Q&A with Jackson Mattocks
As nonfiction stories come across our desks a bit less frequently, we are delighted to have a new nonfiction piece joining The Wild Umbrella! “Mountain Man” by Jackson Mattocks is as humorous as it is harrowing, and may leave you double checking your routes next time you go on a hike. One of our editors, Róisín Sheerin, discussed with Mattocks some of the details behind this experience of his and what he has been up to since, particularly as a writer.
I looked up the Karwendel High Trail - the information is fairly explicit about it being for experienced climbers only. What induced you to attempt it? Youthful enthusiasm?
Haha, I appreciate the delicacy with which you phrased your question, but I think it was more so just stupidity than youthful enthusiasm.
How old were you when you took the trip?
I was twenty-two when I went on this trek.
Do you still suffer from 'main protagonist' syndrome? Do you ever suffer from being 'just an extra' syndrome?
That’s a good question, but I don’t really feel that I do so much as when I was living abroad at twenty-two and was free to roam the mountains. Now that I’ve returned to Canada and settled into being a grad student for the last few years, I feel far more to be part of an academic/creative community, than an itinerant solo-travelling main character. I think joining the creative writing program at the University of Calgary has made me a feel a lot more connected and less self-centered, so I now feel more like a member of a community than a lonesome main character.
Have you read the book or seen the film Touching The Void? Do you know the story of Aron Ralston who had to cut off his own arm having been pinned by a boulder in the Bluejohn Canyon?
I’m not familiar with Touching the Void, although that does seem relevant to my story, albeit far more extreme than my own, but I do remember watching 127 hours—the film about Aron Ralston cutting off his own arm—as a child and thinking to myself, Why would anyone want squeeze themselves into a canyon like that? But then when I entered my twenties, I likewise found myself with a “youthful enthusiasm” driving me to participate in dangerous activities. While the two examples you provided are a lot more extreme than my own of hiking Karwendel, as it is a fairly popular and well-marked trail, but I can now at least in part empathize with that desire to hike or climb for no other reason than that it is an exciting and somewhat life-threatening challenge.
Would you take similar risks now? More mountain climbing? Do have a sense you may have used up your feline 9 lives?
I’m living in Calgary now, and my girlfriend and I often go out hiking in the Rockies, but we always follow the AllTrails live maps and fortunately don’t intentionally choose the most difficult and dangerous hikes to satisfy some misplaced sense of pride.
It seems so ironic that a person can survive extreme adventures and yet be killed by something as simple as cutting one's own toenails, like Captain Halpin who was the force behind laying the first Transatlantic Cable (he developed gangrene after stabbing his toe with a scissors). Is it down to fate, do you think? Do you feel when your time is up, your time is up? What about Donald Trump dodging a bullet but the Fireman standing behind him being struck and killed? Divine intervention or lucky accident? How must the Fireman's family have felt do you think?
It does seem ironic how fate seems to arbitrarily claim some lives while allowing others to die. There’s certainly no logic or reason to it. For example, on the Karwendel trail, two years after I went on my mountain trek and at around the same time of year, an experienced hiker in his seventies was buried and killed by an avalanche. A lifetime of experience of course means nothing in the face of an avalanche hurtling towards you, and so he died, while I, on my first ever mountain trek, left unscathed.
Donald Trump is an interesting example to bring up, because he in many ways is a kind of walking embodiment of the “main character” syndrome, both in his disposition and in the way that he seems to almost be a staple of our reality at this point in time. I don’t know if the bullet missing him is “divine intervention” or the intervention of a more subterranean force, but I would imagine that the fireman’s family must have been devastated, and from the little I saw on the news from his wife that seemed to be the case, along with her being angry at the ineptitude of the secret service. I think it also says something about which lives and deaths we value. Because of course the murder of this fireman is a tragedy, but the murder of Donald Trump at that time could have likely spelled the beginnings of a Civil War—so I think you could say it’s fortunate for the sake of the nation that he was experiencing some of the plot armour benefits that accompany his embodiment of the main character syndrome.
How does your family feel about your adventures? Do you tell all or are you economic with anecdotes?
Right after it happened, my parents came to visit me and I of course, not wanting to face the reprobation of my mom, left out crucial details about just how must danger I had been in. But I’ve since told my mom how stupid I had been on that hike and how scared I’d been for my life, and she of course thought the whole journey had been very stupid on my part. I agree with her in part, but I also think it was a valuable experience, so long as I learn from it.
What sort of literature are you most drawn to? What projects might you be working on now?
To relate back to your previous question about fate, I’m really interested in novels in which characters go on long sprawling, Odyssean journeys that are largely propelled by fate. One of my favourite novels is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and what I love so much about that book is that the protagonist Theo has almost no say in the most seminal moments in his life, such as stealing a priceless painting in the delirium following a museum bombing. This chance event both strips him of his mother and allows him to meet the love of his life, so he becomes a completely different person because of it. Theo then himself becomes an extremely influential force in the lives of so many other characters in the novel, but so many of these relationships and encounters seem propelled by fatalistic events such as the bombing—and so the story seems to constantly question whether fate governs all reality or whether agency and free will can at times override it. This is a question I also wonder, and Tartt doesn’t provide any easy answers for it.
Do you also write fiction?
Yes, I actually mostly write fiction, but I took a creative non-fiction course in the first year of my PhD studies and despite my initial reservations about writing about my own life—because I’m typically quite a private person—I found that it was in many ways much easier than writing fiction, because when writing memoir the events you are writing about actually occurred, so you don’t have to go through the mental hoops of envisioning a coherent fictional reality. But I now write both fiction, memoir, and autofiction. For my creative dissertation I’m currently working on a somewhat autofictional novel set in Winnipeg, my hometown, and the loneliness and social segregation that constitutes life in that city.
Do you have a favourite writer?/Several favourite writers?
Yes, I would say Donna Tartt and Kazuo Ishiguro are my two favourite writers. I’m far more drawn to character-driven stories, especially those told from a raw and vulnerable first-person perspective, and that’s why I love both Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go more than any other books.
Are you still living in Prague? What drew you there? If you are still domiciled there, do you wish to return to the U.S at some point, or travel elsewhere?
I’m actually from Winnipeg, Canada, but that’s a common mistake, Canadians and Americans share so many cultural influences and we often present ourselves very similarly, but I don’t imagine I’ll be visiting the U.S. for the next for at least the next three or so years. I left Prague in 2023 after having lived there with my two friends for fifteen months. I finished the latter half my bachelor’s degree during quarantine, and was feeling quite cooped up, listless, and frankly depressed, so I wanted to get as far away from Winnipeg as possible at the time. I’d heard online about a month-long TEFL course in Prague called the language house, and that Czechia was one of the easiest places to get a job teaching English in Europe, so right after I finished my degree, I moved to Prague and started teaching. I’m glad I did too, because it was one the best years of my life, spending my time teaching children and young adults, travelling around Europe, and drinking Czech beer with my friends. I did miss it after returning to Canada and often had dreams about being back in some dingy Czech bar drinking beer, but I actually returned to Czechia last summer and spent a month in Brno. The Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports funds a Czech language and culture scholarship program for foreigners, so I had my room, board, and Czech classes covered for the month. It was great, and also put an end to my Czech dreams since returning to Canada.
Does literature about extraordinary travel/sport - climbing, hiking, exploring - capture you? Do you feel you can identify?
I love Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book Into Thin Air, about climbing Mt. Everest and getting caught in a horrific windstorm that ended up killing several of the climbers of the climbers in his group. I had read this a few years before going on the Karwendel High Trail and in retrospect I think it certainly influenced me and intrigued me as to the thrills of mountain climbing and hiking. While the events he recounts are harrowing and tragic, he also conveys mountaineering in a manner that makes it seem so blissful, serene, and rewarding, and I carried some of these expectations into my trek. I think I can somewhat identify with these extraordinary sport experiences, but it is a bit of a stretch to compare my experience with that of Krakauer’s or Ralston’s, who were doing activities far more dangerous and requiring far more expertise than my simply hiking the Karwendel High Trail, a well-marked, albeit challenging hiking trail. But I will say that my inexperience and stupidity did inject a lot more inadvertent danger into my hike than the typical experienced hiker may have faced on that trail, so in that sense I can perhaps identify with some semblance of the danger they experienced, but much of it was simply due to my being not very smart, rather than being brave and bold like the other aforementioned mountaineers.
