MOUNTAIN LIFER
THE LION SPEAKS TONIGHT Adventurer/scientist Jon Turk on big cats, myth and storytelling
Mountain Life's longest-running columnist, Jon Turk celebrates the release of his 35th book.
words :: Feet Banks A lifelong skier and adventurer, Jon Turk spends his winters ski touring in British Columbia and his summers mountain biking in Montana. A regular Mountain Life columnist to the Coast Mountains edition, Turk is also our resident expert on how to avoid being drowned by a crocodile and evade death at the jaws of a charging lion. For protection against lions, you need a rungu—the thick, knotted, hardwood club used by the Samburu people of Kenya. In his latest book, Tracking Lions, Myth, and Wilderness in Samburu, Turk recounts arriving at a remote “lion research camp” (more realistically a safari tourism outpost) on the African savannah, being handed his own rungu and instructed by his guide Ian on how to stop a charging 250 kg lion.
“Maybe you think to hit the lion on the head?” I don’t need to make a fool of myself, so I shrug noncommittedly. “No, you don’t,” he explains. Ian takes the rungu back so he can demonstrate: “Like this.” Then, with a silent, explosive burst, like an NFL running back breaking through the line at the Super Bowl, he leaps into the air, spins sideways and swings his weapon horizontally at waist height. I still haven’t quite comprehended the lesson until he explains, “You jump up and out of the way, so the lion does not eat you.” Ian looks at me intently, head cocked slightly to the side, to make sure I am listening, “And then, as you are falling back to the ground, you hit him on the side of the neck. Hard. Do you understand? You swing the rungu with your falling body and the arm. Together. Break his neck. If
ERIK BOOMER
you hit him on the head, he will not stop. He will eat you.” “Thank you. Got it.” I try jumping, spinning and swinging, and Ian smiles feebly as if to say, “If that’s the best you can do, my friend, then I guess that’s the best you can do. You are a white-haired white man, after all. We’ll have to live with that.” Spoiler alert: The book isn’t just about lions. Turk uses his time in Samburu to dig into the history of human civilization and demonstrates that, for the past couple hundred thousand years (at least) the stories we tell have defined the path ahead—from the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago that led to the development of language and a population explosion, to the mechanized labour of the Industrial Revolution, to the current climate crisis. Turk argues that the narratives we weave (or those woven around us) hold the keys to surviving our current perils of global warming, plague, pestilence, ego, greed and the impending self-destruction of humanity. On the other hand—yin and yang, black and white—the fundamental dilemma of humankind is that the narratives we weave created those same problems in the first place. “We don’t need something new to solve our current problems,” Turk explains. “We need to rediscover something very old.” Now in his mid-seventies, Turk has been a professional storyteller for decades and penned five adventure books, 30-plus textbooks and spoken at numerous events, including a TEDx in Canmore in 2016. As he releases what he says will be his last book (it came out in early September) we caught up with Jon to talk about storytelling, lions and why he jumps off cliffs to stay present. 41
