BEYOND

Seeyaatthebottombye

words :: Jon Turk illustration :: Lani Imre

A few years ago, I interrupted my Fernie ski season to do a speaking gig in Philadelphia. I hopped on an airplane, zoomed around, and checked into my hotel. The next step was to take the subway to the auditorium where I would be the keynote. Simple enough.

I trundled down the stairway into the bowels of the earth along with the usual river of humanity: a man in a business suit and leather briefcase, a woman in a dress so tight she could hardly navigate the stairs, a teenage goofball with baggy shorts hung so low you could see the top of his crack, another woman with a yoga mat rolled under her arm taking the stairs three at a time and cross-fielding through the crowd like a running back in the Superbowl.

For the people around me, this journey into the underworld is a daily routine, business as usual, but I had spent the winter on snowy ridges and in white-clad subalpine forests, and this was not normal. I felt closed in and confined, squeezed tight by humanity, bombarded by advertisements telling me to buy this and crave that, and breathing lifeless air that was running through the stale air machine that hummed and gurgled on worn bearings in the ceiling.

“Okay,” I reasoned, “this air won’t kill me—not today anyway— and thanks to the red exit signs plastered liberally at every corner, I can get outta here alive, just as I survived that avalanche in the Canadian Rockies or the moving ice on a polar ocean. Only different.

But I couldn’t shake my mind free. I stopped, becoming a temporary island in the flow of people. To calm myself, I dragged up an old hippie aphorism that every passage into darkness must also be a journey into light. Of course, of course. I’d been here before, in a hallucinogenic dream state with Moolynaut, the aged Siberian shaman. She had led me down into the dark lifeless bowels of the Underworld so we could journey into the bright light of the Dream World.

In that amanita-induced trance, it seemed as though we walked for days. And then, I saw a tiny bright oval light at the end of the tunnel. Moolynaut told me that I must now proceed alone. As soon as the words left her mouth, she disappeared—poof—as if she had been vapourized. Alone now, I stepped forward, slowly placing each foot deliberately. The light grew larger, brighter, and I knew that soon I must step across the abyss, into the Dream World, where I would find Kutcha the Raven, who had helped heal my pelvis. Then, I froze. I wasn’t strong enough, brave enough, or assured enough to enter the Dream World. Not now, not in this way, not launching from a frightening non-reality that I couldn’t understand. I turned and ran back headlong through the cavern, bouncing off the walls in my haste. After running in panic for a long time, past many junctions in the labyrinth, I realized in terror that I was lost in the never-never land between the Real World and the Dream World. Everyone knows that that you are supposed to trail a string when you venture down into the Underworld to lead the way back into the Real World—if that’s where you need to go.

Pop. Bing. Drop it. Give yourself a break, a Jon. Your think-too-muchknow-it-all brain is creating an elaborate story, again, to complicate a simple task. Remember, this is Philadelphia and some kindly person has carefully plastered the Underworld with red exit signs. All you need to do is follow the Google instructions, find the correct subway train, locate the address, and then stand up in front of all those people, and give your talk. You’ve done it a million times before.

So, I trundle onward, past a KFC that serves up food-like-stuff to compliment the air-like stuff that engulfs me. Turning a corner, I find a skinny toothless man, in his early fifties, slightly balding, with improbably large ears, sitting on an upturned white plastic bucket, loudly beating on pots and pans, and blowing a penny whistle, imagining he is creating music and hoping people will drop a quarter into a paper cup. His eyes are closed in rapture and his body vibrates with a song he imagines in his dreams.

He revs up, dripping in sweat, contorting his whole body, and banging away. He grabs his penny whistle to squeak out a few improbably shrill bars, twirls his sticks above his head in imagined triumph, thanking the non-existent crowd for their non-existent applause, then back to the pots and pans with gusto.

He is the only one down here who doesn’t need to trail a string because he isn’t going anywhere—forward or back. He carried his pots and pans into the Underworld and had the courage, or madness, to step across the threshold into the Dream World—his Dream World. Of course, to the sea of people flowing past he may have been just a lost soul living underground, scraping by at the bottom of our society’s barrel. I wanted to slip a $20 bill into his cup, but that seemed inappropriate, so I dropped in a dollar instead. He nodded almost imperceptibly and twirled his sticks again.

A few days later, I’m back on my home turf, standing on a snowy ridge with my best ski buddy, Luc. It’s a sunny afternoon, spring corn, stable snowpack. Luc looks at the distant ridges, looks at me, nods and says, ‘seeyaatthebottombye’—fired out as one word, his standard parting statement before he drops in.

Luc was a professional bull rider before he took up skiing, and he rides the undulations in the slope with the same mixture of power and grace that kept him alive and largely uninjured on the rodeo circuit. As he snakes his way downslope, I expect him to lift his hat off his head and wave it at the imaginary crowd, as the toothless man twirled his drumsticks, announcing, “I am on the top of the bull ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Despite all odds against it. For now, anyway. And that’s all that matters. Isn’t it?”

Luc disappears over a steep roll and I’m on the ridge, alone. The spring sun is warm. I take a deep breath of clean mountain air, ceremoniously lift off my toque, and announce with gusto, to no one and everyone in the cosmos, ‘seeyaatthebottombye.’ I point my tips downhill and slide into the valley below, because I know with absolute certainty that I can find my red exit sign easily enough simply by slapping on my skins and climbing slowly upward through the parallel lines of afternoon shadow, offset by sunlight on sparkling bright snow. And who’s to say where the bottom is anyhow?

Jon Turk is the author of Tracking Lions, Myth, and Wilderness in Samburu published by Rocky Mountain Books. jonturk.net