A convincing argument could be made that human beings are the species that tells itself lies to make it to the next day. Instead of Homo Sapien, Wise Man, perhaps we are instead the Lying Beast or Mendacium Bestia, a term that also dispenses with the patriarchal collective noun Man and perhaps better captures our true nature in many respects as well.
In 1981 I went without any food for 4 days in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. My little group of 4 other backpackers were set the task of walking 25 miles across country in 4 days, navigating with map and compass, to our exit point where NOLS instructors would pick us up – this after spending over 3 weeks in wilderness and covering over 100 miles on foot during a Natural History/Wilderness Survival Skills course. All the food, except for 1 emergency meal (1 meal for all 5 of us), was taken away. We could forage or fish. Otherwise, nothing. This was our last test.
I remember the final camp the night before we were to leave. All of us had lost many pounds – I came home 30 pounds lighter – but it was the overwhelming fatigue I remember so vividly. I could not walk up what was probably a 5-degree slope from the stream to our tent without stopping every few steps to rest and catch my breath. My body would not obey my commands. I was 28 and fit from carrying a 60-pound pack for all that time while walking up and down mountains at altitude, but on that last night, I found out how dependent I was on my body to shape my sense of myself: strength of body equates to confidence and confidence is everything.
At the time I remember thinking that this is how becoming old must feel – the body refusing its master, the will overcome by the body.
Now at 73 I go to the gym every other day and work hours in the yard and in walking on off days. My legs are strong, mind clear, heart repaired, but all that is also a form of vanity, and vanity is always a lie. I’m hoping all that work will keep me young enough to stay vigorous until 90, robust as one of those Sicilian peasants who eat olives and pasta and drink wine at every meal and live to 107. Yep. Right. I can rely on that flow of Sicilian blood in my white on potato Irish veins.
But age is a loss on every front and flank. Sometimes it takes the form of a massed attack, and then it’s goodnight bubba. If luck holds on and siphons the attack into narrow corridors that might seal off disaster for a bit, time continues to move forward, and the walls of those corridors will be breached. Aging’s pings bring fear, even when they are merely feints – the strange blood test, the pain in the morning where there had never been pain before. What is this one asks, the “distinguished thing” itself or a Halloween mask only saying “Boo! See you later?” And if it is a feint, I can say “Not Yet,” but what I really mean in my innermost, most secret, delusion-loving chamber of my lying heart is “Not never, not no how, not no way!”
