Prologue – Perilous Men

These are no longer the days of perilous men.

Think about it. Look around you. Look at your house, your job, your significant other. Any minute, any second they could be taken from you, these creature comforts that make your life soft and complacent, that drive you in the same rhythm day after day. Would you fight for them? Would you give them up for something that mattered more? Or would you take the safe way out?

In 1877, thousands of men walked off the line in the great railroad strikes. They raised torches, burned buildings, destroyed locomotives, made their voices heard. Dozens died–and when they died, their deaths meant something. What will your death mean? Will you go down fighting for something that matters to you, or will you rot away in a nursing home somewhere, waiting for someone to change your diaper, mourning the lost years when you could have done something, anything?

I’ll tell you the choice I made. I chose to look the other way, chose to keep my mouth shut. And here I am, shitting my pants and waiting for Nurse Clara to sponge my ass dry and swap out my Depends. I can barely see this goddamned laptop, the cataracts are so bad. I should have died years ago. I think I wish I had, but I can’t die. If I die, everything’s forgotten.

And some things I can’t stand to forget.

I wish I stood for something. Once, I did. We all did. There were four of us, then. When there were only three, we asked each other what the hell it was all for.

I’ll tell you what it was for. It was for glory. For honor. It was for the magic that comes when you stand for something, when you truly think you can make a difference–because sometimes you do. It’s a risk, it’s a gamble, and we’re not a gambling society anymore. We’re all about the safety nets, the savings accounts, the padded walls that cushion the impact of life.

But sometimes you gamble, and you come up gold. We were gold, I tell you. We were gold.

This is the story of four boys who walked the wire. We thought to be perilous men. Maybe we were never a danger to anything but ourselves.

But for a while, we were beautiful.

——————————————

Not really sure what this is, where it’s going, or if it’ll go anywhere at all. Believe it or not, it popped into my head while I was watching the new Star Trek movie and thinking about how the message of the original show affected not just one generation, but every generation that followed. How it struck a chord with man’s need to explore, to adventure, to experience the unknown – to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

And somehow that led to thinking of how most people don’t do extraordinary things anymore, wouldn’t even dream of it–because extraordinary things would jeopardize the promotion, the mortgage, the steady paycheck. And suddenly I’m seeing four gangly older boys in long, patched peacoats, scarves swaying, kicking up snow as they walk down a narrow street and rattle two-by-fours against rusted tin trash cans. And thinking, “These are no longer the days of perilous men.”