WHAT IT

In an overgrown, vacant lot on 22nd Street, just off of Sheldon, an eleven-year-old boy took a blood oath. He made a promise to himself that he would one day….become an adventurer.

Many things came to bare on the boy’s obsession with adventure. Among other things, he had done substantial research into adventuring at Morrill Hall—Nebraska’s State Museum. The museum was within a long walk from his Clinton-Malone neighborhood—and it was free to the public. He had certainly put in his research time in that museum throughout the 1950’s and on into the 1960’s. Morrill Hall had been initially discovered by the boy as a Cub Scout, and its effect on him made it become a veritable touchstone in his life. Both he and his brother spent hours nearly every weekend just gazing at the treasures that were the bounty of adventure. Each time upon entering the museum, the boy would immediately beat feet to the same exhibit where he would stand and stare at….the shrunken head. He would get almost nose-to-nose with the grisly relic. Next, he would go to and study the ancient mummy lying peacefully prone in his sarcophagus. For the boy, every trip to Morrill Hall was an adventure….albeit, an adventure by proxy.

The boy and his brother would save their pennies to spend at the museum. They slid their coins across the glass display case that functioned as the Museum’s retail front. The boys could not afford to buy much, but each modest acquisition was treated like the treasure it really was.

Along with their diligent study at Morrill Hall, the boy and his brother acted upon what knowledge they had gathered at the museum, and mounted their own field expeditions in search of fossils, artifacts and….adventure. These field expeditions were generally staged at the large gravel and sand piles of the Redi-Mix Concrete Company, located between 22nd and 19th and ‘Y’ Street—just behind their Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house. The boy’s adventures on the dunes of the Great Redi-Mix Desert yielded a flint arrowhead, numerous fossil crinoids, bivalves, and shards of teeth and bone from unknown Pleistocene critters. Once or twice the boys found fossil sharks’ teeth. The two searched not only for fossils, but also for….neat rocks.

After hours of searching on the gravel piles, they would come home, pockets full of….treasure. The boy transferred his stash of treasure from his pockets to the patio for final culling and analysis. The treasures were then finally transferred into a drawstring pouch he made in Cub Scouts. After numerous expeditions, the sheer number of study specimens demanded more storage space. Study specimens—those not achingly cool—were placed in empty coffee cans and warehoused in the garage next to the family’s Kaiser.

For a number of years the boy pursued his study of natural history at Morrill Hall while gaining his field experience on the Redi-Mix Desert. The library on 27th Street off of ‘Y’ Street also fed the boy’s hunger for all things….adventurous. He checked out a blue, cloth-covered book called, ARCHAEOLOGY….over thirty times. He also read and reread AKU-AKU by Thor Heyerdahl, along with a host of other natural-history and adventure titles. One book—KING SOLOMON’S MINES by H. Rider Haggard completely captured him, and literally changed his life, as the Dark Continent went to the top of the short list of places the boy planned to go to and seek….adventure. He also read and reread the stories of the discovery of Troy—the excavations of the Great Pyramids—the Valley of the Kings—Babylonian temples—Easter Island—places the world usually denied access to for a young boy growing up in a poor neighborhood.

But that day in May in the vacant lot, the boy took matters into his own hands, and exerted his own….will. He was no longer totally content with looking at the displays of other people’s adventures. And he was no longer completely fulfilled by their discoveries in the Redi-Mix Desert. The boy knew that somehow—just somehow—he would have to go on his own adventures—real adventures. He would no longer be content to only read about Schielman, Hillary and Heyerdahl. Some day people would be reading about his adventures.

Despite the realities of the Clinton-Malone neighborhood, and all of what that meant in the real world, the boy took his oath. With unusually serious intent, he drew the blade of the pocketknife across the palm of his hand and watched the crimson line appear. He licked the wound….and made the vow.

As an eleven year old boy I took a blood oath to be an adventurer.

Barely ten years later I was surrounded by angry Samburu warriors.

Eleven Years Later—1973: Malindi, Kenya

I sat in the shade under palms and fig trees looking at a stone pillar left by Vasco da Gama in 1498. I was burned darker than a Somali and had dust in my hair and stubble. My Third-World eyes were shot with red. I felt light, and raw boned. I sat drinking a cup of chai poured from a tall brass urn for me by a white-robed Sikh. Calls to worship floated on the hot air as dhows with their shark-fin sails set out to fish for Jack Mackerel off from Ras N’gomeni.

I realized then that perhaps I had gone too far. I was perfectly at home in a world beyond the belief of even the most imaginative, young boy from Lincoln, Nebraska. At that point in my first international adventure, I had spent some months in country….months that had changed who I was.

I had been a part of an expedition that attempted Mackinder’s 1899 route up Mt. Kenya from the lower grasslands, through the bamboo and rain forests and up onto the perpetual snow and ice of the equator. I had spent a month and a half in the dripping forests of camphor trees and the Martian landscape of the upper slopes with its giant dendrosenecio and groundsels. I had stood on ground never before trod by humankind. I saw things that I’m certain were seen for the first time by human eyes.

In the Great Rift I had worked a Paleolithic site—Hyrax Hill—where I met and dug in the dirt with the patriarch of physical anthropology, Dr. Louis Leakey. Around campfires outside of Narok I listened to the often humorous stories of George Adamson. His stories provided an unusually honest context for the true lives of him, his wife, Joy and the lions made famous in Born Free. I slept in a tent by the railroad bridge over the Tsavo River which was engineered by Patterson—after he dispatched the Ghost and the Darkness—the man-eaters of Tsavo.

I backpacked for weeks at a time through the Maasai Mara Reserve—dodging Cobras, Mambas, Hines and Gaboon Vipers. I was trampled by Cape Buffalo, charged by rhino and protective elephantine matriarchs. I competed against the Morani—Maasai warriors—in foot races and spear throwing. I was robbed of my food bags by felonious baboons and spent two weeks hungrier than I had ever been before. I canoed the Galana where a hippo took a dislike of our 17-foot craft, causing me to swim with the crocs. North of Lamu I was assaulted and chased by Somali shifta bent on slicing and dicing me with their pangas.

I saw landscapes and life vignettes of nearly painful beauty. And I saw the dark underbelly of a world full of hunger, disease, danger and death. I had seen Africa in all its splendor and squalor.

And then sitting there in Malindi, I realized that I could stay in this new home of Africa for the rest of my life. I was at a cusp: Either go back to America—and do so very quickly—or stay in the Dark Continent….forever. It was that afternoon on the coast of the Indian Ocean, I realized that I had fulfilled my boyhood oath. I had finally and truly become….an adventurer.