Taking risks leads to courage, self-knowledge

Page 5

Tansi, ahnee and hello.

When I was a boy I had a friend named Mike Keewatin who lived in a foster home down the road from mine. He was a daredevil, one of those brash, swaggering, drop-of-the-hat kind of guys we all knew as children and I admired the high-hearted gallantry he brought to the playground of boys.

When I think of Mike these days I remember one scene in particular. There was

an old iron bridge that spanned the creek over our favorite swimming hole. We dove from that bridge on hot, summer days, revelling in those previous moments of freedom as our bodies became unencumbered of adult things like earth and chores and time.

Mike, of course, was the first to ever do it. Through the eyes of a boy the distance from rail to water seemed impossible. When he dove head-first that day there wasn't one of us that didn't gasp in astonishment. I still recall that smile beaming on his face as he broke the surface and raced to shore to do it all over again. He was a hero, that Mike Keewatin.

As the days spun by that summer everyone took their turn. One by one they made that long solitary walk along the shore and up the bank to the bridge. One by one they dangled above the precipice, hung there for virtual eternities before the courage or the taunting from below spurred them into action. It was only Mike Keewatin that ever dove head-first. The rest were content to drop like cannonballs, feet first, legs tucked under bums, heads curled around and under like armadillos.

Then the day came and it was my turn. Walking on the edge of the gravel road towards the middle of that bridge was like the walk of the doomed. I was terrified. Below me in the water Mike and the guys were waiting to cheer as my small body tumbled through time and space to splash triumphantly into the middle of Otter Creek. Time halted.

I recall those moments perched on the edge of that bridge as though they were yesterday. There's something immaculate about the danger we court as children and transcends the logic we learn as we grow. Something akin to magic that never vanishes once it touches our spirits with the ebullient rush of victory. That's what I recall these days. That strangely buoyant feeling of a headlong rush into doubt, space and time.

I dove.

As my head emerged from that water amidst the cheers of my pals, I surfaced

into the knowledge of my own bravery. I'd done the impossible. I'd courted vertigo and terror, shook hands with darkness, smiled into the face of uncertainty and dove headlong into my own life for the first time.

Mike Keewatin smiled, a huge, gape-toothed grin that children reserve for those they love and admire. "Cool," he said and raced toward the shoreline with me in hot pursuit. We dove in tandem for the rest of that summer and in the process became each other's heroes for a lifetime.

Mike was killed in a car crash when he was 14. I'd moved by then and read about it in the paper. I still recall the dull ache that started somewhere in my feet and travelled through my entire body when I read that story. There's a vacuum when our heroes leave us and it takes some time before memory refills with the snapshots we'll carry forever in our hearts and minds.

But this isn't really about death or bridges or diving or even Mike Keewatin. It's about the realization that we all have to jump sometime.

There comes a time for all of us when we dangle on the precipice, when we have to live for awhile on the edge of our risk, heave a mighty breath and tumble headlong into it. When we surface again it's into the knowledge of our own courage, that soft kiss of magic we learn as children.

Our elders tell us that we have to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. That the plunge is the admission price to our own histories, our necessary territories. You can't lose something you've never gained and that's the trick of life - to jump despite the implications.

I learned that when I was eleven, when I made that first leap of aith into my own life. But like most of us, I forgot. Forgot it in the importance of things, in the need for security, in the search for salvation and an ordered history.

In truth we dangle over risk every waking moment. The longer you hold onto the bridge the longer you deprive yourself of surfacing into magic. It is, after all, the risk that sustains us, not the safety.

Until next time, Meegwetch.