It was not all fun and mosquito bites up north. The two story cabin needed another coat of preservative stain, and standing on ladders on tiptoes while the sticky chemicals ran down our arms and spattered our hair wasn’t what memories are made of. But we finally gave up for the season and headed down to do the “lighthouse walk,” a stroll of 3.5 miles along a nice gravel path to the old light house that is now manned by no man at all, but rather a computerized machine. It was Labor Day weekend and of course the parking lot was filled with cars and SUV’s and campers and one lone bicyclist with long-distance gear attached to the front and back. I noticed him with passing interest, a guy of about thirty dressed in spandex who couldn’t have had less fat on him if he had been flame cured. I pointed out the biker to my son and would have continued on had my son not seen a small license plate attached to the back of his seat that said “Washington.” With that I had to stop for a small chat, whether the biker wanted one or not.
“You come all the way from Washington (state – a good 2,000 miles from the UP)?”
“Yeah,” he said with no small pride, “and all the way to the east coast.”
“Holy cow! And you’re heading back to Washington against the wind?”
Of course he was. He had gone all the way to Bar Harbor, Maine, tooled around Acadia National Park, and was now on his way back against the continental west-east wind just in time to beat the snows in the Rockies and Cascades.
“I bet you’ve had some adventures, huh?”
“It’s been a good ride.” And with that, the conversation ended. He was not annoyed and would have continued, but we had a time constraint ourselves, and more to the point, it seemed to me (maybe incorrectly) that his adventures – or at least the ones he would talk about – all had to do with the challenges of biking. I was looking for my kind of adventures – being taken in by some fanatical religious family in the Green Mountains for a week, or a single woman lonely for some anonymous company, or escaping a half-crazed pot grower in Michigan after being sky-high for three days straight. Those are the kind of things that had happened to me in my travels (I will plug my hitching book here, Dream Weaver), but it was apparent to me that this would not be the case with this man. With him, it seemed to be all about the biking. What he was doing was an amazing feat, but that was it. Climb the mountain and come down. Courageous and undoubtedly moral, but limited.
Perhaps I jumped to such a conclusion so quickly because of an uncle of mine who recently died at the age of 97, only his last year spent as somewhat of an invalid. He had lived an astounding life of adventure. Growing up on the Connecticut shore, he had rowed across Long Island Sound in a home-made boat as a boy, climbed the vertical faces of several large cliffs in the area without gear, and in his late teens had competed to be a diver for the US Olympic team. When the Big War came up, he served as a pilot for the B-17 bombers out of England, then again as a jet pilot in the Korean War. He became a math teacher so that he could spend those long vacation days sailing and mountain climbing and scuba diving and who- knows- what. He even ran marathons into his 70’s until his knees gave and his kidneys bled. He was one tough and fearless guy. And yet when my wife met him, knowing of his many adventures, she said, “I never met a guy who has done so many things who is so boring.” This was no disrespect to my uncle, who was not any more boring than many of us. Rather, she presumed he would have been fascinating, a Sir Richard Burton of America, not some math teacher who happened to have done some things.
His two sons were cut from the same cloth. One was flying hang-gliders back in the early seventies when they were even more unsafe than now, jumping off sheer cliffs for updrafts. He held the state record for staying aloft, which he kept breaking again and again until he stopped flying. When I asked about his record flights and why he had stopped, he said, “At a certain point I learned how to stay up as long as I wanted. It got boring.” His brother had no fear of heights either, or of anything else as far as I know, and made big bucks hanging from wires repairing really big and tall bridges. But he, too, had little to say about it. For him, a job was a job.
There are others too, remarkable people who strike one as unremarkable. They may be that way because of humility, which is a virtue that I could better learn, but in the cases I know of, that is not likely. Rather, these people seem boring to us because – and I am presuming here – life seems boring to them. That is why they do remarkable stuff.
My mother, the sister of the fearless math teacher, was precisely the opposite. A walk around the block for her was an adventure, sometimes one of wonder and sometimes one of fright. Colorful flowers and sun and shade literally sang to her, but stray sounds could be those of women or children in danger. Nothing was a simple as it seemed to the rest of us, and she was in almost constant amazement. She would NOT have made a good bomber pilot, and it would have been an adventure itself to see her work up the nerve to approach a cliff’s edge, let alone jump off it with a hang-glider.
The point is, she didn’t need additional excitement. Life itself provided more than enough excitement as it was. I am sure that heaven for my mother is color and light, without a stray sound of potential danger or discord.
Most of us aren’t as fearless as my uncle, or as replete with adventures as my mother, but most of us need at least a little more than what we have to keep the juices flowing. Life as it is is simply not enough, and there is no objective measuring stick for us in what constitutes “enough.” Some men are satisfied with one wife, while others need an endless array of women, or men, or children or whatever, seeking satisfaction in a certain lane where it is never fully achievable. The mother of the red-headed skate border, Shawn White, tells us that her son was always pushing the limits, doing back-flips off the house and racing recklessly down steep paths because he could never sit still and could never be satisfied for long with the last thrill. The pain he often had to endure could not deter him. Then there are the alcoholics and the drug addicts and the billionaires and the professional soldiers and on and on, people obsessed with finding completion that can never be found in behaviors and things.
The above are the special ones that we all see and shake our heads at or sometimes envy, but I think we all have our little obsessions that we think will bring us ultimate satisfaction: chocolate; ski trips or Hawaiian beaches; fishing; mountains or wilderness or a Buddhist monastery; and of course the ever-popular desire for lots and lots of money to complete a host of other obsessions. Many of these work for a while, but we are often surprised when none of them work forever.
It is obvious from this that we were built for completion but often have to learn at great cost what the completion is. Of course it is God, the truth of which is so elusive because that is not how we ordinarily role. We learn that we must accomplish tasks or own things to be admired by others and ourselves. Many of us are told that it is God we are after, but how can we be satisfied with an abstraction when a solid act or possession is so much more real? In time, it becomes obvious to anyone who observes that this “hard” reality is not the real reality, but this truth slips away far more easily than it came. How is it that we can we hang onto this idea when everything else in our ordinary society and personal nature tells us otherwise?
The biker was fulfilling his own need for the time being, which was definitely not mine. But even had I had the additional adventures, I would have been left flat and disappointed not long after, in need of another adventure, another fix. I know this because it has happened again and again, as all things eventually pass back to the standard unsatisfactory reality of the present.
My uncle had no religion or spiritual nature that I know of, and he made it explicit that no memorial or anything at all be made at his death. Ashes to ashes, and that was it. Until now, I have thought that he himself was flat, needing the thrill of death to even feel alive, but maybe there was something to his dangerous obsessions after all. Many paths sincerely taken can lead to the truth. In the end, he could no longer defy death because of his age, precisely when death was not only at his door but finally inevitable. Maybe then he had gotten his needed “hallelujah” moment and his fearlessness had served him well. Maybe then as he looked ahead to the final adventure that would truly lead to no-thing, he had calmly nodded and finally understood: so this is it. After so many struggles, at last I am here. Thank God.
It was not all fun and mosquito bites up north. The two story cabin needed another coat of preservative stain, and standing on ladders on tiptoes while the sticky chemicals ran down our arms and spattered our hair wasn’t what memories are made of. But we finally gave up for the season and headed down to do the “lighthouse walk,” a stroll of 3.5 miles along a nice gravel path to the old light house that is now manned by no man at all, but rather a computerized machine. It was Labor Day weekend and of course the parking lot was filled with cars and SUV’s and campers and one lone bicyclist with long-distance gear attached to the front and back. I noticed him with passing interest, a guy of about thirty dressed in spandex who couldn’t have had less fat on him if he had been flame cured. I pointed out the biker to my son and would have continued on had my son not seen a small license plate attached to the back of his seat that said “Washington.” With that I had to stop for a small chat, whether the biker wanted one or not.
“You come all the way from Washington (state – a good 2,000 miles from the UP)?”
“Yeah,” he said with no small pride, “and all the way to the east coast.”
“Holy cow! And you’re heading back to Washington against the wind?”
Of course he was. He had gone all the way to Bar Harbor, Maine, tooled around Acadia National Park, and was now on his way back against the continental west-east wind just in time to beat the snows in the Rockies and Cascades.
“I bet you’ve had some adventures, huh?”
“It’s been a good ride.” And with that, the conversation ended. He was not annoyed and would have continued, but we had a time constraint ourselves, and more to the point, it seemed to me (maybe incorrectly) that his adventures – or at least the ones he would talk about – all had to do with the challenges of biking. I was looking for my kind of adventures – being taken in by some fanatical religious family in the Green Mountains for a week, or a single woman lonely for some anonymous company, or escaping a half-crazed pot grower in Michigan after being sky-high for three days straight. Those are the kind of things that had happened to me in my travels (I will plug my hitching book here, Dream Weaver), but it was apparent to me that this would not be the case with this man. With him, it seemed to be all about the biking. What he was doing was an amazing feat, but that was it. Climb the mountain and come down. Courageous and undoubtedly moral, but limited.
Perhaps I jumped to such a conclusion so quickly because of an uncle of mine who recently died at the age of 97, only his last year spent as somewhat of an invalid. He had lived an astounding life of adventure. Growing up on the Connecticut shore, he had rowed across Long Island Sound in a home-made boat as a boy, climbed the vertical faces of several large cliffs in the area without gear, and in his late teens had competed to be a diver for the US Olympic team. When the Big War came up, he served as a pilot for the B-17 bombers out of England, then again as a jet pilot in the Korean War. He became a math teacher so that he could spend those long vacation days sailing and mountain climbing and scuba diving and who- knows- what. He even ran marathons into his 70’s until his knees gave and his kidneys bled. He was one tough and fearless guy. And yet when my wife met him, knowing of his many adventures, she said, “I never met a guy who has done so many things who is so boring.” This was no disrespect to my uncle, who was not any more boring than many of us. Rather, she presumed he would have been fascinating, a Sir Richard Burton of America, not some math teacher who happened to have done some things.
His two sons were cut from the same cloth. One was flying hang-gliders back in the early seventies when they were even more unsafe than now, jumping off sheer cliffs for updrafts. He held the state record for staying aloft, which he kept breaking again and again until he stopped flying. When I asked about his record flights and why he had stopped, he said, “At a certain point I learned how to stay up as long as I wanted. It got boring.” His brother had no fear of heights either, or of anything else as far as I know, and made big bucks hanging from wires repairing really big and tall bridges. But he, too, had little to say about it. For him, a job was a job.
There are others too, remarkable people who strike one as unremarkable. They may be that way because of humility, which is a virtue that I could better learn, but in the cases I know of, that is not likely. Rather, these people seem boring to us because – and I am presuming here – life seems boring to them. That is why they do remarkable stuff.
My mother, the sister of the fearless math teacher, was precisely the opposite. A walk around the block for her was an adventure, sometimes one of wonder and sometimes one of fright. Colorful flowers and sun and shade literally sang to her, but stray sounds could be those of women or children in danger. Nothing was a simple as it seemed to the rest of us, and she was in almost constant amazement. She would NOT have made a good bomber pilot, and it would have been an adventure itself to see her work up the nerve to approach a cliff’s edge, let alone jump off it with a hang-glider.
The point is, she didn’t need additional excitement. Life itself provided more than enough excitement as it was. I am sure that heaven for my mother is color and light, without a stray sound of potential danger or discord.
Most of us aren’t as fearless as my uncle, or as replete with adventures as my mother, but most of us need at least a little more than what we have to keep the juices flowing. Life as it is is simply not enough, and there is no objective measuring stick for us in what constitutes “enough.” Some men are satisfied with one wife, while others need an endless array of women, or men, or children or whatever, seeking satisfaction in a certain lane where it is never fully achievable. The mother of the red-headed skate border, Shawn White, tells us that her son was always pushing the limits, doing back-flips off the house and racing recklessly down steep paths because he could never sit still and could never be satisfied for long with the last thrill. The pain he often had to endure could not deter him. Then there are the alcoholics and the drug addicts and the billionaires and the professional soldiers and on and on, people obsessed with finding completion that can never be found in behaviors and things.
The above are the special ones that we all see and shake our heads at or sometimes envy, but I think we all have our little obsessions that we think will bring us ultimate satisfaction: chocolate; ski trips or Hawaiian beaches; fishing; mountains or wilderness or a Buddhist monastery; and of course the ever-popular desire for lots and lots of money to complete a host of other obsessions. Many of these work for a while, but we are often surprised when none of them work forever.
It is obvious from this that we were built for completion but often have to learn at great cost what the completion is. Of course it is God, the truth of which is so elusive because that is not how we ordinarily role. We learn that we must accomplish tasks or own things to be admired by others and ourselves. Many of us are told that it is God we are after, but how can we be satisfied with an abstraction when a solid act or possession is so much more real? In time, it becomes obvious to anyone who observes that this “hard” reality is not the real reality, but this truth slips away far more easily than it came. How is it that we can we hang onto this idea when everything else in our ordinary society and personal nature tells us otherwise?
The biker was fulfilling his own need for the time being, which was definitely not mine. But even had I had the additional adventures, I would have been left flat and disappointed not long after, in need of another adventure, another fix. I know this because it has happened again and again, as all things eventually pass back to the standard unsatisfactory reality of the present.
My uncle had no religion or spiritual nature that I know of, and he made it explicit that no memorial or anything at all be made at his death. Ashes to ashes, and that was it. Until now, I have thought that he himself was flat, needing the thrill of death to even feel alive, but maybe there was something to his dangerous obsessions after all. Many paths sincerely taken can lead to the truth. In the end, he could no longer defy death because of his age, precisely when death was not only at his door but finally inevitable. Maybe then he had gotten his needed “hallelujah” moment and his fearlessness had served him well. Maybe then as he looked ahead to the final adventure that would truly lead to no-thing, he had calmly nodded and finally understood: so this is it. After so many struggles, at last I am here. Thank God.
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