The following is an excerpt of Chapter 3 from Mike Gaddis’s From A Higher Hill, featuring 65 explorations of the sporting life, the whole of which transcend contemporary perspective, and ascend to rare and unexcelled poignancy.
Pardon the indulgence, my good fellows, but I guess this one’s on me.
I am confronted sometimes for writing sentimentally. An accusation I most humbly accept as a compliment. A shortcoming for which I never apologize.
Because I find miracles, great and small, in life and living, and these—and the feelings they frame—intrigue me the most. Our sporting lives encompass some of the most profoundly touching moments a man or woman may ever experience, some singular in life. These I try to fully explore.
Granted, it’s hard to broach miracles without seeming a Pollyanna, suffering the accusation of maudlin or being dismissed as hopelessly romantic.
And yet, when the subject is forwarded honestly, I venture it almost impossible to exaggerate, because it reaches the very spiritual bedrock of human existence, the wellspring we must all return to as often as everyday we live—lest we drift more forlornly and distantly into an uncharted sea of storm and sadness.
If life were nothing more expressive than a mundane gambit of “we’re born, we live, we die,” it would hardly be worth the living.
If hunting or fishing, or coursing or falconry, were hardly more sensitive than “how to catch it” or “how to kill it,” or merely a laconic description of the catch or kill, then our sporting legacy would wax a rather colorless, dimensionless and indecorous accounting.
But do you believe in miracles?
In a more celestial moment, Einstein—whom we most often think of as a man embedded in the inexpressive and empirical tenets of physical mechanics—once observed that there are two ways we can live our lives: “One is to believe that there is no such thing as a miracle. The other is to believe that everything is a miracle.”
In other words, you believe or you don’t. For if you believe once, then must you not always believe?
Is it not difficult, in parallel, to accept God without practicing godliness?
It’s hard as well to say exactly when sentiment transcends to miracle, but no one who travels with Nature can deny they co-exist hand in hand. That sentiment, in its most intense expression—in the presence of seed and conception—becomes the mother of miracle.
What is a miracle, other than an emotional transfixion so hypnotically uncommon that it defies understanding?
And how many things have you seen in your lifetime outdoors that were so transcendently beautiful and affecting it was inconceivable they could happen? That affected you in a way you could not completely grasp or understand? Do you not live and hope, go the more, but really never expect to see them—in exactly that way—again? Are you not infinitely thankful that at least once you did?
Do you try to explain them? To someone for whom you care? Precisely as they happened? Just to the color and the pinfeather as they were? Do you try to convey just how deeply at the moment of their epitome, they imprinted on your soul? Do you exhaust every emotional and technical aspect of your consciousness and still fail to capture them as sufficiently as they deserve? That is the challenge: not to retreat and hurry away at the terse dismissal of an unconscious phrase.
But it scares people to think that way. It constantly amazes me that so many are so deeply afraid of honest sentiment. Are unwilling to accept it, God forbid express it, but stand defensively and instantly ready to condemn it as the over-emotional fantasy and failing of someone else who does. If it’s in literature, it’s tactless and illiterate; if it’s in music, it’s gratuitous and unsymphonic; if it’s in art, it’s abstract and fanatical. It strikes me at my core that, secretly, they must live despondent and lonely lives. To never feel anything genuinely enough to be moved to a tear.
I am stricken, also, by the thought that if you allow yourself to depart from romanticism, it is difficult to ever again completely regain the company and trust of those who are romantic. And that, whether you accept it or not, is a monumental loss.
So I, as you I hope my fellow sportsman, am glad that at heart I am hopelessly and openly optimistic, that I feel things as deeply as I do, that I would be woefully saddened should I ever feel less.
For I believe miracles happen every day. Not only that, but I know where to find them. I think you do, too.
I want again—as much as I want to live—to stand on a high alpine ridge in the Colorado Rockies in the dawning light of day, to hear the soul-binding bugle and chuckle of a bull elk in the meadow far below, the answering challenge of his fellow a half-mile distant and, just barely, that of another a half-mile more. I want to feel the hair rise on the nape of my neck. I want to feel the burning lump of emotion rise from my stomach and lodge in my throat. The welling in my eyes. The matter and marrow of the wilderness that affects me in a way I can neither wholly express nor explain, in the moment when I so profoundly become a part of wildness itself and emotion transcends to miracle.
If that is sentiment of extreme, then proudly I am sentimental.
I want to return to the highveld, see again the gray, ghostly glide of a great kudu bull through the mopane at evening, when the plain itself lies gray and dusky and you cannot be certain he is real. When he emerges a wraith and dissipates as vapor, and I strain to find him again in the murky moments, he will reappear under the spiraled majesty of the horns that first led me here.
I want to say to myself as I did then that this is Africa—that this is Africa—and there is the grail. I want to know it again as I did then. Feel the part of me that transforms beyond myself, the part of me that at last perceives the miracle, that I am there.
If that is emotion to extreme, then I am emotional.
I don’t want to again look into the deeply pleading eyes of a dog that is dying—who has been my closest friend for 15 years home and field, that I have loved more than I can even fathom love, that I will in the next few moments end the life of—but I know I will. For the devotion of a dog is more precious than all the gold in the universe, and there is nowhere else on earth that you will find it. And so I know I will have another. Even as I cradle his head upon my knee, look into those beautiful, hurting eyes, and do what I have to do to ease his pain—with the tears streaming down my face—when grief has forced me to my knees and I do not care who is there to see.
For I’d much rather give him back—should I could—years of my own in trade for just one more day together as once it was. For he was mine, he thrilled me and gave me his all, and we were closer than I can tell. He is so deeply a part of me I can never explain. In a world in which emotion and sentiment are bartered and sold as pretentiously as counterfeit currency, he never once sold himself as anything other than faithful and true.
He was the miracle that came on little, bouncing feet, and his paw prints are the tracks that measure the distance across my heart.
If that is exaggeration, then, “yes,” most sadly I have embraced and cradled it to extreme.
Lastly, I want to look into the welcoming face of my wife and lover of 56 years now, see the tears of joy welling in her eyes that I am safely home—after the going. After I return again from another wild and exotic destination, to which I was bound to go, where I have discovered another few miracles. And feel the tears rising in my own, the choking burn in my throat, the overwhelming thankfulness in my heart, as I come again to terms with myself—tell myself in the crush of the moment that I do not ever want to leave her again—that she is first and last, the miracle I left behind.
If that is over-baked romanticism, then I am always and forever desperately romantic.
And should that be insufferable, ride on, pilgrim. You’re in the wrong church and the wrong pew.