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The Wilderness Within

Suicide and the Outdoor Life

By Andrew Gulliford

Found in: | Outside | Hunting | Rifle |

"The counterpart of the suicide is the seeker; but the difference between them is slight."

- Paul Watzlawick

With a shotgun blast to the heart, my buddy Jim had finally managed to kill himself. Months earlier, I had returned his guns because he seemed to have risen above the depression that had plagued him.

After learning of his suicide, I fled to the outdoors to grieve. Lying awake on top of a Lake Powell houseboat, I stared at the Milky Way and remembered our last day together - a hike to an 11,000-foot pass, a good meal, a long soak in a hot spring. While small waves lapped at the hull, I wished like hell that Jim had stayed on the pills, kept talking to a counselor, and for God's sake gotten a dog. Anything to pull him out of that dark pit. And I imagined the fatal shot: Jim's blood and bits of his bones scattering, the body falling backward, the gun dropping to the floor. Then silence.
Jim lived 38 years, but for me that stillness will last forever. Hanging in the silence is the survivor's question: why?
Jim was a good landscape painter, a fine outdoorsman, and an even better friend. We hunted and fished together, skied and ran rivers, talked politics, and watched campfires flicker in October after long days looking for mule deer bucks. Like everyone, Jim had problems. He was between girlfriends and had troubles with the IRS. But so what? Life goes on.
Since Jim's death, I've thought a lot about suicide and the outdoors. I've wondered if the wide open spaces of the West are just too big and empty for some of us. Statistics suggest that might be the case. Westerners, I've learned, are far more likely than most Americans to take their own lives: nationwide, there are 11 suicides annually per 100,000 people; in the West, there are 15. And of the 11 leading states for suicide, nine are in the West.
I've also considered the many stories about suicide among outdoorsmen: is there some connection between outdoor people - risk takers - and inner pain?
The quiet solitude of wilderness offers enormous challenges and stimulation. But the return to civilization can be a deadly let-down. In the 1930s, a young gas station attendant from Oregon named Buzz Holmstrom became the first solo boatman to float the entire Colorado River system. Notes from his journal suggest that this enormous feat of endurance left Holmstrom strangely dissatisfied: "the bad rapid - Lava Cliff - that I had been looking for, nearly a thousand miles, with dread - I thought: once past there my reward will begin, but now everything ahead seems kind of empty and I find I have already had my reward, in the doing of the thing." Nine years after his epic journey, Holmstrom took his own life.
Author and Colorado River guide Brad Dimock, who co-wrote the Holmstrom biography The Doing of the Thing, describes the hazards of what he calls "re-entry":

For many of us, re-entry is the hardest and most disturbing part of the river experience. Having just recently discovered (or rediscovered) an entirely different world, it is wrenchingly difficult to leave it, to return to the so-called real world. Which, one wonders, is the real world after all? The more one comes to know and love the River and the solace it brings to the soul, the more miserable re-entry can be. Those of us who spend our lives on the River experience the symptoms on an even greater scale. The end-of-the-season blues can be devastating, and worst of all is the time when a boatman must leave the river entirely for family, health or fortune. Many of us never fully re-enter, but live out our lives trapped in some limbo, torn between the pain of parting from the River, and the joy and vision it has given us to carry through life.

For those who make their livings on the river, suicide could be seen as an "occupational hazard," writes Rebecca Lawton, a former guide. In Christa Sadler's anthology, There's This River, Lawton eulogizes Curtis "Whale" Hanson, whom she credits with saving her life after she was thrown from a boat.
Hanson came to the rescue "in full control of his boat and the situation," Lawton writes, with "a supreme look of concentration on his face, his blue eyes in a focused squint, his blond hair properly tousled and wild. He looked as brave as George Washington on the storm-whipped Delaware, as alert as a predator about to pounce, as unwavering as if he were my best friend."
But Lawton's rescuer could not save himself. Years after pulling her from the water, Hanson would deliberately end his own life. After his death, members of the river community formed the Whale Foundation, which works to help Grand Canyon river guides with employment and health issues - including post-season depression.
"One of Whale's greatest attributes was his love for his friends and his willingness to listen to others as they talked through their troubles," states a Whale Foundation brochure. "Unfortunately, he rarely asked for any help in return."
What is it about being face-to-face with raw nature, doing difficult tasks involving split second decisions, timing, pacing, agility, utter focus through a rapids or on a cliff, tracking a bull elk at sunrise, and yet not having the ability to cope with day-to-day trials and tribulations?
In 2008 in Telluride, a 43-year-old writer, skier, climber, and mountaineering guide died of an apparent suicide. According to the Telluride Daily Planet, Andrew Sawyer "was part of a new wave of extreme skiers who'd decided to conquer the steep and avalanche-prone peaks of the San Juans," including "a first descent of the ultra-steep Wire Couloir, among others." Sawyer battled depression, according to his brother, Hugh, "but his best medication was being outdoors, being active and skiing, climbing, biking, bagging peaks. Doing the things he loved."
In a final essay about extreme skiing in Telluride, Sawyer could have been describing himself: "Despite the risks, there will always be an unquenchable pioneering spirit in someone, somewhere, that will lead us past new boundaries, and even those of us who have faced death eye-to-eye are likely to be there, stepping out into the unknown."

Facing death may be a great adventure, but there are no guaranteed encores. And the living will remain, with questions that can never be answered and holes that can never be filled. After three years, the sting of Jim's death has faded, but it will never completely go away. I need my friend to hunt turkeys with, to teach me more about tracks, scratches in the dust, roosts on ridges, and where to be at sunrise. I need him to share the beauty of life in the outdoors.
And there are a few things I need to tell him:

You could've come back here, Jim. Do you remember the first time we stopped you? It was Christmas and my wife and I were driving toward the mountains to see my sick brother. We got to your house in the falling snow and no one was there. We were worried and then you showed up anxious, breathing hard, sobbing. "I was going to do it," you said. "I was going to do it. Why are you here?"
That's when I collected your guns. Beth drove you to our house in your blue pickup. She took your keys and all the household knives to bed with her. We didn't know you had an extra key. And she forgot one paring knife. You left at dawn. She called the sheriffs of two counties, but you slipped past the deputies and came back to our home, your wrist slit. You told us breathless, fevered stories of coyotes and ravens, of black wings spiraling closer to where you hid in a farmer's haystack. Images borne of hunger, exhaustion, and fear. Earlier in the week, you had tried freezing to death in the woods, but death wouldn't come.
But now you've finally found death. I'm still here, asking why. When hunting season returns I'll see the golden aspen leaves, smell the ponds at dusk, wait for deer to slip through the shadows. But who will I tell stories to at night around the fire?

Andrew Gulliford is a historian, photographer, and professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College in Durango. He can be reached at Gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.