Another “Bucket List” in the Penny Press!

The lad mags I love so much have a love of their own: so-called “bucket lists”! For some unaccountable reason, the core readership of magazines like Esquire, GQ, Outside, Details, and Men’s Journal – over-monied young white male douchebags – just love “bucket list” features designed to help them tick off the last few things they want to do before they die, even though they’re in their mid-twenties. True, most of them are dumb enough to consider some kind of smoking (asshole cigars, trendy-legal pot, “vaping,” or what have you) as a fashion or “lifestyle” choice rather than a corrosive chemical addiction, but even indulging as they do, simple actuarial probabilities give them at least twenty more years of racist, misogynist condescension before they have to start trash-talking and firing their way through a succession of long-suffering doctors. So you wouldn’t think they’d care all that much about “bucket lists” designed, at least in theory, to round off a few loose ends from a long, adventurous life. But no – hardly three issues of any lad mag go by without such a list.

Take the one in the latest issue of Outside. It’s by Kate Siber, which certainly sounds like a woman’s name, but the list itself couldn’t be more lunkheadedly masculine if it were chiseled on the wall above a men’s urinal in Pamplona.

I confess, when I read these lists I like to check off the items on them that I myself have done. Of course, when I did them, I had not thought of any “bucket list” in mind – I was just out in the world, trying to enjoy myself and do interesting things. And yet, it turns out I scored fairly well on this latest list. It’s true that I’ve never “cage-dived” the enormous great white sharks that swarm off California’s Farallon Islands (as, indeed, no sane person has), but even so, I’ve managed to do a quite a few of the things on this.

I’ve “tripped out” on the Northern Lights, for instance. The list advocates seeing them in Iceland, and I’ve done that, although I’ve also enjoyed them in many other places, including dark spots far, far from the lights of mankind. Likewise the “go it alone” entry, which encourages readers to go solo camping; the list emphasizes that if you’re doing this for the first time, you should prepare extensively so that you don’t end up the dumb live-footage emergency-rescue clip at the end of the evening news, and I agree. It also helps to have a group of well-trained dogs along for the trip – not quite going it alone in that case, but my, they do come in handy.

Likewise the list urges its readers to try North Rim back-country camping down the Grand Canyon and paddling the remote beauty of the Allagash in Northern Maine, both of which I’ve done. Spending the night lodged high in a Douglas fir is also recommended, and this, too, I have managed to do, though never strictly voluntarily. And utterly in-voluntary have been any of my up-close encounters with grizzly bears, and yet this article in its madness suggests that readers seek out these 600-pound killing machines – go to Admiralty Island during salmon season and just hang out with the bears, who are so intent on gorging on salmon that they’re “decidedly carefree about your presence.” To which I can only add: they’re decidedly carefree about your presence – right up until the moment they’re not. At which point you become intimately acquainted with the fact that a) they’re extremely easily enraged, b) they have claws the size of ice-picks, and c) they can accelerate to 45 mph in the time it takes you to pee yourself. Sheer insanity, to knowingly go anywhere near them, salmon of no salmon.

But one item at least on this list is something twenty-something douchebags are unlikely to do but that I can testify is life-changingly worth doing. It’s listed under “Cross the Ocean,” and I’ll quote it in full: “The right way to do it, as part of a sailing crew. Online hubs list openings for sailors on boats making crossings. Many captains don’t require extensive experience, and they’re happy to offer passage if you’re willing to work hard for it.”

That’s simply, absolutely true (and was true even before these mysterious-sounding “online hubs”), and the adventures that can result from picking up and making that choice enormously out-distance mountain-biking down a vertical rock slope in spandex or hiking to find that one super-rad hot spring in Utah. But then, if you made the mistake of telling any of those accommodating captains that you were checking them off your “bucket list,” you might find yourself swimming home.