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49 PETER TURCHI  Afew years ago, on an island off the coast of Norway, in the course of a casual hike, first my wife and then my son stepped from one bank of a narrow stream onto a concrete footing (what it was doing there, we never figured out), and from there to the far bank. The curious and, it turned out, troublesome aspect of this was that the stream bank was sheer, about a six-foot drop to cold, fastmoving water. The distance to the concrete footing was one longish stride; the top of the concrete pillar was too small to put both feet on, so the crossing required two quick steps. I froze. And the longer I stood there, the more unlikely it seemed that I could avoid falling into the water. My concern was, as my wife and son pointed out, and I agreed, silly—but that made it no less paralyzing. I could have found some other way around, but the physical block that had appeared without warning seemed both absurd and potentially crippling; so I stood there, willing my intellectual self to overcome my instinctual self. Our son offered to take my hand, but by then it seemed to me a perilous reach. He offered to come back across to demonstrate the technique, but the problem had nothing to do with understanding the necessary steps; it was a matter of overcoming a powerful and completely irrational fear. Finally—due to no particular urging or inspiration—I took the long first step, and plunged to my death. Well, no; I made it across just fine, and we continued a perfectly pleasant mountainside stroll. The episode was so forgettable that I hadn’t thought of it until today, as I considered the challenge of recognizing what is, for one person, a significant act of courage, but which might seem, to an onlooker, like a walk in the park. Specifically, I’ve been thinking of the wide range of risks writers take, from the physical to the intellectual to the emotional, and our inclination to value some kinds of risk over others. One Man’s Risk CH013.qxd 7/15/09 7:36 AM Page 49 50 PETER TURCHI When I started high school I was assigned to an afternoon Study Hall. After the first day, even I could tell Study Hall was a place where no studying would ever get done. I asked if I could take Journalism, which met at the same time, but which was normally reserved for upperclassmen. The teacher, Mrs. Lovell, agreed, but the other students—the editors and writers for the school paper— jealous of their territory, said they’d decide after I turned in a sample assignment . Reasonable as that sounded, it was in fact an excuse to get me to conduct an interview none of them wanted to do: someone needed to ask Coach Higgins about the upcoming football season. I don’t know that Coach Higgins taught classes; I certainly never saw him in a classroom. While everyone knew him as the football coach, he didn’t look like a football player. For one thing, he was underweight. But he appeared to be made out of flexible metal, his face was worn and creased like an old baseball glove, and he had the voice of a man who smoked two packs a day before breakfast. He didn’t so much speak as bark. As a freshman and a decided non-athlete, it was intimidating enough to have to go down to the boys’ locker room to find Coach Higgins’s office. The locker room was seven stories underground, dimly lit by candles stuck into little niches in the stone walls. (I believe the candles were stuck in the skulls of boys who had failed to reach the top of the rope in PE, but I may be misremembering that part.) You had to wade through a swamp of old shower water and used towels and jock straps to get to the dim caves of the coaches’ offices; and if you somehow talked your way past the lacrosse coach and the basketball coach and the various unidentified men who lived down there, you could finally get to see Kurtz—I mean, Coach Higgins. Not only was I a freshman, but I didn’t know how to interview anyone, and I wasn’t entirely sure what my story was supposed to be about. So I mumbled...

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