A Life of Adventure?

In a conversation recently, a friend remarked to me: "Every man dies, but not every man lives." If you think about it, that is profoundly true and rather disturbing. I hope that shakes you up like it does me.

You might not be one of those men who are truly alive - not yet anyway. Maybe you need an example, a few words to inspire you, or a life to look at. If so, then you can do a lot worse than examining the life of Richard Halliburton.

Richard Haliburton was a man who lived relatively briefly - about 40 years, much of it in the period between the First and Second World Wars. But into those years he packed a lifetime of adventure. He started as soon as he could. The moment he finished at Princeton, he headed to Europe to start a two-year, round-the-world trek. He climbed the Matterhorn, took forbidden pictures at Gibraltar, gambled (profitably) in Monte Carlo, spent all night in the Taj Mahal, survived thermometer-bursting heat in India and Afghanistan, climbed to the top of the great pyramids in Egypt, and so on. Later he would swim the Hellespont and the Panama Canal, march with the French Foreign Legion and fly a biplane across the Sahara. He was arrested on numerous occasions, and even landed in jail a few times, but his crimes were only those fueled by his curiosity, trying to see things which he wasn't supposed to see and go places he wasn't supposed to go.

Lots of people make round-the-world trips. But what is endlessly fascinating about Halliburton is the transmission of his stories, observations and his motivations to us. Before he died in 1939 (attempting, unsuccessfully, to sail across the Pacific in a Chinese junk), he wrote half a dozen books, hundreds of articles and, most importantly, more than a thousand letters to his parents. In his amazing writing - amazing in quantity and in beauty and insight and humor - he displays an appropriate awe of nature together with a deep appreciation of the achievements of the pinnacle of God's creation, man.

Often Halliburton encounters conditions which were (to put it mildly) uncomfortable and people who were (from his vantage point) unusual. But at no point does he criticize, complain or moan. Rather, he exudes a quintessentially American optimism, a modest cheerfulness, a genuine belief in the decency of many of his fellow man, a passion for seeing the world and its variety of people. He recognizes that for all that separates him from the Dyak tribespeople in Bornea, he sees that they, above all else, love children and cannot have enough of them. He expresses admiration for the simplicity and gentleness of the people of the tiny mountain country Andorra and has tea with their President, by a fire in the living room of the Andorran White House.

Through all of his adventures, Halliburton remains cheerful, exuberant, charming and full of wonder. And he never takes himself too seriously. In fact, the most uproariously funny passages in his writings are where his inexperience and a faraway place collide. Take, for example, his account of an (unsuccessful) panther hunt in India:

"?I fired. One could have heard the rifle's roar in Calcutta. The recoil knocked me completely?out of the tree. I thudded to the ground on one side, the bearer on another, and the elephant gun on the third. In three terrified leaps the panther was back in the jungle. I had not killed him, and my self-condemnation knew no bounds. To investigate the possibility of a blood-trail the bearer and I walked over to the carcass [of a deer killed by the panther], and found that instead of slaying the panther in the best accredited Daniel Boone style, I had shot a large hole straight through the ample side of the dead calf. My humiliation was so touching, Doctor Lap on his return arranged for a real hunt with the idea of giving me a chance to redeem myself."

Even his final transmission from the Sea Dragon is hardly a distressed call for help, but a string of cheerful, common sense observations: "Southerly gales, squalls, lee rail under water, wet bunks, hard tack, bully beef, wish you were here-instead of me!"

For all of his decency, Halliburton is a bit harder on folks back Home. The Royal Road to Rom