Thank You, TLC, Wherever You Are

Well, it’s that time of the year again. The most wonderful time of the year, in fact. The time when we kiss goodbye the previous twelve months, throwing open wide our arms and embracing the next dozen. It’s a time for letting go of the old and ringing in the new, for reflection, for honest appraisal, for fresh starts, for…champagne. Lots and lots of champagne.

And even better, it’s also the time when GPB comes out with our year-end wrap-up. It’s our look back at the highlights of the past 365 days, condensed nice and neat into a Top Ten List. Which is all well and good, except this was such a banner Pink Boots year it is virtually impossible to fit into one little catalog a true accounting of all of the memorable moments that resulted from a full twelve months of epic overindulgence, confused ethics and questionable decision-making skills.

So, what then, to do? After many long, fruitless minutes spent pondering this very question, inspiration struck, oddly, in the form of a once-popular female R&B trio and their multi-million-selling effort, CrazySexyCool. Because though I have yet, as of this writing, to incinerate a NFL player’s home in a fit of pique like dearly departed Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, I do feel 2011’s adventures can broadly be broken down into categories inspired by the title of TLC’s second album. Sorta.

Ok, maybe I’m reaching, but it’s the day before Christmas and I need to get this piece wrapped up because I still have shopping to do, dammit. And I need a pedicure. Desperately. So without further ado here, in no particularly order, are GPB’s CRAZIEST moments of 2011:

• Descending Into Quebec’s Jacques Cartier River

It wasn’t just that it was February in Quebec, and the Jacques Cartier was covered just short of entirely in a six-inch thick sheet of ice. It wasn’t just that it was dusk, a few quick minutes from full dark, or that it was snowing big fat flakes hard. And it wasn’t even that the ladder down into the water’s black, hopeless depths looked as shaky as a bowlful of Jell-O on a rocking chair. It was that Le Nordique, the magnificent Nordic spa where I was whiling away the late afternoon hours had emptied out with a disquieting suddenness that in horror movies tends to signal a giant half-mutant ax-wielding cannibal is about to appear. I mean, suppose I was swept by the river’s current out of the bathtub-sized hole that had been chopped in the ice? It would be well into spring thaw before my fish-ravaged corpse popped to the surface. Nonetheless, into the river I went.

• Scuba Diving Big Corn in the Caribbean

The first time I went into the sea off Nicaragua’s Big Corn Island wasn’t what I’d call crazy, despite the six-foot swells that tossed me around like a wet sock in an empty dryer. See, at that point I wasn’t afraid of the water. I wasn’t suffering from claustrophobia or fear of drowning, or pondering the very real, if admittedly remote possibility that I if somehow did manage to submerge myself deep into the ocean’s mystical blue depths my brain might rupture or my lungs explode. No, that came at least 15 seconds after I launched myself backward off the edge of the dive dingy – and shortly before I attempted to climb the ladder back into the boat still sporting not only my air tank and regulator, but also my weight belt and flippers. Nonetheless in a feat of what might appear to be courage but was, in all honesty, much more likely a potent combination of drooling idiocy and brute stubbornness, I actually went back into the water, eventually managing to hunker down on the ocean’s floor, 35 feet beneath the surface.

• Paragliding Over Jackson Hole Wyoming

It’s a doozy, that first step. Three thousand vertical feet straight down, with only a thin air-filled bit of cloth keeping you from plummeting straight to the valley floor. Yes, I was trussed like we were two turkey legs on Thanksgiving morn to Scott Harris, Jackson Hole Paragliding’s profoundly capable and deeply attractive proprietor. But though I knew consciously the chances of something going amiss and Wyoming winding up splattered with Jillparts was small, as we stood waiting for a good gust of wind the animal side of my brain more or less constantly pleaded with me to take off my helmet and step away from the side of the mountain. That is, until our parachute was filling with air and Scott was yelling at me to run – not even walk – run toward the edge. And I was.

• Shootin’ Big-Ass Shotguns At The Homestead, Virginia

Ok, so compared to jumping into frozen rivers in the midst of Canadian winter, or off mountains in Wyoming, perhaps blasting away at a few clay pigeons at The Homestead, an ultra-luxe resort in Virginia might seem downright…tame. But consider this: someone actually put a 12-gauge shotgun into my hands. And this massive weapon wasn’t loaded with rock salt, neither. Nope, we used regular old, kill-you-deader-than-Lindsay-Lohan’s-career-if-you-get-hit-with-‘em buckshot shells. While it was damned crazy holding that big, bad weapon, and even crazier still firing it, what was craziest yet was how much I enjoyed shooting it – and just how damned good I was at it. When you can beat a good ol’ Georgia boy your first time out on the range, well then, as I was told, “Girlie, you a natch-ral.”

• Boarding Volcanos in Nicaragua

I admit that preceding the very most frightening, seemingly foolhardy things I do – like before I got back into the water off Big Corn – I often have a moment, clear and still, like a placid lake in a forgotten forest – when I wonder just what in the hell I’m thinking. But never, in the entire history of Pink Boots – not even that night in Ohiopyle, PA, when I challenged those three strapping, testosterone-fueled adventure racers to that tequila drinking contest – have I ever regretted a decision more than when I stood at the top of Cerro Negro, a seething, smoking, absolutely and utterly live volcano in Nicaragua, and looked down 1,600 feet to the bottom of its bald slope. So steep was this incline that I couldn’t see its end; so high was it that the truck that had ferried me from Leon to the volcano’s base looked like a Tonka toy. And I was to sit on what was called a sled but was more accurately a couple of wooden boards nailed together, and ride it to the bottom. That I actually did so was due simply to the fact there was no other way – short of hiring a helicopter to pluck me from the peak – to get back down.