Are You Empty? Jesus Will Fill The Void
The skies are electric and the women are all asmile two nights ago when I wander over towards Fergburger from Shotover Ln. on Camp St. I’m about to cross Camp to Cow Ln, when I see a big placard behind glass to my left. The sign reads:
Are You Empty? Jesus Will Fill The Void.
Immediately I think Jesus is hitting on me, using the storefront of the Queenstown Salvation Army as a sort of real estate wingman. I can’t help but respect that, even if I am forced to conclude, given my lack of immediate joy at the prospect of Jesus entering my void via my exposed ribcage, as is clearly suggested by the purple robed skeleton display next to the placard, that the son of God is not quite ready for this jelly.
He almost was, though, about two days ago, the scamp, when he playfully dunked me under a waterfall called “Big Kill Splash” or something like that – my canyoning guide had a really thick accent – and knocked me off course, almost toppling me, still submerged, down a chute into another pool, where I would have probably “cracked my head open good.” That I understood, after my guide dragged me back to the rocky bank and sat me down for a few minutes to catch my breath. What I couldn’t understand, not immediately, was that not five minutes after I escaped that wily void-penetrating Jesus and the jaws of death that, thanks to Mr. Skeleton, I now picture as his henchman, he wanted me to jump back into the murder pool.
Canyoning is rough, I think I can say with some certainty. I have bungy jumped, hangglided, canyonswung, jetboated, and river rafted, and skydived, all without batting an eye. Well, I batted an eye once, but nobody was looking, except this one kid, who I threatened to kill if he ever told anyone. Canyoning blew my doors off. It spanked me like a naughty stepchild. Which is to say, it spanked me with obvious relish, as you would a stepchild, not as a stepchild would spank you; please stop being ridiculous. I threatened to kill the kid, the one who saw my eye involuntary bat, by kickboxing him through a picket fence until his face exploded. Those were my exact words. It just came to me – I don’t know how to kickbox but I have, in fairness, seen Say Anything, like, a million times.
Here is what canyoning is: you are picked up at your hostel in Queenstown by Mike who informs you with his mouth that you will be his only canyoner today because he had no other bookings, and informs you with his eyes that he hates your stupid handsome guts – you are, in this canyoning scenario, very handsome - because he’s got to spend his day off carting your FOC ass through Routeburn Canyon. The next 40 minutes or so, as he drives you out to Glenorchy, are largely spent in silence, as Mike inventories the things he could be doing – golfing, sleeping in, skinning you like a possum, etc – instead of taking you out canyoning and you, for your part, realize you probably should have offered to drive in to Glenorchy; you hadn’t realized Routeburn Canyon was so far away. You think about mentioning this realization to Mike, but think better of it.
TIPBOX: If you’re going to go canyoning, try not to have the guy who knows what he’s doing and who may have to save your life a couple of times, not hate you.
So you get out there, into your manbreast enhancing wet-suit, and your guide just sort of takes off, so you follow, caribiners jangling from your testicle-cuddling harness as you bound through a couple of rivers – not streams, rivers, which are hard to ford because rivers = stronger than you - before hooking up with the Routeburn Track for a few minutes. Eventually you get to the canyon, and stop to take a breather. You are tired. Mikeasks you if you have any abseiling experience. You lie. Mistakes are already being made, and you haven’t gotten out onto the slippery, slippery rocks yet. Did I mention it’s raining. It’s totally raining.
To refresh: the first time you swam the pool, you pushed off hard and made it past/under the waterfall and to the ledge you were supposed to. You are instructed to take a practice jump into the from a spot slightly above it, so as to get used to throwing your legs up when you jump so as to minimize depth achieved on impact. If you don’t minimize depth achieved on impact, you might hit the rock bottom of some of the shallower pools, breaking your legs off at the knee and or hip. Fair enough. You jump, and instead of being able to swim to the far side where you started from – is everybody with me? Good – you get caught by the circular motion from the whitewater dragging back under the fall. Your guide – Mike of the hateful, hateful eyes – is telling you to go with it, to go ahead and swim around (you really have no choice at this point), but you have no momentum and almost die, and then you swim it again, and you make it, but you’re very, very tired. Immediately, like, two minutes later, Mike wants you to slide backwards down a chute into a pool, which you also need to swim out of quickly. You balk, because fuck that, man – word? Word. - and Mike becomes visibly disgusted with the paradoxical temerity of your unfuckingbelievable cowardice.
You have about fifteen or twenty obstacles to go, and have made it through two.
You do everything else with more success, jumping when and where Mike tells you to, abseiling down sections – you’re good at abseiling, for whatever reason – ziplining – no such luck here - and climbing. Much of the time you think you should be bolted into the wall or something, because shit, these rocks are slippery, you aren’t. Many of the times you are told to jump exactly here but not here because there’s a big rock here and you will dash your face open like a melon, perhaps a cassava, if you hit the big rock, that warning only serves to make you jump towards the big rock face first, or the wicked undertide which will take you into a cave area where Mike can’t come get you, or whatever, slow, painful death, lingering in a coma, lawsuits, tears, atrophied limbs, sadness. Hillary Swank will for no apparent reason except masochism play you in the TV movie. But you get out okay. Very tired, pretty cold – your wetsuit is really tricked out, as far as these things go, with about twice or three times the heat protection you get from the wetsuits you’ve used bodyboarding or whitewater rafting, but still, it’s water from a glacier, flowing into a glacial lake, and you’ve been in it and scared for three hours. Mike, at least, has warmed up to you a bit, because he was pretty sure you were going to die, and he realized after the first mishap that he forgot to get you to sign a litigation waiver.
The hapless Swedish girl working at the small café in Glenorchy flirts with you a bit, even though she’s really not good enough on the register yet – having apparently started that morning, to risk talking and entering prices at the same time, and that makes you feel a little better, as does the espresso. The espresso costs you 350 dollars when you’re pretty sure it was supposed to cost 3.50, but you don’t mind, because a world of expensively clumsy Swedish girls you’re not at-all interested in because you’re dating the jaw-dropping, sigh-inducing Katherine Thompson - who is apparently not mentioned enough in this blog - is infinitely better than a world of hard, slippery rocks and caribiners which won’t unlock and safely attach you to a rope you should have been hooked on to twenty meters ago. Meters are bigger than feet, incidentally.
Mike drives you back to your hostel. On the way the both of you stop for Mike to pick up some equipment at a secluded resort looking place on Lake Wakahootyhoo, or whatever, at this point you’ve stopped caring about how the Maori thought of the lake and the surrounding mountains as Gods, having pretty much figured out that in the case of the New Zealand Maori the DOC would be more efficient if they put up signs at places indigenous peoples didn’t think of as divine. (Entering Stretch of SH1 between Oamaru and Timaru – thought of as “a pretty boring stretch of highway, if you think about it, definitely made out of ordinary asphalt and not some sort of weird transportation god, in any case” by natives). As you drive back to the highway, he tells you that a night in that place costs 2000 dollars. You reflect on this. “The property was purchased by the CEO of Levi Strauss in the 70s for around what he charges someone to stay for a week now.”
“Huh.” You say. What do you say about something like that? Mike laughs, he knows exactly what you mean. For a nice little moment the two of you bond over the extent to which rich people are stupid dicks.
“Hey, how close did I come to that rock on the second jump?” you ask, after a few minutes of companionable silence. He looks over at you briefly before executing a pretty sharp turn, and shrugs reassuringly. “Close enough.” That’s really deep, Mike, you schmegel, very zen.
Are You Empty? Jesus Will Fill The Void.
Immediately I think Jesus is hitting on me, using the storefront of the Queenstown Salvation Army as a sort of real estate wingman. I can’t help but respect that, even if I am forced to conclude, given my lack of immediate joy at the prospect of Jesus entering my void via my exposed ribcage, as is clearly suggested by the purple robed skeleton display next to the placard, that the son of God is not quite ready for this jelly.
He almost was, though, about two days ago, the scamp, when he playfully dunked me under a waterfall called “Big Kill Splash” or something like that – my canyoning guide had a really thick accent – and knocked me off course, almost toppling me, still submerged, down a chute into another pool, where I would have probably “cracked my head open good.” That I understood, after my guide dragged me back to the rocky bank and sat me down for a few minutes to catch my breath. What I couldn’t understand, not immediately, was that not five minutes after I escaped that wily void-penetrating Jesus and the jaws of death that, thanks to Mr. Skeleton, I now picture as his henchman, he wanted me to jump back into the murder pool.
Canyoning is rough, I think I can say with some certainty. I have bungy jumped, hangglided, canyonswung, jetboated, and river rafted, and skydived, all without batting an eye. Well, I batted an eye once, but nobody was looking, except this one kid, who I threatened to kill if he ever told anyone. Canyoning blew my doors off. It spanked me like a naughty stepchild. Which is to say, it spanked me with obvious relish, as you would a stepchild, not as a stepchild would spank you; please stop being ridiculous. I threatened to kill the kid, the one who saw my eye involuntary bat, by kickboxing him through a picket fence until his face exploded. Those were my exact words. It just came to me – I don’t know how to kickbox but I have, in fairness, seen Say Anything, like, a million times.
Here is what canyoning is: you are picked up at your hostel in Queenstown by Mike who informs you with his mouth that you will be his only canyoner today because he had no other bookings, and informs you with his eyes that he hates your stupid handsome guts – you are, in this canyoning scenario, very handsome - because he’s got to spend his day off carting your FOC ass through Routeburn Canyon. The next 40 minutes or so, as he drives you out to Glenorchy, are largely spent in silence, as Mike inventories the things he could be doing – golfing, sleeping in, skinning you like a possum, etc – instead of taking you out canyoning and you, for your part, realize you probably should have offered to drive in to Glenorchy; you hadn’t realized Routeburn Canyon was so far away. You think about mentioning this realization to Mike, but think better of it.
TIPBOX: If you’re going to go canyoning, try not to have the guy who knows what he’s doing and who may have to save your life a couple of times, not hate you.
So you get out there, into your manbreast enhancing wet-suit, and your guide just sort of takes off, so you follow, caribiners jangling from your testicle-cuddling harness as you bound through a couple of rivers – not streams, rivers, which are hard to ford because rivers = stronger than you - before hooking up with the Routeburn Track for a few minutes. Eventually you get to the canyon, and stop to take a breather. You are tired. Mikeasks you if you have any abseiling experience. You lie. Mistakes are already being made, and you haven’t gotten out onto the slippery, slippery rocks yet. Did I mention it’s raining. It’s totally raining.
To refresh: the first time you swam the pool, you pushed off hard and made it past/under the waterfall and to the ledge you were supposed to. You are instructed to take a practice jump into the from a spot slightly above it, so as to get used to throwing your legs up when you jump so as to minimize depth achieved on impact. If you don’t minimize depth achieved on impact, you might hit the rock bottom of some of the shallower pools, breaking your legs off at the knee and or hip. Fair enough. You jump, and instead of being able to swim to the far side where you started from – is everybody with me? Good – you get caught by the circular motion from the whitewater dragging back under the fall. Your guide – Mike of the hateful, hateful eyes – is telling you to go with it, to go ahead and swim around (you really have no choice at this point), but you have no momentum and almost die, and then you swim it again, and you make it, but you’re very, very tired. Immediately, like, two minutes later, Mike wants you to slide backwards down a chute into a pool, which you also need to swim out of quickly. You balk, because fuck that, man – word? Word. - and Mike becomes visibly disgusted with the paradoxical temerity of your unfuckingbelievable cowardice.
You have about fifteen or twenty obstacles to go, and have made it through two.
You do everything else with more success, jumping when and where Mike tells you to, abseiling down sections – you’re good at abseiling, for whatever reason – ziplining – no such luck here - and climbing. Much of the time you think you should be bolted into the wall or something, because shit, these rocks are slippery, you aren’t. Many of the times you are told to jump exactly here but not here because there’s a big rock here and you will dash your face open like a melon, perhaps a cassava, if you hit the big rock, that warning only serves to make you jump towards the big rock face first, or the wicked undertide which will take you into a cave area where Mike can’t come get you, or whatever, slow, painful death, lingering in a coma, lawsuits, tears, atrophied limbs, sadness. Hillary Swank will for no apparent reason except masochism play you in the TV movie. But you get out okay. Very tired, pretty cold – your wetsuit is really tricked out, as far as these things go, with about twice or three times the heat protection you get from the wetsuits you’ve used bodyboarding or whitewater rafting, but still, it’s water from a glacier, flowing into a glacial lake, and you’ve been in it and scared for three hours. Mike, at least, has warmed up to you a bit, because he was pretty sure you were going to die, and he realized after the first mishap that he forgot to get you to sign a litigation waiver.
The hapless Swedish girl working at the small café in Glenorchy flirts with you a bit, even though she’s really not good enough on the register yet – having apparently started that morning, to risk talking and entering prices at the same time, and that makes you feel a little better, as does the espresso. The espresso costs you 350 dollars when you’re pretty sure it was supposed to cost 3.50, but you don’t mind, because a world of expensively clumsy Swedish girls you’re not at-all interested in because you’re dating the jaw-dropping, sigh-inducing Katherine Thompson - who is apparently not mentioned enough in this blog - is infinitely better than a world of hard, slippery rocks and caribiners which won’t unlock and safely attach you to a rope you should have been hooked on to twenty meters ago. Meters are bigger than feet, incidentally.
Mike drives you back to your hostel. On the way the both of you stop for Mike to pick up some equipment at a secluded resort looking place on Lake Wakahootyhoo, or whatever, at this point you’ve stopped caring about how the Maori thought of the lake and the surrounding mountains as Gods, having pretty much figured out that in the case of the New Zealand Maori the DOC would be more efficient if they put up signs at places indigenous peoples didn’t think of as divine. (Entering Stretch of SH1 between Oamaru and Timaru – thought of as “a pretty boring stretch of highway, if you think about it, definitely made out of ordinary asphalt and not some sort of weird transportation god, in any case” by natives). As you drive back to the highway, he tells you that a night in that place costs 2000 dollars. You reflect on this. “The property was purchased by the CEO of Levi Strauss in the 70s for around what he charges someone to stay for a week now.”
“Huh.” You say. What do you say about something like that? Mike laughs, he knows exactly what you mean. For a nice little moment the two of you bond over the extent to which rich people are stupid dicks.
“Hey, how close did I come to that rock on the second jump?” you ask, after a few minutes of companionable silence. He looks over at you briefly before executing a pretty sharp turn, and shrugs reassuringly. “Close enough.” That’s really deep, Mike, you schmegel, very zen.
posted by Jeremy at 11:11 AM
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