Life Lived Wild by Rick Ridgeway

Author:Rick Ridgeway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Patagonia Works
Published: 2021-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

The inside cover of my journal for 1989. On the next page I had taped the photo of our three kids, but this page had taped to it a wild iris that I’d found pressed between pages of a book I had given to Jennifer.

Chapter Thirteen

Talking to Beluga

It was a clear day with a cell of high pressure stabilized across the High Arctic. Out the window of the plane, the sun reflected off the inlets of Great Slave Lake, the Slave River flowing in from the south, and the Mackenzie flowing out to the west. There was as much water as land, and the land was mostly rock, scoured over the eons by the ebb and flow of glaciers. From horizon to horizon, there were no signs of the handiworks of humans.

Across the aisle, Doug Tompkins, the Do Boy-in-Chief, was also looking out the window, and I guessed he was likewise appreciating the largely untrammeled expanse. Behind him was another good friend, Doug Peacock, who had a map out and was tracking our position. Yvon had met Peacock a few years before, and he had become part of our Do Boy posse.

“If we had living national treasures, like the Japanese,” Yvon had said, “I would nominate Peacock.”

Doug Peacock was a double-tour Green Beret medic in the Vietnam War, who had returned to his Midwest home with what today would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. He loaded his backpack and camping gear in his truck and drove west. He was armed, and he had enough self-awareness to recognize that he was potentially dangerous. He wandered through the Rocky Mountain states, and when he ran out of money, he stopped at a pay phone to call home. An operator came on and told him to deposit two dollars and ten cents. He put the coins he had on him in the phone, and when the operator said, “Please deposit twenty-five more cents,” Doug asked the operator to wait while he returned to his truck to rummage through his pack for extra change. He found a quarter. Back in the phone booth, however, the line had gone dead. He redialed the operator, who told him the phone did not return change.

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