MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

63 In the Eye of the Beholder When I travel to remote places, I always carry gifts for people who show me great kindness. Kids thrive on delight, which is universal and uncomplicated. So… balloons are light and compact and always spark joy. And the inevitable tears that burst forth when the balloon finally pops is short-lived, because kids don’t elevate simple disappointments into imagined, long- lasting tragedies. But grownups have stronger opinions about technology from distant lands, and they can be surprisingly hard to please. I once stuffed a small handful of Swiss army knives in my kayak. Who could find fault with a knife—an elegant product of modern technology forged out of shiny stainless? But when I gave one to Tolla, a rough-and-tumble, fur-clad Chukchi hunter in northeast Siberia, he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “What is this?” he asked with sincere bewilderment. “A knife?” “A what?” He ran his thumb over the smooth red plastic. “It sure doesn’t look like a knife.” “Let me show you.” I opened the folding blade, fully expecting a look of amazement reminiscent of a child’s open-faced awe when I blow up a balloon. Tolla burst out laughing, his weather-beaten face folding into a mysterious roadmap of creases that outlined the storms he had faced on open tundra and moving sea ice. Then he turned surprisingly serious, almost angry, despite our friendship. “Jon. I am a hunter, not a child. This is not a knife. Could you skin a walrus or cut blubber out of a whale with this thing?” He handed it back to me. “Here. I have no use for this… whatever you call it.” I didn’t have to heart to show him the screwdriver. The most dominant machine on this frozen wasteland was a visdichot , a Russian armoured personnel carrier built at the end of World War II now held together with massive, inevitably rusted screws and bolts. I could already envision the conversation: “A what? This is not a screwdriver.” And so forth. And how about the toothpick? I put the knife back in my pocket, to give it to a youngster in another village. Tolla realized he had caused me to lose face, and we were friends after all. So he unstrapped his knife from around his waist. It was ten inches long, ground out of an old snow-machine leaf spring, with a handle of reindeer antler, sheathed with sealskin. “Here, Jon. You are living on this land with us. You will need a real knife to survive.” “But Tolla, this is yours. You need this knife.” He refused to take it back—and today I still cut tomatoes and brie with this no-nonsense tool, crafted out of what was available on the landscape and given to me when I had a literal pocket full of technology that just wouldn’t cut it. My next expedition was to Vanuatu, a string of equatorial islands in the South Pacific. I decided to bring vise grips. I understood you couldn’t jar loose the corroded track pins of an ancient army tank with one of these things, but there had to be a broken machine, somewhere on the islands, where vise grips would come in handy. Nope. I handed the tool to my Melanesian friend with the Christian name, Michael. “What is this?” he asked with sincere bewilderment. “Pliers, kind of like a wrench?” “A what?” He opened and closed the thing, staring intently at the movement of the hinges, spring, and levers. “What do you do with this thing?” The problem was that there was no machinery—of any kind—on the island. With a machete, an axe and a shovel, a farmer can clear forest and plant crops, or build a house of sticks and thatch. Iron cooking pots sure are handy, as are fishhooks. How stupid of me—I should have brought fishhooks. Michael accepted the tool and set it carefully on a shelf where it would remind him of a friendly white man who showed up unannounced from a faraway land in a tiny plastic canoe-sort-of-boat. But you can’t go wrong every time. Back in Siberia, years later, my Russian friend Misha and I were travelling across the tundra, fast and light, without gifts because we had no room in our sleds for extra weight. Far from any village or road, on a tundra that extended nine time zones from east to west, in a land ruled by cold and wind in winter and mosquitoes and bog in summer, we ran improbably into a young man and his son walking slowly across the seemingly infinite landscape. George invited us to spend the night in his small wall tent, because our nylon mountain tent was clearly “good for nothing. And look at those boots you are wearing—maybe useful for killing gophers, but clearly not what a reasonable person would wear.” We were all short of food, so we hodge- podged dinner together with what we had and finished our meal still hungry. Then George brewed a pot of bitter Russian outback tea made up of stems, seeds, and stale leaves that no one else in the world would buy. But he had no sugar. I went to our sled and pulled out our plastic Nalgene with sugar. George’s eyes lit up. “Where did you get that jar?” he asked. “What a good idea! A jar to hold your sugar, so it doesn’t spill out. How clever.” I poured half of our sugar into a zip-lock and gave him the rest of the sugar and the Nalgene. “Thank you. Thank you. A plastic jar to hold my sugar. I already have a teapot, now I have a teapot and a sugar jar. I will keep these two things for the rest of my life. My teapot and my sugar jar. I am a wealthy man. Thank you.” We are told when giving gifts it’s the thought that counts, but the value of technology, it seems, lies in the eye of the beholder. words :: Jon Turk illustration :: Dave Barnes In 1910, German mountaineer Otto Herzog noticed the unique clips used on military rifle straps and adopted the idea for the first climbing carabiner .