A few years ago, the City of San Diego overreached itself in making demands upon the dog park club that I had helped to form. We had persuaded the city to let us fence in for dogs to run around off-leash an unused area of a large park. They did so, but required us to form an organization to represent us on the local recreation council. This was fine, but they then demanded the right to approve, disapprove, and edit the bylaws of the club we had formed.
Specifically, they objected to a clause in our bylaws that prohibited convicted felons or people who had been convicted of crimes of moral turpitude from serving on our club’s board. It was there because, before we had organized, our self-appointed president was found to have stolen for personal use donations for dog park improvements made by generous users. After his thefts were discovered, an Internet search had revealed that the man had three felony convictions, two for selling drugs and one for DUI. He had another DUI accident in Mexico that was not even on his record.
We met with a senior City Parks and Recreation Department representative to settle the matter. We brought a lawyer to the meeting and forced them to back off. Most of the meeting was taken up by the city official’s unsolicited soliloquy about his “illustrious” life. That inspired the following story.
After sitting in a dull meeting of three park users with a San Diego city official, I had occasion to mull over the differences between the long, steady life of that bureaucrat and my more varied, adventurous life. This reflection was stimulated by his interruption of our business at hand to boast that he had been working for the city for most of his life.
In a long soliloquy, he gave us his life story. He had lived in the same house and had been married to the same woman for 35 years. He had never served in the military, traveled to foreign countries beyond Mexico, or engaged in any sport other than jogging around the block. This information and more about the vast extent of his responsibilities he delivered spontaneously and proudly as if he expected us to be awe stricken at his wonderful life and great achievements. In a way, I was awed. He amazed me by his naïve belief that his life was one to which anyone would aspire, when, on the contrary, I had wondered idly why he had not already committed suicide owing to his life’s sheer dullness. Nevertheless, I momentarily became more charitable, thinking of the stanza from Thomas Gray’s“Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”:
“Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.”
However, he was not poor. In fact, this beneficiary of “ENRON by the Sea” (USA Today’s term for the woefully mismanaged city of San Diego) was making a great deal of money and could certainly expect to retire with benefits bordering on the obscene.
Compared with him, even from childhood, I had a life of greater adventure, especially if adventure is defined as that which almost kills one. Not counting falls from chinaberry trees, there was that seventy mile canoe trip my cousin and I made down the Cahaba River in Alabama as boys. Jim and Huck had nothing on us in that adventure, which became an ordeal after a storm inundated us and after our food ran out.
Years later, there were a few road accidents in Europe to spice up my Grand Tour on a motor scooter when I was a young college student. Shipboard life in the Navy on vessels varying in size from riverboats to aircraft carriers was an endless source of adventure for me. In 1964, I saw the first air strikes launched on North Vietnam, and I was serving on a guided missile cruiser 25 miles from Haiphong at the end of that war over seven years later. My various ships experienced typhoons, fires, rescues at sea, flooding incidents, collisions, and men overboard.
An in-country Vietnam tour as an advisor to the South Vietnamese Navy subjected me to enemy ambushes and sapper attacks. I survived a plane crash uninjured. Viet Cong used a captured U.S. 500 lb. bomb to blow up a building I was visiting. I was just badly shaken up. Adding to the thrill was my realization that these mean, angry little men attacking me out of the jungle at night seemed to have no appreciation whatsoever for the fact that I had volunteered to come to their country to bring them democracy, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not even Conrad’s Kurtz could claim to have experienced “The horror! The horror!” as I did.
I also had a long and varied business career after the Navy. That career was also filled with many adventures, world travel, and accomplishments of a different sort.
Retirement, too, has been an adventure. My many backpacking trips in national parks featured moments of sublime beauty punctuated by ordeals of endurance and scary bear encounters. Not even leisurely bicycle tours in Europe were free of accidents. The sinking of a rented boat left me and two scuba diving companions rapidly floating north in the Gulf Stream five miles east of Marathon, Florida, with no other vessel in sight. Finally rescued after hours adrift and with night approaching, we reflected deeply on our near disaster.
In the dark moments of such events, one bemoans one’s lot in life, but what would life be without them? Fellow Alabamian Helen Keller wrote, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
To me the secure life of that city official seemed to be on the wrong end of the Keller spectrum running from ennui to adventure. He seemed to have perverse pride in the “noiseless tenor” of his way. The only hint that he might not be as proud of himself as his words indicated was the phony, incongruous grin fixed on his face, for which I have coined the scientific term risus scatophagus (grin,shit-eating).
Of course, one does not have to be a daredevil to have a life of adventure. Surely, Helen Keller had no life-threatening motorcycle jumps over Snake River Canyon. Instead, she actively participated in the passions of her time; traveling, learning, and contributing to magazines and newspapers. Mark Twain, her friend, considered Napoleon and Helen to be the two most interesting people of the 19th Century. Think about the contrast between those two lives, both adventurous in their separate ways.
Perhaps my city servant, too, had some undiscovered adventures of a sort that he, out of modesty, failed to mention to us. Had I overlooked “a mute, inglorious Milton,” or a “Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood”? Or did he simply live with the dull hope that he would eventually move up by inertia and the fortuitous death, retirement, or promotion of superiors from being the guy with two secretaries, two phone lines, and two double chins to becoming the guy with four secretaries, four phone lines, and four double chins.
We are better for our adventures. Thoreau wrote, “We should come home from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day with new experience and character.” My adventures have enriched my life greatly. When a serious health problem recently required surgery, I went under anesthesia thinking, “If I don’t come out of this, it has been a great ‘E Ticket’ ride!”
Would the city official feel the same way in similar circumstances? If so, good for him.