Snapshot: Boys Do Foolish Things

When I was a kid, about ten years old, I had a bad fear of heights. I was troubled by this and thought I needed to cure myself of this fear by toughening myself up somehow. I worried about it a lot; courage is a virtue unreasonably prized among boys, and I didn’t want to be afraid. We then lived four miles outside of town and we three older kids would occasionally be allowed to walk into town to see a movie, a great treat, after which our mom would drive in to pick us up. In those days, a movie cost fifty cents, not like now, when they are twenty times that. I am loath to sound like an old fellow who walked four miles to the movies that only cost fifty cents in the misty, much-better old days, but that is the way it was. I was there. And candy bars only cost a nickel, so there. The snow in those days was whiter too, it seems to me, but probably that can’t be right.

The walk in to town would cross the Colorado River and the bridge was high above the river, perhaps thirty or forty feet, but to my ten-year-old self, it looked like much more. Every fifty feet or so along the bridge span, the iron railing had a gap of about eighteen inches, and I would stand in this gap, with my elbows resting on the railing on both sides, and swing my little body out over the river far below, to force myself to conquer my dread of heights. Stupid, no? At first, this was quite sickening to me, and my adult self is amazed I did not faint and just fall in. But I did it more and more, until I was no longer afraid and was cured of this particular phobia, though of course, I don’t recommend this method. Had I slipped even slightly, I would have fallen into the swift river below, and it is hard to think that would have had a happy ending of any kind. Children do foolish things, of course, as every parent knows, boys especially, and I am not going to try to justify what my young self did; I will say that just thinking of doing this today makes me almost ill with dread and parental anguish. This was the first really dumb thing I ever did in life, and it bothers me still, many years later, after I have done so many more.

A year or two later, I had a nearly fatal accident when I was not doing anything stupid but was only being a bit careless and unaware. We had relatives in town and were taking them around Western Colorado to show them some of the beauties of our state. We were in Ouray and going to see Box Canyon Falls, a spectacular cataract that cascades down a tight box canyon in the San Juan Mountains. There is a catwalk you take to get in to the cataract, and this has a chain link railing on it for safety. Like the happy, rather dopey boy I was then, I was actually skipping along this catwalk, ahead of my family, when I slipped on the wet planking and shot out between the planking and the chain link. Today, the chain link is attached to the planking, sensibly, but then it was not, and this fact almost proved fatal to me, in my parents’ horrified sight. But, as I shot out under the chain link and into the rocky, watery abyss, I grabbed the chain as I almost slipped through it and held on for dear life, of course completely terrified. The drop to the rocks below was very far and certainly fatal. No parent should have to see something like that, and I feel bad to this day that my parents did; it wasn’t very fun for me either, of course.

A few years after that, I was an exchange student in Australia, and for Christmas vacation, the family I was boarding with took me to see some friends of theirs who ran a sprawling, rustic sheep ranch, or “station,” on the sparsely populated and very rugged and scenic Eyre Peninsula of South Australia. I was hanging out with some of the teenage boys who lived on the ranch, and when we were out joyriding one day, we decided to go swimming and fishing, as they always kept a big net in the trunk of their car. We didn’t have suits, but found a great deserted beach and decided to go skinny-dipping (I had never swum without a suit before, so this was a first for me). We were going to drag the huge fishing net out into the bay to trawl for mullet, which their mum loved to fry up as an inexpensive way to feed her large family. I was a very strong swimmer at the time and swam competitively (strong but never very fast, unfortunately and to my great chagrin), so I volunteered to swim the net far out into the water while they held the other end on shore, so we could draw the net across a large section of the picturesque bay. It was a beautiful summer day and none of this felt dangerous or ill-considered at the time, though of course, everyone knows about sharks in Australian waters, especially off the infamously dangerous south coast.

I was far off from shore, just about at the far point of the parabolic course I was swimming, and dragging the heavy net behind me, when suddenly a big, triangular dorsal fin slashed out of the water right by me, perhaps four feet away. I could actually feel the push of the great bolus of seawater on my body as the creature’s own, and much larger, body swam swiftly next to mine. My blood turned cold and I was terrified. I felt like my heart stopped beating altogether, and for a moment, I was sure that the shark attacking was going to be the next thing I experienced. I clearly remember thinking, in short thought fragments in this exact sequence: I am going to be killed, today, as a sixteen-year-old boy, in the middle of the ocean, 12,000 miles away from home and family, it’s so unfair!

Before I could react or even call out, a magnificent dolphin, for that was what it actually was, leapt up in a playful salute, landing with a big happy splash, and continued swimming near me for a little ways in friendship or curiosity, likely both. In the movie version of my life, this scene happens in slow motion, and the splash as the dolphin hits the surface of the ocean again is amplified and held for some time in a freeze frame. That is exactly the way I saw it. In just a few seconds, I went from the fear of certain death to delirious laughter, swimming naked with a wild dolphin on a glorious summer day at the bottom of the world. But it is decidedly the fear that I remember to this day; it still chills my blood as if it were only yesterday. We hauled in a huge catch of fish and the feast was delicious. I relished it immensely.