. . . to the extreme . . .

Having just returned from the gym, where I watched 45 minutes of Fox News coverage of the missing — and presumed dead — Mt. Hood climbers, I am renewed in my sense of gratitude that my wife and I chose not to replace our television after it broke in August. I am also reminded of how little I sympathize with people who engage in pointless, anti-social, ego-driven gestures like these. Living in Alaska, I am all too familiar with the variety of (usually male, overwhelmingly white) knucklehead who would devote his life to mountain climbing, helecopter skiing, and other forms of “extreme sport” that regularly send people to early graves. I can’t ever recall a conversation with one of these people that didn’t reinforce my suspicion that all of them — allof them — are utterly mental and should be more or less permanently incarcerated for their own safety.

I have a colleague who claims to study the philosophy of sport, and he insists that there is something philosophically profound about ascending Mt. Everest, or Mt. Hood, or Denali; or free climbing some obscure Soutwestern rock outcropping; or squandering thousands of dollars in gear and transportation so you can risk being smothered by an avalanche on a slope that no one has ever skied before. Whenever he holds forth on these theories, I can’t help but wonder if he’s not crackers as well. Perhaps I’m a callous, risk-averse pantywaist who will choke, Prufrock-like, on a peach pit. But at least I won’t be hauled off a mountain by a C-130 whatever it is they use to haul dead bodies off mountains, frozen solid, with my entire family — left behind by my own stupidity — watching the spectacle on cable television.