Missoula Notebook
Not Where I Thought I Was: Some Notes on Being Wrong
By Sutton Stokes, 3-02-08
“Coming to recognize you are wrong is like coming to recognize you are sick,” writes Norman MacLean in his unusual and wonderful book Young Men and Fire, the story of his investigations into the deaths of 12 smokejumpers in the 1949 Mann Gulch fire here in Montana. “You feel bad long before you have any of the symptoms and certainly long before you are willing to take your medicine.”
Sometimes, though, you are just smacked in the face with it, which is what happened to me last Sunday up at Lolo Pass.
Amy and I had to clear out of the house so that the landlord could bring some prospective tenants by, so we threw the skis in the car and made the 40-minute drive out Route 12 to the Idaho border. We’d been snowshoeing up at Lolo a couple of times this season but had yet to try out the ski trails. Lolo has two groomed cross-country loops, the 2.25-mile Glade Creek Loop and the 6.5-mile Packer Meadows Loop. Being relative beginners at skiing and knowing our capacities, Amy and I wanted to do the shorter loop. “There are signs with maps and mileage at every junction,” said the visitor-center ranger as we pored over the map with her. “You can’t get lost.”
At various points in my life, I have resolved to remember that statements like this one are suspect at best and great huge red flags of warning most of the time. “Unsinkable”; “what’s the worst that could happen?”; “she’s never done that before”; etc. The problem is that every time I relearn this lesson, I start to fly right for a while, which means I get used to nothing going wrong, which means I start to let my guard down. Especially in situations where the stakes seem low, which they certainly did as we looked at the two simple circles on the ranger’s map, one green, one blue.
Amy and I climbed up on top of what a sign in the visitor center advised was 92 inches of snow pack, clicked into our skis, and slid off toward the head of the groomed trail area. There we found a map on a post showing the two trails ahead of us. I was immediately confident that I knew where we were on the map, though it took some bullying to convince Amy to agree with me. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but— back when I used to read accident reports in the Coast Guard — this kind of dynamic often turned up in testimony about how a ship had ended up on the rocks.
To imagine the two trails, picture an upper-case letter “B” rotated 90 degrees clockwise, so that it is lying on its face. It’s a misshapen, barely recognizable “B”, to be sure — for example, its upper loop (the 6.5-mile trail) is much larger than the lower (the 2.5-mile loop we wanted to ski) — but this gives you the basic idea.
The map told us that we were at a point on a little extension of the bottom of the “B”’s spine and so had not yet reached the “B” proper. My mistake was thinking that the distance shown on the map between “you are here” and the base of the “B” was shorter than it actually was, and that we were therefore standing within sight of the trail loop we were looking for. This in turn led me to think that I’d already accounted for a trail branching to the right that would take us counter-clockwise around the bottom of the “B” when, in fact, that “branching” was actually an unrelated snowmobile trail.
As a result, when we reached the real intersection of the extended spine and the base of the “B,” about 500 yards further along, I thought we were at the middle of the “B,” not the base, and when we turned right there, I thought we were now heading clockwise around the bottom loop of the “B” when in fact the opposite was true. This error caused me to misinterpret subsequent directional signs in a cascade of errors that eventually led us out onto the upper loop of the “B” — i.e., unwittingly heading even further from our starting point — just when I’d thought we had reached the halfway mark on the lower loop and was glad because my thighs were starting to feel like they were on fire.
Just when I was starting to look forward to a cup of the hot chocolate they hand out for free at the visitor center.
MacLean’s investigations into the Mann Gulch fire acquainted him with the work of a pioneering Forest Service fire scientist named Henry Gisborne. “To Gisborne,” writes MacLean, “science started and ended with observation, and theory should always be endangered by it.”
If I’d been more like Henry Gisborne, I might have noticed that the trails we were on tended to curve the wrong way — left when they should have curved right, right when they should have curved left — but I had early on made the crucial mistake of deciding that I knew exactly where I was and so I simply wasn’t looking for or taking in the kind of information that would have told me otherwise.
Several years after the Mann Gulch fire, Henry Gisborne visited the site with a ranger who had been on the fringes of the conflagration. It wasn’t long before Gisborne, looking at the visual evidence, realized that one of his main theories concerning fire behavior was incorrect. No shame in that, by the way: most up-close observations of the type of fire event that occurred in Mann Gulch in 1949, known as a “blowup” and described as a “tornado of fire,” have been made over the shoulder at best, so Gisborne had had to rely on pretty sparse evidence. In MacLean’s telling, Gisborne was “excited” to learn he was wrong: “He was the first to point out his error and was happily preparing to wake up the next day to correct his theories.”
I was skiing ahead as Amy and I made our ignorant way from the short loop out onto the long one at the top of the “B”, and so I was the first to reach another directional sign, placed randomly but fortuitously far ahead of the next intersection. It took Amy about a minute to catch up, so I had plenty of time to study the sign and try but fail to think of some way to interpret it that wouldn’t mean I had led us on a wrong turn and put an extra mile between us and the visitor center.
So, like Gisborne, I was “first to point out” my error, but, as I waited for Amy, I wasn’t “happily preparing” to do anything but have a tantrum about how much further we now had to go, not to mention how badly my glasses were fogging up in the damp, still air, not to to mention that — when Amy did catch up and after I had explained my error — I managed to fall flat on my ass as I tried to turn myself around.
Once I recovered my feet, I was naturally in the mood to ski fast and make up the lost time, but I guess damp, heavy snow is not as good for smooth skiing as powder, especially as the day warms up. My skis squeaked through the snow against the extra traction, and I thrashed along, soaked in sweat, feeling about as graceful as an elephant on ice skates. My triceps and various other muscles were screaming at me, and all I could think about was how much I wished we were back at the visitor’s center and also how stupid I was to have made such a silly mistake.
Then the idea for this essay popped into my head and I stopped to make a few notes. Amy skied on ahead and left me alone with the sounds of my pen scratching on my notebook page and the occasional whumpf of snow sliding from fir branches down onto more snow and no other sounds at all, and gradually I remembered that the world is a wonderful and beautiful place and that I was lucky to be anywhere in it at all but especially right there, right then.
What I wrote in my notebook:
“Notes on being wrong: desire to be in control, get things right. Easy to start feeling like a master of the universe when everything is going well (career as a freelancer taking off, almost earning two figures, about to buy a palatial four-room house, etc.). So it’s good to get a dose of humility now and then.”
It took me forever to catch up with Amy again.
For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.
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