Adventure can be fatal
The Crocodile Hunter was out of his element. Best known for his land-based taunting of deadly reptiles – crocodiles, cobras, and more – he was swimming off the Great Barrier Reef in preparation for another television show. This was his specialty, putting his life at risk to demonstrate the natural order of things, and his own cleverness (and perhaps by extension, the human edge) survive. His viewers, which included television fans of his “crocodile hunter” show for Animal Planet, visitors to his family Australia Zoo park north of Brisbane, and the audience of the advertisements he did for sponsors.
So Steve Irwin was out of his element, Still, he should have known better. He was closing in on a beautiful creature, but it was one which could hurt him, and he and his cameraman had him cornered. From the accounts – and the video, which one of these days we’ll see – the ray panicked, turned, and struck.
True, stingray stings were painful but not fatal. And Irwin had been stung, or bitten, before. (If you're feeling morbidly curious, there's a page of Close Call Clips available on his web site.) But someone failed to take into account the 17 fatal stringray attacks in the past 30 years, a number of which resulted from a stinger through the heart. Once could have been luck; twice coincidence. But a third time, and you better realize it might just be a pretty useful defensive reaction. A dart to the heart sounds like one of nature’s most efficient weapons.
Among his viewers to these stunts was his own family - and the new program he was filming was to co-star his 8-year old daughter Bindi. And this raises an inevitable question about responsibility. Of course, if Irwin lived entirely in his own dream world (and there’s every indication he did), the idea that he might die on one of his stunts would have seemed dramatically powerful, if technically impossible. But what about the kids, the wife? Two children – Bindi, and 2-year old Robert, whom he famously put in harm’s way several years back while feeding a crocodile with one hand and holding the baby with the other – are left behind; his wife Terri too is bereft of her companion and business partner. This is an ethical question that has presented itself in other adventure sports as well, in particular climbing.
Several years ago I was covering on a web site the climb of Great Trango Tower by a team that included Alex Lowe, at the time the greatest living American climber. He too had a wife and two children – they were older, at the cusp of adolescence – and she would not willingly participate in our coverage of the climb. Somehow, one got the feeling she would become complicitous if she were, should Alex fall.
Eventually she allowed some modest involvement, but stayed out of sight for the duration of the climb – which was successful, and produced some great stories, and added to Lowe’s luster in the media world. But two months later on his next expedition Lowe was one of three climbers killed by avalanche in an approach to Shisha Pangma, one of the 8000 meter peaks on any mountaineer’s list.
In the end, it probably didn’t matter to Lana Lowe that the web coverage we did for Trango Tower ended favorably, or that the Outside Magazine story planned about her husband’s Shisha Pangma attempt didn’t come out as scripted. What mattered was her loss, and the loss to her children.
It’s the same in the Irwin camp, I’m sure. He will be missed, for his wit and daring and good-humored goofiness. And nationally, Aussie’s will miss him as a representative of their colorful national character, an ambassador of Oz and lover of natural history.
There was something transcendent about Steve Irwin, as if he were possessed by a higher power. One that pushed his own skin forward that the lot of us would be less intimidated, less afraid. The bleeding edge, if you will… as indeed he was, at the last. The public interest in and grief over Irwin's death signals his importance to the public imagination, if nothing else. (A recent article from Australian Broadcasing Corporation discusses this aspect of the event.)
Maybe we need people like Steve Irwin. Our kind, our species needs examples of the edges, needs to know what is possible and what is just ordinary. Nothing Steve Irwin did was ordinary, he seemed above the usual, tougher than the rest (though his self-effacing humor and evident giddy nerves in the face of his deadly adversaries endeared him to us). His was a well-crafted character, media-savvy and appealing.
Now that he’s gone, we have to ask ourselves, Are we complicitous? Did we buy into the myth by gluing ourselves, grinning, to the tube as he wrestled with crocs and our fears? And did Steve Irwin himself buy into the myth of Steve Irwin? "I thought you were immortal," at least one wreath commented. "How I wish that were true!"
Yet at the end, even given how it ends, aren’t we better off for the life he led? Maybe he didn't die for our sins, or even our entertainment, but he died for our curiosity, as well as his own.
So Steve Irwin was out of his element, Still, he should have known better. He was closing in on a beautiful creature, but it was one which could hurt him, and he and his cameraman had him cornered. From the accounts – and the video, which one of these days we’ll see – the ray panicked, turned, and struck.
True, stingray stings were painful but not fatal. And Irwin had been stung, or bitten, before. (If you're feeling morbidly curious, there's a page of Close Call Clips available on his web site.) But someone failed to take into account the 17 fatal stringray attacks in the past 30 years, a number of which resulted from a stinger through the heart. Once could have been luck; twice coincidence. But a third time, and you better realize it might just be a pretty useful defensive reaction. A dart to the heart sounds like one of nature’s most efficient weapons.
Among his viewers to these stunts was his own family - and the new program he was filming was to co-star his 8-year old daughter Bindi. And this raises an inevitable question about responsibility. Of course, if Irwin lived entirely in his own dream world (and there’s every indication he did), the idea that he might die on one of his stunts would have seemed dramatically powerful, if technically impossible. But what about the kids, the wife? Two children – Bindi, and 2-year old Robert, whom he famously put in harm’s way several years back while feeding a crocodile with one hand and holding the baby with the other – are left behind; his wife Terri too is bereft of her companion and business partner. This is an ethical question that has presented itself in other adventure sports as well, in particular climbing.
Several years ago I was covering on a web site the climb of Great Trango Tower by a team that included Alex Lowe, at the time the greatest living American climber. He too had a wife and two children – they were older, at the cusp of adolescence – and she would not willingly participate in our coverage of the climb. Somehow, one got the feeling she would become complicitous if she were, should Alex fall.
Eventually she allowed some modest involvement, but stayed out of sight for the duration of the climb – which was successful, and produced some great stories, and added to Lowe’s luster in the media world. But two months later on his next expedition Lowe was one of three climbers killed by avalanche in an approach to Shisha Pangma, one of the 8000 meter peaks on any mountaineer’s list.
In the end, it probably didn’t matter to Lana Lowe that the web coverage we did for Trango Tower ended favorably, or that the Outside Magazine story planned about her husband’s Shisha Pangma attempt didn’t come out as scripted. What mattered was her loss, and the loss to her children.
It’s the same in the Irwin camp, I’m sure. He will be missed, for his wit and daring and good-humored goofiness. And nationally, Aussie’s will miss him as a representative of their colorful national character, an ambassador of Oz and lover of natural history.
There was something transcendent about Steve Irwin, as if he were possessed by a higher power. One that pushed his own skin forward that the lot of us would be less intimidated, less afraid. The bleeding edge, if you will… as indeed he was, at the last. The public interest in and grief over Irwin's death signals his importance to the public imagination, if nothing else. (A recent article from Australian Broadcasing Corporation discusses this aspect of the event.)
Maybe we need people like Steve Irwin. Our kind, our species needs examples of the edges, needs to know what is possible and what is just ordinary. Nothing Steve Irwin did was ordinary, he seemed above the usual, tougher than the rest (though his self-effacing humor and evident giddy nerves in the face of his deadly adversaries endeared him to us). His was a well-crafted character, media-savvy and appealing.
Now that he’s gone, we have to ask ourselves, Are we complicitous? Did we buy into the myth by gluing ourselves, grinning, to the tube as he wrestled with crocs and our fears? And did Steve Irwin himself buy into the myth of Steve Irwin? "I thought you were immortal," at least one wreath commented. "How I wish that were true!"
Yet at the end, even given how it ends, aren’t we better off for the life he led? Maybe he didn't die for our sins, or even our entertainment, but he died for our curiosity, as well as his own.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home