The Spirit of Adventure

I have risked my life foolishly.  I can recall, without trying very hard, a handful of occasions where a simple twist would have left me dead and all my friends saying “Gee, I never thought he was that stupid”.  Admit it, that’s what you think when you read about someone getting killed out in the wilderness,  “What a dope”.

My favorite was the time I flipped a canoe while wearing an entire winter outfit and carrying most of my tools in various pockets.  As I plummetted to the bottom trying desperately to untie my steel toed boots, I could just envision the sheriff dragging my body ashore, pulling the pliers, screwdrivers and hammer out of my pocket and telling the assembled media, “What a dope”.  Fortunately for me, the lake was only five feet deep in that one spot.  It didn’t have to be.

Increasingly, the papers are full of thirty, forty and fifty somethings who perish in similar adventures.  The richest of them die climbing Mt. Everest or fishing Alaskan streams, while the poor die climbing Mt. Washington or trying to navigate the mouth of the North River.  They all share one thing though.  They stepped out of their everyday lives and tried something.  What dopes.

A friend of our’s went this way recently, meeting her end in a wilderness accident very, very far from home.  She risked her life at least as often as I did, but she was not, I think, a reckless person.  It was a calculated risk that she took, to live the way she believed even though staying home would have been safer.  She had an idea, a very strong belief about how best to live her life.  That belief included long walk’s in God’s country, far from the suffocating embrace and warm safety of modern society.  She knew the risk.

That I have friends who’ve died is an accident in itself, I suppose.  Plenty of people my age have never been to a funeral for anyone under 60.  They sail on in the comfortable belief we all had as kids - that old people die and everyone else just lives forever.   Not me. 

When I was young, I wanted desperately to be grownup.  I knew just what it would be like, that I would be a writer, and have a dog and a wicked cool girlfriend.  I even knew that I’d have a broken leg, though I didn’t think it would hurt as much as it did.  What I never suspected though, was that I would ever know so many dead people.  This does not make me tragic, noble, or even wise.  Like all survivors, my first and most persistent reaction is that they’re dead and I’m not and that’s better than the other way around. 

My other reaction is harder to quantify, but no less persistent.  I cling to the things they said - terminally ill Jack’s reaction to a get-well card -  and the things they gave us -  Vanda’s rescue pup Dudley – and invest them with all the value of the life, now passed.  When I look at Dudley, I see not a self-absorbed 60 pound eating machine but a life saved by an earnest woman who couldn’t turn her back on someone in need.

Vanda, wherever you are, we took good care of Dudley and we remember you.