ding the bags. Norman Mailer captured the tedium of training in his book The Fight, an account of the legendary Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle”:
Just as a man serving a long sentence in prison will begin to live in despair about the time he recognizes that the effort to keep his sanity is going to leave him less of a man, so a fighter goes through something of the same calculation. The prisoner and the fighter must give up some part of what is best in him (since what is best for any human is no more designed for prison—or training—than an animal for the zoo). Sooner or later the fighter recognizes that something in his psyche is paying too much for the training. Boredom is not only deadening his personality but killing his soul.
A few weeks before I had to leave, my friend Quentin Oram had e-mailed me from Australia and asked if I would help him and his girlfriend (also a great friend of mine), Florence Bel, take his ’38 Hans Christian cutter across the Indian Ocean. We had all met working on a yacht in the Caribbean.
So I flew back to Darwin, and we spent five months crossing the seven thousand miles. Quentin is English and Florence is French, and they refought the Hundred Years’ War during the passage. We touched in Durban, South Africa, and I happily got off the boat and wandered around for four months. It was restful after the long, tedious anxiety of the passage, except for being chased by a young bull elephant near Kruger and stroking the fin of a great white shark off the southern coast. When I was alone and unobserved, I would shadowbox a little, and my unused limbs would flash and spin. I missed fighting, and I thought about how much better I’d be if I were still training and competing. I would sometimes talk about it, but people’s reactions were weird; they didn’t know where to put me, or whether they believed me.
Finally, I flew back to the States and started temping in Boston, a little panicked to be twenty-six years old and without a career. But I felt like I was in disguise wearing a tie on the subway, like I was pretending. I hated my job. I worked at a law firm and found myself turning into a nihilist, an anarchist, hiding files, sleeping in closets; soon I would work half an hour and then take an hour break. I asked my brother-in-law, a computer systems manager, to write me a virus, and he clapped me on the back and laughingly shook his head. I wanted to tear down the financial district. I worked out and found some guys to hit Thai pads with, but I was so far out of fighting shape that it felt like a joke. There was a black guy with a wicked lead-leg kick who had fought in New York, and he was surprised at how good I was for just six months of training. “You might be something if you put in a few years,” he said.
When people asked me about my muay Thai experience, the stories began to feel distant and dreamlike. Friends shook their heads (usually affectionately) or gave me puzzled looks. I guess it was a strange thing to go do, although at the time it didn’t seem that way. I was frequently asked, “Why? Why fight?” I could argue that the fear of fighting drove me to fight, but I’m not afraid of being hurt, and the thought of getting knocked out doesn’t faze me. What I am afraid of is being made a fool of, of dishonoring myself.
But that’s not all of it: I am afraid of confrontation. I don’t like it when anyone gets mad at me, and I try to avoid angering anyone. It’s not big scary men, or women, or anything in particular. I don’t like pissing anyone off. I am afraid of the anger of others.
By doing something repeatedly, though, and understanding it, you can diffuse and defuse the fear. This is true for sailing, riding motorcycles, asking girls out—even getting hit in the face by a man who wants to kill you.
I thought that I could walk away from fighting, having taken the test. But fighting is never over. I hadn’t been tested, I had been given an easy victory without any kind of struggle. I hadn’t learned enough to be done. I had the problem all boxers and fighters have: They never want to quit, they always are looking ahead to the next fight, when they’ll do better. I was broke, though, all the sailing money long spent. I didn’t have the background to be a professional fighter—I started too late and wasn’t a genetic freak who could get away with it—and I wasn’t sure that just training was enough stimulation.
In the summer of ’01, I nearly joined the Marine Corps again, this time to fly helicopters, and I was breaking in my boots for boot camp when, on some desperate whim, I took a job doing construction for Raytheon in Antarctica, at the South Pole. The National Science Foundation pays for the operations there and contracted out to Raytheon; they were building a huge year-round station to hold the large numbers of scientists and visitors that the Pole gets these days—around two hundred in the summer and thirty to fifty people in the winter.
Ahh, Antarctica. You had to be there. It was 70 below zero without windchill the first week down there; with windchill it hit 118 below. That’s brisk. We were working outside for ten hours a day, and even during “summer” it was usually 20 below.
I remember when summer ended and the temperatures began to drop again, one of the crane operators said to me cheerily, “There’s a nip of fall in the air today.” It was 50 below. When I wasn’t working, I lifted weights and ran on a treadmill, and there was a heavy bag in a little gymnasium that I would pound on. I felt like I had just scratched the surface of fighting, and the depths beckoned, but I needed money.
While down in Antarctica I met Cheri Dailey, a beautiful, tall, strong girl who was one of the few female smoke jumpers in the world. I thought smoke jumping sounded about right. I asked Cheri how I could be more like her, and she hooked me up with her old hand crew (a twenty-person firefighting team) in Washington State. I couldn’t have had a better recommendation. There is a legend about Cheri Dailey, and it goes like this: One of the fitness tests that smoke jumpers take is humping a hundred-pound pack for three miles. Out of a class of about sixty, Cheri came in first, beating all the men—and these guys are Division 1 football players, total badasses. Cheri smoked them all. She also had a tongue stud.
I left Antarctica in January as winter was settling in, the sun beginning its monthlong set, and traveled around New Zealand for a month before coming back to the States. I bummed around L.A. and New York again, then headed out west in the spring to join a firefighting crew.
The Ahtanum 20 was a state crew where the average age was about twenty-two. I was twenty-seven and made a conscious decision to “out-young-man” the young men on the crew; I would be more enthusiastic, run farther, work harder, race around more. It was the best way I could see to handle the situation of being the old guy who was a rookie. We had a good time, fighting fires and roaming Washington, which is a heartbreakingly beautiful place. I was the weird old dude who hung punching bags in the trees around camp and hit them barefoot. The Ahtanum 20 was a type-2 crew, which meant we couldn’t do certain dangerous jobs that called for type-1 crews, called Hotshots. I remember watching Hotshot crews head into the worst parts of the fires and thinking, Man, I got to get on with those guys.
In the winter I came back east to get my EMT certification, and the following spring I headed out to interview with Hotshot crews. I drove all over the country and was picked up by the Gila Hotshots in New Mexico. It was a considerable honor to be hired by them, as Gila is considered one of the best crews in the country. Up at the camp, high in the Gila National Forest, I found a heavy bag and hung it with some carabiners, to pound on in the afternoons. At the time, I wouldn’t have said I was going to fight again, but the idea still lurked.
Fire, especially big fire, is awesome. Sometimes when we were doing big burnouts on gnarly fires, working in and among acres of flames, seeing clumps of trees torch out fifty or a hundred feet into the sky—there’s a lot of adrenaline there, too. When the heat hits like a wall and drives you back without conscious thought, the straps of your backpack so hot they burn you through the Nomex shirt—we all suffer from a touch of pyromania in the business. Our primary weapon against fire is fire, and burning was my favorite job. Being on big fires at night, watching the behavior of intense heat and flame, can be indescribably beautiful.
After the season, I applied for a position with the North Cascades smoke jumpers in Washington State and got a new tattoo on my left forearm, a tattoo of my life, with the motto “Mundis Ex Igne Factus Est,” which means “The World Is Made of Fire” in Latin, a quote from a Helprin book (A Soldier in the Great War) that I had read maybe five years earlier. It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul. No good painting ever came easily to me: The good ones were battles. I got the tattoo so that I would always see it there and be reminded.
Though I had applied to be a smoke jumper (and got hired), somewhere, in the