Pat Bean's blog

 “Victory is won not in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later, win a little more.” Louis L”Amour

While I haven't taken a walk through Alaska's wilderness, I have driven the Top of the World Highway past Chicken. It was an awesome drive. -- Wikipedia Photo

Book Talk

I just finished Lynn Schooler’s “Walking Home,” a true story about Alaska, Mother Nature’s fierce side, a crippled grizzly bear that wanted to eat a human, and coping with loss.

Lynn survived the bear, plus a raging creek, and heart-wrenching, although self-imposed, solitude – I’m not giving away the ending because of course he had to survive to write the book – with the comment that his next adventure might just be a drive in a rented car around Hawaii.

“Why not? I am fifty-five years old; they are all victory laps now.”

He said a whole lot more that resonated with who this wandering/wondering, nature-loving old broad is, but that comment made me laugh with joy. I’m 72 years old so certainly my life is now nothing but victory laps. It’s fun to think of it that way.

And I spent all day in a bus traveling this road in Denali National Park to Wonder Lake. Mount McKinley, shown above, hid behind the clouds for most of that day. -- Wikipedia photo

Lynn said it after surviving an awesome environment that suddenly turned mean and realizing that his wife no longer wanted to be with him.

His book, one of those slow-reading ones so you have time to ponder the words, made me think of the things I had survived. While nothing so deadly as Lynn’s adventure, I had survived my own marital breakup, teenage-children with rebellion in their makeup, 37 years as a journalist and even being thrown out of a raft in the middle of a raft-eating rapid on the Colorado River as it flowed through the Grand River.

These are indeed my victory-lap years. Thanks Lynn for allowing me to think of them this way.

Bean’s Pat: Everywhere Once: American Safari http://tinyurl.com/7932lx2 Who said you had to go to Africa to be on safari?