Be careful - #119

Worry, warning, and when things go wrong.

This week’s essay is also available in audio form. Enjoy the crackling of the fire, the purring of a cat, and the wind. If you enjoy this format, be sure to let me know.

Photo: Ben Foster

My parents always shouted “be careful!” when I left the house as a teenager. And every time I would reply “always am!” 

I thought this would become a kitschy family thing, our own little sitcom exchange we’d laugh about years later, but it didn’t seem like anyone ever noticed I said the same thing every time, or even that they said the same thing every time. I was writing for an audience of one, and they were watching their pride and joy leave in the used ‘95 Mustang with fake dual exhaust that they’d bought me. Racing stripes, velour seats, and rear wheel drive in a Midwest winter. 

Be careful. 

As a teen, it’s hardly surprising I found this adage condescending. What did they think I was doing out there? Be careful at the TGI Fridays, ordering chicken tenders. Be careful at the Best Buy parking lot, talking to a boy named Dom who’d spend years saying you were his dream girl and never try to kiss you. Be careful at the mall, taking pictures of each other on disposable cameras in the Dillard’s dressing room, trying on prom dresses and personalities. This was before the onslaught of cell phones and shootings. This was 2002 when we were still using payphones at the movie theater. 

But ‘be careful’ was said to me so often that despite my distaste for it, I absorbed it into my vocabulary. Like living in the American South, it’s only so long until you start saying y’all and never stop. Y’all be careful out there. 

Our own cliches are often lost on us until an editor shows up. Mine was Ben. We’d be hiking somewhere when Cooper, an incredibly thoughtful dog, would approach a cliff. “Careful, Coop.” 

“What are you doing?” Ben would ask.
“What?” 
“Why are you telling the dog to be careful?” 
“Oh, I—”

…didn’t realize I was saying it? Didn’t think through the notion that we’d never taught him the word careful? Was hoping this very intelligent dog was simply catching my tone, my drift? Reached a place of deep understanding that my parents were never giving a command but instead expressing their love through fear and anxiety, and I’d never learned to do any different?

As my confidence in my dog grew, so did my curiosity about having a kid. 

“If we’re going to have a kid,” Ben would say, “you need to stop saying be careful.” 

Last week, we visited my parents. Be careful, my mom said when I asked to stretch my legs and walk instead of being driven up the driveway. It’s habit now, meaningless in its abundance. Another “how’s it going” or “have a good one”, just a thing to say because saying things is what people do. 

As I plodded up my parents’ soft, ambling driveway under the quiet moonlight, someone was dying across from my house. 

Death comes to our valley with a startling regularity for a town of only 200 people. But maybe not, when you consider the 200 — hardened backcountry dwellers with gear garages whose total cost would put Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe closet to shame. Nature herself is our only real predator left, and we simply cannot resist the arena. This valley is not home to runners and skiers, but ultrarunners and backcountry guides. Why would you ski groomed runs from a lift when you could skin up a mountain with no services for several hours to ski one perfect run? 

And so they do. I liked backcountry skiing. Or rather, I liked backcountry skinning. I loved the effort of sliding my skis uphill, one after the other, over and over, feeling the mohair slapped to the bottom of my ski grab onto the snow. It was the skiing part I didn’t like. I love to ski, but I learned in Ohio. I know how to ski ice; I do not know how to ski powder. This was going to be the year I learned, the year that I really dedicated the time to becoming a powder hound. Of course then I learned how to grow a baby instead — and anyone will tell you an important part of making a baby is not falling over. So when Ben gears up for a backcountry adventure, I head to the groomed lowland trails for skate skiing, where no one can run into me and I cannot run into anything else. 

As we kiss goodbye in our various layers, I can hear it ringing in the caverns of my memory: be careful. 

Some of the best backcountry skiing in Colorado is directly across from our house. Ben and his partners ski from our front yard across the snow-buried dirt road, and then head up into the basin — radios on, beacons ready, emergency inReach in reach. In the rare times Ben goes by himself, he sticks to the one slope that doesn’t run. Of course there are always terrain traps and mishaps, but he’s educated, thoughtful, and in many ways, careful.

The man that died was a neighbor, a long haul local in his late 60s that I would occasionally see at town meetings. He was an avid backcountry snowboarder and a doctor. The day he died, he was alone. The avalanche he triggered ran down a section of terrain I’ve skinned above, ran above, taken photos above. It’s below tree-line on a slope around 40 degrees with little tree coverage. 

When people talk about dying in avalanches, toying with the theoreticals of their potential deaths, most people will hope for trauma. If you’re going to die, make it quick. No one wants to suffocate under several feet of snow, spending their last few minutes in the desperate gauntlet of hope burning into fear. But the doctor died of neither. He survived the avalanche, only partially buried. He was able to dig himself out, but not his pack, leaving it and his broken snowboard behind. His body was found 500 feet from the toe of the avalanche. His injuries had not been immediately life-threatening, but combined with the cold, he died that night while my parents left the garage light on for my driveway walk despite the sweeping night light of the moon. 

Be careful. 

Pets are an ample training ground for children. Not only for wiping up butts and vomit, but for changing behaviors. When Banzet climbs the sanded and sealed beams to the apex of the cabin, you can hear his claws struggle for purchase as he begins his wide-legged slide back to the base. When he launches himself onto the beam, instead of saying be careful! I’ve started to say what’s your plan? The practice is for me, not for the New Mexican feline with bengal markings. The practice is for when the drum-and-bass-loving soccer player in my abdomen is released into the world full of gumption and grit and god knows what else. What’s your plan, little man? 

A few months ago Ben and I listened to a podcast interviewing Will Gadd, an ice climber and Red Bull athlete. Gadd is an outdoor enthusiast, and he finds his biggest joys at the farthest edges of life. He’s also a dad. In the interview, he talks about his own risk, and how he’s teaching his daughters about it. Gadd didn’t quit being an adventure athlete when he had kids. He wanted to show them a father that was fulfilled, and Gadd finds fulfillment through big risk and big walls of ice. So his family implemented a system for reviewing risk around three tiers: bumps and bruises, hospital, and death. He’ll ask them what kind of terrain are we in? and the girls will do a risk assessment and respond. A walk in the woods is just bumps and bruises, they can run and jump with little worry. But a walk alongside a cliff? That’s death, and it requires their full attention and care — it requires them to be care full. 

But you only know how to be full of care when you know what to care about. 

When Ben heads into the backcountry, I don’t say be careful. I ask what his plan is, who he’ll be with, what their estimated time of return is. I turn on my own radio at home to listen to the chatter — if something goes terribly wrong, I can call for emergency services. I can activate a phone tree. The radio is on right now, and I can hear them being careful, calling out cues, dropping in one at a time, reviewing conditions and terrain. 

The doctor had a type of plan. He told someone he was out there, and when he didn’t return, they went looking. They found his skin tracks, but not him. When Search & Rescue found him in the morning, it was too late. When we heard the news, we volleyed what ifs, playing out scenarios and ideating on how to prevent and how to prepare for future calamities. They rattled in our brains until we could soothe them, tame them, and catalog them. 

When I kiss Ben goodbye, I still have errant thoughts of worry, like what am I gonna do with this baby if he dies in an avalanche? At what point does a pregnant woman stop searching for her buried husband in the snow? Would anyone date me as a widowed mother?, I don’t say any of this and I certainly don’t say be careful. After I understand his plan, I say “have fun!” And he will, in a basin where death lingers, where nature lays bare everything she can give and everything she can take, he will have fun. 

We don’t have to trouble ourselves with be careful when nature says it for us. When I pack my bag for whatever adventure I’m going on, whether it be with a shovel and probe, an inReach, an extra layer, extra water, extra food, extra extras, I can hear Mother Nature call to me as soon as civilization does not. “Be careful,” she whispers on wind, not with worry but with the wry warning of something ancient, and I whisper back, “always am.” Snow flops heavily from a branch, leaves crack in ensemble under foot, water babbles in a brook, and it sounds like she is laughing.