The beautiful mystery goes on

THIS IS not about Johnny Danger, I don’t think I can write about him yet. Not with this hollowed-out feeling that lives so acutely behind my solar plexus.

Any of you friendly with the bride, on the omnipresent, seductively evil Book of the Face, know that my old pal Danger exited the world on June 23, at his home on the Eastern Sierra, in Bishop, California. That was a month ago today, which occurs to me only now, in real time.

We had talked on the phone a few weeks earlier, but I never sensed it would be our last word. I would have been out there again on the motorcycle if I had gotten that feeling. Danger was the one fighting a rare cancer that chemo can’t touch, but I always thought I’d get a piano dropped on me from the 18th floor before he did; I mean, the riding is so insanely hazardous nowadays, if the inattention doesn’t get you the rage will. I always thought the bride would be calling Danger with news. As the mystery would have it, his Kathy called me.

I can’t write about this… Will show you a few pics and move on to something else.

Here’s ol’ Danger in the early 80’s, in the newsroom of the Bangor Daily, in Maine. I was a reporter there. Danger was working for the National Park Service way up in the northwest corner of the continent, The Great Land, Alyeska. His parents were living in Stockton Springs, Maine, so he’d occasionally get back east for a visit.

My friend Jim Verrill snapped this pic, and Jim would soon be gone, at 42. What’s it all about, Alfie? Something? Nothing? It’s all a mystery to me. But a beautiful mystery. We seem wired to summon words that lend beauty to it, and create meaning.

The approved abracadabra creates meaning for many, all well and good, even if the argument from authority (this text, this person…) doesn’t happen to move me one way or the other. Institutional ways of thinking about eternity end up looking like systems of social order; men telling women how to live, the haves keeping the have-nots in check, toting Corporate’s guns around the world, all that… If the effect went the other way around religion would have been outlawed a long time ago. But somehow I can’t look at the images beamed back by the Hubble and think this is all about nothing; that the 66-year sum of humanity that was Danger simply winked out of existence and is no more.

What a waste that would be. Is it that kind of universe we live in? Maybe…

I hope not, but what I hope is beside the point. Whatever is simply is and that’s that.

A pre-Alaska pic… I snapped this one in ’78 or ’79.

Danger and I were making minimum wage in the world’s worst shipping department. He used to stick labels on his shirt in an attempt to ship himself out to a better job.

And that he did. Got on with the National Park Service, rangered at the Gates of the Arctic, Anaktuvuk Pass, Lake Clark, worked his way up to chief ranger of the Western Arctic National Parklands. He flew a Cessna C-140 taildragger, landing on gravel bars in rivers, trying not to hit caribou or Bad Mr. Grizz.

The wild blue yonder was in his DNA. His dad was a fighter pilot. Danger was born at Bergstrom Air Force base in Texas, under the alias Jon Alan Peterson, spent much of his childhood in Japan and South Korea.

Kathy had a bouquet, Danger felt he ought to have something to hold on to as well.

They lived in Kotzebue, on the Chukchi Sea, then went from one weather extreme to another, off to Arizona where there was rangering to be done, at the Grand Canyon, and Glen Canyon.

Death Valley National Park was Danger’s final assignment. He was a special agent there, doing criminal investigations. Until his diagnosis retired him early.

Extraskeletal Myxoid Chondrosarcoma, a rare cancer of the cartilage. The docs gave him two years. He fought for his life for the next 17 years, until he was 66. What courage! And funny through the whole thing.

I’d give him a shout, Hey bud, what’s going on?

Not much, I’m dying, what are you up to?

That big, booming laugh, I can hear it now. Throughout our 40-year friendship, what we mostly did was laugh. And there was good talk, I’m always going to miss that. Danger was well read and could talk intelligently about anything… history, prehistory, culture, geology, the flora and fauna of the world, really any earth science you can name, current events, he was interested in everything.

Here’s Danger with one of his bird dogs, Moxie. Gabby? Going by Danger’s age, I’ll say this is Moxie.

Danger was completely unselfconscious about having been through the meat grinder of the cancer wars, that radical chest-cracking he underwent before they knew how to treat what he had in a more humane, semi-invasive way. When we’d go to the hot springs in the Owens Valley we’d find women to soak with because Danger loved to peel off his shirt in front of them.

Aw, maybe that wasn’t the only reason, but you know how chicks dig scars. Danger wore his with pride!

He was missing most of the muscle on the right side of his chest. That first big surgery removed most of his sternum, several ribs… They fastened the front of his ribs to a plastic mesh to create structure and protect the heart, pulled the skin over the plastic, sewed him up. He started calling himself Bondo Boy.

He was a familiar figure at UCLA Medical Center after that, down there many times a year for 17 years. Instead of cracking his chest again, they started going after tumors with a cryo ablation technique. They’d stick probes into his lungs, his diaphragm, wherever the tumors popped up, freeze the malignant cells in place. He was UCLA’s very first patient on that emerging technology, in 2001. I’m told it’s fairly common today.

Never a word of self-pity… a poor me, why me… His attitude was, shit happens—I’m as much in line for it as anyone else. He told the docs, I’m your lab rat, experiment on me, learn something that’ll help the next person.

Said I wasn’t going to write about this… god dammit…

One more… this is Danger coming down from the mountain with the ten commandments of Burning Man.

He was a regular. I went once. Rode out on the iron piggy, met up with Danger in Bishop, loaded his truck, then we were off for Nevada and the Black Rock Desert.

This was nine years ago now. Some of the regulars in our camp whispered to me in solemn tones about how it was likely Danger’s last trek onto the playa, and what a hole he’d leave when he was gone, a big personality like that.

Here’s what happened instead: one of the best-loved kids in camp, happy young guy in his 20s, whip-smart and full of life, he was the one short on time. It was a motorcycle get-off that got him, right? What else?

And Danger, written off for dead, endured at UCLA and turned up at Burning Man for eight more years.

A beautiful mystery at work… We stand in wonder, we motes of star-carbon with a little water added.

Tony DePaul, July 23, 2018, Cranston Rhode Island, USA