Kevin Fedarko Is an Idiot

And other weird summer thoughts

Kevin Fedarko is an idiot.

That’s his opinion, not mine. He’s also impulsive and shortsighted, a slow learner. Fedarko—who takes us along with him on A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon—set out to hike the length of the Grand Canyon with his buddy, photographer Pete McBride. He could easily have presented himself as a “superman,” an ultra-athlete adventurer who sought out and conquered this immense challenge. 

But A Walk in the Park is not the story of man conquering nature. Rather, it’s a story of humans coming to terms with the immensity of trying to move through a challenging and sometimes hostile desert environment. Fedarko tells us of his and McBride’s impulsive decision to “get up off the couch” to hike the canyon and explains how they got themselves so far out over their skis that they nearly died, several times. Fedarko never pretends that he’s anything but lucky, not just to have lived to tell the tale, but also to have found fellow adventurers who helped him along the way.

Fedarko’s humility is a powerful narrative tool, for it invites the rest of us mere mortals to go on this adventure with him, to feel the fear and the reverence of journeying into this amazing landscape and tackling the biggest challenges you can imagine. 

It’s a fantastic book and going for the audiobook, narrated by Fedarko himself, makes it all the better. (The voices he gives to characters, especially his buddy Pete, are priceless.) If outdoor adventure books are your  thing—good god, they’re mine!—go out and read or listen to the book.

End of book review!

A good book has a way of making you see the world differently. Fedarko’s book, for example, has been helping me get my head out of my ass. I inserted my head in my ass back in March, when I set about to explore my “personal myth” and ended up convincing myself that I deserved not a whit of credit for anything I’ve ever done. I didn’t choose to be who I was, I reasoned, and to take credit for the decisions that got me where I was would be to be self-delusional, something I don’t want to be. (Funny thing is that it was another book, Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, that set me down that path.)

Taking the absence of free will too seriously drove me into a bit of a writing funk: I couldn’t figure out how to write the stories I wanted to tell, personal stories, if I didn’t trust that I had any real agency in making decisions. How do you explain decisions when you’re not sure you’re making them? So I’ve been treading water.

But Fedarko showed me just how compelling a first-person narrative of adventure could be. He didn’t bother to wonder about the deep reasons behind his decisions; he didn’t ponder whether he was just blindly following the dictates of his genes and his environment. How the hell are you going to know those things anyway? As I listened to Fedarko describe how he got himself into river rafting and eventual canyon hiking, I realized just how much I’d been overthinking this whole “free will” thing.

Overthinking! Kind of my game.

Sara and I have been overthinking the question of whether we should move for several years now. Enough so that we built a spreadsheet to identify all the qualities we were looking for in a home, and have been scoring and weighting each of those qualities for each place we looked at, so we’d have an aggregate score that we could compare to our existing place. Thinking so rigorously and regularly about this meant that we were constantly evaluating places we’d visit to see how they would stack up (I wrote about this in “Extreme Walkability.”)

This whole looking-at-houses thing is Sara’s passion, not mine. She looks at house listings every day and restrains herself by only showing me the ones she really loves. For a long time, I resisted even engaging with it, in part because it scared me that she actually meant it, that she’d actually want to move. But then I realized it wasn’t going to be good for us to be crossways on this stuff, so I better figure out how to have these conversations with Sara. We make all the big decisions together, so we built this spreadsheet to help us evaluate whether we really wanted to move.  

When we went off to Walla Walla, Washington, to celebrate my recent birthday, we focused on things I wanted to do. We went on bike rides and ate at nice restaurants and visited Palouse Falls and went to a winery and a brewery. But we couldn’t help but notice how nice some of the neighborhoods were, how walkable; how beautiful the rolling hills were in the fading light; how pleasant the town felt. Sara had quickly identified half a dozen houses she really liked, and we drove by them just to get a look ... but I didn’t want to call realtors or go to open houses. It was my birthday weekend, dammit!

And yet, as we were driving the five hours home, we got to talking about how much we liked Walla Walla and convinced ourselves that we wouldn’t be true to our “House Ratings” spreadsheet if we didn’t go take a look at a couple of these houses. Two days after we had returned home, we turned back and drove back to Walla Walla!

Our second trip in 10 days put the kibosh on our house hunting, however, and in the best of possible ways. We had set up these criteria that we thought would make us move, and Walla Walla seemed to meet these criteria … but we had to know for sure. We owed it to ourselves to go visit these houses, to learn more about the climate and the town and the availability of healthcare, etc. And when we did that, when we really tried to imagine ourselves living in this new town, in these new houses, we could plainly see that we didn’t want to move.

As we drove home the next day, Sara said, “I’m turning off all my real estate alerts, I think we’re staying put.” It was a great feeling, to realize that the home we have lived in for 27 years, and have remodeled extensively to fit our tastes, really was our dream home. 

I gotta say, when you’ve overthought something for a long time, so much so that it feels like you may be trapped inside a labyrinth of your own creation, but then you resolve it, it feels pretty damn great. 

Writing about Veggies

I’d been doing some overthinking on a much smaller scale related to this little “side project” I’ve taken on: helping my friend Petrina create content for the weekly newsletter that she sends out to people who buy into the CSA¹ at her farm, Skylight Farms. 

Each week, I write a couple paragraphs and link to a couple recipes associated with the veggies that are coming to the market that week. So I’ve done bits on asparagus and radishes and mizuna and so on. It’s really a fun opportunity for me to learn more about these veggies and test out new recipes, and it helps Petrina too, which makes me happy.

One of the sources I keep going back to is a book called Bounty from the Box: The CSA Farm Cookbook, by another friend of mine, Mi Ae Lipe (who just recently brought her writing on driving over to Substack.) Mi Ae calls this a cookbook, and fair enough, it’s got lots of recipes, but there’s so, so much more to it: it’s a deep dive into the history, nutritional value, and preparation methods for more veggies than you’ve ever heard of, and add to that a bunch of interesting asides about the ins and outs of growing food. It’s so damned impressive, and I consult it nearly every time I write a piece for Skylight.

Anyway, I wrote to Mi Ae and told her how impressed I was with her book, and she told me that she sells access to all the copy in this book to farmers who need help with this side of the business … but because we were friends, I could have it for free. She sent me the content, a huge PDF file, and made it clear that I could just cut and paste nearly all of it.

I was freaking paralyzed!!!

I sat on the file Mi Ae sent me for 10 days. Couldn’t even open it. And then when I opened and realized there was all this pre-written copy, I was paralyzed further. It made me queasy to think of just taking someone else’s words and using them for my ends. 

I didn’t want to plagiarize! Plagiarism pisses me off. It offends me (and I’m not easily offended). When I was editing reference books years ago, we would occasionally get a writer who submitted material that was plagiarized. One such scofflaw was an assistant professor at my Alma mater, Michigan State University, and when I found that he had boldly lifted several paragraphs from an online source and claimed them as his own, I was really irked. I strongly considered turning him in, exposing him to his academic department, but decided that rejecting his work with a strong reprimand was enough.

When I was teaching college writing I’d give kids the benefit of the doubt, and when they submitted stuff they’d clearly lifted from elsewhere, we’d have a nice pleasant conversation about what plagiarism was and why it mattered (and, if I thought they were up for it, we’d talk about how corrosive it was to their character).

I couldn’t just lift Mi Ae’s words, and I didn’t feel comfortable using generative AI to write my copy either. I gave it a shot, and the copy was plausible … but it just felt wrong. Maybe if I was sitting in a corporate marketing gig, just churning out copy for the endless marketing campaigns that make the world go round, I could get used to using AI to do my heavy lifting. But I’m a retired guy writing copy for my local farm because it helps me feel closer to the work they do and it helps me both practice my writing and learn more about veggies. Why the hell would I do anything but write my own copy?

Honestly, I don’t think I’m overthinking that one. There may be some limited cases where it’s okay to find your words somewhere else—to copy them or let AI generate them—but I think the moral value of creating your own work speaks for itself. It’s what makes us human, for fuck’s sake.

Hope you’re all having a pleasant summer. My garden is finally going bonkers and I’ll attach some photos of that at some point, as well as share with you a recent piece of work by my wife, Sara Pendergast.

1. CSA = community supported agriculture, a “subscription” of sorts to whatever a farmer you love pulls out of the ground for the season. If you have an opportunity to get into a CSA, do it.