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By 1969, after I had graduated from college and joined the Peace Corps, I was on a safari in Uganda. High above Murchison Falls I went for a walk in the woods when I came within ten feet of a huge boulder. I took a few steps towards it, when it turned on me. I was frozen in place, now face-to-face with a very nasty looking hippopotamus. I had no idea hippos left the water so far below to inhabit the forest. Its little pig ears were twitching and its eyes were red and for a few agonizingly slow moments I thought for sure it was going to charge. I knew if I turned and ran, it would catch me and crush me. I knew if I didn’t do something, it might open its jaws and swallow me whole. I knew if it decided to attack, I was one dead Peace Corps volunteer. The hippo stood its ground, never taking its eyes off me, as I took very slow steps backward, one by one, until it decided I wasn’t a threat, and I decided I could finally turn my back on it and get out of those woods.
My last day in the Peace Corps a visiting friend and I were peacefully passing a joint, enjoying the sunset on the beach in Accra, Ghana, when a stranger came and sat down beside us. My friend, who had flown over from New York and didn’t know the customs, offered this Ghanaian a hit. The man took the joint, smiled, and held it. Then another man approached us, holding a copy of the daily newspaper, shouting about a story inside of a farmer who had been arrested for growing marijuana. I tried to calm this second man down by offering him one of the bananas we had with us, but he wasn’t interested in a banana, he wanted our money. I had the equivalent of eight dollars in my shirt pocket and when he saw that his eyes grew wide. There was a breeze so I tossed the money in the air and the first fellow jumped up and ran to gather the bills. But the agitated one wanted more. He demanded my friend’s Nikon camera. My friend was reluctant to give it up and the man pulled out a knife and cut his arm. I was shocked and infuriated. In my three years in Ghana I had never had a single dangerous incident. Now, on my last day, there was this violence. I stood up and shouted at the guy, who had by then grabbed the camera and was backing up, still waving his knife. I demanded that he give the camera back. He continued to back up. I continued to go forward. Sensing that if he turned and ran we would chase him he made a move, lunging straight at me with his knife. I saw the blade coming towards me and inhaled as the knife reached my mid-section, just barely breaking the skin. I looked down at the knife, at the man’s fully extended hand, and at his eyes. He was just as scared as I was. He laid down the camera and ran off. I sat back down and thought of how close I came to leaving Ghana in a wooden box.
My next to last close encounter with eternity happened when I fell off a ladder trying to unclog a drainpipe. We had had an unexpected rainstorm in Los Angeles and the clogged pipe was pushing water into my wife’s studio. So I climbed a six-foot ladder, made it to the top rung, and slipped. My memory has erased what happened next, but I’ve heard about it from my wife, who found me lying unconscious on the concrete in a pool of blood. I had just missed hitting my head on one of the wooden railroad ties that served as a tree planter, but my skull did crack on the ground. X-rays taken later showed the numerous breaks to my head, face and wrist. I woke up in a hospital bed, so grotesquely bruised that when my six-year old daughter came to visit, she wouldn’t come into the room unless I put a bag over my head, so she wouldn’t have to look at me.
I somehow managed to survive each of these experiences—some my fault, some accidents, some provoked—and what they have taught me is that life is a gift, that when your time is up, it’s up, and when it’s not your time, appreciate that you’ve been given back the gift, so make the most of it.
After I went into that skid and lost control of my mother’s car I had a dream about my death at the age of thirty. It was very palpable and I was convinced it was a harbinger of how I was going to go. It involved a car crash into an overhead abutment on Northern State parkway on Long Island. After that dream I remember driving with my mother on that parkway and I started telling her about it. She didn’t want to hear what I was saying, and mid-sentence I stopped. Not because she was shushing me, but because we were passing an accident that was exactly what I had dreamt. A car had crossed into the overpass, and there was an ambulance on the scene, and a police car.
“I didn’t see that,” I whispered to my mother. “I didn’t see the ambulance or the police.”
“Don’t talk about it,” my mother said. “Don’t ever talk about it.”
I didn’t see it in my dream because I was already dead. But seeing that accident, after having that dream, made me believe that I wasn’t going to live beyond thirty. I was so sure of it that I made the decision then to live as uncompromising a life as I could. I would not take a job just for the money, or to please my parents or anyone else. I would pursue my dreams, even if that meant walking a tightrope without a net. And that’s what I’ve done ever since.
I passed that thirty marker a long time ago. I’ve managed to avoid death from being run over, from crashing a car into a house, from an out of control car crashing into me, from rifle fire, from knife stabbing, from hippo crunching, and from falling off a ladder. I’ve had no other dreams of how I’m going to die, but I’ve never taken life for granted. If it took all these omens and precursors to give me a lifestyle, I’m not complaining. I may have chosen the road less traveled, but it still offers me a direction.
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