his raging seas

I recently found a blog written by someone I know through the kayak community. And there, in one of his posts, was the "raging seas" comment I recognized from a Dale workshop. We had been surfing the Tybee Triangle all day, and the waves were nice 2-3 footers for the most part. And yet, this person had written on facebook that evening that "the sea was truly raging today!! We had genuine rescues in the almost impossible conditions!" We all looked at each other, blink blink. "Raging seas?!" Really? No. This fellow was in a different class, different instructors. Benefit of the doubt says "it must have been way worse where he was."

Where did hyperbole-laden adventure writing come from? This "raging sea," "angry ocean" "attacked the lines of surf with pure aggression" seems a little silly. His experience is so far from my experience that not only can I not relate but I am so turned off I can not even bring myself to finish reading his blog post. Raging seas...one coach's words come to mind "every man's raging sea is different. What is your calm day may be his 6 foot swell."

Raging seas, where I would say "I was out of my depth"
and shark-infested waters, where I would say "lots of sharks."
Ed wrote:

In today's literary marketplace, daunting feats in wild nature hold little appeal. How did this reversal come about? We remain fascinated by secrets, yet contemporary writing (fact and fiction) revels in individual experience, where the inner lives of characters are explored as exotic landscapes, conjured or real. Besides this turn toward inner landscapes, narrative style is emphasized equally if not more than the tale recounted--Salinger, Hemingway, DF Wallace are pioneers of this mannered approach. 

A surfeit of grandiose Everest accounts surely helped dig this grave, but the bulk of adventure writing today is low-brow, unartful or vain, approaching kitsch. Few adventure writers escape the scorn of the high-brow critic--Thesiger, Mathiessen and Gretel Ehrlich are prominent exceptions. A random pick from my Africa shelves reveals Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness by acclaimed travel writer Jeffrey Tayler. A literary expatriate attempts Conrad's famous voyage, this time in a dugout canoe. Instead he collides with Congo's surreal poverty and extreme destitution, recoils, then finds himself grander for the experience. Self-glorification and the voyeurism of disaster tourism disguised as adventure lit? Little surprise then that the genre feels spent of originality and nuance, resorting instead to spectacle, gimmick or humor. 

Here's a link to the full blog post: http://rackleyed.blogspot.com/2015/08/greenland-end-of-exploration.html

Now, I might have a little trouble accepting Ed's high brow-low brow comments, only because I would prefer not to self-identify under those categories. I get the gist of what he is reaching for, but I was caught off-guard by my perception of him judging. (Then again, do we not all make judgement calls about the literature we read? More thought is required on that topic)

In truth, I am mostly low brow. There, I self identified.

And yet, here I sit, contemplating writing about my adventures. How does one navigate the grey area between "low and high brow?" I don't even know where that border is; much less have an idea of how to avoid it, and its mine fields.