Can Birthdays Generate Wisdom?
posted: July 10th, 2015 | by:Bert
©Bert Gildart: Commemorating a landmark passage in age, I’ve been reviewing pictures forwarded by friends and family, using them to help me evaluate life altering choices I once made. Were they good ones?
First thoughts. In most cases I shudder to think what might have happened if I’d followed other roads. Why I might have become an accountant, an engineer — an officer and a gentlemen.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, I heard other drummers, though it took much trial and error to reach my destiny, for I was attempting to veer from the military tradition created by generations of high-ranking and insistent forefathers, and sometimes rebellion got in the way.
L to R: Confused and floundering young man; two, older and creatively searching
In high school and my first year of college, rather than seeking academic success, I boxed; and during those years I became the Alabama state runner up in the Golden Gloves.
INFLUENCES OF MUSIC
Music also influenced me, and there were times when all I could hear was Hank Williams crooning “Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow.” And so I headed away from the sanitized environment in which I had been reared and headed west, the most significant move of my life.
Boxing took me to
many places in the South, and though I lost but one fight by a technicality, wisely I got out of the sport.
Nevertheless, I still floundered for awhile and suspect a good name for me during my early years in Montana might have been Bourbon Bert. But simultaneously I also learned to ride a horse and even got to the point where I could stay on the back of a truly wild cayuse. I learned to shoot well, and once I dispatched a charging bear with a .30-06. The bear had killed a young girl.
Rogue bear was created by its
association with garbage dumps, and in1967 it killed a college girl. A ranger friend and I were assigned to find it and kill it.
I guess roving might also be called “getting your shit together,” and that’s what happened. As birthdays began to mount I returned to college in Montana. Upon graduation I became a teacher and summer-time ranger, and then, a few birthdays later, I began working as an Outdoor Writer for a newspaper. Simultaneously I freelanced and published in most magazines that used outdoor material to include Field & Stream, National Wildlife, and Smithsonian. I even tried Playboy, but editors there replied that I simply had not covered the subject adequately.
DON’T WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES?
All this is not to say that everything was perfect, and that I didn’t make a few mistakes. But then that’s what birthdays are for. They’re intended to instill wisdom, and I finally concluded that Playboy was not for me. As well, a very good part of my past caught up to me. I found a girl I had dated in high school.
L To R: Photography and writing have become not only an avocation
but a vocation; two, photography has taken me all over the globe; three, peripatetic Janie, my kindred spirit.
In 1991 I married Janie and that inaugurated a genuinely adventurous period of time. Together, we’ve shared 25 more birthdays — highlighted by months on the Yukon, hikes through the Arctic Refuge and a very meaningful association with the Gwich’in Indians. More recently it has inaugurated explorations of North America in an Airstream trailer resulting in literally dozens of travel stories. It also marked a period during which I’ve produced some of my best works. Significantly Janie and I have coauthored several hiking books and I authored several celebratory books on national parks and scores of magazine stories.
Because of the sterling life I’ve led I’m anticipating that I’ll add another quarter of a century to my current tally. If that proves to be the case, I plan to spend the years with my children — and of course with all family members – helping, I hope, when I can. Perhaps, too, I’ll come out of retirement as a Golden Gloves boxer and return to a symbolic ring to help others fight for the things that have come to mean so much to Janie and me. In a nutshell, that would be the diminishing quality of life I firmly believe we have lost because of our vanishing wildlands.
In another quarter of a century I’ll provide a tally detailing those birthday years. I hope you will check in, for I expect to be wise beyond my years. Some of you already are, I know, and I hope for no less.
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THIS TIME LAST YEAR:
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