Post 1: Into Thin Air

You can tell the author Jon Krakauer remembers the details of this expedition very substantially. He remembers very small details that really make the story come to life at the beginning. For example on page 49 "The summit looked so cold, so high, so impossibly far away. I felt as though I might as well be on an expedition to the moon. As I turned away to continue walking up the trail, my emotions oscillated between nervous and anticipation  and a nearly overwhelming sense of dread." This seemed to me that doing something like climbing Mt. Everest is such a rush that its like your senses are overloaded and that feeling gets locked into your brain and you remember it forever. I know I personally would forget these types of detail before the catastrophe begins if something traumatizing like that happened to me I would only remember that experience and the rest would be a blur. This makes me connect this to something that happened to me this summer. I was doing an Outward Bound camp and we were canoeing 3 of the 9 days. On the last day or white water canoeing, I don't remember what we did at the beginning of the day like I mentioned before. At about 10:30am we came up to a class 3 rapid and my friend Sylvie and I decided to go on the hardest of the 3. When we got to it and went over the waterfall part but our boat tipped and I got stuck under the air bag that keeps the boat floating when the boat tips. That was the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. I remember swallowing water and choking and getting dunked under as I went through the rapids that were past the falls and getting hit and bashed its rocks. I remember thinking to my self more than once during that time that I thought I was going to die I said it in my mind when I came up and found pocket of air then went back down under. I am also sure that the guys on the expedition were thinking the same thing but more times than me. Even thought my experience with death was immensely shorter than theirs it was that same feeling of hopelessness and thought of dying. It's something that is so scary that it is very hard to explain and I would like to see how well the author does at expressing that feeling later in the book.