The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

And he was the only little duffer in the whole school to get a poem written to him. The other children came on time and passed into oblivion; this boy (he certainly was a boy) came late and has become immortal.

The desert is doomed, no doubt, but we shall always have détours; and if “on the surface of things men have been there before us,” we must go beneath. There are giants still in these days; the daughters of men are still fair; there are frontiers for those who will find them; and, clipper ships or no, I believe in the everlasting adventure of rounding the Horn. I believe in magical chances of escape, born though I was after my parents, which might have been fatally late had I not happily come before my children, each of whom is an adventure and an escape. Wherever I turn, I see a chance to sidestep the decorous, the conventional, the scheduled, to dodge into the bushes and escape. Every day is an adventure.

There are magical human chances to go round; there is adventure and escape for everybody who will seize it. Youth is as young, the world as round, the earth as wild as ever. And, in spite of all those who have grown old, it is still appareled in celestial light—sunlight, starlight, moonlight—or else wrapped in ancient and adventurous dark. The sun still knoweth his going down, thank Heaven! There are some things that do not change nor pass away.

Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.

The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.

The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens.

Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.

Then look out for your men-folks. For this is the end of the decorous and conventional. This is the time wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.

We are what we always were, and so are things what they always were, though they look different. We have changed the spots of a few leopards, the skins of a few Ethiopians, and shifted the frontier from the dark wild heart of the forest to the wild dark heart of the city; but we have not changed the darkness, or the wildness, or the Ethiopian, or the leopard.

I have seen the evening come over the city, a night deep with darkness and wild with a great storm blowing salty from the sea. I have watched the streets grow empty till the shadow feet of Midnight echoed as they passed, and all the doors were shut. Then I have crept down along the dark wet ways, bleak and steep-cut as cliffs, where I have heard the beating of great wings above the roofs, the call of wild shrill voices along the craggy covings, and the wash and splash of driving rains aslant the walls; I have tasted brine, spume, and spindrift on the level winds, flying through a city’s streets from far at sea—“one-way” streets by day, and so clogged that traffic could barely move in that one way—but here—in the hushed tumult of the storm and night—I could hear the stones crying out of their walls, and the beams out of the timbers answering them; the very cobbles of the pavement having tongues that would speak when the din of the pounding hoofs was past.

Some one complained to Browning that Italy is the only land of romance now left to us. The poet answered promptly, “I should like to include dear old Camberwell.” And I should like to include dear old Haleyville and dear old Hingham. And you would like to include dear old Wig Lane, if you were born there.

But I started out from Hingham, pages back, to find the frontier. Have I found it yet? So Abraham started out from Ur of the Chaldees to find a frontier, which he called a “City without Foundations,” and did he find it? Whether he did or not, he certainly had a plenty of adventure by the way. Abraham was a hundred years old when Isaac was born. There is something thrilling about that. Yet, narrow as that chance was, it is nothing when compared with what happened to him next. For, when Abraham was one hundred and forty years old, he married Keturah. Here was a man who would not be put down by a little circumstance like one hundred and forty years. Life comes along at one hundred and forty and offers Abraham Keturah, and he takes her!

I say he may not have found his city. We know that he did find Keturah—which is vastly more of an adventure. We may not have the pleasure of erecting the last house in the suburbs of Astoria City, as Thoreau says; but we might have the wilder adventure of living in it. And as it happens to be a government lighthouse out on Tongue Point, at the mouth of the Columbia; and as it happens to be where the night and the rain and the fog are thickest on the face of the globe, life in that last house is a constant frontier.