If at Birth You Don't Succeed (21 page)

Reddit is the self-proclaimed “Front Page of the Internet,” filtering out the best of the Web with no bureaucracy but rather a truly democratic voting process. With the mantra that all links are created equal, anyone can submit a video, a meme, a news story, or an animated GIF of a sea otter dancing in the shower, and the Reddit community will upvote the content they like and downvote the stuff they don't. They'd been my bombastic cheerleaders ever since they discovered my audition video for Oprah.

One of the best things to come out of that whole experience was my friendship with Alexis Ohanian, who is the cofounder of Reddit and the sort of guy who could accomplish more on a groggy Sunday morning than I could in four years of college. Alexis has been one the most outspoken advocates for Internet freedom. He successfully lobbied in Congress against many old men and women with mustaches who didn't understand the value of an open Internet and, in trying to regulate it, were in danger of just shitting the pool and closing it down for everyone. His book,
Without Their Permission
, is a rallying cry for Net Neutrality that also features a picture of me naked in full color.

When
Rollin' with Zach
was unceremoniously dismantled and swallowed up in an endless and unforgiving sea of basic cable, I knew that if I got a second chance to make another travel show, I'd have to forgo conventional channels and get back to my Internet roots. When I told Alexis over Skype that my show had been canceled, he immediately asked, “What kind of show do you want to make next?” without skipping a beat. Luckily, I'd thought about this ever since I realized that
Rollin' with Zach
would be far less spontaneous than I'd envisioned. It bothered me that the Internet community that championed me to begin with was completely shut out of the creative process of the show they helped me win. If I was going to be hitting the road again, I'd want Reddit to be not only involved but in control. And on top of that, I actually wanted to meet up with Redditors in person and hang out with them. With that simple concept we were off and running.

Alexis had already been meeting with Google to discuss original online content that the company was looking to fund. They hadn't been sold on his idea for a talk show, so he started pimping
Riding Shotgun
instead. With all his charm and charisma, he was able to convince them that I had the same Internet appeal as a sneezing panda. And just like that, I went from being Oprah's first flop since
Beloved
to being a travel show host again. When we finally hit the road at the end of July 2012, it was clear that the freewheeling “Just roll with it” mantra that had been missing from
Rollin' with Zach
would be on full display this time
.

Riding Shotgun
promised to be the first travel show “For The Internet, By The Internet”—sixty-five hundred miles, four friends, and a Wi-Fi hotspot. With the power of the Internet to fuel the adventure and thousands of dollars of petrol to fuel our SUV, I jumped into the passenger seat and set out across North America for six weeks with two college buddies and my brother. Acting as both on-camera talent and film crew was Josh, a well-built warrior teddy bear
2
; Aaron, our token underwear model; and Brad, channeling a '70s domestic beer spokesperson with his long blond sideburns. We asked the Internet where we should go and what we should do, using only Reddit for suggestions and meeting up with actual Redditors in the cities we visited. It was either the perfect recipe for adventure or a sure-fire way to be murdered.

Over the course of a month and a half, the Internet guided us on an unconventional journey from the stage of the grimiest strip club in Montreal, to the VIP room of the nicest restaurant in New Orleans, and everything in between. And while the Reddit community digitally shouldered the burden of creative spark for the show, my friends shouldered the physical weight of the show's host on more than one occasion—which is how I got to piggyback my way to remote waterfalls in the wilderness of Blacksburg, Virginia, and over the peaks of mountains in Denver, Colorado.

The drive between Denver and our final city, Vancouver, was the longest of the whole trip. To break up the monotony of nights on the road, Josh decided to spend our remaining hotel budget on lodging that boasted indoor water parks. We were willing to get up at seven in the morning in Billings, Montana, to make sure we had time to splash and frolic without eating into the day's drive, because nothing washes away a month of road fatigue like chlorine. At the mere sight of that slide, I slid right back into my childhood, singing improvised verses to “Part of Your World” from
The Little Mermaid
.

“I wanna go on a waterslide / at eight in the morning in Billings, Montana / swimming around in that … whatchamacalit? / pool!”

All of the feelings I'd had that first time on a waterslide at the pool rushed back to me like a tidal wave, eroding away any bitterness I still held toward these marvelous, whirling, plastic pleasure chutes. They were like crazy straws for people—who could ever stay mad at these things?! I was in my element and was again lulled into a false sense of security that summer, along with my waterslide privileges, might last forever.

We'd hoped to compare and contrast these wet and wild attractions, but when we arrived in Spokane, Washington, an unsympathetic white sign with cruel black letters greeted us with the news that their water park had closed for the season, just the day before. On the surface, this may seem like a simple instance of bad timing. But it's actually because Spokane, Washington, is the worst place on the planet and you should never, ever go there because it's a city of false promises and filthy liars. That dry, empty waterslide should have been a red flag about what was to come, and I guess it was, except the next flag we encountered was a red and white flag with a maple leaf in the middle of it. We discovered that while Canada gave unfettered access to its oceans and waterways, it was rather protective of its trees.

All I knew about Vancouver prior to our visit was that it often doubles for America in a lot of movies because it's cheaper to film there. I also assumed that all Vancouverites were big fans of hemp because my cousin who lives there had, at one point, owned a hemp store. At Christmastime, when the family got together, she'd often gift us with various hemp products—hemp rope, hemp soap, hemp chocolate, hemp notebooks—that would always elicit the same knowing glare of disapproval from my grandma Ruthie. So, as an American who knows very little about the world outside of Walmart territory, I expected the whole city to be pot-smoking hippies who all owned juicers powered by bikes.

By the time we made it across the border, the end of our journey and our budget was in sight. We couldn't afford some of the things that the Vancouver Redditors wanted us to do, so for the first time in the trip we reached out to a local government tourism board for assistance. The partnership gave us access, but it also meant that we felt obligated to follow both their itinerary and their rules. The oversight wasn't ideal, but it meant we wouldn't have to pay for anything, which also meant we wouldn't have to handle ridiculous, Monopoly-colored money with fuzzy owls on it. I mean, if somebody offered you free Canada, you'd take it, right?

So we found ourselves at the Capilano Suspension Bridge, which is proclaimed by Canadians to be the eighth wonder of the world but is more accurately labeled by the world outside of Canada as … a bridge. We met up with a tour guide in a bowler cap and suspenders who went through a rigidly scripted timeline of its construction, which revealed that it was, as I had suspected, originally made of hemp rope. He then took us to the bridge itself, proclaiming, “There it is, the eighth wonder of the world, the Capilano Suspension Bridge, strong enough to hold 203 moose.” Apparently our guide was oblivious to the notion that, outside of Canada, wonder is not measured by the number of moose a structure can hold. “Well, I only weigh as much as three moose,” I quipped. Our guide ignored me, continuing, “The bridge is so high that if you placed the Statue of Liberty in the river below, the bridge would be roughly at her shoulders.” I don't know why but I tried again, shouting, “You would like to do that, wouldn't you! I know about the War of 1812. You tried to burn down our White House!” His reaction taught me the important lesson that if you're attempting to lighten the mood, it's probably best not to insinuate that the person you're talking to and their entire country are terrorists.

Even if our tour hadn't, thus far, produced the most exciting content or the most charismatic guide, there was still the appeal of getting to cross the bridge itself, which was placed precariously over a stunning ravine in the middle of the Canadian Rockies. Though no one had ever fallen off the bridge, it looked bouncy enough and certainly high enough to make the heart jump. For us, the big draw was not the bridge itself but the enchanted treetop town that lay in wait on the other side. I'd always wanted to meet an Ewok and/or reenact scenes from
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
, and this seemed like a grand opportunity to realize one, if not both, of those dreams, putting a glorious ending on an otherwise lackluster first day.

But I felt an all too familiar sting of disappointment when both our humorless guide and several large signs informed us that no strollers or wheelchairs were allowed on the bridge under any circumstances. I interpreted this as a challenge to crawl across it, a proposition that was also denied, despite having previously established that I was far under its maximum moose capacity. It was just like the fable of the Billy Goats Gruff, except the trolls were exceedingly pleasant Canadians, and the only goats they wouldn't let pass were goats with pacifiers or parking placards. Naturally, I was devastated, not just because we were told I couldn't do something but because, after six weeks of finding a way to do almost anything, we'd finally come to a bridge we couldn't cross. And it was an actual bridge!

There was some discussion that we should have just crossed that sucker and taken whatever repercussions came as a result in stride. I was sure Canadian prisons were nicer than most American schools, and I imagined guards apologizing to me for not having enough maple syrup for my pancakes. But our liaison at the Vancouver Tourist Board had been so accommodating that we didn't want to break the rules, even when those rules were keeping me sidelined and excluded in a way that felt frustratingly familiar. Not willing to risk another war with Canada, the four faithful comrades looked across the bridge and decided that unless all of us were able to cross the bridge, none of us would. That steadfast resolve lasted precisely seven seconds before Josh, Brad, and Aaron sprinted across, unable to resist the allure of the woodland wonderland that beckoned from the other side. It was hard to see the forest for the trees that day as I listened to my friends recount their frolic in the Ewok village, but luckily Canada is rich with treetop treasures and, thanks to Reddit, the most elusive of all of them would be accessible to me. Sort of. If we could find it.

While scouring Vancouver's sizable subreddit page for ideas, Josh, my friend, producer, and excessively hairy person, stumbled upon a gaggle of Redditors who were planning a weekend expedition to find the HemLoft, a legendary tree house hidden deep in the mountains of Whistler. Nobody knew exactly where the HemLoft was, which only added to its mystique: a secret tree house, perched on a dangerous slope amid a hemlock grove, discovered by only the boldest of explorers. These Redditors thought they'd cracked its location, so we decided to piggyback off their weeks of research, while I literally piggybacked on Aaron and Josh through the woods. Using a community to discover something few had ever seen was what Reddit was all about. Even if we didn't find the tree house and simply got lost in the woods and eaten by bears, we all concluded that any outcome of this expedition would make for a glorious ending to the show.

Gone were the guidebooks, bowler hats, suspenders, and scripts. As we drove up the mountain to the meeting point, the skies were gray and threatening rain. Our detailed intelligence on the location of the HemLoft turned out to be little more than a few scribbled notes on a crumpled-up piece of paper, probably hemp paper at that. When we arrived, one of our new Reddit companions had already been decommissioned by a vicious bee attack. That early casualty might have shaken lesser men's confidence, but what was
Riding Shotgun
if not aimlessly wandering until we found something cool? So, for the last time, I resumed the Yoda position and hopped on Aaron's back. We trekked into the woods, leaving my chair along the side of the road, reasoning that even if it was stolen, it was our last day and no one gave a shit at this point.

For the next hour we confidently fumbled through the forest. I lost a shoe early on and my socks didn't shield me from the fear that every leaf my foot touched was poison ivy. “Leaves of green, let it be,” I'd always misheard. To make matters worse, there were surprisingly few benches in the forest. Josh and Aaron were understandably exhausted from carrying my useless body, and Brad was characteristically exhausted just from walking and being outside. These types of excursions always left me conflicted because I didn't want to be perceived as a helpless sack of crap that everyone had to lug around, but, for better or worse,
Riding Shotgun
had taught me that sometimes that description is pretty spot-on. My pride aside, we were getting nowhere.