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I cannot compose an essay in which I describe all of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. Say, rather, that I choose not to. I choose not to ask that of my editor and publisher.
The hardest things I have done in my life mostly have not been done in the out-of-doors and do not belong in this forum. They may be too traumatic or personal. Or I cannot write here about them for disclosure reasons or mandatory reporting reasons or because of taboo or shame.
I have such a list, but I will not write it here.
“Memories are the only paradise from which a man cannot be torn,” a wise old man who shall go unnamed but not unknown said to me. He was an optimist, and had the important ability to forget, or what we now call compartmentalize – to put negative memories in closets or drawers – and then to take the occasional dip in the cool, hard waters of paradisal memories.
I say, in contrast, that memories are one of many Hells from which a man cannot be saved.
The list of the hardest things I’ve ever done includes the first day of kindergarten, and the first day of the first grade and of second grade and the first day of school every year thereafter and notably the first days of junior high and high school.
It includes fistfights with our neighbor, Randy, who was one year older than me, and bigger, and more athletic, and more cold-headed in a fistfight, all of which are decisive in a fight.
The list might include the personally important evening of September 26th, 1987, when I was a senior in high school. It might include the first day I boarded an international flight. Maybe also having to play the role of goon for my spineless teammates on the broomball ice. Maybe when I checked myself into a hospital in Dublin, Ireland. Maybe when I left my room the first time in Vietnam and went down into the shantytowns of Ho Chi Minh City. Or going to First Avenue sober. Or to square dancing.
With regards to the out-of-doors, I can say with conviction at the top of my list of hardest things I’ve ever done in my life was to give cardio-pulmonary resuscitation to my pup – mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions. And to go on living when I was unsuccessful.
That yellow lab and my golden retriever I took out on a big, deep, cold-water lake in the canoe with the duck shotgun. I paddled across the steel gray lake with the pups standing side-by-side at the bow of the canoe with their paws on the forward seat and gunwale, a mile off to the north-west corner of the lake under a doomy late fall sky, where there was a deep bay of emergent vegetation, and, I was thinking, the potential to jump shoot some ducks. When we came into the bay, and I was paddling quiet we flushed no ducks and only saw an otter swimming lazily around the beaver lodge.
On our return paddle across the lake – the mile – a storm came up on our backside left shoulder. Halfway across the lake over 70 feet of deep cold water the whitecaps started breaking into our port side, and the pups no longer at the bow but now between my knees and the rain in their eyes facing me shaking from cold and instinct. Because a pup knows bad tides from good.
And I rowed and rowed and paddled and paddled hard and the whitecaps came over the left gunwale and the waves and wind pushed us to the big water before the south shore and the big rocks. And the pups were afraid from the canoe flopping around and for my anxious, frantic paddling as hard as I could with as much and as many of my resources as I could muster.
But we made it back to the canoe slip in the woods. And now I am no fan of big winds or big waters.
Neither am I a fan of younger (now), bigger, more athletic, and cool-headed fighters. Or of school. Or of spineless friends. Or the Third World. Or bars or clubs or dances. Or of dying puppies.
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