“The pathway to salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor’s edge.” – The Razor’s Edge (1984)
What did the hobbits say as they rode the Ents into battle? “Run, forest, run!”
It was on July 4. I had convinced two of my friends to follow me on a bizarre quest – we were going to climb one of the tallest mountains in North America. By one of them, it’s in the top 50. So, in my book that counts.
The trip started using gasoline – we had a borrowed Jeep® that we took as far up the hill as we could, since it was a borrowed Jeep™. My friend who had borrowed the Jeep© didn’t want to wreck it, since it was before YouTube® and we wouldn’t even get likes from a cool video if we wrecked it on the amazingly rough road.
We decided to make this hike a three-day event. On the first day, we’d do nearly a mile gain in elevation while we camped out 1000’ below the summit of the mountain. Then, we’d summit the mountain and spend the next night at our basecamp. Then we’d hike out the next morning.
Of course, it rained.
At the elevation of our basecamp, trees can’t grow, so we boiled filtered water in the rain. It worked, sort of. At that elevation, water boils at less than 190°F. It was enough to reheat a fifteen-year-old dehydrated Mountain House® Chili Mac, even though the beans couldn’t get hot enough to not be crunchy.
After climbing up a mountain, crunchy beans and all, it was the best dinner I’d had in years. I think I ate two.
The chili mac wasn’t red hot, but there was no way I was going to give it away, give it away, give it away now.
The next day morning we were sore – but we could leave our packs at the camp so we’d just be carrying ourselves and our water. It was nearly half of a mile to get to the summit – a half of a mile straight up.
The trip up was a true scramble – a broken field of boulders that we sometimes had to ascend on all fours. It was steep – very steep. As we intersected the ridge that led to the summit of the mountain, I looked forward to seeing what was on the other side of the ridge. I was certain that it must be flatter than the steep boulder field we’d just climbed – there was no way it could be as steep.
I got to the edge of the ridge, and looked down.
Until that moment in time, I had never been afraid of heights. But I was not expecting to see what I saw.
It was a cliff. A sheer drop off – I was looking at a certified Wile E. Coyote precipice.
When I was stuck on that cliff, they told me not to “look down.” So, I smiled.
I don’t know if you’ve ever looked straight down and seen a cliff that went nearly three-quarters of a mile straight down when you weren’t expecting it. For the first time in my life I was experiencing vertigo – it felt like the mountain under me was going to slide off down that cliff.
I moved back down the ridge. But I still had to climb a few hundred feet upward to reach the summit. Up the side of the ridge I went. I assure you, I stayed back from that knife-edge as we crawled up that hill.
Then, finally, tantalizingly close, there was the summit. I was nearly to the top of one of the highest mountains in North America.
There was one little problem.
Between the ridge I was on, and the top of the mountain there was a path. It was about six or eight feet long, and probably a foot wide, and it was flat, like it had been machined.
What’s the difference between Humpty Dumpty and 2020? One of them had a great fall.
On one side of it was, you guessed it, a sheer cliff that bottomed out 3,000 feet or so below me. On the other side of the path it was a lot better. There was only about a 1,000 foot drop.
Wait, was 1,000 feet better? I’d get more time to live if I fell down the 3,000 foot side.
Choices.
But when facing that last few steps, shaky with the first vertigo in my life, I’ll admit those were some of the toughest steps of my life. But, hey, what was I going to tell the folks back home? That I climbed to a spot nearly three miles into the air to stop two feet before I reached the top?
Nope.
But that ridge (to me) was a razor’s edge. On either side was disaster. I took a deep breath. I put one foot in front of the other. And I walked – one step, two steps, three steps – to the top, where my friends were waiting.
What brought this to mind was an email forwarded by frequent commenter, 173dVietVet, where he said (in part) this on discussing where our country is:
“(I’ve) Done a bit of mountain climbing in my Ranger days and I know full well the meaning of knife’s edge, where any wrong step throws you headlong forever into the abyss of death that lies on BOTH sides . . . .”
We are in that zone. In climbing mountains, the knife edge is more than a metaphor – it’s real. On either side is death, and it’s not metaphorical death, it’s mangled into a wadded pile of Wilder by the combined forces of gravity and the sudden stop on the rocky outcropping at the bottom. Sure, Wile E. Coyote could survive, but not me.
Everything went downhill after gravity was invented.
But in life, the knife-edge is a metaphor. We’ve created a financial situation where the economy is horribly broken, and for the last year we’ve survived mainly by printing money and not allowing people to be evicted from houses, despite the questionable legality of that.
A bigger component to our knife edge is that the rule of law has been progressively ignored in the country. Where is the right of the Federal Government to stop evictions of tenants?
Oh, there isn’t one. They just made it up.
That would be (at best) an action by a State, though even then it’s of questionable legality. But then the Patriot Act made spying on American citizens “legal” so who cares about legal, anyway? Then every agency with three letters of an alphabet decided to swallow up all of that online data, and all of the phone calls, despite laws to the contrary.
Of course, Federal employees were put in prison.
Hahahaha!
No.
The NSA: a government agency that actually listens to you!
Despite obviously illegal orders, no one was put in prison, and the only one likely to be put into prison is the whistleblower (Edward Snowden) if he ever shows back up in the United States. It used to be the Constitution that was ignored, but that’s so 1940s.
Now, the government can ignore any inconvenient law it wants to ignore. Of course, the people that can ignore the law are those that are either leaders, government employees, or those favored (think Antifa™) by the government.
Destroy evidence? A felony for most. But when the government does it? It’s “a regrettable incident.”
What people misunderstand is that Trump isn’t at all the cause of our problems today. Trump is a symptom. Without Trump, the answer would have been (yet another) Bush, this time Jeb, versus (yet another) Clinton, this time Hillary. Oh, the excitement for electing ¡Jeb!
The difference between another Clinton and another Bush? Nothing, really. And America didn’t want that – so America elected Trump. If anything, Trump cleared the fog, and made the knife edge we were walking clearer.
Jeb has a perfect place in government, as the Secretary of Low Energy.
And now, we are walking, and the knife-edge is sharper and narrower than the one that I walked to get to the top of that mountain on July 4th a couple of decades ago.
We have left the bounds of Constitutional governance some time ago – people think it’s quaint when I bring the entire idea of the Constitution up. Is there a path back to an actual Constitutional government?
Sure. It’s narrow – a knife-edge. But so was getting that Constitutional government in the first place. But getting that original Constitution depended upon men climbing a mighty steep mountain several hundred years ago. Were they afraid when they saw the cliff’s edge, the price of failure?
I’m sure they were. But yet they continued. And when it was time to thread that final few steps to the summit?
They did, and damn the dangers on either side.
We face the same knife-edge. Where are we going?
The only way to survive is to fight as one already dead.
The USA is dead. Long live America! (Or possibly Midwestia, at least for now.)
Indeed. “Never take counsel of your fears,” said by almost everyone in history (Patton, Stonewall Jackson, Andrew Jackson . . . etc.)
Vertigo is a pain in the rear. Got a bad case years ago and still can’t look straight up without the bat spins. McChuck is correct I accept that we are dead and it makes me feel more alive than I have in a long time. I will do what I can for my children. My Dad has always said since I was a little kid, “when they come for your guns, it’s over”
That is another Rubicon . . . and it would be, um, spicy.
Up.
John – – Another point just gleaned from re-reading your article (the two little grey cells don’t function well before morning coffee): You didn’t say it, but your knife edge jaunt to the summit contains an allegory about life.
Here’s how I see it: Achieving success in accomplishing difficult and overwhelming obstacles requires one to walk a very narrow and peril strewn path. And that path is littered with detritus that can quickly turn your direction into disaster. One misstep, one divergence in your focus, and you have mission failure with that summit remaining unreachable.
Another tale with embedded life lessons well told. KUDOS !
Thank you for the inspiration, sir!
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass
Apparently many of us have great endurance, and the majority enjoy the abuse. God help us, no one else will.
Part of the problem is that things have been so good for so long – people feel there’s too much to lose. And?
They’re expecting a “return to normal” that may never come . . .
I am a pilot.
Helicopter in a loop — no problem.
Crop-duster inverted under a bridge with the vertical stabilizer dragging the river — no problem.
Miles of air under me or the gear scraping the weeds — no problem.
I am a SCUBA diver.
Oceans, wrecks, caves, muddy nights — no problem.
At Lake Tahoe in December a couple-three decades ago with a foot if snow on the beach, we paddled out a couple-three hundred yards on our backs.
A crystal-clear day, visibility unlimited.
Elevation is about a mile-and-a-half.
Breath-taking isolation.
I rolled over to submerge, and it hit me.
Vertigo.
Disorientation.
I was on top of water deeper than I could see.
Bottomless.
Invisible.
Nothing below me.
Nothing above me.
I felt the transition from terror to acceptance.
And grinned.
And survived.
Is this an analogy for me for 2020 and beyond?
Utterly lacking in visible support?
Garsh!, I wonder what happens next!
This reminds me of a hot summer day when I went wading in a local river. As I moved slowly downstream, I realized that I was on a narrowing sandbar, and had to weave from side to side to stay in the middle of it. The water got a little deeper, so I decided to turn back, and suddenly realized that what felt like firm footing when moving WITH the water just dissolved under my feet when I tried to move AGAINST the current.
Fortunately, I could swim to a low bank and climb back out, just a little wetter than I intended, but it was a valuable metaphor. Sometimes, the “razor’s edge” leads to nowhere at all.
Sometimes set of constraints leaves no feasible solution, and you have to redefine the problem.
Exactly. But to do that, you have to let go of the preconceived notions, just like in your great story.
Whatever “The Razor’s Edge” is in America today, it sure isn’t cutting into expenditures. Here’s a repost from elsewhere of what’s in the latest Emergency Stimulus bill along with your $600 check-in-the-mail:
$300,000,000 for Migrant and Refugee Assistance pg.. 147
$10,000 per person for student loan bailout
$100,000,000 to NASA, because, who knows why.
$20,000,000,000 to the USPS, because why not
$300,000,000 to the Endowment for the Arts – because of it
$300,000,000 for the Endowment for the Humanities/ because no one even knew that was a thing
$15,000,000 for Veterans Employment Training / for when the GI Bill isn’t enough
$435,000,000 for mental health support
$30,000,000,000 for the Department of Education stabilization fund/ because that will keep people employed (all those zeros can be confusing, that’s $30 BILLION)
$200,000,000 to Safe Schools Emergency Response to Violence Program
$300,000,000 to Public Broadcasting / NPR has to be bought by the Democrats
$500,000,000 to Museums and Libraries / Who knows how we are going to use it
$720,000,000 to Social Security Admin / but get this only 200,000,000 is to help people. The rest is for admin costs
$25,000,000 for Cleaning supplies for the Capitol Building / I kid you not it’s on page 136
$7,500,000 to the Smithsonian for additional salaries
$35,000,000 to the JFK Center for Performing Arts
$25,000,000 for additional salary for House of Representatives
$3,000,000,000 upgrade to the IT department at the VA
$315,000,000 for State Department Diplomatic Programs
$95,000,000 for the Agency of International Development
$300,000,000 for International Disaster Assistance
$90,000,000 for the Peace Corp pg. 148
$13,000,000 to Howard University pg. 121
$9,000,000 Misc. Senate Expenses pg. 134
$100,000,000 to Essential Air carriers pg. 162. This of note because the Airlines are going to need billions in loans to keep them afloat ($100,000,000 is chump change.)
$40,000,000,000 goes to the Take Responsibility to Workers and Families Act This sounds like it’s direct payments for workers pg. 164
$1,000,000,000 Airlines Recycle and Save Program pg. 163
$25,000,000 to the FAA for administrative costs pg. 165
$492,000,000 to National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) pg. 167
$526,000,000 Grants to Amtrak to remain available if needed through 2021 pg. 168 (what are the odds that doesn’t go unused) Hidden on page 174 the Secretary has 7 days to allocate the funds & notify Congress
$25,000,000,000 for Transit Infrastructure pg. 169
$3,000,000 Maritime Administration pg. 172
$5,000,000 Salaries and Expensive Office of the Inspector General pg. 172
$2,500,000 Public and Indian Housing pg. 175
$5,000,000 Community Planning and Development pg. 175
$2,500,000 Office of Housing
What DOES ALL of this have to do with the Virus?
EXACTLY!!! We have been bi-partisanly screwed! Sadly the President on 10/6 asked for a stand alone bill that would have sent $1200 checks to Americans. Period.
Gah. Consider that the sound of appreciation (you’re right) in lieu of a “like”
That’s in tomorrow’s post – great summary!!
Excellent as always, John. But I’ll have to admit that I’m more than a little skeptical of the wonderfulness of “constitutional government.” Look back into our history a ways. How long did constitutional government survive the ratification of said constitution? The Whiskey Rebellion was put down, and the Alien and Sedition Act passed, while the founders were still in charge. And the corpse of the constitution was thoroughly mutilated by Dishonest Abe before the mid-1860s.
Constitutions are well-intended efforts at Law Control. Very much like “gun control,” where the government says you can’t have those deadly guns. Problem solved, right? No gun crimes being committed, because nobody’s got guns. Except, of course, that such laws are obeyed only by the (foolishly) law-abiding. Similarly, you have a constitution — a document, words on paper — saying that the government can do only what it explicitly says the government can do, and it sure as hell can’t do this other list proscribed by the first ten amendments. Well, the government’s not law-abiding. It simply empowers itself, in the person of a “judicial branch,” to say what the text of the document “really means,” and of course its Real Meanings are so mysterious as to be decipherable only by a priesthood of government-employed lawyers. And it simply does what it pleases, totally ignoring our wonderful constitution. In a game of rock-paper-scissors, Gun beats Paper any time. So our rulers make sure they have plenty of guns, or servants with guns, and that we have as few as possible.
Law Control works just as well as Gun Control. Which is to say, not at all.
So, what’s the solution? I certainly don’t think there is one, short of the return of Our Lord. Until then, I think we have to hope for a tolerable form of government for as long as it lasts, keeping always in mind what Jefferson said about the nourishment requirements of the Tree of Liberty. In short, every now and then, it has to be Bullets, not Ballots. And it’s been WAY too long now.
Great comment – the Whiskey Rebellion is not taught enough in school. But yet the Constitution, and maybe more, the Bill of Rights has given us more freedom than nearly any nation on Earth . . . for a while.
We can see how quickly that is slipping away . . . .
Even if you find instances in which your interpretation of Constitutional Rights is inconsistent with the world you live in (as I do), I believe that we’re better off having those rights enumerated. Who knows WHAT sort of restrictions might be imposed upon us in its absence?
How many of us believe in “law and order”, and yet casually exceed posted speed limits by 5, 10, or 15 mph? How many of us ignore laws regarding fireworks? (My neighbors certainly do, especially for July 4th, and New Years Eve.) How many of us hire undocumented workers, or patronize businesses that do? If there are laws that we feel free to ignore, how can we complain when others choose laws that they can ignore?
Does “law and order” mean obedient little front-of-the-class-karens or is it a short hand for something else?
Like: “American” is short for “United States of American” or “How are you” means “generic greeting of mild comraderie” not “detail your mental, physical, and spiritual health.”
I don’t know, but I think it might be.
Let me think about it.
My life’s motto has been ” Ask first, miss out” so I’m not really the target audience. Might be barking up the wrong tree.
My solution is to write fewer laws 🙂