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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 21 A ll in life is an adventure of contrasts, set about the slender bridge of hope we walk between pain and pleasure and tenuously balanced upon the pillars of compromise we sink to keep us afloat. While there remains that great paradox between hurt and happiness: that we can never know the pinnacle of either without experiencing the limits of both. Ultimately bringing us to discover that at their thresholds, at the juncture they meet, before either surrenders to the other, lies a narrow coincidence of contentment. Some never find it. Some find it intolerable. Others choose not to dwell there if they do. But if you passionately embrace the sporting life, you will no doubt discover where it lies. It's that arguably friendly territory, midst the often unstable struggle between agony and ecstasy. People license it in different ways. Not all are hunters or fishermen. I have an old friend who in the last several years has suffered the misfortune of multiple surgical invasions and has been forced to retreat there quite often—most usually when he is set upon by extenuated bouts of physical therapy. In the interstices between each excruciating bodily manipulation and the delightful, temporaneous relaxation that follows lies a sweet isthmus of surcease. So that now he actually looks forward to going, he tells me, and aptly defines each session upon the whole as "exquisite torture." Hold up a minute there and tell me how many particular days afield you can remember that couldn't possibly be chartered to a better label. Which explains why maybe the majority of our most memorable days are undeniably deeded to the record books under the proposition that sometimes you have to be almost intolerably miserable to be so ridiculously happy. There'll always be disbelievers, of course. The people around us who recognize only the pain, but fail to sense the pleasure. Who mistakenly brand passion as obsession. Who will never understand. How to explain it to them? Why the hell should you want to? They'll ever be afraid to try. Although I guess there's nary a one of us who hasn't more than one time or First Light by Mike gaddis SeaSonS change and yearS paSS, but Some thingS are aS predictable aS the SunriSe. another in our sporting lives questioned our basic sanity. It's the cost of loving the outdoors and its creatures so profoundly that all else is an intermission. We'll ever risk pain for the pleasure. It's the sanction of success, the tariff of triumph. Have you ever stood in the purple melancholy of twilight on the last day of December, gazing into the mystery of the New Year, eager for, yet dreading somewhat, the morrow? Anxious for the insurmountable gladness it will bring, despairing of the undeniable strain it will borrow. It's the calendar renaissance again, and I guess if we're truthful with ourselves— looking to those most grandly anticipated "out-home" exploits we trust are ahead— it's a bit like that. There are times we know—as with the almost insufferable, sardined 60 hours of incubation on a commercial jetliner, in turn for the sensual glory of New Zealand—when the weight of the barter will seem only barely worth the trade. Until later we recall all so much less of the pain than the soaring LOJ5407/istOckphOtO.cOM