Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
IAN FRAZIER
A Farewell to Yarns
FROM
Outside
A
TRUTHABOUT
theoutdoorsisthatitcausespeopletolie.Strangeforcesoutthereinthewild
have always conspired to corrupt human honesty. Over time, intelligent listeners and readers
came to accept that an adventurer's reports would not consist of one-to-one representations
of fact but instead would contain exaggerations, distortions, omissions, additions, events that
foolishpeoplewantedtobelievehadhappenedbuthadn't,anddeliberate,implausible,fantast-
icallies.Maybethatwasevenareasontherestlessandsketchyamongusventuredintothewil-
derness in the first place: because if we claimed we did or saw something amazing there, who
could prove the contrary? Returned from our journeys, we could brag all we wanted without
fear of contradiction. An enormous attraction of far places has always been that no one else
was inconveniently in the neighborhood to check.
“Here Be Monsters,” the old maps announced, next to drawings of walking leviathan-fish
with huge maws and claws and fangs. The pictures must have been accurate; how would the
mapmakers have known what to draw unless eyewitnesses had told them? Somewhere out
there, travelers said, lived blue-eyed Indians who spoke only Hebrew—a Lost Tribe of Israel,
miraculously transportedtoremotestAsiaortheAmericanWest.Thosewhorevealedthisdis-
covery had not, it turned out, met the blue-eyed (
blue-eyed?
) Hebrews themselves but once
crossedpathswithpartieswhohad.Inventivewandererssaidtheyhadseensnakesthathadbit
their own tails and made themselves into hoops and rolled across the ground, cannibals with
three heads,Arctic dwellers whocovered their earsagainst thesoundofthesunrise,andbeau-
tiful Amazonian women warriors who held healthy young men (often the wanderers them-
selves) captive for sex. Explorers claimed they had climbed mountains they hadn't climbed
and had reached the North Pole when in fact they never reached it. Apparently sober indi-
viduals gave firsthand accounts of seeing yetis in the Himalayas and Nessie in her loch and
jackalopes on the prairies. Old-time sailors boasted of sleeping with beautiful mermaids, an-
noyingly omitting the precise physical details, and according to certain fishermen, mermaids
offering to grant them three wishes had come up in their nets. The words
fisherman
and
liar
are linked in our brains for good reason. And in the interest of brevity, I will pass over the
many stories involving logging roads, elk hunters, space aliens, and intergalactic crossbreed-
ing. There are some doors man was not meant to open.
Lies made the wild scary and alluring. When I was a boy, local places I knew about buzzed
excitingly with crazy tales. In rural Illinois, Argyle State Park was said to be inhabited by a
creature called the Argyle Monster—a huge cougar that had lost its front feet in a trap and ran
