Outdoorism

My first dog taught me something that I hope to apply now to my outdoor life. I’d like to treat the outdoors as a whole the way I learned to treat my first dog.

I dropped out of college after my first semester, hoping to snowboard more. It was really my first attempt at an outdoor life, and not a bad one. Gracious employers allowed me to keep my part time job at the University of Wyoming while I slacked off of school. That gave me a little time, and very little money.

When spring break approached I found myself with no lift ticket money, and not eager to compete with my more responsible peers in the lift lines anyway. I didn’t know Sarah well, but when she argued that mountain biking in Utah was way cheaper than snowboarding, and she would drive, I agreed to go with her for a week. I still had some accounting difficulties, so I moved my belongings from my basement apartment into my van and reapportioned my rent money to mountain biking in Moab.

We started the party in Sarah’s truck about 10 miles out of town. At 30 miles we hit a snowbank, rolled, and totaled her truck. Later that day I found myself sitting in my van with a cold wind blowing outside, facing my first night without heat. I made two decisions while I shivered. First, I would go back to school in the fall and major in something impressive like physics. Second, I would go to the pound and get a dog big enough to warm up the bed in the back of the van.

The dog I chose weighed about a hundred pounds. His former name was Rasta. They thought he might be a Great Dane / Yellow Lab mix. He looked as lonely as I felt. I rechristened him Schrödinger after the famous physicist and loaded him in my van, his sinewy legs shaking with fear and uncertainty. We drove into the hills, and he relaxed. When I ran with him on his leash a little ways, he bounded with glee and licked my face. When I let him off, he ran in joyous circles around me. I took him on a mountain bike ride, and he ran full steam ahead of me. In horror I watched him speed toward a cattle guard with no hint of restraint. He seemed to feel the world had become a perfect place for him, with a new companion and complete freedom. I thought the cattle gaurd would bring his happiness to an abrupt end, but somehow he curled up into a ball and rolled when he hit it. He lay on the ground a moment, then rose, then started running back to me as if to warn me of the danger. This time he cleared the gaurd in one inspired leap.

Dinger was like that every time we went outside together. His enthusiasm was infectious. Of course my renewed academic ambitions didn’t always allow for time outdoors with him, and my own enthusiasm for life waned during these periods as well. Dinger eventually died of cancer in my Dad’s care during a backpacking trip in the Rocky Mountains while I was going to school in Chicago. Reflecting on his death, I reached this conclusion: to provide a good life for your dog is to provide a good life for yourself.

I had absorbed a common belief in our culture that caring for something or someone else is always a personal sacrifice. My personal (Schrö)Dinger’s Law is the disproof of that belief: taking care of something or someone you value can be better than trying to just take care of yourself. When the pursuit of my own perceived interests at the time didn’t nourish me, the pursuit of Dinger’s did. My company in the outdoors never failed to make him happy. Why did it take so long to realize that it did the same for me?

As an outdoorist, I’d like to apply Dinger’s Law even more broadly. I suspect that if I act to take better care of the outdoors, my life will improve as a result. I have come to value the outdoors highly, but still I’ve been mostly an outdoor consumer, concerned with what I can get out of it. It may be folly to think that I can give anything back to Nature, but I want to see what happens if I try. Perhaps Dinger’s Law will be a founding principle of Outdoorism.