They come in various and distinct forms do adventurous men… and the truly adventurous also leave true to that form. Some of them seek fame or knowledge, others crave adrenaline or merely stories to tell. But the truly dangerous one’s seek adventure for money in order their families don’t want……
I knew him as Mono and I once saw pictures of him in Colombia taken just a few years prior to our having met so long ago. In those photos I recognized that same old familiar laid back smile under a generous mustache….. and the menace in his eye. He stood in one photo at the edge of a jungle clearing cradling in the crook of his arm what was once a U.S. Military rifle as he guarded over something obviously illicit. In another he offered the camera objects freshly robbed from ancient graves that museums worldwide would have coveted. “Mono” is slang in South America for monkey and he earned that nick name from the fact that while “working” in an area of Colombia known as “The Choco” he would hunt and eat monkeys. His explanation that when you skin a monkey the carcass looks just like a human baby has in all likelihood put me off of monkey meat for life…..
America was too tame I think for a man like Mono and he returned to his native country years ago. We’ve recently learned that no one has seen or heard from him for over eighteen months meaning it’s doubtful now that any one ever will. And so we’ll likely never hear the story of his last adventure or its outcome and that seems unimportant now. I have a picture of he and I taken at the end of a bar crawl at the end of a night at the end of some obscure town in central Colombia. And photos of us on a frozen N.H. lake where I taught he and his sons the art of pulling a trout through a hole in the ice. And I guess that’s all that’s left of a friendship of a man with little in his past that I could condone with clear conscience …….
But in spite of his past…. how do you not admire a real life Harrison Ford on his endless quest for The Temple of Doom …..?
cya Mono
