“Bruce likes to terrify himself.” So began a story years ago in Success magazine.
One day Bruce led some friends 9,000 feet up Mount Hood, and decided to show them how much fun it would be to slide down part of the way. While zipping down an ice field at 30 miles an hour, Bruce suddenly realized he had forgotten to remove his crampons – the spikes that attach to hiking boots. His feet were useless as brakes.
Uh oh.
Bruce had the presence of mind to realize that jabbing the spikes at the ice whizzing past him wouldn’t work either – that would risk breaking his ankles and hurtling off the side of the mountain. So as the edge of the cliff came rapidly into view, Bruce flopped over on his stomach and jabbed repeatedly, frantically, with his ice axe. He finally came to a halt about 50 feet from the edge of the cliff. He later said that the thing that kept running through his mind as he got closer and closer to the edge was, “Boy, this is a stupid way to die.”
Uh huh.
Oh, and just a thought – if it’s a stupid way to die, then maybe it’s a stupid way to live. But hey, that’s just me.
I don’t know if Bruce ever went ice surfing again. And for all I know, he may be the ultimate LifeVestor. But on this day, he was a gambler.
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I guess it was the first face-off between parent and teacher in Carrie’s life. She was a little freaked in first grade about some impending disaster reported as fact in her science class – global warming, the death of the ozone layer, or something. We were riding in the car, and she asked me what I thought (in first-grade language, of course) about the certain impending doom of planet.
I found myself speaking from the depths of my soul – using words I’d never put together in the same sentence before.
“Carrie,” I said, “never, never, never believe anyone who would make you afraid of the future.”
I came by that honestly. I remember asking my dad at about the same age, “Did you know that the Russians have enough bombs to destroy every American?” He replied, “Yes, and we have enough bombs to blow up every Russian.” That more or less ended the Cold War for me. (By the way, you just haven’t lived until you’ve heard “Shout to the Lord” sung in Russian. Those American Idol contestants got nothin’ on our brothers and sisters in the former Soviet Union.)
This all came back to me last week. I was shopping with my wife at Walmart and passed a display of some sort of DVD series or books or something. The basic idea was, “spend your money on this to learn about how we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.” I passed.
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