Living Expansively

It’s been a week since I heard the news of Lukas’ death in Alaska’s Atigun Gorge.  Since Olaf’s final post on the expedition’s Facebook page, the details surrounding the tragic event are now widely known.

As for me, I’ve been reflecting this week on why this story affected me the way it did.   Let me make a confession:  I barely knew Lukas.  My wife and I probably only met him 2 or 3 times and then only “shared” him in a larger crowd.  Though we were Facebook friends, the only contact I had with him in 3 years was to request his secret Lamb shank recipe a few Christmases back.  So why the preoccupation with his death this past week?

It could be that the story bore strong parallels with the movie “Into the Wild” – and a book of the same name written by John Krakauer.  In that poignant case however, the drama surrounded a young college student’s somewhat reckless sojourn in the wilds of Alaska.  But since Lukas was always meticulously prepared for his adventures and already highly experienced in extreme and hostile environments, this could not explain my sadness fully.

Another reason might be that I actually contacted Lukas via Facebook just three days before his death to wish him well for his birthday and to invite him on a trekking holiday in Nepal this September.  If anyone would accept such an invitation it would be he.  But in spite of the uncanny timing, this explanation falls short too. 

A third explanation seems to resonate more deeply.  Not since opening a Facebook account 6 years ago have I seen the medium serving a community more powerfully than it did last week.  It wasn’t just the innumerable and heartfelt condolences on his Facebook wall.  It was the fact that for a few very moving days, people from all over the world; regardless of race, language, gender or creed came together in a messy yet sincere effort to not only console one another but to genuinely assist each other in celebrating the life of a human being who had touched them in so many ways.  If ever there was a sincere and  spontaneous celebration of shared humanity this was it.

Moreover – and I admit I may be reading too much into things – it was as though each post bore the telltale signs of self-examination.  While none should aspire to become a carbon copy of this unique individual, his death served as a blunt yet timely interrogation:  what is stopping me from living as generously, urgently, courageously and expansively as he lived? 

Mindful of the persisting sense of loss I find myself wrestling with a question: Can a man achieve more through his death than he did through his life?  

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

John 15

Troubled as we remain over the fact that he is gone and haunted by the wasteful and potentially avoidable nature of his demise, this tragedy has produced “many seeds”.  Indeed, is not each Facebook update and tear shed a separate sowing?

Who knows what he would say to this from the vantage point of eternity?  For one thing, it is quite likely that he is laughing over what happened, his fall no more to him than it would be to us had we tripped over the cat.   As the Great World War I poet Wilfred Owen wrote in stirring “Spring Offensive”

Of them who running on that last high place

Leapt to swift unseen bullets, or went up

On the hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge,

Or plunged and fell away past this world’s verge,

Some say God caught them even before they fell.

For another, he would almost certainly encourage us to reach higher.  As Paul wrote to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 6: 12 - The Message Translation)

I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life.  We didn’t fence you in.  The smallness you feel comes from within you.  Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way.  I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives.  Live openly and expansively!

Or as C.S. Lewis wrote in “The Last Battle” – “Further up and further in!”

Post Script

A lot of the time we tend to define success in terms of how we'd like our epitaph to read.  The Bible is fairly clear that this is like putting the cart before the horse.  Psalm 37 clarifies that we only get the desires of our heart when we "delight in the Lord", when we "seek his face" - when we prioritise the Kingdom ahead of our earthly ambitions.  Viktor Frankl said:

"Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.  For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.  Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success:  you have to let it happen by not caring about it.  I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.  Then you will live to see that in the long run - in the long run, I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it"

Into the Wild

Alaska has always been one of the world’s last frontiers for adventurers.  For generations and for different reasons, men have hurled themselves at its wild interior, often paying the ultimate price for doing so.   One such man was a part time doctor and full time adventurer named Lukas Grobler.

I met Lukas in May 2009.  He visited our church on Easter Sunday and immediately turned heads – though mostly those of the women amongst us.  Lukas was a striking man with an imposing build.  To best describe him I steal verbatim from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby":

“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.  It faced – or seemed to face – the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour.  It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey”

I’ve met tough and adventurous people in my time though none of them come close to Lukas.  He always went big and moreover, did things in style.  Before a brief spell in general surgery at one of Durban’s hospitals, he had completed an unsupported winter traverse of Southern Greenland with a Norwegian companion.  He was also an aspiring bow hunter and keen horseback rider.  Lukas was fastidious about food and baulked at anything that even remotely resembled a short cut in the kitchen.  I remember him once taking 24 hours to roast a leg of lamb and then forbidding his guests to bring any form of snack to dinner for fear of it spoiling their appetites.  Instead he laid on a perfectly grilled kudu loin which he sliced so thinly you could almost see the sunset through the pieces.  In short, he was a man who knew how to suck the marrow out of life.

But back to Alaska.  As far as I’ve been able to work out, Lukas and his Norwegian companion Olaf Schjoll had their sights set on an un-supported trek across the inhospitable northern part of the country.  The journey would start at the Canadian border and end 1600 kilometers away on the shores of the Bering Sea, a stone’s throw from the eastern tip of Siberia.  Between them lay the formidable Brooks Range, a 1000-mile mountain chain that, according to Wikipedia, has only been traversed by a handful of people.  Intending to live almost entirely off the land, the pair set off on June 21 equipped only with  as much food as they could carry, fishing tackle and Browning hunting rifle.  A photograph taken on June 20th shows Lucas in characteristic pose; standing astride the border separating Alaska and Canada, larger than life and looking like a modern day Grizzly Adams.

With the aid of a satellite device, Schjoll kept a meticulous blog in which he described the hills, rivers flora and fauna as well as the escalating hardships that came with the hostile terrain and inclement sub-Antarctic weather.  

On July 15th, he bemoaned the constant hunger and resulting loss of weight: 

“…we are starting to get terribly thin…we must have more food in one way or another!”

On July 17th, he described the mood between himself and Lukas as “sharp” remarking that they had argued on a number of issues.  

On July 20th, they discovered a ramshackle cabin and a modest stash of expired food.  The owner, it seems, had not been there since 2006.  Thanks to this small mercy they lived the good life for a few days, drawing from the cabin’s stash and augmenting it with trout caught in a nearby lake.  For a brief moment, a certain joy returned to the journey though Schjoll wrote, “I realize that the idea of self-sufficient trip has failed badly”.  

Two days later they celebrated Lukas’ birthday.

Friday July 27:  I stared at Schjoll's blog post in disbelief. 

“There is no easy way to say this: the expedition through the Brooks Range stopped yesterday, when Lukas Grobler died after a fall from a mountain cliff, into a river, Atigun Gorge”

A brief article on the Reuters newswire confirmed that the accident had occurred on Wednesday 25th July about 400 kilometres southeast of the town of Barrow and that Schjoll had used a satellite telephone to call for help.  It went on to say that the US Coast Guard found Lukas' body about a mile downstream from where he had fallen.

I hurried over to Lukas’ Facebook wall – already littered with condolences - more already than I was prepared to count.  The mood was (and still is at the time of this writing) one of complete sorrow and disbelief.  Someone had posted a picture of Rembrandt’s masterpiece “The Return of the Prodigal Son”.  The caption read: 

“As we mourn today, angels rejoice! Lukas Cornel Grobler is home with the Father!”

It was Lukas’ favourite Bible story and he spoke of it often during the brief time we knew him.  “Sometimes I’m the son – sometimes I’m the brother” – he would say.  He was an avid reader of anything written by C.S. Lewis - and perhaps because of this, someone had posted Brooke Fraser’s  hauntingly beautiful “C.S.  Lewis Song”:

If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy,

I can only conclude that I was not made for here…

For we, we are not long here

Our time is but a breath, so we better breathe it

Lucas isn't the first to succumb to the perils of the Alaskan Wilderness.  But it's hard to imagine that any of her victims influenced as many as he did in his short life.

Farewell Lukas.  You certainly made the most of the breath you had.  And though we only knew you a short time you left your mark. 

 Onwards!  Upwards!  Higher!

The Atigun Gorge where Lukas died