Bus 142

Bus 142 by Anu Khosla A burly man approximately the size of a yeti in a jacket the color of caution tape made a ski cut across the convex roller. He applied the full weight of himself to his ski edge in order to make a line in the snow, releasing a mini avalanche below us. We watched that slab of white wall whumpf its way down like fresh icing sliding right off a still-hot cake. Buddied up for this lap, we locked eyes and clinked our poles like champagne glasses. Go time. Like that famous line from Albert Camus: “In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.” But for me the summer wasn’t exactly within. Skiing was the summer; it was external. I liked that menthol burn at the top of the throat that arises from cold air quickly consumed. I liked that striated pulse of the quads. It made me feel things: competent, at ease, alive. Happy, even. I’ve wanted to be an adventurer, and to be recognized as an adventurer: one of the brave ones who carries pain like a pack to the ends of the earth and comes back to tell the story.  Camus also wrote that “When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardor and that illumination.” I have had the good luck to chase down that ardor and illumination of the outdoors like a dragon. “Forsaking beauty and the sensual happiness attached to it,” Camus continues, “exclusively serving misfortune, calls for a nobility I lack. But, after all, nothing is true that forces one to exclude.”  Somehow, people didn’t want to see me the way I wanted to be seen. There was some barrier to it. Something physical stood in the way.  * Chris McCandless went into the wild and found himself a shelter structure. It was an abandoned bus, Bus 142, found along the Stampede Trail, near Denali National Park. Bus 142 is very similar in shape to Miss Frizzle’s Magic School Bus. It is white on top, and looks to have been previously yellow towards the bottom, but is now painted over in a mossy green. Just above the windows it says “142” in a stylish sans serif, and below it reads “FAIRBANKS CITY TRANSIT SYSTEM”.  Chris McCandless went into the wild. The wild was an old bus that had originated in a municipal transit system. It originated in a history that contained names like Benz and Daimler and Maybach and Ford. The wild was on the edge of a national park that was established in 1917. Denali was number 12 in a line of national parks, an American idea –– “America’s Best Idea” –– first conceived in 1872.  Chris McCandless was found dead in Bus 142 in September of 1992. He was found alongside his journal, whose last entry, tagged Day 102, read: “BEAUTIFUL BLUE BERRIES.”    Jon Krakauer wrote about Chris McCandless in his 1996 classic Into the Wild. Sean Penn directed a 2007 film adaption of the book starring Emile Hirsch. Guys like Krakauer –– and Penn, I suppose ––get to decide what a true and authentically rugged –– always rugged –– outdoorsman looks like.  Thanks to Krakauer, McCandless remains, in the collective imagination, as exemplar bar none of an outdoors person. Meanwhile, Krakauer remains the absolute epitome of outdoor writer. Never mind that McCandless didn’t make it out alive. Never mind that Krakauer had to revise his facts, again and again and maybe again.  The shelter was a bus, not a cave. It was the crumbs of civilization, not the treasure of the untamed.  * Gear is a kind of treasure, and in many corners of the outdoors having old gear is a point of pride. The most embarrassing thing you can bring to the trail (or the crag, or the line up, or the river) is a brand new piece of equipment free of any scratch or blemish. New gear indicates unused gear, which can indicate a poser who has the money to buy the thing but not the marks of experience. The new gear becomes synecdoche, and the person holding it is assumed to navigate no farther than the REI parking lot.  Old gear is an indication that something has been used. The patina of a piece of old gear becomes proof of someone’s time spent doing an activity –– the ultimate source of authenticity in the outdoors. The seams of a wetsuit can only rip and the edges of a climbing shoe can only be rounded through use. Never mind that gear can be bought used by anybody at all. * When I was 11, I traveled to Connecticut for the first time. Every kid I met there asked, “You’re from California? Do you surf?” One would think that you can’t surf in Connecticut, but actually you can, sometimes. That technicality had no relevance to these kids because they lived inland, and they had no access to the shore. They also lacked access to any profound concept of California. They could not imagine that the Northern California coastline is shockingly frigid and unfriendly. I do not mean “shockingly” metaphorically. Each time I dip even a fingertip into the ocean here my body goes into a light shock. The Connecticut kids could not imagine that there was a version of Californian culture that did not encourage scraggly brown girls to grab a board and paddle out.  Someone painted them a picture of California, but that place they imagine is myth. I must live in the real place.  * In the summer of 2023, I am a brown girl entering the De Young Museum in San Francisco to see an exhibit on the works of Ansel Adams. Alongside his prints are more recent photographs from artists who came after him, printing works in conversation with Adams’ pieces.  One of those artists is Binh Danh, an