A Life of Comically Calamitous Close Calls: Introduction

Victor Davis Hanson

I’ve been very lucky in dodging bullets but even more unlucky in finding them. Over some 55 years, I found myself in some of the worst situations imaginable. And post facto, I realize that I got myself into these jams due to my own negligence and lack of circumspection. And yet somehow, I have always gotten out of them alive—though often at some permanent cost. What follows are ten near disastrous encounters and why someone might learn not to do what I did to avoid them.

I was told by my parents that I was “reckless” at six, not in the usual sense of rowdiness or courting danger. But reckless in the sense of neglecting the physical self. I would read nonstop or become absorbed with books for hours and mindlessly not pay attention and, by default, do stupid things. In the innocent days, that might entail walking barefoot around the farm in March and getting sick. Or not wearing a coat to a November football game. Or jumping into the dirty pond and getting severe ear and sinus infections. Or studying far too long and sleeping far too little and then wondering why I seemed to get the flu in high school.

I did well in high school and, as I remember, had a 3.9 GPA and was voted “most likely to succeed” of our senior class (ironic when, between 1980–85 my PhD was put to work pruning vines and spraying chemicals on the farm, and one of my high-school friends lectured me that I was a has-been failure after all).

After my first college semester in fall 1971, I decided after taking two wonderful classes from Greek Professor John Lynch, that I should major in classics. But I had missed the Latin and Greek sequences that started in the fall.

He suggested I enroll (at 18) in the “Yale Intensive Foreign Language Program,” since a good classics friend of his, John Madden, was teaching it (Madden was one of the kindest and smartest academics I have met).

In other words, I decided to fly at 18 to a faraway city, enroll with seasoned graduate students at Yale, and take a difficult language course for eight weeks in a hot, humid New Haven summer.

I had no idea where Yale was, what I was doing, or why I needed to plan anything. And so I just went to the airport in Fresno with a suitcase with worried parents, and left. (My parents were free-rangers and thought independent children would become stronger by navigating their own choices, if they stayed in daily contact as a reserve to rush in when we got ourselves in trouble.) The only parental rules guiding my misadventures were—no drinking, smoking, drugs, premarital sex, unlawful behavior, and politeness to authorities and strangers at all costs, and to call every five to seven days “to check in.”

So here we go with Disaster One (they will increase in morbidity as we work through all ten).