One day in July of 2018, I decided I was going to bag a peak (aka climb a mountain).
I was coming up on a year since I’d moved to Utah to copy edit at The Park Record. And in Utah, you can wake up, look at the weather, and decide right then and there that you’re going to climb a mountain.
So I filled up my backpack reservoir of water, assembled a ham sandwich, and drove 15 minutes to the Clayton Peak trailhead in the heart of the Wasatch Range. In order to bag the 10,721-foot Clayton at that time, you needed to trek up a steep incline, conquer an unnamed peak, rinse and repeat for another mile or so until you reach the top. It’s considered one of the easiest summits in the state — not technical, not far from a road, just steep.
About 45 minutes in, though, I couldn’t keep going. My legs weren’t weak nor was my head getting light, but for some reason, my brain decided that was the end. I summited that first unnamed peak, sat down, and dug into the sandwich before descending. It was a nice lunch with the chipmunks who lived among the rocks, but it wasn’t a triumphant one.
I do a fair amount of recreational hiking and I’ve been in worse shape in my life, so why couldn’t I finish it? Because psychologically, I’d fallen prey to a false summit.
A false summit, in mountaineering speak, is a point on a trail that fools you into thinking you’ve made it when you still have a lot more ground to cover.
It’s more of a concern if you’re looking to go backpacking King’s Peak in the Utah wilderness or arrange a trip to stand in line at Everest, but when you encounter one, it can seriously hinder your will to go on and meet your goal. Even if you’re like me and you’re very far from the average Edmund Hillary.
False summits can break you. And two years on from that failed day hike, a million other things have happened in the world — you know, thinking a global pandemic was finally getting under control, that civil uprisings were over, that wildfires in the west had concluded their season, that hurricanes to the east had already hit their logical limit,. That’s why I’m talking about pointy rocks and chipmunks on this election blog: Don’t let Nov. 3, that magical 3rd of November in 2020, be your false summit. The election ain’t over. There’s a long journey ahead. Now is a time you can build up your emotional reserves, plan for rest stops along the way, and keep your eyes trained on a longer horizon.
Take it from me, a copy editor who hates ambiguity: hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and for the love of God, don’t expect clarity next Tuesday.
In the words of our founder, we’re alarmed by how unalarmed some newsrooms are. Others have heeded the advice and are relaying it to their readers. The universe of scenarios is nearly infinite — there’s legal shenanigans, violence in the streets, maybe I’m reporting to you from the Holy Republic of Deseret by this time next year.
Or maybe those scenarios don’t come to pass, and this election turns into a landslide that just took a little longer to tabulate. (Admit it, an anticlimax after all of this tense buildup could be a relief, but would also be taxing in its own way.)
You know the score. Journalists are under an extreme amount of stress. COVID-19 accelerated and intensified everything that was stressing us out in the first place. Record layoffs and cutbacks in news have resulted in the elimination of even more jobs like the copy-editing gig that brought me to Utah in the first place.
Election SOS has been doing all it can to alleviate the tension, including with the national fellowship I help facilitate where 39 early-career journalists have been doing great work assisting newsrooms with election coverage from Portland to Portsmouth. But at the end of the day, it’s up to the individual and what they can control around them — including whether to compound the inevitable stress, exhaustion and emotional ups and downs that are to come.
Prepare for anything, and prepare with no regrets. And don’t set yourself up to be crushed by considering Nov. 3 to be the end goal.
That’s just a monumentally steep and false summit.
