Lust For Life

I turned 30 last month. I say this only in passing b/c it precedes a great story which is made even better by the knowledge of my receding youth; though any compulsion to bestow cash donations, property, gold bullion, and/or other contributions of a monetary nature may be directed to my parents in New Mexico who have broad legal authority in managing all my financial interests.

Dirges, solitary meditative retreats, last wills & testament, birthday cards with snide comments… these are all things we associate with turning 30… It’s that age where one is officially an adult and expected to behave in a mature and responsible manner. Slowing down, putting on a little extra weight, finally paying off the car and the school debt, eating high-fiber cereal for breakfast… are all considered part of the territory of this third decade of life. It’s one of the primary reasons my favorite super hero is Peter Pan. It takes some super-human strength to maintain youth in the face of bills, carbs, kids, and hair loss. I think I’ve dreaded getting older from about age 9. My granddad said something like “you’ll never be a single-digit age again” at which point I realized that moments are measured in seconds and hours and my youth was rapidly diminishing – I was already half way to college. It wasn’t until college that I had the mathematical prowess to actually calculate the number of moments the average person will experience; roughly 690,000 – only 263,000 occur when you are young and by then I’d already used up 175,000. Life needed some serious carpe diem if I was going to get the most out of my moments.

Ten years have past since I was a freshman in collage and I’m still sucking Thoreau’s perverbial marrow out of life. Turning 30 has been something I’ve prepared for since turning 19 – physical exercise, mental aerobics, special meditation, organic foods… But in maintaining youth, how does one measure success?

The weekend following my birthday I went on a motocross trip with a good friend of mine, Ben. Having never actually ridden a motorcycle outside the city before, let alone off-road, I told Ben that maybe a wild 11 hour motocross trip into the Cambodian jungle on ancient logging trails thick with soggy clay, motorcycle-eating potholes, chest-deep water crossings, in the the pouring rain with four crazy Frenchmen in body armor might be a little over my head. Good thing I spelled it out for him so clearly.

As a raw beginner with no motorcycle experience except for 100cc-Honda’ing around town at speeds of less than 30mph I thing it’s safe to say that being “tossed into the deep-end” is a mild understatement. “Thrown into the Pacific amid a school of sharks with a paper cut and a 10lb weight” would be a better metaphor (though it doesn’t roll of the tongue quite so readily).

Between obscure topo’s and a GPS unit we only managed to get lost about 8 times and backtrack 20 miles of trail barely suitable for a water buffalo. I began the trip at a tentative 5mph on slick mud roads slipping and tottering on my 250cc Honda dirt bike using my feet for training wheels and ended the trip doing donuts in a 20 acre mud hole that had been recently clear-cut by a bulldozer. After 11 hours of riding – 9 of which were spent wrestling the bike like a bucking bronco – my hands were nearly frozen to the handlebars and two days later I was still eating and brushing my teeth with my left hand. In between potholes, monsoon rains, and dodging cows, I managed to take a few blurry photos of the event which in retrospect seem rather sterile compared to the insane mud-spewing, adrenaline-pumping, smoke and sweat event.

However, if fun is proportional to the depth of the pot holes, the saturation factor of your clothing, the thickness of mudcake on your face, the size of the leeches, the density of the horseflies, the number of falls, and the immanence of death, then I HAD A BLAST! And I think therein really lies the measure of youth. Regardless of what you are forced to eat for breakfast or how much Rogain you use, youth is measured by the size of the smile through the mud cake, grass stains, and bruises; it’s measured by the wonder and desire for new experiences and a lust for life. I may not be Peter Pan (though my wife might like me in the green tights) but I will certainly count myself among the ranks of the Lost Boys.