learned early on in his high sensation experiences that “adventure-
seeking...takes you right to the edge.”
“I think it started when I was 11 years old,” Wes explained.
“My family and I were taking a trip to California. The plane lost
cabin pressure and nose-dived 30,000 feet. I fell unconscious and
perforated both of my eardrums. It was one of the most painful
things I’ve ever experienced. I remember looking out the window
seeing death happening as we nose-dived. Ever since then, when
I’m faced with some kind of adversity, I often try to challenge
myself to do something out of the ordinary.”
As I’ve mentioned in previous chapters, early life experi-
ences may set the stage for sensation-seeking to develop. Nose-
diving 30,000 feet as a child would clearly create a lot of sensation.
It may be that Wes had a higher tolerance in his adult life for
situations most of us would experience as stressful, since he faced
death at such a young age. Whatever the case, Wes clearly
embraced being a sensation-seeker.
In some cases, this was a good thing. Having been in a nearly
fatal accident so early in life led Wes to pursue activities like
mountain climbing and skydiving which, in turn, helped him con-
quer his fears. But even though these experiences usually helped
him, he discovered that sometimes they went too far. One such
experience illustrated how his sensation-seeking was spiraling out
of control.
“When I was in high school, I was big into hiking and
mountain climbing,” he explained. “I decided I wanted to climb
a volcano – Cotopaxi. It’s at an elevation of around 19,000 feet.
I wanted to see what sunrise at the top of an ice-capped volcano
looking down on the clouds was like. I thought, ‘If can do this, I can
do anything.’
“So, I flew to Quito, Ecuador. From the airport I drove to
a little store to pick up a tent and some gear, and then went straight
up to Cotopaxi National Park and started hiking for hours. Going to
the mountain immediately after landing is probably one of the
stupidest mistakes I’ve ever made. I got to the first station where
a lot of climbers stop to eat and chill, and I noticed I had a little
headache. I figured it was no big deal. But by the time I got to
the second station, around 15,500 feet, I knew I was in trouble.
I could hardly breathe and thought, ‘Why am I huffing and puffing?
I’m in great shape. I run all the time. What’s going on?’ Later in the
evening, I began hyperventilating. Everybody went to bed at 8pm to137 / The Dark Side of High Sensation-SeekingDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:20:10, subject to the Cambridge