Pro Guiding Service - Of Idiots and Avalanches

The Idiot is bored. These exercises are beneath him--he came to shred the backcountry.

"Why don't you bury this beacon out there, while we turn our backs," I tell him.

"Whatever," he says, grabbing the transceiver.

"Make sure it's on before you bury it."

"What do you take me for?" the Idiot asks.

A few minutes later he gives us the thumbs up, and the student-in-training bursts out of the blocks and flies out over the white meadow in pursuit of the signal. Several minutes later she's no longer flying but pacing herself as she works back towards us.

"I don't hear anything," she tells me.

"What do you think?" he snarls condescendingly.

I search the area too. Nothing. "Where did you bury it?"

The Idiot leads us confidently to a well trammeled area and rubs his palm around a table-sized plot of ground. "It's right in here."

"You sure?"

"Yup."

"How deep?"

"A little more than a foot."

Five of us armed with shovels form a line and start a two-foot-deep excavation of the area. The table-sized area swells into a room-sized plot. The Idiot sits on a nearby pack sporting an amused smile. I'm sweating by the time I walk over and hand him the shovel. "Your turn, maybe it will improve your memory."

"Whatever," he says, taking the shovel.

"Concentrate." I tell him. "If we don't find the beacon, I'm charging you."

"What's it cost?" he asks flippantly.

" $250."

For the first time, the smugness evaporates. He surveys the area carefully and excavates on the side of the pit opposite the other four rescuers. Thirty minutes pass. Still nothing. The Idiot is no longer sure of his judgment and leads us to another patch of ground thirty feet from the first.

"Actually, I think this is the right place."

"Fifteen more minutes," I tell our group, "Then it's invoice time."

Everyone privately prays the Idiot has to pay. Still, we line up and execute a coarse search, sweeping about eighteen inches of snow under our straddled legs as we furrow forward. After ten minutes a shovel strikes something hard. Bingo. We huddle around the beacon awaiting the verdict of what caused this inconvenience. I pull the beacon from its protective stuff sack and check the controls. The switch points to 'off.' The Idiot is staring at his feet.

It hasn't been the training they bargained for, but the Idiot has done this group a favor--he's helped everyone internalize the futility of finding a buried bud who lacks a beeper. It's like...well, like finding a non-beeping beacon.

"It took us an hour to find this guy," I say holding up the beacon. "If it were a friend, there would be an 85% chance he would be toast. I lay the beacon on the ground and listen solemnly for a heartbeat. "Dead awright..."

"He got what he deserved," an unsympathetic shoveller interjects. He fixes the guilty with a stare, "If he's too stupid to use the transceiver he's carrying, do we really care if he's snuffed from the gene pool?"