I've gotten a lot of comments from people who've enjoyed my reading of some of my dad's work, particularly his article called The Thanksgiving Deer about my first deer when I was 11 years old. and I thought we'd jump back in the way back

machine go back 30 years 1984 when I published a book called Close Calls.

Yep, 30 years ago I wrote this book.

I was a lot younger then.

And just to make it fun, I'm going to pull a chapter out of this book. Now this was a collection of close

calls in the outdoors, people who have had brushes with death. Great stories, interesting

stories. One of the things I learned in doing this and talking to the people

I interviewed for the book is that physical conditioning and mental toughness made all the difference.

In many cases, they're struggling, they're treading water, they're trying to get through snow,

they're, in some form of fashion, being physically challenged, and a number of them reported the exact same thing,

none of them talking to each other. They talked about a conversation going on in their

head, two different voices really, bargaining with themselves I'll go another

hundred yards I'll tread water for five more minutes and then I'll give up

understanding the whole time that giving up means dying and just saying,

you know, it just hurts too much, but I'll just keep trying for a little bit longer.

Now of course what we'll never know is that those who didn't make it off the

mountain, those who did succumb to the waves, we don't know how many of them made the conscious

decision to give up. Just said it's too hard, I'm

packing it in right here. I guess the thing that I got out of this at a

talking to all these people was trying to be as physically fit as you can and

also ramping up your mental toughness because that makes all the difference.

So again this is from this little book it was

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