OK, onto the second thing that stuck with me from The New Yorker story. Full disclosure: five minutes into the story and I hated Lesh’s guts. The story’s author, Nick Paumgarten, seemed to view Lesh with the sort of whimsical fascination mainstream writers often had for Trumpian behavior in those halcyon days before January 6, 2021. Throw Marjorie Taylor Greene, a case of Natural Light, and a pair of Pit Vipers into a blender and you’d get David Lesh. In total, the piece painted a portrait of a spoiled and rich white dude living fast and getting gnarly, all at the expense of our public lands. In Lesh’s eyes, Virtika was the antidote to the hollow wokeness of the outdoor industry, and he bragged that Virtika sales skyrocketed after his Hanging Lake photo caused a public uproar. His antiestablishment, trigger-the-snowflakes marketing strategy was seemingly all part of an evil-genius plan to sell his tacky outerwear to a very specific demographic-and folks, here’s where I’m guessing-of frat-rush rejects and commenters on your uncle Ron’s Facebook posts. To be fair, Lesh had another motivator: greed. The story’s title, of course, is “Trolling the Great Outdoors. That’s right, David Lesh just wanted to troll people like you and me, and he did so with glee. His sole motivation was to dunk on those uptight outdoorsy types who, you know, don’t want fragile ecosystems ground into sawdust by snowmobile treads and would like to keep mountain lakes as poop-free as possible. Rather than fear punishment, Lesh flaunted his rule breaking for the most 2020 reason ever: to own the haters. The writer of The New Yorker profile, as well as the authorities, knew about Lesh’s offenses, of course, because he documented every single one them on his Instagram page, along with all manner of bro-brah content, like hucking cliffs and riding a giant Galápagos tortoise like a rodeo steer. In another he appeared to drop trou and poop in the lake adjacent to Colorado’s Maroon Bells. In one photo, Lesh appeared to wade across the delicate Hanging Lake, where swimming and wading are strictly forbidden. Now, the snowmobile stuff was far less gross than some of the other photo-op stunts Lesh apparently pulled. A post shared by David Lesh kicked Mother Nature in the teeth with the same adrenaline-fueled zeal that powered Patrick Swayze to shred monster waves in Point Break.
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