PAPUA NEW GUINEA
cherish life.

Canoe racing was one of the most challenging sports we’ve experienced anywhere.  Losing focus for just a second can send your canoe in the opposite direction or drop you in the drink. It was frustrating, so frustrating, but also so rewarding once we got the hang of it. I was enjoying it, doing well, and looking forward to the race.

But when we were told that the race was 14 kilometers, my heart sank.  I couldn’t even sit in the sun in Papua New Guinea for several hours without getting dehydrated not to mention race a canoe.  My hosts had been so excited all week at my top finishes in the practice races and kept telling me that I must win and how much it would mean to them. So I raced anyway.

I made it much farther than I thought I would. But with about one kilometer to go, my legs became unable to support me. I kept falling in and was losing strength to slip back into the canoe. I switched to my knees. I continued to paddle but I could hardly steer. I’d stopped sweating. I knew that I was suffering from heat exhaustion, but the finish line was so close—I had to make it. My vision began to blur and I could hardly see as I arrived and stumbled up the riverbank to meet the other guys. I composed the strength to say a few jovial words and then collapsed. I was immediately put on an I.V. and evacuated to a medical facility.

That night was the most miserable of my life. Hallucinating waves oscillated all around me. I could not control my intestines or my bladder and covered myself in my own waste. My head felt like it was being crushed by an industrial clamp. I vomited regularly as I fell in and out of sensations of extreme burning, then shivering. I was terrified that I was dying.

I was returned to the village the next day and greeted my hosts who had the most swollen eyes I think I’ve ever seen. They told me that they’d been crying all night blaming themselves for my injury. I kept telling them it was my choice, but they didn’t understand. They said that they would not believe that someone would ever choose to hurt themselves.

That day I ended my flirtation with danger. All this talk of adventure risks being worth the reward is selfish malarkey. The bravado toys with this beautiful gift of life and tears at the hearts of friends and family in the most cruel manner. Mountaineers don’t climb the highest because the view is better: the clouds obstruct that. Divers don’t want to dive the deepest because there’s more to see: almost all of the organisms are near the surface. Risks must be limited to those things that truly enhance our lives—for our own sake, and especially for those that care deeply for us. [My mountaineering mentor, David Roberts, has expressed this particularly eloquently in his magnum opus On the Ridge Between Life and Death. The first to climb some of the world’s hardest mountains, he has now hung up his cap.]