Someone quipped to me just yesterday. ‘Old age is not for sissies!’ Boy, you’re not just ‘whistling Dixie’! The young just wouldn’t be up to this shit! But their turn will come.
Most of my (old) friends are either already dead or might as well be, creeping safely towards the grave as they have been doing for yonks. Most have decided long ago that wilderness treks, hunting, white-water canoeing are not for them, at least not for this life. ‘What if you die out there?’ is an oft-repeated homily.
‘What if you don’t?’ is a fine reply – as what sort of life would you have had then, really?
My grandad, George Jones used to opine, ‘Most folks die in bed, therefore bed is a dangerous pace and should be avoided!’ I remember going around to his shack after he had just died and seeing a brace of hares hanging on his back verandah (as was his wont), hares he had shot out hunting a few days before in his late eighties.
Here he was at Dora Creek as I remember him in the early 1950s.
They will have to drag me kicking and screaming out of this place!
