Left for Dead by Beck Weathers

Author:Beck Weathers [Weathers, Beck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-50588-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2000-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

Beck at Windy Corner, Mt. McKinley, 1989.

PART THREE

SIXTEEN

If you’ve never felt very good about yourself, you never really expect to, and therefore you don’t begrudge your lack of happiness. You’re never content, but you manage.

That is not to say you function normally. You are not emotionally whole, and you cannot bring much value to your personal relationships. But you can keep putting one foot in front of the other, day in and day out, just as you must do when you climb mountains. There’s even a certain grim satisfaction in succeeding in this way, by sheer dint of will and intelligence.

That was my outlook in the early years of my marriage. I did what I’ve always done best—work—and I courted a sufficient number of challenges and diversions to keep my mind engaged. It was a form of running away, of course.

I tend to be a little over the top at first with a new idea or interest. I’ll get fascinated and learn a lot about it. Then having scratched that itch, I move on to something else.

My first hobby was a Hobie; that is, a Hobie Cat, a type of small sailboat in which I navigated Dallas-area lakes during my residency at Southwestern. This was not a fleeting interest. My long-term goal was to sail around the world. The cat was simply a first step in what I expected would be a methodical, protracted process leading to the actual expedition. Events, however, intervened.

I took correspondence courses in every imaginable subject, from oceanography to marine meteorology, acquiring as much technical knowledge and sailing skill as one can living several hundred miles from the nearest saltwater. I also attended sailing schools and assembled a large sailing library. Some of my practical experience was gained in the Caribbean, where I went “bareboating”—renting a boat with no captain or crew—on a couple of occasions.

If you think you’re good at shading the truth, you ought to see what it takes to convince some guy he should rent you, a stranger, his valuable sailboat for a few days. The first time I went I took along Tom Dickey and his then-wife, who was dubious enough to commit her last will and testament to toilet paper on the flight down from Dallas.

I instructed them not to ask any questions in front of the boat’s owner, just to stand there and look knowledgeable. If they were to inquire what the front and back are called, I explained, or what that tall thing in the center was, we might end up nailed to the dock, or drinking mai tais someplace, but we definitely would not be sailing.

Dickey called me Captain Bligh.

On my second bareboating excursion, I took along my father, my brother Dan, Tom Dickey, and my brother-in-law Howard, who would be the team cook. Once again I had to warn this band of lubbers—Howie had done some sailing—not to betray their inexperience until we were safely away.

Sailing was a parallel to my later mountain climbing in that it

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.