The best life

Jeff Nash 14,000 feet above Clewiston. COURTESY PHOTO

I come from a long line of preachers and teachers — the kind who like to tell you what’s best for you. Another way of putting it: They’re often hypocrites.

Hypocrites are an essential part of our world — every parent ought to be one, at least when necessary — because they’re willing to instruct us in our better interests and behaviors without actually having done it themselves.

“Don’t do drugs” advice from a drug user, for example, is hypocrisy.

“Read a book” advice from a non-reader is hypocrisy.

“Don’t spend more than you have” advice from a debtor is hypocrisy.

Doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

The same is true of “Don’t get married before you’re 30,” or the most immediately sensible, “Don’t jump out of a perfectly good airplane in flight.”

I wanted to deliver that advice in a commanding imperative to my youngest son recently, but couldn’t without risk of being an obvious hypocrite.

It put me in mind of a simple truth: Adventure, a word with a Latin origin meaning “to come to,” is a way of coming to the notion that life is precious if you can live beyond the merely comfortable or routine, unharnessed by age or experience or the expectations of others.

Every adventure has one trait in common: It asks the adventurer to give mind and heart, and sometimes physical grit and courage, to the moment.

That’s the best of living, I suppose, and as Florida Weekly celebrates “The Best Of,” I want to point to it, by mentioning some adventurers I know.

There’s James Kennedy, son of Jerry and Jo Kennedy, an Alvanian who stepped out of his 26-year service in the U.S. Navy to become the most singular, focused, determined and well-researched apologist for the preservation of semi-rural lands and their flora and fauna in the region. He’s a man pitted not against development, but against greed and comprehensive land-use violations.

There’s Dr. Robert Hilliard, set to turn 99 in June, combat survivor of World War II, professor emeritus of Emerson College in Boston, a fierce and untiring apologist for civil and human rights and the author of nonfiction books, novels, books of poetry and plays. Still writing, he’s about to embark on an extended voyage of Europe with his wife, JoAnn Reece, arguably the most thoughtful and sensible person south of the North Pole.

Then, finally, there’s my Colorado cowboy cousin, Jeff Nash, who challenged my disciplined, determined, youngest son, Nash (one of three with those qualities), to skydive with him. Jeff is a lot more than that moniker — cowboy cousin — but he grew up on a big working cattle ranch in the Rocky Mountains chasing cows on horseback, building fences and driving pickups, beginning when he was 10 or so.

He regularly phones my 96-year-old mother, the last of seven who grew up on the same ranch struggling through the adventure of very old age, because she’s a Nash by birth, too.

At 70, Jeff is 48 years older than my son. The two had never met, although they’d established a warm relationship over music and life, in correspondence and gifts. And then the other day Jeff rolled in here from his current home in Oklahoma to check this item off his bucket list: “Jump out of a perfectly good airplane.”

With my son. From 14,000 feet above a sugar cane field.

Some people jump out of planes in their 80s or 90s — not many — and one woman set a world record by doing it at 100. But they didn’t leave a challenging boyhood in the mountains eventually to work for years as a prized fixer on oil rigs from Africa to Asia and Alaska to Peru, in what were sometimes the toughest conditions.

Over time, devastating injuries came with those jobs, along with deafness — until he got cochlear implants, bringing music and conversation back into his life. That helped him escape the very pragmatic conclusion that life wasn’t worth living without health or hearing. Starting some years ago he also developed a disciplined health and work regimen that led to this: Skydiving, for decades on his bucket list.

On a vividly clear April morning near Clewiston, therefore, the two joined about 10 other folks at Skydive Spaceland Florida, a well-organized outfit that sells customers, for less than $200, the chance to avoid dying in a nursing home or a hospital or wilting away with cancer — or sitting in a small sheetrock cubicle called an office for 40 years — without an adventure first. Like any adventure, one we all hope will not lead to mortality.

In this one, you jump out of a perfectly good airplane with two things affixed to your back, if you’re a first-timer: a skydiving instructor, and a working parachute.

There should be a law against putting parents through this, but since there isn’t, we went with it.

We swallowed our anxieties as they swallowed theirs, climbing into their harnesses, embracing their joie de vivre, and boarding a fine little airplane.

They went out at 14,000 feet above an April peninsula checkerboarded in greening agricultural fields, slender gray plumes feathering upward here and there from burning sugar cane far below, with Lake Okeechobee to the east.

Then they fell 1.5 miles in about 60 seconds, before opening their parachutes. “The first few seconds I thought, “What. Have. I. Done?” Jeff said.

Then down they came into Mother Earth, into the best of a life of adventure, into their shared humanity and devotion. ¦

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