A summer evening on a bridge over Soldier Creek, ten miles north of Topeka, Kansas. The concrete bridge spans two wooded banks that drop steeply into a stream 40 feet below. The water eases around a bend from the west and washes over a sloping layer of limestone, then slips more quickly over a second layer of stone and passes beneath the bridge into a deep pool of flat, brown water. Boys from Silver Creek and Topeka have checked its depth and decided it’s deep enough to break the fall of a boy leaping off the four-story-high bridge.
My teenage son Alex and his friends have jumped from the Huxman Bridge several times. They drop 40 feet and plunge deep into dark water. It’s an adrenalin rush. But rushes diminish with use. It’s called the law of diminishing returns.
One summer evening he and his friend Cory returned to the bridge. A black fisherman on the far bank watched as they climbed the footpath through weeds and shrubs up to the high deck. The two boys walked the roadway to the center of the bridge and Cory volunteered to jump first.
He sat down on the knee-high concrete guardrail and swung his legs over to face the shadowed current so far below. The sun was down and the western sky was fading from orange to mauve; twilight was near. Swallows still skimmed the surface below and a silver quarter moon stood high above the bankside cottonwoods, maples, and walnut trees. The two boys talked for a few minutes.
“Ready?” Alex asked.
Cory nodded and Alex counted him down: “Three, two, one . . .”
Cory jumped, dropping feet first, dropping free, arms flailing the air to keep his balance, hitting the water hard with a sudden clap and disappearing.
Alex leaned over the rail and waited. A few seconds later, Cory’s head and shoulders burst from the surface. He swam for shore.
“You all right?” Alex yelled.
“I’m okay, you ready?”
Down the stream, the fisherman had turned his attention from his red-and-white bobbers to the remaining boy on the high bridge.
“You ready?” Cory shouted up again as he found his footing and stood up in shallow water.
Twilight was deepening, and they could hear a train approaching on the tracks that parallel the stream. Above the dark trees, the moon was undergoing the alchemy of evening, exchanging silver for gold. The air was warm. The swallows were gone to their clay huts under the bridge and a bat was dodging and flicking along the stream. Alex sat down on the concrete guardrail and swung his legs over. The evening shadows had dyed the water black. He turned about and faced the roadway, his hands holding the knee-high guardrail, his toes on the deck.
A car approached from his right, its headlights picking up the shirtless boy at the edge of the bridge. The driver slowed down. Alex grinned fiercely and gave the man the thumbs up. The train was coming, a heavy rumble shaking the air. The car pulled away and rolled over the tracks just before the red lights began flashing and the striped crossbar swung down to the metallic ding, ding, ding of the warning bell. Alex heard the coming diesel horn call out its warning.
A phrase from a movie comedy was running through his head: Do something every day that scares you. Do something every day that scares you. Awful advice for teenage boys.
“You ready, Alex?” came another shout from below.
He nodded and took a breath.
“Three . . . two . . . one . . !”
He stood fixed to the concrete guardrail, his heart pounding.
“Come on, Dude!” Cory called. They had done this many times before. Why was Alex holding up? He was a black silhouette forty feet up against the western sky. The diesel horn sounded nearer, shouting three times across the corn fields and forest groves. There was the sharp, persistent ding, ding, ding, of the crossing bell, the red lights flashing.
Cory called out, “Three . . . two . . one . . !”
Alex pushed off from the guardrail, leaning backwards into empty air. He bent his knees and pushed his legs hard off the concrete deck. His stiff body began pivoting backwards down the night, head under heels: one turn, a second turn, trying for a double back flip, but he already knew he wouldn’t complete the second flip, he closed his eyes tight and stiffened as his horizontal body slammed hard onto black water. Water surged around him, pain rushed up from the muddy depths and flooded him. He was kicking for the faintest light, his face surfaced, he gasped for air and found himself already stroking for shore. His hands, then his feet found mud and gravel and he tried to stand. Bent double, he waded a few steps and pulled himself onto a limestone slab and collapsed.
Cory sloshed over and climbed the rock beside him. “You all right?” He leaned over Alex. “You all right? Geez! I didn’t know you were going to do that!”
Alex pushed himself to his hands and knees and coughed. Blood sprayed his forearm.
“Dude, you all right?”
Alex hung his head and coughed again, spitting up a glob of blood. There was a sharp pain in his chest. His bones ached hard. The skin on his back burned like a prairie fire.
The train was rumbling by, shaking the night. Alex tried to breathe through his pain.
Cory leaned over him and said, “You’re the craziest sonofabitch I’ve ever seen! I don’t know anybody that would do that.”
Alex stared at the bloodied rock and smiled.
From the gathering darkness downstream, they heard the fisherman call out, “You guys crazy!”
Which about sums it up.
But there’s more to this. Everyone knows that young men are risk takers. Insurance companies have calculated their behavior to decimal points. For hunter-gatherer cultures, courage was necessary for tribal survival, but now insured security is what the society craves. Risk-taking is often punished by traffic tickets and drug arrests while our rhetoric— backed by literature, television, cinema, advertising, entrepreneurs, and commencement speakers—praises risk taking.
But where can an average young man or woman legitimately display courage, and more importantly, to what purpose? Courage is a means to an end. The end matters, especially when it raises the real possibility of your end.
* * *
Three summers ago, after getting lost hiking in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho, Alex and I found our way out to a highway and began hitchhiking. A damaged Saturn four-door swerved over and stopped. A burly young man in a bright blue T-shirt opened his door, stepped out and opened his trunk. We dropped our heavy backpacks in the trunk and opened the car doors; Alex climbed in the back seat, and I slid into the front. His name was Tyler Lamere and he was a Native American. I asked what tribe and he told me he was a mixture of Ojibwa, Cree, Assiniboine, and Sioux.
He pulled onto the highway and stepped on the gas. We were moving fast down the mountain, very fast. He soon overtook a car, but it was impossible to pass with the highway constantly curving in and out around the mountain slopes, so he kept his bumper almost attached to the car ahead and awaited his opportunity, swerving out occasionally to weigh the risks.
He was a risk taker, a UFC amateur cage fighter trying to work his way into the professional ranks. He told us his record so far was 7-0. He’d had a fight with a 253-pound heavyweight who was introduced by the announcer as being six-feet-eleven. Tyler was about a foot shorter but strong in the shoulders. When the announcer called out Tyler’s 205 pounds, the tall fighter just rolled his eyes in disgust. “Wouldn’t even shake my hand. . . . I knocked him out in 57 seconds.”
He told us of another fight, a longer struggle with a gigantic Samoan.
As we rushed down the mountains, he occasionally darted into the passing lane and floored it to roar around a car or pickup. He talked about the danger of getting kneed if you come in for a double-leg takedown in a cage fight. About how amateurs aren’t allowed to use their elbows. About how he wanted to move to California where he could get noticed. He needed to get noticed.
Alex leaned over the seat and asked Tyler if, as a cage fighter, he had a fighter’s nickname. Tyler said no, but he’d thought about it. “Maybe Crazy Bear,” he said.
“Crazy Bear,” said Alex. “So do you do anything else that’s crazy besides cage fighting?”
“Sky diving. I’ve jumped from 13,500 feet.”
“Really? How did that feel?”
“It’s a rush, man. You should try it.”
He told us of street racing with his friends, of how he once smashed into his buddy’s car trying to speed past him on an entry ramp to a highway, which accounted for the driver’s door of his Saturn painted in grey primer and a long crack that jagged across his windshield. “It’s a rush, man.”
* * *
In a Sherman Alexie short story, two Indian boys “wanted to be warriors. But it was too late to be warriors in the old way. All the horses were gone. So the two Indian boys stole a car and drove it to the city. They parked the stolen car in front of the police station and then hitchhiked back home to the reservation. When they got back, all their friends cheered and their parents’ eyes shone with pride. You were very brave, everybody said to the two Indian boys. Very brave.”
They wanted to be warriors, but warriors have largely lost their function in normal, everyday society. Not just for Indians, but for the vast majority of Americans.
* * *
Aristotle said that courage is noble, but he allowed that there is such a thing as too much courage: “Those who go to excess, he who exceeds in fearlessness . . . would be a sort of madman or insensible person if he feared nothing, neither earthquakes nor the waves, as they say the Celts do not.” Aristotle thought a rash man a fool, a brave man, noble, but the difference between the two is not only in the measurement of risk, rating the odds of survival, but in the purpose of the act. For what do you risk a snapped neck, a crushed lung, death by drowning, life as a quadriplegic? For an adrenalin rush, for the praise of peers?
Leaping off bridges, sky diving, street racing are acts of physical courage. I met a middle-aged woman who was hobbling around an academic conference on crutches. She told me she had been whitewater rafting when her foot caught in an oarlock just as the raft flipped. Her ankle snapped. They sent in a helicopter to extract her. She survived whitewater rafting but at the cost of months of pain. We sat down and talked for a few minutes. She was in emotional pain as well as physical pain. She told me that while she was recuperating from the ankle injury, she received a phone call that informed her that her son had just been killed while base jumping: leaping from a cliff with a parachute. Apparently a wind gust had driven him and his parachute back into the cliff from which he had jumped; the parachute collapsed and he dropped to his death.
* * *
Physical courage is often born of boredom: what shall we do today? Let’s go jump off a bridge. Or it is encouraged by conformity: he jumped, so I must too. Or to attract the praise of peers: ‘and their eyes shown with pride.’ Mark Twain said, “It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
Moral courage is conceived deep within that interior labyrinth of principles taught, conflicts experienced, thoughts pursued concerning justice, duty, freedom, loyalty, forgiveness, compassion, and much more. That labyrinth with many windows we call the conscience where heart and mind and will embrace or refuse or ignore an ideal, a belief, a principle. A fully formed conscience is a costly thing. It can lead to rash behavior.
A man is knee-deep in snow, slogging in a long line of prisoners. He is memorizing the poem he has hidden in his ragged clothes before the guards can frisk him and find it. When he returns to the wooden barracks after ten hours laying bricks on a near-starvation diet, he pulls out a matchbox where each broken piece of a match represents 10 lines of poetry. As the exhausted prisoners in the bunks around him curse and cough and fall into fitful snoring, he sets out on a long mental journey, repeating each line, fighting sleep, moving with cold, calloused fingers the tiny, broken sticks, rehearsing the lines; each collection of words arranged and stacked like treasure in his shaved head: An illumined interior suffering core:/ May, for everything, this be our one recompense . . . twenty minutes later, twenty bits of match have moved, and 200 whispered lines have passed his chapped lips: Then I passed betwixt being and dying,/ I fell off and now cling to the edge,/ And I gaze back with gratitude, trembling,/ On the meaningless life I have led./ Not my reason, nor will, nor desire/ Blazed the twists and turns of its road . . .
We named our bridge-leaping son Alex after that prisoner, Russian writer and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn. During eight years in the jails and slave camps of Stalin’s Russia, he memorized over 12,000 lines of self-created poems that recorded events in his life and ideas that he could not allow the guards to find, a memorized record of his days and of his changing beliefs (he had once been a convinced communist). Solzhenitsyn risked everything, with little hope a single word would survive the camps.
He had won decorations for valor as a captain of an artillery unit fighting the Nazis on the eastern front, but had been arrested by his own government for writing letters critical of their Communist dictator Joseph Stalin. He spent the next decade in prisons, in brutal forced-labor camps, and finally in exile far from home. For countless men and women unjustly imprisoned, this was a soul-corrupting experience. It was survival of the fittest, of the most cunning, the disloyal, of thieves and murderers and informers. But for Solzhenitsyn it became something else. It was a chance, he said, to reconsider his life, “to temper, to cut, to polish one’s soul so as to become a human being.”
In the harsh, snowbound concentration camps, he wrote of “the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go to the left—you lose your conscience.” In the camps, a conscience was a risky thing to maintain: One’s own order to oneself, “Survive!” is the natural splash of a living person. Who does not wish to survive? Who does not have the right to survive? Straining all the strength of our body! . . .
“But simply ‘to survive’ does not yet mean ‘at any price.’ ‘At any price’ means at the price of someone else.
“Let us admit the truth: At that fork in the camp road, at that great divider of souls, it was not the majority of the prisoners that turned to the right. Alas, not the majority. But fortunately neither was it just a few. There are many of them—human beings—who made the choice. But they did not shout about themselves. You had to look closely to see them. Dozens of times this same choice had arisen before them too, but they always knew, and knew their own stand. . . .”
(The Gulag Archipelago)
* * *
Two quick examples, actually, three examples in two stories. The first comes from Solzhenitsyn: a ten-year-old girl named Zoya Leshcheva was taken to an orphanage. Her father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, and older adolescent brothers had all been scattered to distant concentration camps for their faith in God. In the orphanage she “declared she would never remove the cross from around her neck, the cross which her mother had hung there when she said farewell.”
Zoya tied the cord tighter so they couldn’t rip it off when she was sleeping. “The struggle,” writes Solzhenitysn, “went on for a long time. Zoya became enraged: ‘You can strangle me and then take if off a corpse!’ Then she was sent to an orphanage for retarded children—because she would not submit. . . . Zoya stood her ground. Even here she refused to learn to steal or to curse. ‘A mother as sacred as mine must never have a daughter who is a criminal. I would rather be a political, like my whole family.’
“And she became a political [imprisoned for anti-Soviet views]. And the more her instructors and the radio praised Stalin, the more clearly she saw him the culprit responsible for all their misfortunes. And, refusing to give in to the criminals, she now began to win them over to her views! In the courtyard stood one of those mass-produced plaster statues of Stalin. And mocking and indecent graffiti began to appear on it. . . . The administration kept repainting the statue, kept watch over it, and reported the situation . . . . And the graffiti kept on appearing, and the kids kept on laughing. Finally one morning they found that the statue’s head had been knocked off and turned upside down, and inside were feces.”
Interrogations and threats followed: “Turn over the gang of terrorists to us, otherwise we are going to shoot the lot of you for terrorism!” There were 150 children in the camp.
“It’s not known,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “whether the kids would have stood up to them or given in, but Zoya Leshcheva declared: ‘I did it myself! What else is the head of that papa good for?’
“And she was tried. And she was sentenced [to death], no joke,” writes Solzhenitsyn. But because she was only fourteen years old at the time, the law did not allow execution, so she was given ten years in the camps. At eighteen, she was transferred to the adult prison camps. “For her directness and her language she got a second camp sentence, and it seems, a third one as well” and her life fades away into the nonhistory of an unrecorded death.
Was she rash? Certainly.
* * *
A woman, a loyal Communist, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, was arrested because she had agreed with Trotsky when Trotsky was a much-praised member of the leadership. After Trotsky fell from grace, so did his advocates. A bureaucrat, a Major Yelshin, sitting in his comfortable office with a big window that overlooked a lake in Kazan, laid out a plate of French rolls cut diagonally and filled with “tender, pink, succulent ham that made the mouth water.” He had just extracted Semyonovna from the prison cellars where she was starving and had been kept sleepless for days, but she refused to sign the documents that would have falsely accused her friends. Major Yelshin then had her sentenced to ten years. The sentence later was doubled. Again and again, over the next eighteen years, she came close to death, but survived to write her well known chronicle Journey into the Whirlwind.
Near the end of her second term, she was dying of scurvy and malnutrition in one of the Kolyma camps of northeastern Siberia (they were intended as death camps), but was given a brief reprieve in the mess hall washing dishes, a place extra food could be found and a worker could avoid the subzero temperatures and exhausting labor of chopping and stacking trees in the frozen forests. In the mess hall, she worked with a deaf Volga German who kept talking to himself in German. “From the second day on, a tacit understanding had grown up between us. I was amused and touched by his way of treating me like a lady in this jungle world. He stood up when I did, let me go through doors first, and helped me on with my prison coat . . . He continued to talk to himself a great deal, of course in German. Being used to the fact that everyone regarded his speech as a senseless and unintelligible mumbo jumbo, he did not hesitate to express his thoughts aloud.
“Listening to him, I soon discovered that he was a devout Catholic from a prosperous farming background. He communicated with me by means of gestures and mimicry, having no idea that I knew German. This made me feel awkward, as if I were eavesdropping on his secrets. One day I tore off a piece of newspaper and wrote on the edge in German: ‘I can understand all you say, please remember that.’”
Helmut, for that was his name, was much moved. “He looked at me for a long time with his moist eyes, then kissed my hand, swollen as it was with dishwashing and reeking of soup, and said he was certain the gnadge Frau would never give him away: he could see it in my face.”
One morning a party of prisoners arrived who had been worked in the mines to complete exhaustion, “human slag that was now of no further use there. On the march back, numbers of them had died .” The survivors were assigned to chopping up plants used to prevent scurvy. “As usual when such parties arrived, there was a great emergency in our kitchen and canteen, preparing extra soup and white bread and washing piles of extra bowls. As I bent over the sink, a man poked his head through the opening; he wore a cap with a dirty towel wound around it.
“‘Which of you’s from Kazan?’ he asked in a hoarse voice. I trembled at the wild thoughts that went through my head. Could my husband be among these dying men, or was it a message from one of my friends, and if so, who?
“‘One of the fellows here is from Kazan,’ said the man, ‘he’s on his last legs, he won’t see the night through. He heard there was a Kazan woman working here, and he sent me to ask if there was a chance of his getting a piece of bread for his last meal. Could you spare some for him? You’re so lucky to be where the food is. He promised me half.’ The man rubbed his forehead and cheeks with a filthy sleeve as he started to sweat because of the heat from the sink.
“‘Here you are,’ I said, handing him a ration. ‘Give him my good wishes. Wait a minute—who is it, anyway? What’s his name?’
“‘He’s a Major Yelshin. He worked in the Kazan NKVD’ [a branch of the Soviet secret police].
“The bread in my hand trembled and dropped to the floor. Major Yelshin! I saw, as if in close-up, the comfortable office with the big window looking out on the Black Lake. I heard the velvety tones of the Major’s voice: ‘Make a clean breast of it. . . . You’re just being romantic . . . taken in by those filthy subversives. . . .’ It was he who had decided that my crime fell under the article about terrorism that carried the death sentence. . . .”
The man reaching for the bread stopped and asked, “What’s the matter? Did you know him? He doesn’t seem to have been such a bad fellow. . . . Anyway, does it matter now? He’ll certainly be dead by the night, I can tell only too well. Once the teeth get long and start sticking out of their mouths, it’s all over.”
Semyonovna picked up the bread and handed it to the man. “Give it to him. . . . Wait a minute, though—you’re to tell him it’s from me. Remember my name and repeat it to him. . . .”
She regretted making this request; it bothered her conscience: “What made me suffer was my own behavior. How could I have been so petty as to insist on his knowing my name, to poison the last mouthful of bread that he would eat in his life? Suddenly my legs gave way under me. I sat down on the box we used as a dining table.”
“’Was ist los?’ asked Helmut anxiously, offering me paper and pencil for my reply. I wrote: “The man asking for bread was my interrogator.”
“Helmut,” she writes, “was strangely exalted by the episode of the bread ration. During our work he whispered to me in German: ‘Your life will be saved, do you hear me? You will come out of here alive, because you gave bread to your enemy. I am your friend for ever—I would give my life for you.”
And, apparently, he did.
A few days later, the head of the kitchen crew, Ahmet, tried to rape Semyonovna. Helmut, having seen her called into the man’s office, followed her. The door was locked. “Suddenly the flimsy door began to shake and creak violently; there was a final heave, and I saw Helmut lying on the floor with the door under him, as though hurled forward by the anger which blazed in his face. . . . After a moment’s silence there was an explosion of Tartar [Ahmet was a Tartar] and German oaths. Before long Ahmet found his Russian again and shouted: “I’ll show you, you pair of bastards! So the deaf man’s better than Ahmet, is he? I’ll have you both thrown out of here and sent to a place you’ll never come back from, by God I will!”
She was sent the next day to fell timber in the forests and only by several remarkable chances survived and was released before it killed her. She didn’t know what happened to the man who risked his life to save her, but his chances of survival were awful. He knew that offending his crew chief was lethal.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells many such stories in his massive documentation of the Soviet prison camps he named The Gulag Archipelago. These stories appear like small, fiercely burning stars on a bitter, windy night. Men and women willing to risk everything for conscience, for the good of their fellows.
* * *
I myself recently jumped off the Huxman Bridge. Not at all for an adrenalin rush. And certainly not for conscience. I simply wanted to surprise and please my son, and I suppose, myself. We had been fishing below the bridge when two teenage boys and a girl showed up and tried jumping. One boy and the girl worked up the courage to leap. Each one started on the far side of the road, sprinted for the guardrail and jumped over the rail, grabbing knees and plummeting from far above into deep water.
One boy could not do it. He showed me myself. I can’t even get on a rollercoaster anymore.
Alex and I climbed the dirt path to the roadway to take a look from above. I knew it would please Alex if his father jumped, but he knows of my hatred of rollercoasters and wouldn’t think of asking me to do it. We stood beside the boy who would not jump and the three of us peered down at the brown water so far below. I handed Alex my glasses, my billfold, my cell phone. He looked startled. “Dad, what are you doing?”
Before he had a chance to say more, I stepped up on the guardrail and jumped. No back flips for me. Just an ungainly, flailing, heart-stopping plunge, then a crash deep down into flooding darkness. My panicked lungs held tight, I kicked hard for light.
Alex was mightily pleased with his father. On our drive home he was calling his friends and his sisters on his cell phone and boasting about his dad. His eyes literally “shone with pride.” My bones regretted the jump. For three weeks my right leg, hip, and even small, unknown bones in my shoulder and back kept reminding me that they were embarrassed to have been a part of that leap. A year later my right ankle occasionally complains.
* * *
Does a rash leap make a man brave? Does it encourage courage? No. It’s a momentary foolishness quickly accomplished. The only method by which to practice moral courage or find it in the first place is the imaginative one. We tell each other stories. We recite poems, filing the words of Kipling away in our minds: “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,/ If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,/ But make allowance for their doubting too;/ . . . / If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken/ Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,/ Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,/ And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools/ . . . / If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew/ To serve your turn long after they are gone,/ And so hold on when there is nothing in you/ Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’. . ., ” then it is that moral courage begins to find a shape within, and stories told will add color, dimension, and fiber.
* * *
A man walks home from work and sits down at an old typewriter day after week after month after year when he is fully aware that the government of the land he loves is liable at any moment to break into and ransack his home for documents and is in fact imprisoning and interrogating his friends while night after night after night he keeps on typing, writing the poems and the stories and plays, writing the truth single-spaced on both sides of onion-skin paper, then rolling the papers tight and burying them in wine bottles in his back yard. That was Solzhenitsyn, and that is courage.
* * *
Czech playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel wrote that words can be said to be the “very source of our being, and in fact the very substance of the cosmic life form we call man. Spirit, the human soul, our self-awareness, our ability to generalize and think in concepts, to perceive the world as the world (and not just as our locality), and lastly, our capacity for knowing that we will die—and living in spite of that knowledge: surely all these are mediated or actually created by words?” If this be so, then words can also be the source of one necessary aspect of our being. Words can create courage. Words remembered and repeated strengthen and toughen the created child. And thus we transform the brief summer nights of physical courage into the long, hard winters of moral courage.
* * *
Standing alone in my house on a winter night, with the lights out, I peer from my warm kitchen window at snow blowing through tall pines and settling into thickets and onto a frozen white meadow beyond. Between meadow and dark pines is a grey wooden shack. Caught in the glare of a porch light, it reminds me of the black-and-white photographs of prison barracks in Solzhenitysn’s book, and I recall a starving poet and his matchstick memories, an exhausted woman handing bread to her interrogator, a deaf dishwasher crashing through a plywood door, and a fourteen-year-old girl named Zoya Leshcheva. I memorize their names and hold them tight, so that they will stand with us through the coming night.