In recent east coast BS HQ news, my two sons moved into the same room together. That didn’t happen because we made them, it happened because they wanted to. My wife and I thought that was kind of neat and although Tom, my older son was at first resistant to the idea he warmed up to having Jack in the bottom bunk pretty quick. Along with their sharing of the room, there was a moving of Jack’s stuff including posters, across the hall to make it a truly dorm like situation albeit with a four and six year old pair of occupants. While I provided the muscle moving the heavy stuff, my wife provided the design touches in mounting the pictures, old license plates, metal signs, Dukes of Hazzard stuff, and other items in their new places. Her eye for making stuff look “right” happened to include the one wall treatment shown below with various posters of cool drag cars, a space shuttle, and Bob Motz’s incredible jet powered truck. It is essentially the wall of risk takers and I was acutely aware of it while putting the boys to bed last night after being informed of Bill Warner’s passing earlier in the day by Keith Turk.
Ironically, at least two of the men on that wall (Bob Motz and Rick Kraft driving the funny car) have been brutally injured during their careers but are now back up and at them, doing what they feel they were destined to do. Bill Warner was also badly injured a few years back and worked very hard to come back and compete in the land speed world at the level he was expected to. The space shuttle program has claimed more than a few lives and Bob Riggle has risked life and limb for more than 40 years at the helm of the famed Hemi Under Glass wheelstander. There’s no better group of guys to have my sons staring at before they drift off to sleep every night.
As much as people lament the “pussification” of mankind as time goes on, the fact remains that we have more opportunities for what I would call “elective risk” than have been available to anyone ever in the history of humankind. At the top of the charts there’s space travel. Not a damned thing in my mind trumps that. On the recreation side of things there’s guys taking helicopters to remote locations, jumping out and skiing down cliffs. You can go free climbing up mountains for kicks, bungee jumping, base jumping, and now wing suit jumps are becoming so commonplace they’re normal activities. If you are a hot rodder you can build more horsepower in your driveway for decent money than anyone else has ever been able to. Cars off the factory floor can propel you with relative ease to 150-160 mph…and those are the sedans. While we may be lacking in the kind of raw survival skills that our ancestors needed to keep themselves from being consumed by large woodland creatures with sharp teeth on a daily basis, humankind has certainly not lost a step in its quest to push the envelope and advance the species in ways heretofore unknown.
This all comes back to Bill Warner and those guys on the wall in Tom and Jack’s room for me. I have known more than a few people that met their end at the controls of racing vehicles. All of them have been more removed from me than Bill was. Although I had not known the man an exceptionally long time, I had been in contact with him regarding his event in Houston and during the Wilmington Mile races so when Turk called me to deliver the news it was a true gut punch. All of America felt that punch when the Challenger disaster happened. In racing, small scale Challenger disasters happen with more frequency. It is part of the game and as much as we want to invent new belts, head restraints, seats, safety switches, body armor, roll cages, and soft walls, it ain’t stopping any time soon. That’s not to say that the previously mentioned innovations are bad. They are great and have definitely saved more than a few racers lives but the fact remains, you can’t save them all. I know for a fact that Bill had the best safety gear and equipment that is currently available. He was not a crazy guy. He was a risk taker that did his best to mitigate the possible negative outcomes the best that he could.
There is huge value in risk. As a culture we celebrate those that stare over the edge and come back unscathed. A few weeks ago millions of us watched a guy walk a tight rope across the Grand Canyon it was the most alternately entertaining and horrifying television programming I have ever seen. The guy made it across and kissed his wife, hugged his kids, and promptly announced that he was going to be walking between sky scrapers in New York pretty soon. I have a feeling all of the “pussification” claimers wouldn’t exactly be lining up to show their skills in this same regard as the tight rope walker guy.
On the other side of the spectrum there was the loss of the 19 “smoke jumpers” who are firefighters that literally parachute in “behind enemy lines” to fight raging forest fires. An entire group of them were killed in Arizona earlier this month when the fire they were fighting overtook them. Those are risk takers of the highest order, dedicating themselves to fighting the unyielding forces of mother nature to protect people and property they have never seen nor met. I don’t know what drives them but I do admire their courage and bravery as well as their commitment. Their loss was a tough thing to explain to Tom who is wiser than his six years on the planet would lead you to believe. The fairly simple question of, “Why do they jump into the fire?” verges on the impossible to actually answer with any level of clarity a little guy like him can digest. It is hard enough to make that idea cogent to an adult.
Am I a risk taker? On some level I am, as we all are. Stepping off the relatively secure treadmill of a good paying, solid corporate job to follow the one thing I have always wanted to do in my life was a risky move, going to fetch an old tow truck 600 miles from home that hadn’t moved 100 miles in 15 years was a little risky, going into business with Chad? Yeah…risk.
The vast majority of people that hear of Bill Warner’s passing or see Bob Motz run in his jet truck or watch Rick Kraft hammer a nitro funny car will call the guys “crazy”. My hope is that when my sons are old enough to understand, “crazy” is not in their lexicon when examining the passions, achievements, and hard work of others. In my perfect future while their generation of guys claiming that the world is “pussified” sits on the couch watching football all weekend, my boys are out doing something that brings them the same types of rewards that the men on their wall have earned.
Joe Timney posted the following quote, attributed to the late Bruce McLaren on Facebook yesterday in honor of Bill Warner. It is the perfect summation of everything I’ve been saying here:
To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one’s ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone.
Brian,
Well said.
BKB
Amelia Earhart said it best for me, “My life has been full, the adventure worthwhile, and I don’t mind contemplating the end in the midst of it”…
To the risk takers….
Having just swam out of a sinking Sprit of America,and creating the worlds longest skid marks, Craig Breedlove said “and for my next trick I’ll set myself on fire”.
“RISK” does make you feel alive after your done.
Not sure I agree there are more opportunities “elective risk” . . .
But then most of the “risk” available before the last few years was arguably non-elective (e.g. frequent, massive, winnowing wars fought by draftees, scads of unsafe and unproven technologies, minimal appreciation of preventative safety . . . . )
It wasn’t “non elective” at all. You cannot take what is known today, and say it was risky back when when you measure by today’s standards. I tell people frequently, it pisses me off that I can’t build a ’60’s or ’70’s era car, to run the same et’s they ran back then, without having to build this insanely overbuilt crap NHRA demands. But to your point, you only know what is safe and proven because some of us learned it for you, first.
I ran a turbo nitrous funny bike. I ran 7 flat @ 200MPH with it. Today, sportsman bikes are running faster than that. The only solace I have is that I can still get on a bike and go that fast without 40 yards of 4130 surrounding me. I don’t get the associaton of war and draftees at all.
“Elective risk” assumes both knowledge of the potential harms and a reasonable (and lawful) ability to choose to avoid them. Back when millions of young Americans were drafted and wound up in combat without any real choice, they faced enormous, non-elective risk of life and limb without much of a lawful alternative. BTW, many of those war-hardened heros built our sport.
Being placed in situations of risk without knowledge of how to avoid it isn’t all that “elective.” You can’t really elect to assume a risk that you’re unaware of.
Virtually every aspect of modern life is less “risky” than it used to be. The draft is gone. (and arguably fixations of the young with gangs and violent sports are substitutes for combat) New cars have a dozen airbags, ABS, crush zones . . . Lead is gone from most consumer products. Power tools have all sorts of guards and protective features. OSHA standards help protect workers from being forced into inherently unsafe working situations. Very few still face the daily dangers of agricultural or “hard labor” vocations. Hazards in manufacturing plants are greatly reduced in comparison to the “golden age” of the industrial revolution. Aviation fatalities are a fraction of what they once were. Deaths in motorsports are amazingly infrequent now (compared to the substantial likelihood of death and injury in the early days of the sport)
And because modern life has such reduced involuntary risk, some choose to replace the “thrill” of survival with “elective” risk. Yet even then, modern elective risk tends to be a lot less risky than what the pioneers of any endeavor faced.
While I respect your opinion, I look at a number of your points quite differently. You look at the draft, correctly, I suppose, as something young Americans had no choice in. While that’s true, I support the draft, and would like to see it reinstated. That is, assuming Americans had a public education system that taught traditional American values and history rather than the socialist crap and indocrination kids are being taught today. But I see no harm in making young Americans spend a few years doing something for the good of country. I won’t bee addressing the rampant abuse by various administration in the use of our military. But I’m sure we’d be more alike on that suject than apart.
Where to start with cars…OSHA, EPA….I can’t think of much work than to have some pencil dick bureaucrat telling me how my tools have to work, that I must have air bags, and more stinking buzzers and warning horns for seatbelts, etc, etc. I believe in the individuals ability to improvise, overcome, adapt, and if not, I believe in natural selection. Liberty.