Please enjoy this transcript of my second episode featuring Caroline Paul, author of four books, including the New York Times bestseller The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure. Transcripts may contain a few typos—with some episodes lasting 2+ hours, it’s difficult to catch some minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. I’m recording this introduction inside a phone booth, literally. To the Tim Ferriss Show, welcome back. Every episode it is my job to deconstruct a world-class performer from any given field. It could be sports, chess, entertainment, business or otherwise. This episode is going to be a little bit different. This is a follow-up episode by popular demand. Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter if you’ve listened to the first episode or not, although you should. Back by popular demand, Caroline Paul returns to the podcast for a Round 2. She is answering your most popular questions as upvoted.
This is a standalone piece. You can enjoy it by itself. Caroline is the author of four published books. Her latest is New York Times bestseller, The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure. I read this. I’m not a gusty girl. I try to be a gutsy dude. It is fantastic. It is not necessarily gender specific and there’s a lot to learn from Caroline. She used to be afraid of a lot of things. Then she decided that fear got in the way of the life she wanted, one of excitement, confidence, self-reliance.
She has since flown planes, rafted huge rivers, climbed gigantic objects, mountains, Golden Gate – which I don’t recommend – and fought fires as one of the very first female firefighters in San Francisco. She is amazing. She’s a very gifted writer and teacher. In this episode, Caroline answers many different questions and addresses many different topics, including the best starting point for overcoming your fears. There are many times I can use this myself. How to stay focused in the moment and not let your mind create anxiety and stress. Useful for me this week, in particular. Her biggest life changing experiences.
Coping strategies for dealing with life’s most difficult events and much more. Please enjoy this Round 2 Q&A with Caroline Paul.
Caroline Paul: Hi. This is Caroline Paul. I’m really happy to be back with all of you and Tim on the Tim Ferriss podcast for Round 2. You sent me a bunch of questions and I’m going to answer some of them.
Thanks so much. Let’s just dive right in. No name asked:
“If you’re trying to change your relationship with fear, where do you start? It’s hard to face it when it’s breathing down on you. Any tips?”
Well, first of all, congratulations on changing your relationship to fear. I don’t know if you’re a woman, but if you are, this is an especially big step because as I’ve talked about, I feel really strongly that we as women have been so encouraged to be fearful that it’s an underpinning of our life that we’re often not even conscious of. So just taking this step is amazing. Here’s my tip: it’s really straightforward. Micro-bravery.
Because here’s a concept that a great organization called “Girls Leadership” really articulated to me, which is that bravery is learned. Like anything learned, it just needs to be practiced.
The way we practice things is to start small. Micro-bravery. This is what they call it. I love that. Micro-bravery is basically breaking down your fears into either smaller steps or just starting small with any fear. The reason we want to do that is because, first of all, you become aware of what it feels like to be fearful. Because here’s the truth, and I think I talked about this on the podcast before, but fear feels a lot like excitement. It has the same physiological characteristics of high heart rate, the sweat, nervous tension.
Often what we do, especially as women, because we’re not taught to discern the nuances of fear because we aren’t taught to value bravery like men are, so we aren’t taught to really move through it, is that it feels so similar to excitement that we often mistake the fact that we are not actually completely subsumed with abject fear.
We actually are feeling fear and other things: excitement, exhilaration, anticipation, curiosity. Things that really will open up our life. That actually is telling us this new experience is going to be kind of cool. But because, and again often it’s women, we haven’t practiced bravery, so we don’t really understand what we’re feeling in times of stress, where we’re pushing outside our comfort zone. When you practice bravery, and really what you’re practicing is micro-bravery, you get really comfortable and you start to understand what fear feels like. You start to discern all the nuances of that emotion. The second thing you become knowledgeable about is what bravery is.
I think a lot of women don’t really have a sense of what that feels like either. In fact, I like to turn around maybe even this question and say; well it’s not really changing your relationship to fear. It’s changing your relationship to bravery. What we’re doing, and I know I talked about this before, is that we are valuing a bravery paradigm instead of a fear paradigm. I do think we give permission to women to talk about fear a lot. To rely emphasize it in ways that perpetuates it.
The last thing you do is when you’re practicing micro-bravery; you really start to develop a process of moving from fear to bravery. That process, when you use it in small instances, you can apply when you confront fear in bigger instances.
That can be an emotional fear, that can be fear in your workplace, and that can also be fear in the outdoors. When you practice micro-bravery, I really want kids to practice it in the outdoors because it’s really fun, the outdoors. It’s a really great way to understand that line between being scared and then excitement and then going to bravery because it’s just more obvious than if you’re trying to practice in a more emotional situation. But as adults, I know, you already know whether you like the outdoors or not. This is not about you have to be in the outdoors to be brave. Not true.
You guys who are not so much outdoorsy can practice at home or in the workplace. Small acts of micro-bravery. Again, really important, this is something you start small so you really get to know yourself and bravery better.
An analogy might be deciding you were going to run a 5K. You don’t just go run a 5K on the day of the race. You practice and you practice in small increments. You start by walking. Then you proceed to running a little bit. You get the picture. So you’re breaking it down. In that way, you’re training. You’re training to understand your body, like a runner, and you’re training to understand your own mind.
Haley Harris Bloom asks:
“Caroline is indeed – oh, thank you – Caroline is indeed incredible. Glad you’re bringing her back, thank you. What suggestions does Caroline have to those who work in the emergency medical community?”
Well, first I’d say realize that we are in a Shakespearean professional as emergency responders.
What I mean by that is all these calls you go on are high drama. What you’re seeing is death, destruction, betrayal, birth, intrigue. That’s not only a tremendously powerful view into humanity; it’s also an opportunity to really make yourself better. Because, trust me, if you’re out on the streets like I was, you’re seeing a vast array of humanity. In its glory and in its real sadness, actually. In some ways, that’s really a privilege that frankly I think we often forget about.
In order to really be inspired by our job and not burnt out by it, I would say that remember that the small gestures are so important. This is something that I wish that I had been more aware of at the time. It comes from an experience I actually had. I had been retired as a firefighter.
But I was flying my experimental plane and I had a bad accident. It was humiliating and it was also terrifying. I was packaged up and put into the ambulance and I was being taken care of by a young paramedic. I remember his name – Nicholas. He was so compassionate. He was so caring. He could’ve been my – I was old enough to be his mom. He was so careful with everything he did. He would put his hand on my shoulder. He would lean over me when he talked because I couldn’t move because I was in C-spine and packaged really tightly because of my injuries.
He would make sure that we saw each other’s eyes and he talked to me. His tone of voice was so comforting. I remember he used these endearments with me: sweetheart, dear. Usually I kind of find that annoying, but it was so calming for me.
I was so grateful for how present he was and how careful he was and caring he was. It made me wonder right in that ambulance was I this good as a firefighter? Did I treat the people that I came in contact with this sort of compassion? I don’t think I ever realized until I was in this accident myself, just how scared people are at this moment in their life and how much of a different one person, one young, handsome, half my age paramedic, how much of a difference he’s made. I still remember him all these years later. I’m so grateful for him.
It’s those gestures, it’s those small gestures, it’s that being present that matter. I know that person with the heart palpitations is the umpteenth person with heart palpitations that you’ve probably had, maybe even that week.
But for her, it’s the most traumatic time of her life. We can make such a difference in that moment. That is so powerful. The other thing is that we have to make meaning of these calls because often they feel so chaotic and cruel. I remember a fire that I went to. It was started by a guy who had been sleeping on the couch and he woke up, and I think he dropped a cigarette. But anyway, the place was on fire and instead of warning the people in, he just ran out. This was really disheartening because those six people were missing when the fire was out.
The Chief came to us, the rescue squad, and said, “We got six people missing and we need you to do a search.” When you do a search in a house that’s had a fire, what you’re doing is you’re on your hands and knees, combing through debris.
It’s like looking for a contact lens, but what you’re looking for is people. You’re pushing aside everything. We found them. We found them in two areas. It was one woman with two kids and then in the other corner of the room, it was another woman with the other two kids. It was really clear by the way they were lying, that those women were trying to shield those kids. They had gathered those kids in their arms. They had maybe even gone after those kids to try to just be with them when they died. I don’t know the whole story. But the meaning I put to it is that those women were heroic. In those last moments, those women also comforted the children and died together.
It showed me that amid the unfairness and the cowardliness, these women were heroes and that there was love at the end. Even in the most stressful of circumstances like when a fire is barreling down on you, you will gather kids in your arms and they will be your last thought. Somehow, that gives our whole job meaning, good meaning. I think it keeps emergency workers like you and like me from total burnout.
Hi, Rebecca Faber. You ask:
“What’s the best gift to get firefighters? I have two firefighting brothers and I want to eventually buy them something that’s not booze-related.”
Okay, well, I’m actually not very materialistic, so I might not be the best person to ask this, but I have to say that I do love old fire gear.
You can find old nozzles and old fireboxes and old fire extinguishers online and also in flea markets. I actually have a small collection myself. I would also say that your brothers would like shirts and ballcaps from other fire departments. Stations sell them, at least here in San Francisco, separately. They each have their own distinct logos. That could be really cool, because especially if you walk into a firehouse and ask for this and then have an interaction with a firefighter and tell your brothers about it, that’s an even bigger part of the gift.
Finally, I’d say one gift that you might not think about but would be great, and this isn’t really for an occasion, but maybe read yourself about the job of firefighting. I think firefighters would really appreciate when their family members seem to understand a little more about what’s going on in the job.
You’d be surprised how much you pick up from memoirs and books that talk about what firefighters do. Even if your brothers aren’t in those departments, even if they’re not in a big city department, there’s so much similar that happens. Partly because the traditions run so deep. I, myself, wrote a book about firefighting and I’ve read a lot of them. We often tell very similar stories about what goes on in a fire, the antics in the firehouse, and also some of the horrors of our calls, and some of the poignancy of our calls, and the deepness of our bond. Reading books would be a gift that you can give your brothers, even though they might not even know it. But do that and give them those sweatshirts.
Jeff Urban asks:
“How do you stay rooted in the present? You seem very focused.”
Hi, Jeff. Well, I’ve always been focused, but I have to say I haven’t always been rooted. I am very goal-oriented. So if I want something done, I set deadlines and I’m really specific about it. For my books, if I want to have a book bought, I plan my book proposal and I say when it’s going to be done and I stick to that.
If necessary, I write it down so that I really know. So it’s not just a mushy idea in my mind. It’s there on the paper and I can see it. It’s called sort of how many by when, when you’re really specific about your goals. I think that’s really important. I don’t have a meditation practice or breath practice. I wish I did. I do it sometimes. What I do have is a really structured day.
I get a lot done because I don’t get distracted a lot. By the way, there is a flip side to this, which means I can be inflexible. That’s something I’m working on because I think there is value in being looser. Even though in my life I’ve gotten a lot done by being more what Wendy, my partner, calls rigid, and I call disciplined. Or, as you call it, focused. The other thing I do and this might lead a little more to rootedness is that I don’t schedule too much in a day. I always put in a padding between things because that means I’m not frazzled. I think frazzled leads to unrootedness.
You might still be focused when you’re frazzled, but you’re not going to be rooted. It’s probably one of the reasons that I like adventure so much because I think that’s where focus and rootedness intersect.
Because I can be outside and that’s where I often find my rootedness. A lot of times, the high adrenaline of the situation will really make me focused. For instance, when I’m surfing. I’m not a good surfer, but I really love being outside in the water. I’m a really competent paddler and swimmer. I find that’s where I get most rooted and most focused because I’m focused because I’m not that good and I don’t want to get hammered by a wave. I’m always looking and scrapping over a wave, scrabbling over a wave, trying not to fall off the lip, trying to get over when I’m going out if there’s no channel, which often there isn’t.
Then if I’m actually trying to catch a wave, it’s paddling, looking back, paddling, and that’s all I’m thinking about. I’m not thinking about anything else. I am super focused. I am rooted because I am really physically rooted in my body and also to nature.
I just feel quite complete. I’m not really thinking about anything else but that simple movement of catching the wave, jumping up, trying to move the board, and doing it all again. Partly the simplicity of that movement is also very rooting and one of the big reasons why I really like surfing, even though I can’t really do it that well. One other thing, a habit I have that I think really helps keep my day focused is that when I have to go somewhere, I don’t think of the time I have to be there. I think about the time that I have to leave to be there. One more thing on focus and the writing down and having a goal. I don’t know if you’ve ever ridden horses, but when I was young, we had horses.
My mother used to say, “When you’re riding, make sure that you look where you want your horse to go because your horse can feel where you’re looking and that’s what they’re responding to.” I think it’s the same with us as people. We need to always have our eye on where we want to go. When we take our eye off that, we are going to veer away from that path. If I’m veering away, not getting something that I want, that I’m focused on that I’m working hard towards, I really look like, is your eye really on that? Really? Because your horse is going the other way. It’s really helpful. So thanks, Jeff. I appreciate that question.
The next question is from Kynan Antos:
“I’d be interested to know what your coping strategies are for being exposed to horrific human events. How do you persevere?”
Well, as a firefighter, one thing I came away with was a realization that tragedies are the result of small forks in the road. They’re not usually just one, sudden, catastrophic event.
Preceding them has come a series of small decisions that have led up to this one big moment. From this realization that life is very much random and haphazard and chaotic and out of our control as puny humans, I did take some solace in the fact that maybe I could just make those small decisions a little better. The way I do that is this theory of the checklist. It’s something that doctors have come up quite recently and that pilots have been using forever. Which is the idea that as experienced as you are, you need to stick to a checklist in certain decisions.
Because if you don’t, you will one day make a small error and that will lead to a very big mistake. So as pilots, we walk into our hangars – and I’ve been flying since I was 18 – I still pick up my checklist and walk to my experimental and go through my experimental using that checklist to make sure it’s flyable.
I do not deviate from that because I know that as a human, as experienced as I am, one of these days I’m going to make a mistake and forget something, and that’ll be the day that there’ll be a mechanical error. Similarly, I employ this in my day-to-day life, in that I always wear my seatbelt. I know that sounds weird, but some people do say I’m only going half a block. But I’ve seen really bad accidents within half a block.
But not only that, what I’ve seen is that there’s this erosion where you drive half a block without your seatbelt and you get into that habit. Then you start maybe driving across town without your seatbelt. Then you go on a long trip, so of course you put on your seatbelt. But the next time, your trip’s not so long and you don’t. Blah, blah, blah.
It gets so that one of these days, you’re going to make the wrong decision and you’re going to have your seatbelt off when that car comes barreling at you. That’s why I just simply decide that some of these very small decisions I’m going to have under my control. I’m going to try to make them consistently not haphazardly, so that when the Fates decide to intervene, I have a pretty good chance of coming out okay. I really think that was one of the biggest things that I came away with when seeing what you call these horrific human events, and they were.
They may feel whimsical and chaotic and random, but if I can just be really mindful of those smaller decisions and I’m not overwhelmed by this idea that a piano might fall from a building onto my head, which sometimes seems to be the way life was for a lot of people, then I could persevere through what you call these horrific events.
Thanks so much for that question. Hi, Jason. You ask:
“How do you recommend avoiding gender bias with kids? I.e., clothes, toys, etc.”
I just learned this astounding fact and that is that many of the G movies that the little kids in our lives are seeing completely underrepresent women and girls by a large proportion. This gender bias is starting really young. The statistics said that even in crowd scenes, women make up only 17 percent. Even the animals that are in kids’ movies are portrayed as male. To me, that’s kind of mind blowing how we begin to undervalue and underrepresent girls and women at such a young age and in every single corner of life.
Even a crowd scene? Anyway, that’s what we’re up against here when we’re talking gender bias. I don’t really have any quick solutions for this, except to say that we should also be very aware that it starts at home. You and I are both guilty of this. I think I might’ve talked about this in the previous episode, but studies show that we treat our girls differently than our boys. For instance, on the playground. We caution them much more, even though they’re physically as equal as the boys.
We already have an idea of their abilities or their inabilities. We are telling them in all these different ways. So understanding ourselves. For instance, one thing that drives me crazy and I’m especially sensitive to this is when people use the word “fireman.” I know it’s only three letters – fireman.
But when you add the “man” to fireman instead of firefighter, what you’re giving to kids is just this picture of a man all the time as a firefighter and it doesn’t really sink in. Even now that women are firefighters. The same with policemen and police officers. It’s police officers because when you say policemen, you are giving an idea that men are the only gender that can be police officers. We have to start at home. After all, this behemoth that we’re fighting that’s the media is really hard, even for us to discern.
I don’t know if you realize how underrepresented women are in adult-themed films too. In PG and R-rated films, we are hardly ever stars. Our professions suck on film. We usually don’t speak. When we do, it’s usually about our relationships.
Even if you’re the star, often if you’re in a scene with men, they will speak more. They will be given more lines. None of this is malice. This is all unconscious stuff that we’re perpetuating that our kids see and they grow up with. I have to emphasize that we really need to teach our boys too about this. I wrote an essay on this for Ted.com. One thing is that we really want our boys to be reading books about girls, not just girls reading books about boys. Again, this is just to broaden their idea of what the genders can do.
I got a letter actually from a woman who bought Gutsy Girl for her niece because she said that her niece was “scared of her own shadow” and she thought that this book would inspire her. The niece came and visited and they read it together and I’m sure they thought the writing was awesome and that the stories were good.
But really, the change that came over her over that week was less from actually just reading a good book than being inspired by role models, for one. And for two, the fact that this concept was introduced of gutsiness. That suddenly this girl understood that there was this idea of how she could be. She began even using that nomenclature. Her aunt sent me a photo of her in a tree that she had climbed, looking super proud. She said that she’d also been petting animals and learning to hit a tennis ball and things like that, which really opened up this girl’s life. Having role models and giving kids more concept than the narrow ones we get from the media is also super important.
Hi, Katerina. You asked:
“You shared so many adventures in the first episode, but I feel like you have so many more. What adventures have been most life changing for you and why?”
I feel like I’ve spoken about the obvious life changing ones, the ones where I barely escaped death or injury. I wrote about most of those in The Gutsy Girl. I’ve talked about them. On a subtler level – I will say, by the way, that most adventures offer me one or more epiphanies, which is why I do adventures.
But one I remember is when I went on a sea kayak trip down the coast of Baja. I wasn’t an expert sea kayaker and neither was my friend, but we read this book that this woman had written about her own sea kayak trip down Baja. She listed the routes, where you would pull into camp, what you would need to bring, how you get down there.
We followed that book to a T. We had our own great adventure because it was Baja, which is just rampant wilderness. We saw nobody for the first seven days of paddling. We had to bring all our water. It was pristine ocean and so much wildlife. Really, it was just a huge adventure. It wasn’t like we were expert sea kayakers. We had taught ourselves how to navigate. I remember on the second leg – we did one seven-day leg and then we pulled out, hitchhiked back to our car, drove down to another part of Baja and did another trip that she had outlined for us in her book. We ran into this group of expert sea kayakers. They were from the Bay Area.
They were a paddling association. They asked us with quite a bit of disdain, “Do you know how to roll?” Both Trish and I looked and like, “No, we don’t know how to roll our fully-loaded with water sea kayaks.” They said, “If you don’t know how to roll, you shouldn’t be down here.” At first, I was really taken aback and thought, “Wow, I wonder if they’re right?” The more I thought about it, the more I realized I could understand their point. They were basically saying you can’t be a yahoo when you go on trips. We were already kind of yahoos. We were doing this from a book.
But we were also competent. We knew how to paddle. We knew how to swim. We were really good outdoors people. We had taught ourselves to use a compass on a kayak. We understood the weather. This was well before cellphones. In fact, we had really taken care of pretty much everything. Rolling was not – it would’ve been great, but it wasn’t something that should’ve stopped us from this trip.
What I remember thinking is wow, I bet there’s a lot of people who stop themselves from doing things because they just don’t think they’re expert enough. While I think you need to be really sure that you can handle things, you don’t have to be an expert on everything. There is a point where people are planning and planning and preparing and preparing, and they never actually do their adventure.
Or they just never do their adventure because they don’t think it’s possible for them, when it is possible, with a book, with the right mindset, the right adventure partner, and the right basic set of skills. I guess Tim talks about this. What is the percentage of things you need to know, the least percentage, in order to have the best time? I think that rolling was not part of that.
Years later, in fact, I went on a sea kayak trip with two friends. Again, we just looked at maps and went from island to island in Belize. This time, we were in sit-on-tops. Sit-on-tops have no deck, so rolling is not even part of the equation when you sea kayak like that. I would say that in terms of life changing, it made me realize that inertia is a powerful force to stop you from having adventures because you have, if you can get some time off work and get a little money together and have the right person, all the other tools are at your fingertips. At least they were for me. For that, I’m super grateful.
Hi, Samit Tawar. You have a ton of questions. That’s nice. But you’re going to ask one, it looks like. One would be about your nighttime routine:
“How do you slow down at night and prepare for the next day?”
Well, my nighttime routine is to try to get to bed as early as possible because I’m the most productive in the morning. I’m not a night person. So in some ways, my night routine isn’t of use because I just simply get tired. I don’t sleep that well, but I do get tired. A couple things: I don’t drink water after a certain time so I have to get up in the middle of the night to pee. I do not do that. I also don’t look at screens about a half hour before I go to sleep.
After the show when I talked about how difficult it was for me to get a good night’s sleep, I got some people getting in touch with me about sleeping well, which is my next step to look into. For now, my major concern is always my morning because I really want to feel good in the morning. Thanks for your question.
Hi, Kelsey. You ask about flying. You say:
“You mentioned in Episode 1 about flying, but I was curious why did you start flying?”
I think I started flying because I remember one very specific flying dream when I was a kid. I was flying like Superman, which is what we used to watch when we were kids. It was over a city at night, so it was all lights. It just looked so beautiful. I think I always had that in my mind, as well as the fact that flying seemed to be the utmost adventure. I had heard of Amelia Earhart when I was a kid. She was a female adventurer.
I think that also meant that for me, flying was an option. I mean, I had this great role model of outdoor adventure. I began flying Cessnas when I was 18. Even though I loved that feeling of loosing from the earth and looking down and seeing that panorama below, flying Cessnas never really made me that intrigued.
Because as I say in the book, it wasn’t really like flying like a bird. It was more like flying in a can of soup. I changed to paragliders, which was a new sport at the time when I picked it up, very new. It had been invented by climbers who wanted to get off a mountain without having to climb down. They basically designed this wing-like parachute that has a good glide ratio. I flew paragliders for many years.
I loved it because it was silent and you really did feel like you were flying like a bird. I flew in Mexico and in Brazil and along the cliffs in California. At some point, I decided, after I’d had many knee surgeries from being a firefighter, that I should probably switch to powered flight again, but not Cessnas because they didn’t interest me.
I’d long been intrigued by what they called then ultralights. I became a pilot of these hang gliders with go carts underneath them and lawnmower motors is basically what they look like. That’s what I fly now. I love it. It’s exhilarating to look down on the earth from that perspective. The thing about weight shift trikes, which is what we call these hang glider-type contraptions, is that you can fly very low and slow, so you see a lot of things. I see coyotes. I see leopard sharks. I see incredible mansions over in the Napa Valley. I see all different kinds of landscapes: the ocean, the rolling hills of California and lots and lots of vineyards. It’s a beautiful way to get a perspective on things.
When I go flying, I often feel like all my problems are so small because I see from above just how big the world seems and how insignificant I do. That’s a perspective changer for me. The thing about flying though is that is kind of lonely. Because when you’re up there, you are very alone. If something happens, nobody can help you. It’s sobering that way. But it’s lonely is a sort of existential way, which I think I’ve always liked. Then there are moments when you do remember that you are actually not alone up there.
I remember when I heard over the radio a pilot calling in a mayday. He had something wrong with his plane. I don’t remember what it was, but he was going to come in, a straight-in landing to the airport, could everybody please get out of his way? You could hear the tension in his voice and the trepidation.
And then another voice came on and it was another pilot. He said really calmly, “Hey, buddy. You’re going to be fine. Just remember to use your checklist. Remember to,” dah, dah, dah. I remember thinking, okay, even in the most lonely, scariest moments; somebody can come in, calm you down and remind you to do the right steps because this is the time when you’re liable to make a mistake. I myself had engine issues once and I remember watching the temperatures rise on my panel and thinking, I’m going to have to ditch. Ditching is not really the right word when you’re talking about a hang glider with a motor.
We do have a glide ratio, but I was still going to have to make an emergency landing if I didn’t make it to the nearest airport. I knew where the nearest airport was, so I thought, I really don’t want to make an emergency landing. I’ve done those before and they can get really hairy. Let’s try to make it to the airport before my engine seizes.
I’m looking at my instrument panel and I’m heading right to the airport and I call in, like that other guy did, keeping my voice as calm as possible, saying, “I have an engine problem. I’m coming straight in. Please clear the way if anybody’s in the traffic pattern.” It was a rinky-dink airport and it was dusk. I didn’t get that soothing voice over the radio telling me that everything was going to be okay. I didn’t get anybody. Nobody heard me. I land. My engine does not seize. It is completely overheating though. I get out. I’m so relieved.
I look over and I see a light in a hangar and I walk over and I say as nonchalantly as possible, “I had a little difficulty. I had to make an emergency landing here.” He said, “Come bring your plane in. You can keep it here overnight. I’ll take you back to your airport.” Of course, when you’re a pilot and you’re hanging with other pilots, that doesn’t mean you get in a car
It means you get into a super trick, low wing, aerobatic plane and he flies you back to your airport. You realize at once, first of all, how close that call was. And secondly what a great community pilots are. Flying has really offered me not only adventure, moments of poignancy, and moments of relief, but also these moments of great camaraderie.
Hi, William Ancey. You want to know:
“Was there any moment when you became trapped or needed rescue yourself and how did this affect you and how did you move forward from there?”
When I was a firefighter, I never needed anybody to rescue me. In most of my adventures, when I did get myself into a hairy situation, I did get myself out. But there was one instance on the mountain of Denali, where I did need rescue. It taught me a very huge lesson. Actually, two, in fact. I talk about this incident in my book, The Gutsy Girl, so I’ll be quick about it.
If you want to read about it, please pick up the book. But Denali is a mountain in Alaska and it’s known to mountaineers for its very dangerous weather. The year I went – I went actually twice – this one year, I went as a volunteer to help the park rangers at base camp at 8,000 because one of my very good friends, Eric, was one of the kick-ass emergency rescue paramedics. A very brave guy, super, great mountaineer. So it was me, Trish, and Eric. That year was really warm.
We decided that we would ski from base camp at 8,000 to 14,000 because this terrible weather Denali was known for suddenly wasn’t happening. We began our ascent using skins and roped together like mountaineers do and the nightmare happened. Eric fell in a crevasse and I was only competent in rope rescue because I had been a longtime member of Rescue 2.
We were very well-trained in rope rescue. But there’s a big difference in performing rope rescue when you’re an urban firefighter with ten of your friends who’ve trained with you and there’s a big fire engine with a big bumper that you can attach your rope to as an anchor. In this situation, it was just snow. I had to set up an anchor to stabilize Eric and Trish, who were both on the rope, and pull Eric up, who was not responding. So for all we knew, he was dead.
Making an anchor in that kind of snow was so brutal for me because the snow was so soft. What I learned was that because I wasn’t experienced, I was relying on my narrow range of knowledge to set this anchor and all the traditional methods weren’t working well because how soft the snow was.
Sometime in the middle of this terrible ordeal where we’re setting up an anchor and not an anchor that we were sure of in the end. Then trying to begin our leverage system to pull Eric up, Trish yells that there were climbers coming and that they could help us. The first thing I said to her was, “No way. We’re this ourselves.” Now, my friend Eric is dangling at the end, unresponsive, in a deep crevasse. We know he’s badly hurt if he’s not even dead. The first thing I think of when I see rescue is no way, we have to do this ourselves, hurry up. That is the wrong attitude. Trish was rightly really angry at me and said, “We’re in trouble and we need these people.”
She was right. Even though as an outdoors person I have a very strong belief that we have to get ourselves out of the situations we get ourselves into, I was not doing it and we needed the help. Sure enough, these climbers come and they give us the look of disdain that we deserved for being unable to handle these conditions that were unexpected and difficult. They pulled Eric out. When he got to the surface and gained consciousness – he was had a very bad head wound and was not altogether there – the first thing he said was, “Do not call a helicopter. Please do not call a helicopter. I’ll ski down.”
I looked at him and I knew exactly where he was coming from. He didn’t want to be rescued either. He didn’t want to be humiliated in front of his peers. He knew that if you were an outdoors person and you got yourself into something, you had to get yourself out. He wanted to ski down. I just looked at him and I said, “I know, honey.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. But we’re calling that helicopter.” There’s a lot of lessons on pride there. Look, I might’ve been [inaudible] rope person because I was a firefighter in a big city, but what I lacked was a specific experience on the mountain. What I didn’t have was a nimble mind. I kept trying to use the techniques that I had been taught in crevasse rescue because I had done some practice crevasse training, of course.
But I kept using those same techniques that I had been taught to try to set this anchor that took so long to set because of the terrible snow. When I should’ve immediately been way more nimble mentally and seen that what I was doing wasn’t working and I would have to get creative. The way you get creative, and what any good mountaineer would’ve done, she would’ve immediately taken off her ski and seen what her ski could do and buried it in the snow and used that as an anchor.
Because when you bury a ski perpendicular to the ski, it acts like what we call a dead man, a completely secure anchor because of the way that it leverages against the snow. You bury it perpendicular so any pulling on it, that ski will not dislodge, no matter how soft that snow is. But, of course, I wasn’t that mountaineer. I was a person who learned by the book and was trying to execute by the book, even though nothing about the situation as by the book. As they never are in the wilderness.
What I learned, if I ever get myself into that situation again, I will be very quick to see whether I am simply trying to do the same lame thing over and over or whether I should be trying to think outside the box and blow apart the box I’d been taught to find new, creative ways to get myself out of that situation.
When you ask what did I take away from that? Those are the two things: pride and get creative. Because what you learn in perfect situation is not going to be what you can apply when things hit the fan. On that note, I’ll wrap it up. You guys sent more questions, but they pretty much covered all that territory, so thanks so much for listening. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Thank you.
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