The frontier is a drug
Risk, legibility, and control
The black ink from a Sharpie marker soaks through the Amazon Basics index card, making it useless as a flash card. On one side, I write the word “Atrovent,” and on the flip side, “Ipratropium Bromide, used with Albuterol. DuoNeb. 0.5mg.”
The boundaries of my brain are being realized: it’s a new language part of EMT training. Patient assessments, oxygen rates, terminology.
“OPQRST.” I’ve almost remembered this acronym. It’s humbling, exhausting, addictive, and satisfying to infuse the brain, our ultimate tool.
My favorite places are where physical and mental boundaries intersect. For example: hunting on Kodiak Island epitomized this. Unfamiliar area, physically demanding, life-threatening unknowns that challenge both emotional stability (“stay calm”) and mental acuity (“don’t get sloppy”). When that’s done, and I’ve survived, then I’m left searching for more.
What places like Kodiak demand is attention under consequence. Narrowed focus is the drug.
The sound is small: a dry snap underfoot. My nervous system is spiked, and I stop mid-step. Across the river, a brown bear works a crowd of spawning, rotting, pink salmon. His paws’ splash is barely audible above the steady river flow.
No trails in the comforting sense. I borrowed game paths through alders and brambles. Bears framed every decision.
The pathfinder loves the frontier, the edges. In discovering these places, he kills them.
I know this impulse.
The edge cracks open to civilization, and they are no longer desirable to the pathfinder. He must find a new frontier or be depressed.
I share this affliction.
Strava picks up on a trail that becomes part of a global network that is seamless, accessible, false. With a heatmap, the mystery of a new place fades, outcome deceivingly calculated, and the perception of risk minimized.
A cryptic trail I ski occasionally gets peppered with flagging tape by someone committed to certainty; they place plastic every 20 feet. I tear it down. Inevitably, the trail will end up on Strava, which enables the anxious and curious to edit behavior before arrival. Yesterday’s natural resources are today’s “likes” and “shares.”
Books used to be the only thing that allowed that.
Touring eastern Oregon’s hot springs before online reviews meant faith in an unknown that today is inconceivable. We used a guidebook, slept in a car, and met someone who gifted me a bag of freshly made mountain lion jerky. I believe that’s the only time (I know of) that I’ve eaten cat. This was the consequence of our inability to pre-edit the trip for safety.
Killing a frontier isn’t about land, but about legibility and control. There was a risk in driving the vintage Volvo into a remote area of Oregon, where Reno was the closest hospital.
By sharing a place or idea, are we killing the reason we love it to begin with? Some will never know that space of discovery. Discovery is both liberating and destructive.
Our own frontiers are an edge, where our competence about a topic ends, and new knowledge begins. To what end?
I don’t believe there is an end.
Each of us has a frontier.
It’s solitude, uncertainty, and thrill. Not only do modern needs and wants fade; they’re obliterated by consequence. Chasing a wild animal or being eyeballed by a predator awakens a mindset that’s increasingly dulled by the suburban tendencies of the mind to compare and streamline. Break a leg two ridges away chasing a whitetail deer? In the moment of pursuit, I don’t care. Chaos, recklessness, and freedom in lieu of low stakes and constant connection.
Does our fear of quick death lead to a life of slow death?
I trade the Sharpie for a pen and continue to scrawl the terms I’ll be tested on.
A frontier is just the point where control runs out.
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Well said: “A frontier is just the point where control runs out.”
What it means to push the physical, which pushes the mental. The frontier might be hard lines but there exists a waggle for those who are inclined. A weaving in and out, just touching, just toeing, right at the boundary. And then, the step over.
Great essay, Jesse.