Confessions of an Urban Nature Lover
I've just posted a new travel humor article on my main website at davethefox.com.
Here are the first few paragraphs:
"Mommy, I don't want you to die."
Kaisa uttered the words with the sweet, naïve worry of a nine-year-old.
I looked at Kaisa's mother, Kari. "Did you hear that?" I said. "She doesn't want us to die. You should listen to your daughter."
But Kari was having none of that. She laughed, the way mothers laugh at their children's sweet naïveté. "Nobody's going to die, Kaisa. We're just going for a little hike."
I didn't believe Kari - about the "little hike," or her promise of survival. Norwegians, I had learned 20 years earlier as a foreign exchange student, love their "little hikes," which invariably become death-defying polar expeditions.
Now, my host brother, Marius, and Kari, his wife, were taking me on "a little hike" atop Mount Ulriken, Bergen's highest peak.
I'm one-quarter Norwegian by ancestry, but apparently, my nature-loving genes are recessive. My idea of exploring the outdoors involves sitting by my fireplace as a program about Mount Everest flickers on TV. If other people want to attempt oxygen-deprived death marches, more power to them. I'll watch their video on the Discovery Channel if they come home alive. I seek thrills in other ways. When it comes to slogging through wilderness with burning leg cramps to look at tree after tree, rock after rock, no thank you.
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