SEVEN WAYS to DIE OUTDOORS

So despite your claustrophobia, I ask her, you go back out and risk being buried again?

Well, yes, she says. She's also become a crusader for avalanche transceivers and teaches a course through the Mountaineers to help others stay off unstable slopes. But the experience wasn't so bad that it's given her a permanent snow phobia. "It's actually not as horrible as you would imagine," she assures me. "You know, the beauty of it, like drowning, is that it's very peaceful and quiet."

Debbie Hanley

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IN AN ESSAY WRITTEN last year for the magazine Open Spaces, Dr. Thomas Hornbein, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington and one of American mountaineering's respected elders, suggested that risk is "an essential dietary constituent." It's like a drug, he wrote, "and, as with any drug, dose matters. Too much or too little may not be good for one's health." Nature is inherently menacing; it's liable to kill you when you're most or least prepared. And yet we still venture into it, crave the experience. At some level we need it as much as Dr. Hornbein's drug.

If there is meaning to be gained from these seven deaths, it may be this: If we're going to learn from nature we must be willing to learn that nature is sometimes wrong. We go into the woods to reconnect with wildness. But there's a reason we don't stay. Remain in the wild too long and the wild will kill you. Our ancestors, those poor living-scratchers, learned that lesson the hard way, and after a while started building huts and houses and villages and cities and said to hell with this lifestyle of the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is what seven deaths in the outdoors leads me to—not a waning of my love for nature, but a greater appreciation for its opposite. "In wildness," wrote Thoreau, "is the preservation of the world." In civilization is the making of a better one.