One of the scariest nights I have ever spent was in a small, fenced-in camp in Balule, South Africa, on the southern banks of the Olifants River in Kruger National Park. At night you can hear the lions roar from as far as five miles away – it’s an AWESOME sound.
We’d been clamming across from Redoubt for two days and it was time to pack up our gear and head several hours over to Seward. We were going to go halibut fishing on my friend, Ralph’s 28 foot Bayliner cabin cruiser for two days out of Resurrection Bay. The cruiser was fittingly called the “Think or Thwim”, the same name as his father’s commercial fishing boat I worked on out of Bristol Bay, Alaska in 1985.
In July of 2009, a friend and I were camped not far from a salmon hot spot near Cooper’s Landing, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula. We’d just stowed our portable gas grill and were unpacking our sleeping bags for the night when an ambulance came flying by, sirens wailing. I looked at my friend, who cocked his eyebrows as he said, “Either there’s been a wreck, or someone got hammered by a bear.”
I spent most of my days after school and in the summers exploring the mountainside where we lived. That’s where I came alive. It’s where I learned to hear God speak to me. I didn’t have to compare myself with anyone; I could be whoever I wanted to be and always be the best at it. I wore hiking boots, ragged blue jeans, and a flannel shirt, and carried my BB gun, a pocket knife, and a hand-drawn hunting license I pinned to my back just to prove I belonged in this wilderness environment.