A Rare Sort

 Every adventurer begins as an ordinary person who has had no adventures. Each person must start somewhere. Most people will find that they have had very few adventures in their life. They may have gone camping a few times, or done some hiking, or perhaps spent some money on a guided tour somewhere. But most people will never adventure beyond this, though they deck their cars and water bottles with stickers that say “adventure awaits.” But that’s all adventure does for them. It awaits, and is not pursued. For the precious few in this world though, they will wake up one morning and find that, without quite meaning to, they have become true adventurers. There isn’t much use in comparing oneself too closely with others, for someone else will always have had more adventures than you, and there will always be those who have had less. But there does come a point when a person begins to recall the stories of their life and they realize their adventures have gone far beyond what most ordinary people experience. It might sound something like this: I have canoed spring-laden rivers with Manatees swimming beneath me; I have paddled the 10,000 islands with pods of dolphins dancing around me; I have rappelled into secret caves holding nature’s most glorious monuments; I have rafted rivers whose rapids were so wild that my adrenaline peaked to the point of feeling truly high; I have hiked through the mountains of Virginia over the course of three weeks, watching spring unfold as I walked; I have hung off of a rope midway down a 600 ft. cliff, gazing out onto the whole southern end of the Appalachian mountains spread out beyond me. These are my stories. I have not yet reached my mid-thirties, but these have been the stories of my adult life. And so I realized that perhaps I should begin to write these stories down; because I do not believe that my life has been ordinary. Much to my own surprise and gratitude, I have become a rare sort of adventurer who does not idealize such a life through stickers and t-shirts, but one who has lived more life in a decade than most ever will in a lifetime. Here I shall try to recall as many as possible.