhood. Sadistic rituals and masochistic pleasures make boys men...Right! So why does my wife not understand?

Just the other day she asked, “Are you happier with the guys, or when you are with me?”

“With you,” I replied (perhaps too quickly). I should have followed that with a hug and a long look into her eyes, but the cursed flaw kept my lips flapping. “The guys do things you wouldn’t.”

“But I can do things they can’t.”

“And that’s why I prefer you, but…

“But what?”

“I’ve been wondering if I could go to Utah with Roy and Stan.”

“To do what?”

“You know, guy stuff. ‘Old Hippie Cowboy” Lance has been trying to get me to go with them to the “Middle of Nowhere” for the last twenty years. So I’m thinking this is the year.”

“Go ahead!” 

I love my wife! The reasons soar beyond numerics, but those precious days every year she allows me to suffer my flaw goes beyond the call of vows.

Thus began our journey, most of which is too painful for memory. I do recall, however, one twenty four hour period—the day the Anasazi got even.

Anasazi, Navajo for “Ancient Ones”, populated and exploited resources in the Four Corner area of Colorado , Utah , New Mexico and Arizona from about 1200 BC. Pressed by a three hundred year drought, they abandoned their high Mesa life and re-assimilated with the local people some 700 years ago, leaving behind pit houses, adobe cliff dwellings, irrigation diversions, cisterns and a rich heritage of artifacts: pottery and stone tools found strewn over the ground in the area we went to explore, the Fifty Mile Mesa in Southwest Utah

Artifacts and stone tools, distractions that fracture the male fault zone, stimulate feverish imagination and a lust for ancient riches. Who wants to find an arrowhead?  Everyone! And especially me! For my entire life, I bounced off lamp posts, smacked into stone walls, walked off cliffs, ripped my pants on barb wire, even stepped into fires, keeping my head down and eyes focused for the telltale glint of hand hewn flint. But never, ever has God blessed me with a discovery. Never ever has my heart exploded with the joy of finding a single facsimile of my thick headed ancestor’s basic tool. This trip could end that drought.

Getting to the most remote place in the lower 48 requires a four wheel Odyssey of Homerian dimensions…

…And somehow we got there, stood looking up the vertical wall of a Mesa , 7500 feet high, fifty miles long, and anywhere from two to five miles across, we pulled on our packs and climbed.

(I have omitted one essential piece of information, and will attend to that missing link next.)

 Of the six human beings climbing the wall, one was not a man. That other person, a woman, pulled on her pack (all sixty pounds of it), walked two hundred feet, then dropped it in the rust colored dust and continued the assault unencumbered. Of course no other member of the team witnessed this omission, what with Roy, Stan and I marching ever higher, surging like Hannibal ’s elephants toward the summit. Up, up we chugged, slope headed beasts cursing the gods.  

At the summit we collapsed, our sweat saturating the water table, waiting for the rest of the team to attain elevation. The “Old Hippie” of course beat us all. He stood tall, hands on his hips, sliding his jacket aside to reveal a very big pistol, what looked like a sawed off rifle. For fending off rattlesnakes and mountain lions, I assumed, or settling disputes. Roy and Stan exchanged looks, silently expressing the dim, wary side of fear. But fear what? Fear whom?

When the husband and wife team appeared above the lip of our aerie, I noticed the absence of the woman’s pack. There came an exchange, a barrage of harsh words, recriminations bounded and rebounded and lethal blood letting dripped from venomous mouths. The husband turned from his wife angrily, swirling his jacket to reveal yet another gun—a shiny black, ugly looking weapon, sheathed in a bikini like holster.

A rule of the wild every woman should know (and by now, at this stage of human evolution, it should be instinctive), goes like this: Never, ever commit your sanity to a “guy thing”, especially a guy thing that involves guns. Not privy to the male flaw, she snapped the trap.  

What happened next disheartened me. Stan scrambled to his feet, shuffled past the arguing couple and loped down the mountain. I looked over the cliff and watched his hide disappear. Having heard and seen enough, he abandoned the mission.

Stan, a Mountaineer, having climbed Denali, trekked around Mt. Everest , scrambled through Tierra del Fuego and hiked much of the world is an ER physician, and Southern gentleman who grew up hand picking cotton in the Mississippi delta. With those credentials (and first thoughts always wrong) I could plainly see through heavy lens, Stan sacrificing his body for the team, having descended the mountain to retrieve the woman’s pack. Roy and I exchanged sheepish grins, immediately understood, and would not be upstaged by a Southerner. Northerners know gallantry don’t they, well whatever.

In stages, the three of us ferried the pack to the distraught woman and continued our expedition toward a distant hill, a pimple of Pinyon Pine awash in Juniper and Yucca, the sky blooming knock-down blue. We walked under an inverted ocean, swatting hornets, tripping over old bones and skirting around yucca swords, and in no time my imagination ferreted out the reason for the guns. 

“Old Hippie Cowboy” put his hand to his holster and said, “We are the only dangerous animals here, we use guns to protect us from ourselves.” 

That revelation: guns are defensive, that they are deterrents did not set with me. Think about life as football game, pass for a touchdown and you score. It’s the same with guns, shoot someone and you score. Defense, on the other hand, prevents someone from scoring; or as Lance suggests: it prevents someone from shooting someone else. Aahh, but life, like a great football game, treasures moment when the defense scores—when defense becomes offense—when good people shoot back. Guns too often fail as deterrents. Rather, they are tools of escalating power and destruction. First we used sticks, then bows, guns, bombs, and nuclear weapons. If any of those tools deterred us, they would no longer be necessary, except perhaps for hunting and target shooting. But not so, men use guns to inflate shriveled gonads and parry cowardice. I believe quarrels between men should be resolved by wrestling. Imagine millions of men wrestling to exhaustion. The last man standing, his country wins…Now, everybody back to work!

Well I’m thinking all this, dawdling along under a sixty pound pack, when my eyes spy a sight that stuns my heart. There etched in bald faced rock I count five holes each shaped like ten inch daisy petals, all arranged just so, like a flower. 

“Metates,” said the “Old Hippie”. “This is an Anasazi summer site. They climbed up here to escape the heat and harvest pine nuts. The holes are called Metates. With hand held rocks, called Manos, they smashed pine nuts in these holes, pounded them into nut butter, and spread that over corn tortillas. Summer camps in the pines provided no permanent shelters, so the transient inhabitants left an incredible amount of artifacts behind.”

“Old Hippie” Lance, for thirty years, scouted these sites and captained Green River rafting trips. Mountain Mel, who co-authored our Survival DVD, told me of the many times Lance walked out of a bar in Grand Junction and disappeared for weeks. He keeps a fully loaded backpack in his old beat up Land Rover, the one with the stone shattered windshield. The radiating cracks of broken glass starkly resemble toppo lines on a back country contour map. These impulsive arrowhead sortes fatten Lance’s arrowhead collection, the one I covet beyond original sin.

Climbing scree behind the “Old Hippie”, I watch him bend over and pick up stones, something to surround the fire pit I assumed. But first assumptions, like first thoughts, are often wrong. He scavenged pottery shards, broken manos, flint chips and other ancient evidence of habitation. I walked right over the stuff, as if blind.

“Are we having fun yet?” Roy asked. 

“We looked at each other and chuckled. Yes indeed fun: suffering under the expanding heat of the climbing sun, weary and sore from the trail, two inches shorter under our weighty packs, and feet aching as if they had spent the eternity walking on rusty nails. Flawed or not, men know fun. 

Every boy has a best friend—someone to help escalate the ever expanding world of excruciating pastimes. Roy is that person to me. We have left toe nails in hiking boots on four continents; dressed each other wounds in over thirty countries; nurtured the scoots; brushed against cholera; and poisoned ourselves, nurturing our faulty, misguided and witless escapades with all the intelligence of worms. We may not be gentlemen, so true, however, we are the precursor of that, and like all things frail and human, gentility must start somewhere, even in dimly lit brains.

“Got one,” said the “Old Hippie”.

“What,” I asked?

“A point,” he said.

In his hand sparkled a perfectly flaked quartz arrowhead, a bird point, small and beautiful, evidence of a lost civilization etched in scars on ancient stone.

Three steps later Stan said, ‘Wow!” bent down and picked up a point.

Their success ignited an unfettered frenzy, similar to sharks feeding on fresh chum. We pitched debris helter-skelter, scratching our claws down to blood, kicking over stones with broken toes, and in every conceivable way erasing three million years of appropriate human behavior. We pushed and shoved, darted and groped, set tooth and claw, and jostled for best position, feverishly ripping apart wilderness for the next hand carved stone. When exhaustion finally overtook us, four people had “points” only Roy and I stood empty handed.

“Time to get water,” ordered the “Old Hippie”.

We walked a quarter mile through a dry wash studded with sage and creosote bush to another knoll. Lance took a four foot piece of plastic pipe, and with a handy stone pounded its entire length into the wet, weeping side of the hill. In two minutes clean water dripped from the pipe into a four quart container.  “Two hours it will be full.”  Lance nodded and led us away.

We walked a greater distance, to the other side of the mesa—to a cliff where a splendid view of canyons and mountains and rivers exploded beyond the reach of our eyes. A falcon jeered, Lance cleared his throat and pointed. There in the dust a boot-print stared back at us, a big one.

“Unwanted guests in the house,” Lance whispered.

“Who are they,’ asked Roy .

“Probably grave robbers,” Lance said, “scavengers collecting artifacts for resale.”

Now someone explain this to me. Had those footprints been almost anywhere else, I would have ignored them completely. They wouldn’t have titillated a single nerve. But up there, in a place so desolate and isolated, they took on the significance of Satan, as if the Grim Reaper himself stomped ahead, searching the wilderness for a victim—stalking some hapless pooch to quench His sanguine desire for failed souls.  

“Some people up here are dangerous,” said the “Old Hippie”. He patted the handle of his hip cannon and revealed yet another disturbing truth:  “When trespassing through Lucifer’s playground, come armed.” 

Somewhat buoyed by Lance’s confidence in guns, we followed him across another dry ravine to a pussy seep where water oozed through moss and watercress and marsh marigolds. The “Old Hippie” fell to his knees, rolled up his sleeves and began scratching earth like an anteater clawing for termites.

The four of us gouged the ground as if clawing for silver and gold. Precious metals, however, have little value where cloudless skies, insufferable heat, and warm winds suck the topography dry. High on the mesa, in the lap of God, water is rare and far more sustaining than silver and gold. So we dirtied our split nails creating an ample collecting pool. 

Lance pulled a ten foot length of 1/2 inch plastic tubing from…From where?  Where did he get all this stuff?  Whatever we needed, Lance carried the appropriate tool. He stuck one end of the tube into the rising water, ran its entire length down the hill into a water bottle, and immediately, the siphon paid dividends.

“Full in one hour,” Lance announced, and we trudged after him.

Next stop a dry spring where no amount of digging, praying and head scratching could reverse the curse.

On our return to camp we gathered the flush collecting bottles, enough water for one day.  Had we been Anasazi the evening’s conversation would have formulated a plan to abandon the mesa and move on, water being the distance between subsistence and extinction. Instead we ate steaks and talked of cannibalism—the favorite conversation of flawed male Homo sapiens.

I volunteered the first insight. “This Anthropologist, Turner somebody, thinks that the Toltecs, marched up from central Mexico , and ate the Natives. Can you imagine? A band of cannibalistic thugs destroyed two thousand years of civilization.”

I espoused how a Chaco Canyon excavation uncovered a pile of disarticulated bones, cracked femurs, and smashed skulls—evidence, strongly suggesting the systematic butchering of the hosts by their invaders. Whether religious ritual, social pathology, or random violence, nobody knows.

We traded tall tales of taphonomic signatures, the random butchering and breaking of bones for consumption. Disconcerting questions massaged my flawed brain: Who is the stranger wandering atop the mesa? Will gunfire disturb my sleep? Will my run away imagination stifle even the possibility of sleep? I parried rebuttals, scratched for convincing arguments, then gave up, stood and stretched. Centered in my eyes came the most ominous of sign of the day, a massive black cloud stretched from horizon to horizon.

“Looks like rain,” I said.

‘Nope, not here,” answered the wife’s husband.

“Storms up north don’t come down here,” seconded Lance.

“I’ve been watching those clouds get bigger,” I felt the imminence of a natural disaster.

No reply. With egos at stake, and a rookie calling the shots, my opinion did not justify a response.

I crawled into my bivy sack. Stan disappeared into a tent. And Roy decided to sleep under the stars with the armed half of our climbing team. They huddled around the fire, whispering superlatives and sipping bourbon until they gently drifted to sleep.

Somewhere after midnight the stars disappeared and precipitation gathered, teasingly at first: as fog, then drizzle, but nothing wet enough to flush a stargazer. Those exposed moaned, snuggled tighter in their bags, and then Mother Nature raised the ante. She played her best hand and the mesa won the lottery: it rained like the day Noah unblocked his boat.  

I poked my head from the sack and saw Roy ’s vertical shadow, heard it too, clearing its throat, coughing, bending over, spitting. “Crawl in with Stan,” I said, “there’s no room in here.”

“I’m awright.”

I rolled over, felt moisture seeping into my cocoon and remembered the ledge above me, that scrape in the rock that now few runoff into the shallow depression where I had secured my bivy bag. I thought, yes, I am sleeping in the belly of a hole rapidly filling with cold drinking water. I hoped the sack would float, because drowning on top of a Utah desert mesa would be too rare, and too embarrassing.

Some more noise: Shuffling and muted conversation. I stuck my head turtle like from the hood and saw Roy standing there, now in a snowstorm, white ground cover reflecting his ghostly image. “My god, you awright.”

“Yeah. But can you imagine, snow. Jaysus! What a hellhole.”

“Did you hear that?” 

“Lance is putting up a lean-to. I’m gonna to join them.”

For the next several hours it snowed. I could feel the increasing weight accumulate on my body. I could also feel the cold water rising through my sleeping bag. And, better yet; I could hear a stranger out there beyond our camp tapping his toe: a weary, hungry, cannibalistic thug who would like to savor my loins, chops and ribs. All through that last agonizing dark hour my flawed self wrestled with the three ways I could die: drown in a bag, crushed by a glacier, disarticulated, then strewn—a taphonomic signature of Jim Meuninck cut down in his prime.

Dawn in a white out arrives late, as if Mother Moon jumped in bed with Father Sun and piddled away eternity birthing the planets.

When enough light emerged, everywhere, everything glowed white and wet: our clothes, tents, bivy-sacks, socks, shoes, cameras, playing cards, bubble gum and energy bars. We had succumbed to wilderness ignorance, breaking the Boy Scouts numero uno rule: Be Prepared! With no plastic bags and no dry sacks, all we had were excuses. Who could have known: rain in the desert; snow in an area suffering through a three hundred year drought?  And now, hunkered down, under white ice piling deep and thick as Mount Saint Helen’s ash, we prayed for fire.

Stan looked at Roy and the Los Angeles ER Doc knew hypothermia gripped our beloved college professor. And the urgent need to start a fire preoccupied the southern gentleman’s heroic efforts. Stan pumped the gas stove, struck a match; put it to the generator and nothing. He pumped again, more furiously, again and again, until a palpable cloud of bluish vapor rose against the crashing snowflakes and enveloped the fire maker in a plume of fumes. A swooshing POOF! followed by what sounded like a muffled BOOM!, and exploding flames swallowed Stan whole. He rolled across the ground, a bouncing yellow fire ball. Roy and I grabbed the wet bivy, we would smother him, but the lad moved too fast, rolling away like a tumble weed in a tornado. He crashed into a prickly pear cactus and took a hundred thorns straight in the ass. Back and forth, back and forth, he rolled over the defiant Opuntia, its piercing spines encouraging a Saint Vitus dance that eventually extinguished the inferno.

Given all these distractions, I delayed my urgent need to express water until unbearable pain moved to a little cathedral like shelter surrounded by pinion pines. I unzipped my fly and the urine carve a hole in the snow. My mind wandered: We had to leave, I knew that. I would not find an arrowhead on this expedition, I knew that too. I lamented my flawed life, watching my piss splash clean a strange looking rock, a piece of clear quartz, a heat formed crystalline substance with a sharp point on one end and fluted arms on the other. I just looked at it. I couldn’t move. Didn’t dare, or it would be lost. I bent from my waist ever so slowly, my eyes fixed, my fingers itching and my heart singing: “I have thee not, yet I see thee still, oh palpable arrowhead of the mind…Come let me clutch thee.’

Of course, finding an arrowhead, then bragging about it, turned out to be the wrong kind of medicine for my two suffering companions, but how could I not exalt a lifetime achievement, making me an immediate fellow of the Arrowhead Hall of Shame.

We slopped everything into our packs, pulled our tails between our legs and retreated, all but destroyed by the Anasazi gods. And of course, Lance and the feuding couple enjoyed the last laugh, eulogizing the three wimps with false praise: “You boys did awright.” “It’s tough up here.” “Hey, even my wife complained.”  “No I didn’t!” “Yes, you did!”  “No I didn’t.” So forth and so on.

Of interest here, a wet sleeping bag and sopped clothing provide a generous addition to the weight of a trekkers load. My descent to the truck reduced my knees to silly putty. My legs felt as flaccid as worn bunge cords, and my feet flattened like pancake griddles.

We entered the Motel about an hour before another foot of snow and the Grim Reaper swallowed the remainder of our expedition stranded on the mountain. Roy languished for a couple of days on a steady diet of pizza, the only known cure for a faulty psyche. Stan…Well, he greeted me on the bed with his pants pulled down around his ankles, his ass poised skyward, and a hundred prickly pear spines, stabbed like bayonets through blooming red welts. In his open hand rested a pair of surgeon’s tweezers. And by the time I pulled the last thorn from his gluteus, my surgical expertise strongly suggested I should have pursued a Medical Degree.

We survived “The Devil’s Setup”: when a flawed adventure goes the way of demons. Spend enough time in the wilderness and you know the warning signs: a changeling wind, scudding clouds, flighty bees, birds in a feeding frenzy, moving deer, eagles winging without prayer, buzzards circling above a lowly Neanderthal—a pathetic figure fear fueling his faulty mind—staring at footprints where they shouldn’t be.

Man and Woman, flawed and not, have much to gain from each other. I propose the Theory of Improved Intelligence and Diminished Fear. It goes something like this: Through Natural Selection women received more intelligence than men, at the cost of garnering more fear. Men on the other hand, received less intelligence and respectfully less fear. Men then are simpler and more dangerous than their partners. They initiate disasters they cannot control. Their mistakes reveal the flaw of Intelligent Design the unbroken link to the Darwinian ape. Can men improve? This theory suggests yes. But they must listen and learn from their partners, the fairer sex, those intelligent ones who worry too much. If we communicate and cherish each other, then understanding will flourish and fear will dissipate. This completes the theory. It explains everything. Their will be no period of discussion or comment. It is Law.