boys have need of some recklessness. If they do not come by it naturally, it must be bred into them. The trick is titrating just enough of the stuff so that they are game for life’s adventures but not liable to do something catastrophically stupid, like going to law school. And so it was in this moment, as I stood on Lee Street, that I resolved to put more adventure into his life.
In the end, I settled on taking Cody to Yellowstone for a week of camping and communing with nature in all her brutal splendor. I emphasize that this trip would be for his benefit, not mine. Because while I enjoy nature, in measured doses, I have matured to the point where I have certain needs. For instance, there is only one pillow on which I can sleep—it is almost completely flat, with small indentations perfectly conformed to my neck from three decades of use. Also, I require a double espresso every morning, before 6:30 a.m. This is a partial list of what my wife delicately refers to as my “eccentricities.”
But parenthood requires sacrifice—the two words are practically synonyms—so in early June, I packed up my son, and a great deal of gear, and took him to Yellowstone, one of the last places in America where you can still have real adventure.
Real adventure requires real risk, and Yellowstone has that in spades. The week before we got to the park, there were two “geyser accidents.” In one, a 13-year-old was burned at a thermal area near Old Faithful. The injuries were severe enough that he was hospitalized. In another, a 23-year-old fell into an acidic, scalding-hot spring near Porkchop Geyser. He died in so grisly a manner that rangers were unable to recover a body.