A Different Sort of Glow
I thought about the matches I had fought on my high school boxing team, the contests I had won and lost on the Purdue University wrestling team. I thought about Marine Corps boot camp and officer's training at Quantico, where I had placed fourth (out of 175) in a grueling physical fitness test. And I thought about the time, way back in 1961, when a buddy and I had hiked into Michigan's Huron Mountains to go steelhead fishing.

That was before lightweight gear, freeze-dried food, and backpacks designed by NASA engineers had come into being. We carried our heavy sleeping bags, canvas tent, rubber waders, and tin cans of hash and beans in Duluth packs-some 75 pounds each-for 5 miles up and down steep hills, then waded wild rivers for a week from dawn to sunset, and hiked back out and got stupifyingly drunk on our false IDs in a north-woods bar and danced and partied all night with two women 10 years older than we.

I remembered other feats that seemed at the time to require not much more effort than getting out of bed, and asked myself: Had I, with my thinning hair, expanding waistline, fading vision, arthritic shoulder, stiff knees, and aching spine really done all that?

I had, but no more.

Oh, yes, Captain Marlow, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that expires too soon...

Or does another sort of glow light the aging heart? I looked at the crystalline glitter of the meadow, at the great and still untamed mountains, at the grazing horses, and suddenly felt an acute joy. I had seen no elk and yet there it was: joy. I recalled a conversation I'd had years ago with a California winemaker. He'd told me that he produced an especially robust zinfandel by dry-farming. The vines were deprived of water until they were near the point of death. Reacting to the artificial drought, the vines poured their life essence into the grapes, giving them an intense flavor.

Something like that was happening to me up there on the Red Rock plateau. Painful awareness of my limitations granted a poignancy to the moment that the younger me would not have experienced. He would have been thinking about his quarry. He would have been frustrated, maybe even angry. He would have thought I'll get one next season if I don't this season.

But the older me, with the stent in his coronary artery, knew there might not be a next season. And even if that earlier edition of me did get his elk, he would have missed something utterly, utterly precious.