An Ikigai Fish Story
It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.
My friend Danny was always coming up with brilliant ideas.
Rarely were they ‘good,’ let alone brilliant though this time, it seemed he was on to something.
Danny and I were kindred spirits. You would never know it to look at us.
He was black and from a poor neighborhood, contrasting with my white middle-class background.
He was an outgoing extrovert, me a quiet, functional introvert.
Opposites on the surface, anyway.
We clicked over our psychology mid-term grade junior year in high school.
The teacher, for whatever reason, didn’t see us as his ‘star’ pupils, and yet we both aced the mid-term and were the only ones even to come close to doing so.
Being underestimated and then achieving ‘greatness’ united us.
We’ll go to Alaska
During our senior year, he came up with the idea that after graduation, we could go to Alaska and work on the fishing boats.
We’d make enough in one summer to pay for all four years of college and then some. Or so he claimed. This is pre-internet. He never mentioned where he got his info or did his research.
Even though I was working as a deejay, the thought of making several years’ worth of pay in one summer appealed to me.
Plus, the promise of an adventure to Alaska excited me.
We had another friend Scott who wanted to join us when he heard about Dannny’s idea.
Now if Danny and I were opposites, Scott was from another planet.
His dad was a professor at the university in town. He was nerdy and wore bowties to school. Not even remotely the outdoor type. Or so we thought at the time.
“Okay,” said Danny, “it’s the three of us heading to Alaska as soon as we graduate.”
Best Laid Plans
Danny met a girl in the intervening months, and my radio career started taking off.
Alaska and fishing boat fortune no longer seemed the best course of action for us.
Scott, however, decided to go anyway.
In case you need it…
Several years later, I ran into Scott’s brother, who told me his story.
As it turns out, the fishing boats were all crewed for the summer before he got to Alaska.
There weren’t any jobs on the boats, so Scott got the only job he could find in one of the fish canneries.
He never did work on the boats as that fall; he landed a job with an oil company.
His first day on the job began with a helicopter ride to drop off pipe in the middle of the wilderness.
After helping unload the cargo, Scott’s job was to attach some fittings while the others in the crew went back to get more pipe.
As the foreman got in the helicopter to leave, he yelled for Scott to come over.
Above the noise of the helicopter blades, the foreman yelled, “Here, in case you need it,” and handed him a rifle.
“Why would I need this? No one will try to steal the pipe all the way out here.”
The foreman laughed, “It’s not for thieves; it’s in case you get attacked by bears.” He slammed the helicopter door, and they took off.
“Bears? They have bears up here?”
The Paths We Make
Different adventures awaited Danny and me.
I left radio to join the Marines after meeting the love of my life.
Forty-one years of marriage later, it is clear I made the right decision.
The girl dumped Danny, and he moved to California to pursue, with no small irony, the radio career I gave up. We lost touch after that.
Scott loved life in Alaska and never left.
I heard that he still lives there with his wife and children.
There are many paths on the Ikiquest. Not all involve the possibility of being eaten by bears.
Most challenge us and give us opportunities to uncover parts of ourselves we didn’t even realize were there.
Scott found a life he loved by trying something completely opposite to his personality. And yet there had to be something inside him all along that was brought to life by the idea of adventure in Alaska.
🌀 When have you been called to adventure, and what did you learn about yourself?
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Really liked this one.. It's so true, isn't it? Sometimes the best laid plans don't work, but often we end up somewhere much better. Sometimes it's simply about testing our boundaries, and then extending it just a little bit more. Sometimes it's about making conscious choices, one step at a time.. Whatever it is, our paths are all different. We are all on our own journey..
What a fantastic story, and another example of running down unlikely opportunities.