We live in a world of Dairy Queen Blizzards, smooth fabrics, heated seats and cars that cover a day’s walk in less time than it takes to watch your favorite TV show on something called Netflix. Heck, we can watch that show in the car if we so choose. We live soft and easy compared to our ancestors. They had only one advantage over us: the perspective of knowing how lucky we are to be alive.
The universe wants us dead. Or perhaps, more accurately, it’s built to kill us, and yet somehow we are still alive, for now. The planetary conditions that allow people to eat, drink and breathe without bursting into flames are wholly unique. They might exist elsewhere, but we haven’t found any evidence.
Living in such an environment means accepting limits. At 26,000 feet above sea level, our bodies shut down unless we wear pressurized suits. Project Manhigh in the late 1950s sent an American to record heights in a balloon. A balloon that launched from Crosby, Minnesota, reached a height of 19 miles. Astronauts have even been to the moon, but they can’t stay for long.
As above, so below. A Russian scientific project once dug more than 40,000 feet below the surface of the earth. They abandoned further drilling as temperatures hit 356 degrees Fahrenheit. Fact is, most of the volume of our planet will never be seen or recorded by human beings because of extreme conditions at the boundaries of our existence.
We may travel far in a horizontal sense, but we occupy a band of habitable space that is relatively thinner than the candy shell on a blue-and-green M&M.
Last August, my family and I traveled west for a rare vacation. We’d been to the Black Hills of South Dakota as a family, but never any farther. I once took a flight to California, a shortcut that befogs the experience of traversing the Rocky Mountains. But this time we actually drove into the mountains of western Montana, climbing more than a mile higher than the 1,500-foot elevation of the Iron Range. Our destination was Yellowstone National Park, which sits on a mountain plateau some 8,000 feet above sea level.
We had a great time on the trip, but we weren’t fully acclimated to the altitude until it was almost time to go home. Even that relatively small increase in altitude made physical exertion and sleep more difficult. Conscious hydration helped, but we could not escape the fact that we were flatlanders from Minnesota.
Altitude sickness is real. People report more dramatic symptoms when flying to high altitude cities like Denver because they aren’t acclimating along the way. Individuals have different tolerance levels, and some have experienced “mountain sickness” serious enough to cause brain bleeding and death.
But humans go higher still. The fast-growing city of El Alto, Bolivia stands at more than 13,000 feet, more than double Denver’s altitude. But you wouldn’t want to go much higher than that. Mining operations in the Andes Mountains of South America are known to press the limits of workers, who sometimes have to camp at lower elevations than their work sites just to stay alive.
Most of the time, we remain obvious to the limits of our existence, worrying far more about the limits imposed by our societies and ourselves. Perhaps considering the boundaries of human existence could help us make better use of our lives in this thin candy shell.
My father lives 171 miles from me. My mother lives 26 miles from me. Not quite four miles straight up we meet the inhabitable outer edges of our waning atmosphere and the cold vacuum of space. And yet, as killer stars twinkle in the dark night, my wife and my dog lie next to me, warm and close.
How important our people are, and the air and the water and every little thing that keeps us alive. Our lives — so improbable and fragile — are worth our best efforts.
Aaron J. Brown is an author and college instructor from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com and co-hosts the podcast “Power in the Wilderness” on Northern Community Radio. This piece first appeared in the Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024 edition of the Mesabi Tribune.
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