The Sunday before Labor Day, Wiley and I took a road trip up to Lake Placid (above, viewed from the observation point on Mount Whiteface). I hadn’t been there since I was a child, when my family went to the 1980 Winter Olympics.
The funny thing is, I have a lot of vivid memories of seeing the Olympics, including watching Eric Heiden win a couple of his gold medals on the skating oval and of one unlucky ice dancing couple wipe out, the man’s skate catching the woman’s right on the knee and leaving blood all over the ice.
But I also have a memory of Lake Placid circa 1980 that Sunday I learned does not exist. In my head, the Adirondacks surrounding Lake Placid were like the Alps or the Rockies, monstrous, imposing mountains capped in ice and snow, looming over the small town.
As you can see from the photo above, not quite. The Adirondacks, mountainly speaking, are pretty puny, only a skooch taller than the Catskills I see every day. Good God, they’re virtually hills. Unless there has been unprecedented, massive erosion in the 27 years since I last visited (I think not), the Adirondacks were never the enormous peaks I have firmly filed in my head.
What was especially interesting to me about this experience was that I happen to be reading a great book that I highly recommend: Deep Survival, Who Lives, Who Dies and Why (by a guy named Gonzales if you’re interested in checking it out). The author looks at a number of case studies, mostly of hikers, snowmobilers and white water rafters, but also of people who died in the World Trade Center and his own experiences as an adventurer, as well as scientific studies about how the brain remembers, makes decisions and most importantly builds mental models, outlines of how we perceive reality to be versus what it is.
He also gets into chaos theory and complexity theory, which is on the verge of overgeeking for me, but all of his case studies are based on what happens when people who’ve built mental models face events that don’t fit into their perception of reality.
Gonzales points out, for example, that many times it’s the more experienced rafter or climber that dies when the weather turns or there’s an avalanche, partly because of arrogance (sometimes) but mostly because that person’s mental model over time has become more rigid than someone with less experience who has no idea what to expect and therefore notices more details or proceeds more cautiously, double-checking the weather at the ranger station, for example, rather than just plowing ahead.
Anyway, back to the Adirondacks. I hadn’t started Deep Survival at the time Wiley and I drove up there, but looking back I can see the ideas Gonzales wrote about at work. When I arrived to the area, I figured the mountains must be there, I just couldn’t see them because of the angle and elevation where I was. Not even after driving nearly to the top of Mt. Whiteface, with a 360 degree view, was I prepared to accept that my memory was faulty. I kept thinking "where the hell are the mountains? Why can’t I see them?"
Fortunately, I have since revised my mental model of the Lake Placid environs.
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