That Creepy Feeling

Two guys from Boston waiting for sunset to leave suggested we take their campsite to avoid the rattlesnake in the next one over. Rather than live on top of something that could kill us, we could live right next to it.

Clear Creek, photo: David Boothby

As reassuring as this was, it left me abnormally focused on wherever I set my feet…leaving me worried about how well snakes blended with their backgrounds…leaving me with a memory of that woman in Tucson who died from a snake bite while walking her dog…leaving me mindful that I had never actually seen a rattlesnake in the wild…because...aren't they designed to be invisible???

This feeling of unease felt strangely familiar, like it had been building for a while.

It certainly hit me at the end of the first day, when we were warned about the Colorado River and its potential for menace, the example two kids who leapt from the Kaibob bridge and simply...vanished. The river suddenly felt powerful and threatening and even malicious.

It was building yesterday as we got hotter and hotter, our water dwindling with the shadows, our momentum dwindling until we simply had to stop, the recognition that we would continue to dehydrate even as we dug ourselves into an embankment to escape the sun casting an appalling shadow of futility and stupidity.

Clear Creek Campsite

The feeling went deeper though:

To the preparations for the trip, when I realized how out of shape I was and how unlikely I was to fix it. I had been worrying for months that I wouldn’t keep up with David, who I knew to be in great condition…worrying, but too busy to attend to the issue and stupidly left with this niggling concern at the periphery of my consciousness, sapping my self-confidence.

And deeper still:

To the office, where the recent lack of success in our interviews with potential clients left me frustrated and tentative. I felt as creative as ever, and as excited about the projects as ever, but I wasn’t making these interviews successful and for the life of me I couldn’t explain why. I was losing my edge, my touch, my zing, and this creative anemia was undoing me.

Most fundamentally though was a growing sense of dread as the economy collapsed under our collective feet, a glacier of financial doom crushing opportunity and possibility and all of the idealism I try to muster every morning on my way to the office. Watching opportunities diminish frays the nerves. That I would evade obliteration seemed more and more unlikely, and the corollaries to that eventuality slowly clouded my perspective and obscured the horizon. Up and down no longer felt secure, the avenues of escape ever diminished. This hike felt like running away.

David encountered the snake later that evening. It was getting dark, we needed more water, he was heading down to the creek, and I heard only a grunt. I can’t speak for David’s state of mind, or just how close things got, but reptile and mammal managed a standoff and no harm done.

written by

on May 12, 2009 from Clear Creek Campground, United States

from the travel blog: Heat

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