A different kind of adventure

Look here, reader, upon the faces of despair! Contemplate these images of human suffering, for they will help you to understand my absence from the blogosphere.

For years, you see, I’ve been spending every week of vacation in the backcountry. Suffer fests is what a friend of mine calls these trips. During such suffer fests, reader, we usually burden ourselves with fifty or sixty pounds of ridiculousness: nylon in a variety of shapes for a variety of purposes; lots of shiny pieces of metal, which we tell people are to protect us when climbing cliffs, but are really just to look cool; and a sad array of food that should really be refrigerated, like several sticks of margarine dumped into a water bottle.

It is often cold or uncomfortably hot. Maybe it’s raining, or snowing, or hailing. You probably smell, and you’re likely missing small patches of skin from scrapes with nature. You haven’t slept well, dinner is a mixture of instant rice and peanut butter, and a pack of thoughtless marmots has chewed up half your gear. You yearn for the car, but it’s miles away — miles usually complicated by a dearth of trails and at least one river without a bridge.

Enough suffering, reader! It’s time for a different kind of adventure. The civilized kind of adventure. So I’ve spent my summer working extra hard to finance a month-long relaxation fest. Yes, these summer days were long, but they were spent in the service of librarianship. Yes, there will be fewer weeks in the backcountry this year, but the weekend adventures will be more meaningful. And to what end, dear reader? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens come April.

In the meantime, reader, you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve invested in some equipment to guarantee a more interesting winter.  Stay tuned for stories of cold-weather misery.

Don’t go chasing waterfalls

My last posting, reader, began with an apology of sorts.  I regretted how long it had been since my last update.  This time, reader, I’m done with regrets.  If it pleases you, I will simply bemoan what’s kept me from updating you good people.  I’ve been taking a Latin class, you see — reading some Horace — which is very difficult when you don’t know Latin.  It seems I’ve been spending far too much of my free time slogging through just a handful of lines each week.

Even Latin, however, has its place in the wild.  While humping a heavy pack under the midday sun, for example, I sometimes find comfort in Virgil: hic inter flumina nota et fontis sacros frigus captabis opacum.  I may be someplace new, reader, where the streams are less familiar, but I always find the springs to be just as sacred and the cool shade to be just as welcome.

But you’ll be pleased to know, reader, that my homework has not kept me from adventure altogether.  In fact, this past winter, an adventure educator took me out for my first couple of weekends on steep water ice, which called to mind a very different passage from Virgil.  Allow me to quote John Dryden’s translation:

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.

The descent, in this case, is the drive to the cliff.  The return, as you might expect, is simply getting off the ice in one piece.  A professional mountain guide once told me he would never climb ice.  Ice, as it happens, can shatter.  Apparently this possibility increases when you hack at it with axes, drill potentially load-bearing screws into it, and repeatedly kick it with steel spikes.

Crisis averted

It’s been a long time, reader, since I last posted, but I beg you to accept my explanation.  For a few years, you see, as I was making my transition to the life of full-time librarianship, I was struck with an identity crisis every spring.  After passing the colder months indoors with hot drinks and hotdish, poring over books and considering another round of schooling, the annual thaw reminded me that there was once again adventure to be had outside.  Thus the crisis would set in.  Should I begin training to become a professional mountain guide?  Do I really want to be a librarian, cooped up inside all day long?  This, of course, was before I adopted the hybrid lifestyle of adventure librarianship.

While adventure librarianship has more than adequately addressed what was before a serious personal crisis, my passions still change with the seasons.  As this most recent autumn came to an end, reader, I hung up the climbing rope and racked my gear in the closet.  With winter coming on, thoughts of backcountry skiing and winter ascents fell to the back of my mind.  I instead addressed the stack of unread books here at home, reclined in my armchair with hot tea and some delicious pastry.

You may well ask, reader, Is it not my responsibility as an adventure librarian to pursue adventure year round?  Of course it is, and I apologize for shirking this responsibility.  Breaking this cycle, however, can be a real challenge.  Perhaps you well know this yourself.  Last weekend, however, I did what any adventure librarian would do: I brought to the mountain my winter lifestyle of reading in comfort.  Following an afternoon of reading the Essays of Elia with hot tea and fine Belgian wafer rolls, after an evening of melting snow and futile attempts to block the wind, an adventure educator and I made our way to the top of Mt. Washington, New England’s tallest peak and popularly considered home to the world’s worst weather.  It was cold, reader.  And windy.  But it felt good.  I have since returned to a more monastic winter lifestyle, watching the snow fall from inside, but don’t you worry, reader.  I’ve got irons in the fire.

Technical outerwear for librarians

It’s getting cold, reader, and I imagine that you, too, are beginning to see people on the street wearing appropriate technical outerwear.  This often manifests as the ubiquitous North Face Denali Jacket or, perhaps just as frequently, as a $400 nylon shell.  Both of these tops have their uses and, to be sure, they can be just as comfortable and effective in the city as in the backcountry.  I daresay, however, that they are downright essential in certain adventure librarian situations.  Indeed, reader — if you’ll allow it — I will go one step further and declare such outerwear essential for adventure librarianship.

I received in the mail this week the latest ALA Graphics catalog.  The cover predictably bears the very classic READ posters, these ones featuring the likenesses of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rubert Grint — your favorite Harry Potter actors.  If ALA can sell a Dewey Nightshirt and “Read & Listen” temporary tattoos, could it not provide one of its most active communities with quality ALA-branded outdoor apparel?  When we’re out there scaling a mountain, finding our way up a fractured cliff after coming up several pitches of 60-degree icy slopes, why not sport some apparel that proclaims our dual loyalty to adventure and librarianship?

The t-shirt you see at right, donned by an adventure model I found in the mountains, is an example of the kind of design adventure librarians are looking for.  The shirt at right, of course, is 100% cotton.  What we need are shirts like this in synthetic fabrics.  We need down coats, Gore-Tex parkas and pants, all appropriately designed and branded for the modern adventure librarian.  Mountain Hardwear sponsors a corps of elite athletes.  Patagonia sponsors a number of organizations at the grass-roots level.  And for the love of God, reader, The North Face sponsors the State of Ohio!  Isn’t it time ALA lobbied for an adventure apparel sponsorship?  Is it not time that we got our adventure librarians out of cotton and into polyester blended for performance?

Keeping up with industry literature

 

An adventure software engineer in Rumney, NH

 

Are you, reader, also a member of the Bibliographical Society of America?  Did you, too, receive your quarterly copy of the Papers last week?  I must say, there’s nothing more pleasant than waking up on Sunday morning, brewing yourself a pot of coffee, and settling in to catch up on printers’ instructions to binders, textual corruptions in Shakespeare, and the history of some obscure work by a forgotten 16th-century writer.

The only problem, reader, was that I had been scheduled to spend this past weekend climbing in New Hampshire.  For many regular librarians, this might well be a case of one or the other.  To be honest, reader, the thought crossed my mind.  Should I skip the climbing trip to stay at home and catch up on bibliographical minutiae?  Or should I go climbing and leave my latest issue of the Papers at home?  The only course of action for any adventure librarian — and I’m sure you’re thinking it now — was to do both.

Yesterday morning, sure enough, I woke up in my tiny tent, unzipped my down sleeping bag enough to prop myself up on my elbows, and, protected from the freezing autumn air by a thin layer of nylon, began reading up on the history of printers of obscene libel.  Truth be told, it wasn’t quite as easy as doing the same in the comfort of my armchair.  I had climbed my little heart out the day before and had stayed up late that night warmed by a campfire, chatting with fellow climbers, eating Oreos, and drinking cognac from a used jelly jar.  Nonetheless, catching up on the Papers of the BSA — and taking some Tylenol — was exactly what I needed to get through another day of climbing.

Adventure sentimentality

My brother took this one.

I write to you from Chicago, reader, and I make no apologies for the unchecked sentimentality that here follows.  I’ve no doubt that those of you who have experienced Chicago, loved Chicago, and left Chicago will sympathize.  Finest town in the world, I always say.  “Come and show me another city,” Sandburg writes, “with lifted head singing / so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”  Proud to be alive, indeed.  I am here this morning, reader, on a perfect fall morning, in the city where I came of age, in the city I first loved, in the city that set me on course to become the adventure librarian I am today.

Yes, reader, it’s true.  This city turned me into an adventure librarian.  The transformation started early: it was my first winter in Chicago when security busted me getting ready to ski down a small slope abutting of one of my alma mater’s academic buildings.  The force must have been strong here, reader, to keep me visiting a mountain playground a thousand miles away.  An adventure firefighter and I would just load up his Jeep Wrangler (the “flying tent,” as he called it) and drive west.  If our destination was more than a 24-hour drive, we’d fly.  We saw a lot of the country that way.

All this time, Chicago’s bookish destinations were conspiring to send me to library school.  If I wasn’t planning a trip to the mountains, I was treasure hunting in the city’s used bookstores.  It was a sunny day in Lakeview when I finally decided on a career in rare books, and only a few months later when I landed my first paid (sometimes) job in the field.  Anxious to work with rare books and live in the mountains, I decided to get my library degree.  Makes perfect sense, right?

It all happened here in Chicago.  So yes, reader, maybe I did walk into a Walgreens last night to buy a chocolate milk.  And yes, maybe I did this simply because I walked into the same Walgreens after a memorable night several years ago and did the same.  Like I said, I make no apologies for my sentimentality.  If you could keep this between us, though, I’d really appreciate it.  In the meantime, it’s shaping up to be a perfect day in the Windy City.  I’ve got people to see and a presentation to give, so I’ll see you back east.

The intellectual foundation of adventure librarianship

Too much time has passed, reader, since my last post, but I assure you that I have been busy reflecting on and practicing the tenets of adventure librarianship.  In fact, I recently carried a veritable adventure library high into the mountains of southwestern Colorado — a guidebook to climbing in the area, a book on backcountry cooking, another on tracks of Rocky Mountain animals, and, of course, Elaine Svenonius’s The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization.

As I lay at that beautiful alpine lake, 12,000’ feet higher than my permanent home, I couldn’t help but find parallels between Svenonius’s foundation of information organization and our foundation of adventure librarianship.  Indeed, she begins, “this intellectual foundation consists of several parts.”   She goes on to enumerate them: (1) “an ideology, formulated in terms of purposes … and principles”; (2) “formalizations of processes involved in the organization of information”; (3) “the knowledge gained through research.”

I say, reader, do we not have an ideology, one of purposes and principles?  Do we not stand for the synthesis of information and adventure, and advocate this synthesis both in our offices and in the wild?  And have we not formalized, reader, our processes involved in the pursuit of adventure librarianship?  What’s more, do we not acquire knowledge with every adventure we take, whether it be on the side of a mountain, in the middle of the ocean, or at the reference desk?

But Svenonius’s book can do so much more to support adventure librarianship.  On a regular basis, reader, I found myself in difficult situations in which a book such as hers provided just the right solution.  Indeed, my two companions and I, during our first afternoon at our new lakeside camp, sat down to enjoy a lunch of cheese and summer sausage.  Naturally, I had my multi-tool handy for slicing our food, but our only cutting surface was a quartzite boulder.  Anxious to protect the freshly sharpened edge of my blade (it had been dulled when a friend used it to open a can of baked beans two years earlier), I quickly seized upon a solution to the problem:

Useful, to be sure, but you’re still right, reader: not all that impressive.  Without a doubt, all three of us would have survived the day had we not been able to slice those foods.  It probably would have been easier still simply to take a bite from the brick of cheese, another from the sausage, and pass them around.  Things got a little more interesting, however, when we found ourselves descending an unnamed peak.  We worked ourselves into a spot where downclimbing had become downright dangerous.  We had little gear to work with, but I did have my copy of Svenonius.  I found a suitable crack for the three-quarter-inch book, set it tightly, and arranged our rappel:

Books have saved me from boredom, they have saved me from intellectual and emotional entropy, but this was the first time, reader, that a book saved me from a harrowing descent.  My companions thought it unreasonable to carry nearly ten pounds of books with me, but I saw their potential.  Next time you’re heading into the wild and wondering whether or not you should carry that hardcover book, remember that it just might save your life.

A pair of adventure engineers