The first chapter of Death in Yellowstone deals with death by geothermally heated water, and it's a good deal grimmer than anything in Stiff; descriptions of the decomposition of dead bodies are all very well and gross, but the story about parents watching their four-year-old die screaming in a boiling hot spring is emotionally much harder to take. The same applies to the saga of the guy who dove headfirst into a hot spring to rescue his dog (which also died), the park ranger who fell into a hot pot during a snowstorm, and various other people who fell or jumped into scalding pools and who took, in most cases, an agonizingly long time to die.
After that gruesome start, the rest of the book is a relatively straightforward catalog of deaths in the last 120 years or so, broken down by cause of death: avalanche, exposure, drowning, lightning, and pretty much everything else you'd expect in the wilderness, plus sections on murder, suicide, and disappearance. Occasionally there's something worthy of the Darwin awards, like the people who go right up to a buffalo to take a photo (or, worse, try to pose their children on the animals' backs), but mostly it's either just sad or mildly stupid stuff like backing a car off a cliff.
The book's bottom line is that people tend to assume that a national park is as full of safeguards as a modern office building, and that that's the kind of thinking that can get you killed. The book isn't consistently gripping, especially since only fragmentary data were available for many early deaths, but it is a useful reminder that knowing the risks and trying to plan for them is definitely more appealing than thinking, with your last breath, "Well, now, that was dumb."
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3 comments:
puh-SHAW! Stiff wasn't ever gruesome, just delightfully morbid! Mary Roach is on my top 5 people I would really, really, really, really, really love to invite to a sex-toy party or some other equally odd soiree.
And not to tattle, but Blogger wouldn't let me underline Stiff so I regret that I am exhibiting poor style.
But I was extremely glad that Stiff didn't have pictures or, urg, scratch-and-sniff features. I was just surprised how much more shocking the stories of the deaths themselves were than all the ooky details about putrescine and innards deliquescing.
If you invite Mary Roach to a sex-toy party, what are the odds that anyone would pay attention to the sales pitch? I'd vote for a black-tie dinner and conversation instead.
I could totally see myself dying at a national park. And, after reading The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I am officially afraid of hiking anywhere on the Appalachian trail by myself.
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