"What the hell did you take me on?"
A life in pursuit of holy shit moments
We looked over the edge into the depths of the earth, a black abyss with (apparently) no light, no walls and no bottom. And yet it was into that light-less, wall-less, bottom-less hole we intended to go. The fact that we planned to rapel into this particular hole in the ground with a guide who had done it before suggested very, very strongly that there was in fact light and walls and a bottom. But as John and Patricia, married adventurers from Colorado, and I peered into Goblin’s Lair, a canyon in Utah’s Goblin Valley State Park, we could see none of that. We had to take guide Christopher Hagedorn’s word for it that the ground was down there, 90 feet below us.
I asked Patricia, a flight attendant and amateur pilot, what her anxiety level was. She said it was three now, would jump to seven when she got to the edge and to 10 when she went over it. I liked that she said when, not if. Of the hundreds of customers Hagedorn, owner of Get in the Wild Adventures, has guided on rapelling trips, three have looked into the light-less, wall-less, bottomless abyss and left without entering.
Patricia did not want to be the fourth.
But she didn’t want to take any steps toward the edge, either.
“She’s still smiling, that’s good,” Hagedorn said.
“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking,” she said. “I better not look, or I won’t go.”
Hagedorn tightened Patricia’s harness and checked and rechecked the ropes. She peeked toward the hole—big enough for a person to fit through, too small for, say, an elephant. John had already rapelled and was down there somewhere. She sighed. It was now or never, and she was choosing now … or trying to at least.
“What the hell did you take me on?” she shouted down to John.
By now Patricia was wearing her fear on her face and in her body language. But she was not giving into it. “It’s a 10 now, if you’re wondering,” she said of her anxiety level. She inched toward the opening in the earth anyway.
“You’re doing great,” Hagedorn said.
She exhaled.
“I can do this,” Patricia said.
“I got you,” Hagedorn said.
“I know you do,” she said.
She backed up … reached the edge … one more step and she’d have no choice but to keep going … and took that last step. The taut rope kept her from tumbling backward. She pushed her feet against the canyon wall, her legs parallel to the ground 90 feet below her. She floated down, slowly.
“Holy shit,” she said.
The wonder and exuberance in her voice … it shot out of Goblin’s Lair and hit me in the chest like an arrow in a bullseye. That’s what I want in my life. I want, “what the hell have I gotten myself into” moments to be followed immediately by “holy shit” moments. I want holy shit moments for fear, holy shit moments for awe, holy shit moments for gratitude.
I want you to have them, too. That’s what this newsletter, The Accidental Adventurer, will be about—the pursuit of holy shit moments. I will help you catch them.
In no particular order, here are some of my top holy shit moments from a life in pursuit of adventure.
1. I talked a golf magazine into paying me to spend a summer trying to get my first hole in one. I don’t want to give away the ending to the story. But holy shit, what an ending. I still can’t believe it, and I was there.
2. While doing genealogical research on my family, I drove into the Italian Alps, stopped at a tiny town, yelled hello to a man unloading firewood … and discovered we were related.
4. This predates my devotion to adventure. But it’s the No. 1 holy shit moment of my life and will never, ever be topped, so I include it here. My daughter’s nickname is The Dangler, a reference to her birth story.
5. I will never jump out of an airplane again.
What are your top holy shit moments?
Thanks for reading The Accidental Adventurer! I will take you along as I fall on my face in new and different ways. I will try new products and visit far-away places and scare myself half stupid, all for you, dear reader. My bucket list will get shorter. My goal is that by reading this, yours will get longer. Eventually I hope to organize bucket list trips for you.
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