The Zen of Risk

Some years ago, I delivered a corporate jet to Hawaii to the new owner and had a chance to stay for a night or two due to a tropical storm waiting off the coast. After I left the airport, I caught a ride on the Holiday Inn shuttle with a group of Japanese tourists, a tall redhead in a sea of petite dark-haired people, chattering in a language of excited song. I remember reading somewhere that the Japanese view Westerners as stone but regarded the Asian countenance as water. When I observed myself pushing my way through their group, I vowed to become more like water for this day. I would infuse my motions with the smooth physical flow of a stream. I would place myself in the current and simply float, drifting where the day took me. A sturdy Western stick merging into a vast tropical ocean. The voyage was on.

I couldn't wait to wash off the kerosene smell from my body while boogie-boarding the beginner-sized breakers I'd seen on the final approach. I could see the great ranks of creamy waves curling towards me from the inviting blue water. My pulse quickened.

As my bus companions dipped their toes in the shallows, I noticed a young woman staring out into the water. I watched her, as she watched the water with intensity. She wasn't a tourist but a Native, and she was reading the lineup and break of the waves. This was someone who knew the area, so I shyly asked her how it was. She replied, "You'll be all right if you stay where that flat water is - see over there, but if you get out much further than that, "and she looked out at the vista of water, further out. "the rip current will carry you out there," she said pointing past a cluster of rocks that stood sentry at the far edge of the swimming area, in which cavorted the families I'd driven over with. She looked somberly and continued, "Then the current will grab you, and you'll be pulled out and brought back in over here," pointing to the cluster of hard stones, "where you'll meet up with Mr. Rock, likely headfirst. So any of us here would tell you to stay away from the water that's white Ma'am".

I wondered if I would have tried it if I hadn't spoken to her. Would I have just jumped in, swimming past all those friendly-looking breakers? It looks like a postcard, something I'd send back to my friends. And I began to think how easy it is to die. To just disappear, with little warning or fanfare, off the face of the planet. Indeed, I thought about that when I was 6 hours over the ocean in an airplane, beyond gliding distance from anything, but now I was on the ground, safe, enjoying myself. I left the airport all safe and happy, and there I was, utterly clueless, asking for directions from a local to the bottom of the ocean. I thought, forget all those stupid Survivor shows. Paradise is some serious business. Or, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, Heaven and Earth are inhumane; they view the myriad creatures as straw dogs.

I read a survival book; I think it was "Deep Survival," It tells the story of a rock over here, a popular photo site, where the waves crash against it majestically. Tourists stop here as it's a remarkable photo opportunity, the breakers breaking past them and showering them with sea drops. A man will pause to adjust the settings on his digital camera and look up to find his lover gone, never to be seen again.

One of those things that kills us in the wilderness, in nature, is we don't understand the forces we engage. The environment we have grown up in the US to expect is one of peace and sustenance. For the lucky ones, food appears often and in abundance. There's medical care for those fortunate to have a job that provides it, and there's plenty of light and oxygen. It is like we are in a big safe pen, a domestic den of civilization. Then we go into nature, the playing field is leveled, and we are tested in ways that life or TV do not prepare us for.

Most of us sleep through the test and come in and out of the experience, never really knowing what we did or didn't do to survive. Yet someone believes that we are hardy, knowledgeable adventurers. As pilots say, "Been there—done that." It's smoke and mirrors.

Author Jon Krakauer wrote about mountaineer guide Scott Fisher, the one who encouraged him to climb Mt. Everest. "We got the 'big E' figured out," he told him" "We've got it totally wired." Fisher died up there. The psychology of oblivion is not a new science.. Making someone into a believer and coming to terms with the unfamiliar forces of nature is complicated. We live in North America, where, for the most part, and thanks to many - soldiers, law enforcement officers, and firefighters, we are for the most part, safe. Few of us believe in our own mortality until we're faced with it; even then, after the threat passes, we forget. So, we have no way to prepare for what seems to remove a possibility. As Christopher Burney, who was a prisoner of war at Buchenwald, said, "Death is a word which presents no real target to the mind eyes."

The surest way we can become believers in mortality, short of dying, is to sit and contemplate those things. And so that day, instead of body surfing in the white waves, I sat—very still and quiet, like stone.