Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (9 page)

Next I underwent an hour of Egress Training, which is when you learn how you get out of the airplane if something goes wrong (“although probably nothing will,” they keep telling you). How you get out is: very, very fast. In fact, your seat is actually a small but powerful rocket that will blast you 900 feet straight up if you yank on the yellow handle between your legs, but you’re supposed to do this only if the pilot yells “BAIL OUT BAIL OUT BAIL OUT”—he has to say it three times—and you definitely want to have your head back when you yank it unless you want your kneecaps to pass completely through your eye sockets, which would be bad because you need to check to make sure your parachute
has deployed, because if it hasn’t you should yank on this other yellow lever over here, and if you’re coming down over water you need to inflate your life preserver by pulling on these two red knobs, but first you have to get rid of your oxygen mask by pressing outward on these two metal tabs and yanking the mask forward and …

… and so on for an hour. Correctly egressing a fighter jet requires WAY more knowledge than medical school.

After Egress Training, the pilot, Major Derek Rydholm, gave me a Preflight Briefing in which he demonstrated, using a blackboard eraser, some of the aerial maneuvers we’d be doing.

“We’ll be simulating at attack situation like this,” he’d say, moving the eraser around in rapid little arcs. “We’ll be feeling some g-forces.”

I now realize that, right after we left the briefing room, the eraser threw up.

Actually, my F-16 ride went pretty well at first. Sitting behind Derek in the two-person cockpit, I felt nervous, but my physical discomfort was fairly minor.

Then we took off.

We took off with afterburners. It was like in
Star Trek
, when they go to Warp Speed. Then we made an unbelievably sudden, violent right turn that made me feel like a clove in a giant garlic press and separated my stomach from the rest of my body by at least two football fields.

And that was just
taking off
. After that we did attack maneuvers. We did rolls. We broke the sound barrier and then flew straight up for three miles. Then we flew upside down. My stomach never caught up with us. It’s still airborne over the Florida Keys, awaiting landing instructions. Here’s the conversation Derek and I had over the intercom:

I’m not saying it wasn’t thrilling. It was. I am deeply indebted to Derek Rydholm and the 93rd Fighter Squadron and the entire U.S. Air Force for enabling me to be among the very few people who can boast that they have successfully lost their lunch upside down at five times the Earth’s gravitational pull. And despite my discomfort, and the reservations I’ve expressed in this column, I can honestly say that, if I ever get a chance to go up again, I’ll let you go instead. Although you probably won’t get to ride in the plane I used. I think they had to burn it.

S
kiing is an exciting winter sport, but it is not for everybody. For example, it is not for sane people. Sane people look at skiing, and they say: “WAIT a minute. I’m supposed to attach slippery objects to my feet and get on a frozen chair dangling from a scary-looking wire; then get dumped off on a snow-covered slope so steep that the mountain goats are wearing seat belts; and then, if by some miracle I am able to get back down without killing myself, I’m supposed to do this AGAIN??”

As I get older—which I am currently doing at the rate of about five years per year—this is more and more how I view skiing. I’ve been looking for an alternative winter sport that does not force a person to become so intimately involved with gravity. And so recently I went to Idaho (official state motto: “Convenient to Montana”) to experience two winter sports that seemed better-suited to the mature sportsperson in the sense that you can do them while sitting down. In an effort to make my trip as tax-deductible as humanly possible, I’ve decided to write a two-part series about these sports. This week’s Featured Winter Sport is: snowmobiling.

A snowmobile is a high-performance motorized vehicle mounted on a track and skis that enable it to travel rapidly deep into remote snow-covered wilderness areas, where it gets stuck. Of course I didn’t know this when I rented one. I knew nothing, which is why I also rented snowmobiles for my fifteen-year-old son, Rob, and his fourteen-year-old friend Ryan. It was going to be a fun thing for us three guys to do together; that is what I was saying to myself as I signed the legal release form (“… the undersigned further agrees that he has not actually read this form and just wants to get on the snowmobile already and would in fact cheerfully sign anything placed in front of him including a document granting us the right to keep both his ears as souvenirs”).

We rented our snowmobiles at a place called the Smiley Creek Lodge, which is in a place called Smiley Creek, which pretty much consists of the Smiley Creek Lodge. We also rented helmets and jumpsuits so that we would look as much as possible like the Invasion of the Dork Tourists from Space. A very nice man showed us how to make the snowmobiles go. He seemed extremely calm, considering that he was turning three powerful and expensive machines over to two adolescent boys and a humor columnist. I thought he’d give us detailed instructions regarding where we should go, but basically all he said was that we should make an effort to remain in Idaho.

This did not prove to be so easy; not with Rob and Ryan at the controls. They are wonderful and intelligent boys, but they have the common sense of table salt. It’s not their fault: Their brains have not yet developed the Fear Lobe. If you give them control over a motorized vehicle, they are going to go at the fastest possible speed, which on a modern
snowmobile turns out to be 14,000 miles per hour. They were leaving trails of flaming snow behind them. I tried to exercise Adult Supervision by yelling “HEY! GUYS! BE CAREFUL! HEY!” but they couldn’t hear me, because sound travels only so fast.

So off we went, into the snow-covered wilds of Idaho, with the two Flaming No-Judgment Blurs roaring ahead, followed at an increasing distance by the Rapidly Aging Shouting Man. We would have been inside the Arctic Circle by nightfall if Ryan had not driven into the creek. It was not his fault. He didn’t see the creek. Some idiot had failed to put up the freeway-style sign with fifteen-foot-high letters saying “CREEK,” and so Ryan naturally drove in to it.

Since your model snowmobile weighs as much as a freight locomotive, we were unable to pull Ryan’s out, so he got on the back of mine and we all rode sheepishly back to the Smiley Creek Lodge. There we learned that another tourist party was also having problems: A man had gotten himself and his son stuck in deep snow, and they couldn’t get out. The man’s wife, who had not been wild about the snowmobiling idea in the first place, was informing the lodge personnel that she wanted her son back, but as far as she was concerned, they could leave her husband out there. (She was kidding.) (Sort of.)

While this drama was unfolding,
another
group of tourists returned and announced that they, too, had planted a snowmobile somewhere out in Idaho.

None of this bothered the nice snowmobile-renting man. He calmly called in some local Idaho men—soft-spoken, strong, competent-looking men, the kind of men who never get their snowmobiles stuck and could probably survive for weeks in the wilderness by eating pinecones. They went out
and rescued the father and son, and then they went and pulled out all of the stuck snowmobiles. I realized that this was routine for them; on any given winter day, probably two-thirds of the Idaho population is busy pulling tourist-abandoned snowmobiles out of creeks, snowbanks, trees, mine shafts, condominiums, etc.

So it all ended well, and the boys thought snowmobiling was the coolest thing we could have done short of blowing up a building. I, on the other hand, was looking for a more restful mode of snow transportation, and I’m pleased to report that I found one: It requires no gasoline, it goes at a nice safe speed, and it doesn’t get stuck. On the other hand, it emits an amazing amount of weewee.

NEXT WEEK: Dogsledding.

T
his is the second part of a two-part series titled “Recreational Winter Sports That You Can Do Sitting Down.” Last week, in part one, I discussed snowmobiling, with my key finding being that you should not go snowmobiling with adolescent boys unless your recreational goal is total cardiac arrest. Today I’ll discuss a sport that is more relaxing as well as far more fragrant: Dogsled-riding.

A dogsled is—follow me carefully here—a sled that is pulled by dogs. And if you think that dogs are not strong enough to pull a sled, then you have never been walking a dog on a leash when a squirrel ran past. Even a small dog in this situation will generate one of the most powerful forces known to modern science. In some squirrel-infested areas, it is not at all unusual to see a frantically barking dog racing down the street, wearing a leash that is attached to a bouncing, detached arm.

Historians believe that the dogsled was invented thousands of years ago when an Alaskan Eskimo attached a pair of crude runners to a frame, hitched this contrivance to a pack of dogs, climbed aboard, and wound up in Brazil. This taught the remaining Eskimos that if they were going to build another one of these things, it should definitely have
brakes. Today, dogsleds are mainly used in races, the most famous one being the Alaskan Iditarod, in which competitors race from Anchorage to Nome, with the winner getting a cash prize of $50,000, which just about covers the winner’s Chap Stick expenses.

I took a far more modest dogsled ride, up and down a smallish mountain near Hailey, Idaho, on a sled operated by Sun Valley Sled Dog Adventures. This is a small company started by a very nice young guy named Brian Camilli, who plans to win the Iditarod someday, and who bought his first sled dogs five years ago with what was going to be his college tuition (“My parents still aren’t sure how they feel about it,” he says). He now owns twenty-seven dogs, which as you can imagine makes it somewhat tricky for him to obtain rental housing.

I was part of a two-sled party, which required eighteen dogs. A highlight of this experience—in fact, a highlight of my entire life—was watching Brian and his partner, Jeremy Gebauer, bring the dogs, one at a time, out of the truck. Because of course every single dog, immediately upon emerging, had to make weewee, and then every dog naturally had to sniff every other dog’s weewee, which would cause the following thought to register in their primitive dog brains: “Hey! This is WEEWEE!” And so naturally this would cause every one of them to have to make MORE weewee, which every other one would of course have to sniff, the result being that we soon were witnessing what nuclear physicists call a Runaway Chain Weewee Reaction.

Eventually Brian and Jeremy got all the dogs into their harnesses, at which point they began to suspect that they might be about to run somewhere, which caused them to start barking at the rate of 250 barks per minute per dog.
I would estimate that at that moment our little group was responsible for two-thirds of the noise, and a solid three-quarters of the weewee, being produced in the western United States.

These dogs were rarin
‘
to go. We passengers climbed into the sleds, and Brian and Jeremy stood on the runners behind. The sleds were tied firmly to the front bumper of the truck, but the dogs were pulling so hard that I swear I felt the truck move; I had this vision of us disappearing over the top of the mountain—dogs, followed by sleds, followed by truck, all headed for the Arctic Circle, never to be heard from again.

Quickly Brian and Jeremy untied the sleds and WHOOOAAAA we were off, whipping up the trail at a very brisk pace, the dogs insanely happy. Brian and Jeremy shouting traditional dog-team commands (my favorite traditional command, shouted by Brian, was: “BE NICE!”).