Here’s a question for you: Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Actually, that is not something I want to deep dive here. But it does help to frame a story I want to share, and to invite speculation about what makes us who we are. You may recall from my Flex piece titled “Daredevil” that, growing up, I was a bona fide adrenaline junkie. Part of my penchant for risky behavior stemmed from a steady diet of adventure tales, novels like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and The Call of the Wild. For whatever reason, I loved those books, and they really spurred within me a drive to seek out my own adventures. These included some typical adolescent stunts like bombing around town on a skateboard and playing “King of the Hill” with kids from the neighborhood. However, when my parents bought a farmhouse on thirty acres near the Delaware Water Gap, my quest for adventure, and my opportunities to indulge it, expanded significantly. Summer activities included undertaking rigorous hikes, shooting skeet, and racing around recklessly on a minibike. All pretty generic for a teenager, although I did get very adept at things like casting a fly rod and downshifting a manual transmission. One day, though, I found myself in the throes of a real-life adventure, one that actually rivaled what I was reading about in books.
It was a lazy summer afternoon at our family farm, and I was organizing my baseball card collection. Suddenly, our dog Shannon started barking furiously—yes, that’s the same dog whose head had once been set ablaze by my mom. I ran over to check it out and saw a snake slithering away in the grass. The adventurous spirit within me instantly activated, so I leapt in hot pursuit and grabbed the serpent by its tail. With lightning speed, it whipped around and bit me on the ankle, leaving two distinct puncture marks. I ran to my dad, told him what had happened, and showed him my ankle. Despite my dad having served in the Navy during World War II, he could barely conceal a look of acute distress. He asked me to describe the snake, and I told him it was about two feet long, reddish-brown, and had a head that was triangular in shape. My dad ran in the house, grabbed the appropriate volume from the Encyclopedia Britannica, and looked up “Snakes of North America”. He soon identified the culprit: Agkistrodon contortrix, more commonly known as the eastern copperhead, a venomous pit viper. Herpetologists debate how dangerous it is, but my dad wasn’t taking any chances. We sped off to the nearest regional medical center where the doctor administered a series of antivenom shots and then kept me around for a couple of hours for observation. I developed typical symptoms—nausea, dizziness, and swelling around the wound—but eventually went home no worse for wear. I received the obligatory lecture about reckless behavior from my parents and went on with an otherwise uneventful summer vacation. Thankfully, I have never encountered a venomous snake since.
I opened this essay by posing a grand question about which comes first, art or life. Frankly, I have no idea. But when I look back at my own childhood, I see a pronounced correlation between the books I read and the real-life adventures I sought. Perhaps I had an innate predisposition for risk taking and wanderlust, and that drove me to books and movies that featured swashbucklers, vagabonds, and soldiers of fortune. It’s also possible that my particular upbringing featured so many adventure stories that they gradually rubbed off on me, making me yearn for a more exciting life than what I knew from my fairly mundane, suburban lifestyle. Wherever my adventurous spirit came from, it started early and kept right on going. While books like The Lord of the Rings and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea filled my younger years, I found myself drawn to more challenging adventure texts in college and graduate school, classics like Tom Jones, Don Quixote, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I also acquired a particular taste for grandiose adventure seekers in films like Lawrence of Arabia and Fitzcarraldo. And when Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air about the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster, I read it start to finish without stopping and have devoured no fewer than fifty mountaineering books in the years since.
Behind this essay lie three motives. One, it offers me the chance to share a real adventure with a venomous snake, although, admittedly, the story makes me look more stupid than brave. Two, it invites me to reference The Coddling of the American Mind, a must-read book that encourages parents to grant greater autonomy to their children to better prepare them for adulthood. Of course, I know my snake story is probably not the best example to promote unsupervised play for kids. Moreover, I certainly don’t presume to know any more about the art of parenting than anyone else, although I like the idea, at least in theory, of letting kids fend for themselves. Finally, my third motive—and the one that matters most—is that my story gives the English teacher in me the opportunity to stress the importance of reading, especially at an early age. As a boy without the internet or an iPhone, I passed my idle hours reading books about daring adventures set in mythical worlds and faraway places. These books fueled my young imagination; they also taught me about values like honor, self-reliance, and courage. Of course, my reading tastes broadened as I got older, and some of my all-time favorite books, like The Stranger and Pride and Prejudice, have nothing to do with seeking adventure. But half a century later, I remain captivated by old-fashioned heroes like D’Artagnan and Captain Jack Aubrey. They still inspire me to seek adventure, albeit on more modest terms, and to exhort others, especially my children and my students, to do the same.
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To contact the author: Tom Keating