The Sense Mill
A personal essay
Friends,
I hope you’ll find this essay a useful companion piece to my craft series, particularly this year’s pieces on narrators in nonfiction and the importance of blushing at ourselves before anyone else can.
I plan to prioritize my memoir writing in 2025. Longform essays will be reserved for full members, so if you’d like to sink your teeth into more original work like this, please consider upgrading your subscription.
Thanks, as always, to all who already have. It is an honor to write for you.
Josh
The Sense Mill
As with my first taste of love making or alpine skiing or any of the worthwhile things I have imagined as bliss and discovered as a discipline, my brush with death by heat exhaustion was nothing like I thought it would be. I had been raised to believe in the dichotomy of body and soul, and I envisioned physical death as something akin to falling over the brink of a precipice.1
After nearly ten seasons of wildland firefighting, I was practiced at losing myself in the rhythm of hard work. This summer in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of northern Idaho would be my first with a trail crew, and I looked forward to staying out of the smoke for a change. My crew and I had started down the Selway River Trail before daybreak, hoping no rattlesnakes were coiled in the path. The weather report the previous afternoon had predicted temperatures topping one hundred degrees in the canyons. Twenty-six miles lay ahead of us along the river.
My supervisor had asked us to camp at Three Links Junction, which would have been just over thirteen miles and the rough halfway point, but I was determined to surprise him by finishing the hike in one day. By the time our eight o’clock radio check-in rolled around, I thought, we would be filling our water bottles at Three Links Creek. The rest of the hike to the station at Moose Creek would be a mere stroll.