Nov - Dec 2012 Issue

Kendall Bradley ’11 checked her phone and gave herself thirty-five minutes to fall apart. She’d left Nick in the gaping mouth of an MRA machine, his eyes full of pain and fear, and was finally alone. Or, at least, as alone as one could be in the ghastly circus of the hospital triage room, which teemed with people in various states of agony. Somewhere on the streets of Ho Chi Minh there had been an accident, and victims were being carried in in shocking states of disfigurement. Nearby a teenager in his underwear writhed on a stretcher, a large bandage on his head turning scarlet with blood.

On the first day of his marine conservation course this past January, Martin Smith told his eight undergraduates that they would play a game. One student would wait in the hallway. The other seven would stand around a conference table and go fishing.

It was seventy degrees outside, and my hands were completely numb. I was leaning belly-first against a steep, 13,000-foot mountain slope in Colorado’s Gore Range. The slope was covered with a frigid rind of snow, and my feet were carefully positioned in tiny, kicked-in toeholds. Apart from the toeholds—which could give out at any moment—the only thing keeping me from sliding hundreds of feet down the mountain were my hands— chilled to a medium-rare pink—which I’d crammed into the snow with a my-life-is-on-the-line grip. “Don’t panic, Ken,” I whispered to myself. “Don’t panic.”