States of Adventure by Fitz Cahall #
States of Adventure, Fitz Cahall. This book was a perfect holiday gift for me. Part coffee-table photo book, part adventure memoir anthology, it contains 30 relatively bit-sized stories distilled from Cahall’s podcast The Dirtbag Diaries. That show is the original outdoor/adventure podcast, and one of the earliest podcasts period. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never listened to it (though I’ve listened to Cahall’s other show Climbing Gold, and various interviews with him), so I can’t attest to the direct mapping from podcast episode to chapter in this book (though it is clear that they are not transcripts; many are also not written by Cahall, but by others who either lived the adventure or did the primary reporting). For the most part, the stories were great reading and viewing. Some were downright moving: a team of strangers banding together to carry a taken-too-soon-by-disease man’s boots through the Appalachian Trail so that they at least could fulfill his dream. (This one felt like an antidote to the isolation that has created some of the larger problems in our world right now.). Some felt like they didn’t translate well into written form. While I’m sure the story of the youngest rafting descent through the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon was riveting, the written word was not: “The river pulled her in. Each wave formed its own deep canyon. The kayaks acclerated down the backside of the wave.” While certainly not nearly AI slop, some writing like this had a certain average-of-all-adventure-writing genericity reminiscent of ChatGPT’s “style”. Some were especially enjoyable because they hit close to home: Fitz Cahall is a fellow Seattleite, almost exactly 10 years my senior, so I especially enjoyed hearing about his transition into family life with a trailer in Crystal Mountain’s famous Lot B, skiing down the iconic Brothers in the Olympic mountains, and his evolution as a climber in and through Index. The book certainly has something for everyone, and I will happily pass it around and tell folks about many of the stories, though with a tongue not quite as silver as Cahall’s. Grade: A-