All choked up

The cool thing about wilderness is it gives you plenty of time to think. Not about the big world picture, of course. That's a hairy subject for guys a lot smarter than me, like Noam Chomsky or Marshall, the guy who works the meat counter at Smith's.

No, I was into much shallower territory.

I believe it was at 8,500 feet.

I was coming off Prairie Reef Lookout in the Bob Marshall Wilderness when the Deep Thought struck.

(Prairie Reef, by the way, is the highest lookout in Montana at 8,860 feet. Someplace close to the top there is a herd of bighorn sheep. At the top there were some marmots and a prairie falcon, which is a really cool little nasty bird. The reef is a mass of rock — imagine a wave of mud eons old that just sort of stopped— that is slanted at a 50- degree angle on one side and falls off straight down on the other. On the crest of the wave is a lookout. In the lookout I found a guy named Matt who had committed to spending his entire summer up there.

Matt, as you might have guessed, was happy to see me.

"They said you needed beer," I said, as I was reaching the lookout. "Is a case enough?"

Matt smiled. We hit it off well.)

But back to this bagel.

Did I mention the bagel?

So, coming off the reef after visiting with Matt, I had changed my rotten socks off my rotten feet into clean socks onto rotten feet, and I decided to have this bagel for lunch. Not any ordinary bagel, or course. It was an onion bagel that was mushed and bent but not quite broken, and on top of it, like a slab of cheese, I placed a big hunk of Buffalo jerky (which runs about 20 bucks a pound, but, made here locally, locally is well worth it.)

Then, I thought, as I took a big bite of this delicious bagel, what if I choked?

What if I choked to death right here on this incredible vista? There was no one here to give me the old Heimlich maneuver. There were really no logs close by to throw myself over to give myself the Heimlich maneuver.

Surely, I thought as I chewed on my four-day-old bagel, I would die.

Right here.

On the side of this slope. The Chinese Wall in front of me. The herd of bighorn sheep behind me.

I would be known as that guy, yeah, that guy, you know the one, he hiked all over the place. Yeah, he took my kid's picture in the third grade pitching Little League. Yeah, that guy. Didn't he die a weird death?

My wife wouldn't be able to go through the grocery store without people looking at her.

See that woman? Yeah, her husband choked to death on a bagel in the middle of nowhere. Sad.

I chewed my bagel slowly.

Today was not my day to die. A will to live surged up inside me. I swallowed hard and took another courageous bite.

Sure, wilderness gives you time to think.

Sometimes too much.