Certainly one cannot avoid all risk -- that's a no-brainer! Drive a highway, punch a time clock, ride an elevator, climb on a tractor: there's risk somewhere. The truth is, we who've survived to our dotage owe something to providence as well as prudence and proficiency. Simply said, we have, in some part, been lucky. Pick up any newspaper on any given day and see just how lucky.

Not all that long ago, two men drowned after overturning their canoe in a local lake. I've canoed and so have thousands of other paddlers. We survived. Was ours good fortune, or because of a dexterity with the craft? Or was it that we weren't hit by the same freak storm as the victims? Or was their misfortune really hammered home because neither man wore a life jacket?

Yes, mishaps occur, even to the most cautious. That comes with this territory we call "life." But it's also true that mishaps occur more often to the unwary than to the vigilant. My own rule of thumb is that I listen to an inner voice: "Self," says I, "I don't like the way this trail is sloughing off over yon cliff."

"Then don't cross it," self says. "Turn around and go back the way you came. Find a different route around the hazard."

That same inner voice tells me he doesn't like to raft rampaging rivers. He says it frightens him to shoot over dishonest standing waves that one moment might leave you feeling cheated with your ease of passage and the next flip your raft end-over-end like the deuce of diamonds in a whirlwind. "Self" tells me he doesn't like rafting a river when undertows whisper to me -- when the whisper of the river cuts short a craft's passage through a pool of surface eddies that look as if they have whirlpool aspirations; whispers that sucks down the tail-end of our raft before release. It's times like these when "self" mumbles, "Boy, listen to me! Lifejacket or no, if you'd been in the water just then, you'd be at the bottom of this river scrambling to get back to the surface for a breath of air!

"Self" also whispers there's danger in crossing a late summer snowfield on a 65-degree slope; that carrying insufficient water amid desert country is patently stupid; that leaving home without proper clothing to survive a November blizzard is idiotic.

What happened with us old geezers, of course, is that we've learned through experience. What may be even more pertinent is that, in order to learn, we must first live through those experiences. To do so requires luck, skill, AND caution.

At sixteen, I depended on 90 percent luck and 10 percent skill. At twenty-five, it was 90 percent skill and 10 percent luck. Nowadays I'm not sure of the percentages, but both are seasoned with prudence.

 

Next week? Another walk on the wild side.