Escaping The Pit of Despair

There is another category of story which stays in the mind not because it aroused any particular strong emotion. The story lingers because it presented a puzzle, and you just can’t stop trying to solve the puzzle. Not like a “How does the farmer get the fox and the chicken and the bag of grain across the river?” type of puzzle. A puzzle about how to get out of a particularly messy situation.

The story that has haunted me: “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” by Rudyard Kipling. It is a tale of a harrowing place from which there is seemingly no escape. The puzzle: How to escape.

Morrowbie Jukes is an Englishman in India who sets out into the desert and falls into a deep crater. On three sides, the walls are high and steep. When Jukes tries to climb the sand walls, they collapse and he slides back down. In the crater, there is a group of others who have been similarly trapped there. At one point, Jukes discovers that he is not the first Englishman to fall into this pit; the other died, probably murdered.

Now the sand walls are only three sides of the pit. The fourth side is a river. Cross the river and you can go on your merry way. Alas, the river is full of quicksand. But, there is a path across the river; you just have to know the path. Fortunately, this path is known. So, if you tread carefully, you can cross the river. Alas, if you try to cross the river, you find yourself being shot at by someone with a powerful rifle who is down the river a bit, out of sight from the people trapped in the crater.

Now, what do you do? You are trapped in a space with the ragtag and rather eerie group of people who eat crows and have dug narrow holes into the sand wall in which to sleep. So at least you can sleep in one of the holes that someone who died before you used if you are willing to crawl into a small dark space which may still contain a skeleton or two. You are faced with spending the rest of your life in this place unless you can figure some way out.

Morrowbie Jukes tries to find a way out. Over and over. Every new idea fails. Fortunately, in a bit of deus ex machina, his servant finds him without falling in and is able to thrown him a rope and drag him out of the pit of despair.  So, Morrowbie lives happily ever after and now we know about this place. (The story is written as if it is true; it is curious that neither you nor I are spending even a second wondering if it is true.)

What haunts me is trying to think of how to get out of that pit. What is weird is that I know I will never actually end up there, but I have this nagging feeling that I really need to figure out how to get out of it.

How bad is this problem? The Long-Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator and I went camping out on Cape Cod recently. I had read the story a month earlier. But there I was wandering down the beaches of Cape Cod, which are gorgeous, and staring at the sand dunes wondering how one could climb them if they were steep and high. Indeed, I started wondering how steep a sand wall could get; what is the maximum angle at which the wall will hold? How high would it have to be in order to prevent enough momentum from carrying you to the top? Is there a way to climb that would make it less likely for the cliff to collapse on you? Is this just a matter of percentages, so that if you do it enough times, eventually you will succeed? If you don’t know if it is possible, but think it might be possible, how many times would you try before giving up? A thousand? Ten thousand? If you spent all day every day trying to climb the sand wall, how many attempts would that be?

Yep. I spent a good chunk of time at Cape Cod imaging how to escape from a nonexistent crater in the desert in India. I am a bit concerned that the next time I spend myself wandering by a river, I’ll spend the same amount of time trying to figure out how to cross it if someone is shooting at me while I am trying to navigate a specific path to avoid the quicksand.

I think this means “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” is a rather captivating story. Sure, it could be spun as an allegory for British Rule in India, wondering how England will ever extract itself from its Empire. Sure, it can be spun as a gothic tale of horror meant to alarm readers about the scary things that lie outside your safe civilized realm. Sure it could be spun as a pure adventure story.

But, none of those things are the big takeaway I have. I just want to go read a whole book about the physics of sand dunes.