The Risk Takers

Watch the Death-Defying high-diving daredevil clinging to his tiny platform near the ceiling of the arena. His toes grip the edge. Drums roll. He dives into the void. The mob gasps.

He plunges five stories before the rope around his ankle stops him short and yanks him back part of the way he has come. Upside down, he swings back and forth, his head only eight feet from the ground. He then unhitches himself, stands and accepts the crowd's tumultuous applause. He is a grinning 24-year-old Pole named Sitkiewicz, and he is the featured aerialist with this year's Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He is a very amiable chap, always laughing. He says good morning to people, even at night. He speaks no language anyone else around speaks, the last word in alienated man. By learning one trick no one else will try, he has set himself apart from the rest of the world; and for performing this trick 13 times a week, he earns something over $200. The elephants are not the only circus performers who work for peanuts. Sitkiewicz' career is good for about ten years, if the rope doesn't break. After ten years, if he wants to stay employed, he had better find a new and more dangerous trick.

Watch the death-defying, snake-wrestling daredevil. His name is Kurt Severin. He calls himself "author ... world traveler ... photo journalist ... adventurer." His specialty is snakes. In the past, it has also been sharks, crocodiles and the puberty rites of Latin-American jungle tribes. Today, wading through the Amazon jungle, he comes upon an anaconda thicker through the middle than a man's thigh. About 18 feet long, the anaconda dangles from a tree. Severin decides to grab it by the head while his guide photographs him and it, both grinning.

An instant later, the huge constrictor has flung Severin to the ground and is coiled around him, crushing the life out of him.

"Keep snapping," gasps Severin, who sees a great series of photos in this.

He has the anaconda by the throat with both hands, but the anaconda has him by the throat, too. Its tail is wrapped around Severin's windpipe and is sliding around in a second loop. Severin, contemplating how long the series of photos should be, fights for time. But soon his face goes red. He can't breathe or talk. He manages to pry the anaconda loose enough so that he can say, "Remove the necklace."

Three men, struggling, at last get the snake off Severin.

"Did you get a lot of photos?" gasps Severin, fingering his swollen throat.

Yes.

Severin is happy. "I've had much closer calls than that with cobras," he says.

Watch the death-defying daredevil José Meiffret pedaling a special bike in a wind-break behind a racing car at speeds of over 108 miles per hour, the former world record, which was set in 1941. In the Sixties, Meiffret first raised the record to 109.6, then to 115.9. These are records no one gives a damn about. They are worth absolutely nothing commercially. Each attempt costs Meiffret--a short, bald, 50ish gardener with a concave dent in his skull from an earlier crash--thousands of dollars of his own money.

Now watch Meiffret on an autobahn in Germany leaning forward over the handle bars, straining to make the oversize sprocket go around. Somewhere close to 60 miles an hour, he ducks in behind the windbreak jutting upward from the rear of the racing car. The mob tensely leans forward along both sides of the measured kilometer. The spectators stare down from the overpasses. Now the racing car, with Meiffret tucked into the windbreak, is speeding along at 100 miles per hour ... 115 ... 125. Inside the windbreak, Meiffret is straining to keep his front wheel one inch from a roller bar. If he touches the roller bar, he knows it won't roll, it will fling him off his bike and kill him. If he drops back out of the windbreak through loss of a pedal, or fatigue or a heart spasm, the wind will throw him off the bike and kill him. If he hits a crack in the road, or a pebble, he is a dead man.

Out of the measured kilometer rockets the racing car. José Meiffret is still in the windbreak, upright, alive. Ladies and gentlemen, a new absolute speed record for miles per hour pedaled in a windbreak behind a racing car: 127.98 mph, by the death-defying José Meiffret, daredevil of international cycling!

• • •

This article is concerned with death and with those who risk it deliberately, gratuitously and perhaps compulsively.

But that's not fair, you say. Each of the three men mentioned so far sounds like some kind of nut. The Pole is in a circus, exactly where he belongs, indistinguishable from the other freaks there. Severin has gone to the Far East to see some snakes. Good, because we don't want him around here. Meiffret is frantically and unsuccessfully trying to find backers for a new record attempt, for he has no money left to pay for it himself. Glad to hear it. We are not interested in crackpots acting out death wishes.

But wait. I have some more daredevils for you. The boundary line gets fuzzy.

Watch the war photographer at Khesanh. His name is David Douglas Duncan and he is famous for photographing the art treasures of the Kremlin and Picasso's secret hoard of his own work. Duncan does not have to go to war. He is over 50 years old and he has been to too many wars already: World War Two, Palestine, Greece, Korea, Indochina. But he recently went into the Marine outpost at Con Thien, got his photos and came out alive. Now he flies into Khesanh, runs from the plane, which is being bombarded on the landing strip, and begins snapping a grim record of everyday terror and death. A C-130, machine-gunned while landing, skids the length of the runway and blows up. Duncan, running, braves the heat, the recurring explosions, and photographs live Marines pulling charred dead ones out of the blaze. A direct hit blows up part of the main ammo dump, leaving hundreds of scorched but unex-ploded artillery shells to be disposed of. Duncan photographs Marines gingerly handing scores of live, damaged shells down into a hole to be buried. An enemy rocket explodes fuel hoses that lead like fuses to the main gasoline dump. Marines fight the blaze; Duncan's cameras click. A single stray spark and they will all be instantly immolated. Duncan, at his age, knows the danger better than they do.

After nine days, Duncan flies out of Khesanh. In New York, he shepherds his pictures into Life magazine and onto ABC television. Then he turns around and flies back to Vietnam, back into the middle of bursting shells, terror and death. He might be photographing artsy scenery for McCall's, which once paid him $50,000 for some shots of Paris. But he chooses to go back into combat. Why?

"Death wish?" snorts Duncan. "I have no death wish. I have too much going for me. But it's the most important story of our time, perhaps in the entire history of our country."

Watch the ironworker fastening ribs to the skeleton of a skyscraper 30 or more stories above the street. His name is Edward Iannielli, Jr. Watch him, if you can stand to watch him, scamper across the void on an eight-inch beam, to get to a cup of coffee someone has sent up on an exposed dumb-waiter. Watch him scamper back across the eight-inch beam while studying the coffee carefully so as not to spill it. Listen to Eddie Iannielli talk.

"You're more of a crazy man up there at first, then it gets to be habit. You only focus on your feet, never on the ground. You have to have a sense of speed. You always start out on a beam at the same speed you're gonna finish. You can't change speeds in the middle. Of course, big beams you can walk out on with your eyes closed. You never start out on a beam unless you inwardly have said to yourself you can make it."

The son of an ironworker, Eddie once visited his father on a job, saw a ladder and climbed it, higher and higher: "Finally, I'm on the top, standing on this steel beam way up there, and I'm all alone and looking all around up there, looking out and seeing very far, and it was exciting; and as I stood there, all of a sudden I am thinking to myself, 'This is what I want to do!'" Eddie was then 13 or 14.

When he was an apprentice, climbing a ladder while balancing about 20 cups of coffee for the men, he fell backward two flights, landed on some canvas and got scalded and nearly drowned by the coffee. Working on the First National City Bank Building in New York, he fell into the void but landed on a beam three stories down and, though hurt, held on. The older workers told him he'd never live to see 30.

Working on the Verrazano-Narrows bridge approach, he got one finger crushed and another amputated--the surgeon removed the crushed finger but sewed the amputated one back on in a crooked position, so Eddie could use it to hold onto beams. One day, high on the bridge, he turned to find a buddy clinging to a wire, feet dangling into emptiness, voice pleading, "Help me, Eddie."

Eddie had a grip on the man's clothes but couldn't hold him. The man fell 350 feet to his death. Eddie watched him fall, naked back showing as the shirt flapped in the wind.

"I nearly got killed three times since the bridge," says Eddie. "Sure, I've been thinking about it. But I couldn't quit it. I love it too much. I wake up thinking today might be my last day. But that doesn't mean I'm going to stay in bed."

Watch the diver 140 miles east of Miami--and 432 feet below the surface of the sea. His name is Robert Stenuit. Inside the capsule that has taken him to the bottom, he takes a deep breath of pressurized gas, holds it and swims down into the water. Across from him in the gloom is the rubber house in which he will live for two days. Above him is 432 feet of water. Wearing only a swim-suit, holding his breath, he pauses to look straight up toward the sun he cannot see and to realize that, at that depth, if anything goes wrong, he will have no chance of reaching the surface--none.

So he swims over to the rubber house and climbs in. The gas in there tastes to him as fresh as mountain air. "What calm in this other world," he thinks. "What silence. What peace."

He hurries to connect the gear. His colleague, Jon Lindbergh, swims in. They find that their dehumidifying apparatus doesn't work. Their lights implode, spraying slivers of glass into the rubber walls. In dark and cold, they wrestle into place the four-foot aluminum cylinders that will purify their rubber house of the rapidly accumulating carbon dioxide. But one cylinder is flooded and the other has the wrong cover on it and is useless. They are panting from exertion and the carbon dioxide level in the rubber house is already dangerous.

So they wait while a new cylinder is sent down. When it comes, they wrestle it into the rubber house. They work frantically. At last they hear it working--gas rushes in the way it is supposed to. They are, momentarily, safe. That night, on the bottom of the sea, they eat corned beef, drink canned water and carrot juice. In the morning, they work outside on the bottom.

After 49 hours on the bottom--the longest deep dive ever--and four days decompressing, they come out into the sunlight again.

"Our successors," exults Stenuit, "will stay in the depths that long or longer. They will colonize the sea floor, cultivating its resources instead of pillaging them."

You are against nuts, you say, but you tend to be for war photographers, ironworkers and divers, if they don't take too many chances. You are for bravery, where it seems to pay off, though you are not entirely clear on what bravery is or how much pay-off is necessary. Maybe you would like to believe that the daredevils you approve of display a higher quality of bravery than the ones you don't, or that you can measure the meaning of risk in terms of the good it may do--for someone else. You are against the death wish, whatever that is. You think nobody has a right to risk his life very much. We have a lot of laws against suicide and that kind of thing.

So let us see what you think about certain athletes.

Watch the daredevil bullfighter, ElCordobés, in Madrid. His first bull of the day gores him three inches deep under the arm. He springs up, ignores both his own wound and the bull's horns and plays and kills it so skillfully that, in the general delirium, he is awarded both ears.

Ducking into the infirmary, he allows his armpit to be sewed up without any anesthetic, then hurries outside to face his second bull. This one hooks him at once. He springs to his feet, runs back to it and it spears him again, throws him, wheels and is on top of him. Its horn rips part of his costume off, he lies with his back bloody and exposed and the horn digs for him. His men drag him free and try to carry him off, but he breaks loose, scoops up his bloody cloth and gives the bull a hair-raising series of molinetes, passing the animal behind his back. His costume is half gone, he is covered with blood, his eyes are as glazed as a fanatic's and he is passing the bull again and again behind him.

People are screaming, "No, no, no!" A man near me is shouting, "Get him out of there. He doesn't know what he's doing." El Cordobés is being paid over $16,000 today to give us thrills, but such (continued on page 150) Risk Takers (continued from page 142) insane bravery as this is not pretty to watch. "Get him out of there," we scream.

At last the fearful passes end. He kills the bull with a stroke. Now we cheer ourselves hoarse for him and award him an ear. Men jump down to parade him out the main gate on their shoulders.

Watch the daredevil racing driver, Jackie Stewart, on the 14-mile, 175-curve Nürburgring. Listen to his reaction to the Fuchsröhre, a windy downhill plunge into a dip, then a steep uphill climb into a sharp left-hand turn, followed by a right, a left and another right.

Stewart says: "The first time you go down that hill, you're in fourth gear. and you decide you should be able to make it in sixth gear flat out. So the next time around, that's what you try; you go downhill in sixth gear at a hundred and sixty-three miles an hour, switching back and forth from one side of the road to the other, the trees and hedges going by. You can't see anything but greenery and you think: Christ, I'm going too fast. It's bloody terrifying.' You think: 'I'm not going to have enough time to do everything.' In the dip at the bottom of the hill, the g forces are tremendous; you're squashed down in your seat, the suspension isn't working and you realize you can't control the car anymore. You think: 'It is going to take its own line up the hill, whatever that line may be.' You can't get your foot off the accelerator onto the brake accurately--you only get a corner of it, and the car is going up the hill like on tram tracks. You're struggling to steer it and. at the same time, you're trying to come down two gears and get it slowed enough for the left-hander, and then there is a right, left, right coming--I tell you, it's bloody terrifying.

"But the second time you do it, your mind and body are synchronized to the elements you're competing against, and it is all clear to you, like in slow motion.

"It won't terrify you again until next year, when there will have been some improvements to the car and tires, and you go down there a little bit faster."

Or watch the daredevil mountain climber, Walter Bonatti, the Superman of the Alps, whose specialty is climbing sheer north faces in winter--alone. See him on the north face of the Matterhorn, climbing without gloves for a better grip, while the helicopters and light planes buzz about him all day. Every year or so up to now, he has made one of these fantastic climbs, selling his story and photos in advance to various European magazines. Every climb is much the same. Leaving his 70 pounds of gear behind, he climbs a little way up some sheer rock wall, hammering in pitons. Then he climbs down to get his gear and climbs up again, removing the pitons as he goes, for he will need the same pitons again higher up.

Each night, he hooks his sleeping sack to pitons planted more or less solidly in a fissure in the rock, curls himself into it in a fetal position, lights his spirit heater on his knees and cooks himself some bouillon or tea out of chunks of ice broken off the wall. He eats some dried chamois meat and some nougat candy. Then he hangs there all night, trying to sleep but kept awake, usually, by cold and terror.

Meanwhile, back in their warm, safe homes, Europeans watch that day's part of the climb on television, thank God they are not Walter Bonatti and ask themselves what the hell he is doing up there alone.

He has been up there as long as seven days in the past. The Matterhorn climb takes only four. There is a huge cross atop the Matterhorn, raised there long ago by climbers who came up the easy way; and on the final afternoon, Bonatti at last spies the cross, with a halo of setting sun behind it. The cross seems incandescent and miraculous all at once, and Bonatti feels blinded. He climbs the final meters between himself and safety and approaches the cross with open arms. When he feels it against his chest, he embraces it, falls on his knees and begins to weep.

Do these people have a vision of life that is denied to most of us? Or are they all crazy? And what about the lives of spectators killed by stray racing cars or rescuers killed trying to get climbers off mountain walls? We also don't want to pay for any of the risk taking via tax dollars. When a guy puts to sea in a ten-foot canoe, we don't want the Coast Guard going after him on our money. Should they be stopped? I don't know how you can stop most of them: you can't put police lines around every mountain or every sea. But would you want to stop them, if you could?

And let's look at this so-called death wish. Is there such a thing and, if so, is it everywhere and always deplorable? Or do we merely paste an easy label (because we do not understand) on what is really something else: courage, ambition and technique of such awesome perfection that it removes most of the danger we, from a distance, think is there? Is it possible, most of the time, that most of these people are safer than you and I are walking to work? Is it further possible that they have a perfect right, regardless of society's approval or disapproval, to risk their lives as much as they please? Is it also possible that you and I have an absolute need of such men around us, the useless as much as the useful, those who get away with it as much as those who, misjudging the length of the rope, regale us with brains upon the floor?

Let us look more closely.

You ask what kind of men are these who regularly choose to risk their lives. A few of the ones I have known appear to be what the world calls weirdos. I think José Meiffret, the speed cyclist, is a bit strange, and I think this principally because his insanely dangerous record attempts are worth nothing to anyone else and nothing to him commercially. He does it strictly for glory: "At such speeds. I belong no longer to the earth and not yet to death. At such speeds I am--me!" Meiffret, small, poor, stepped on all his life, suddenly found a way to make people take notice. In the windbreak, crossing into the measured kilometer at 127 miles per hour, he says his head was filled with only one thought: "Twenty seconds more and the record is mine anew. The record will be my revenge on life, revenge on the misery I have suffered." To get to that moment, he practiced strict chastity, slept on a board, ate only health foods. He had written hundreds of letters, trying to line up backers and cooperation and he had spent every sou he owned. His life was not important to him, compared with the record.

I think Donald Campbell, the former land- and water-speed record holder, was a bit strange. Campbell had all sorts of fetishes and superstitions and also believed he could communicate with the dead. Just before setting his final record, as he sat in his cockpit quivering with fear, his face suddenly went calm, and in a moment, he rocketed safely down the run at 403 miles per hour. He explained that his dead father's face had appeared to him, reflected in the windscreen, his dead father's voice had assured him he would be safe.

Other racing drivers claimed Campbell reeked of death. Stirling Moss once told me he was absolutely certain Campbell would shortly kill himself. Moss was right. Campbell's boat blew up as he tried for the water speed record.

And talking to Florida-based Kurt Severin about snakes and about fear is certainly an unsettling experience. "I don't know fear," he says. "It is one thing I am not acquainted with. I get an uncomfortable feeling at times, but it is not fear." Was he not frightened with the anaconda coiled around him? "No. There were three people around to get it off me. I only wanted to have a picture of myself with the anaconda to send to my wife."

Severin has been in the water with sharks and with crocodiles. He has been in three wars and about 20 revolutions. He claims to have been the first (continued on page 176)Risk Takers (continued from page 150) parachutist to photograph himself in flight. He did that in 1934.

But I do not know if I believe him about lack of fear. To get a photo of a cobra striking, he decided, he would have to give it something to strike. Why not himself? Why not, indeed. He built a plastic shield around his camera, provoked the cobra and it came right through the shield and hit his hand, missing a grip on the hand but pumping out enough venom to kill approximately 22 people. Severin dropped the camera, which broke open, spoiling the film. Another, stronger shield was built, and this time, Severin got the shot he wanted.

"I'm not afraid of snakes or sharks or animals. I'm afraid of bugs, though. I'm afraid of disease. I once slept in the bed of a guy who had just died of yellow fever. I didn't know it at the time, of course. Later, I was scared for eight days. It is not a funny feeling to think something might be encroaching on you."

Severin speaks five languages, plays the violin and is interested in painting, ballet and classical music. When he talks, he makes excellent sense; it is only when you mull over, later, what he has said that you become awed, or appalled.

"Fear of snakes is all in the mind," he says. "Snakes are not slimy. As a matter of fact, they have a very pleasant touch. It's like plastic. It's really quite nice."

Whatever Severin may think about fear, most other habitual risk takers are often terrified, and they admit it. In fact, what most separates them from the rest of us is not that they risk death but that they subject themselves to frequent terror, an emotion most of us struggle to avoid at all costs.

Every racing driver, every time he loses control of a car and waits for it to hit whatever it is going to hit, is terrified. Every matador, when he is down and the bull is on him, is terrified. El Cordobés, gored by the first bull he ever faced in Madrid, lay on the sand with the horn rooting about in his intestines: "It wasn't the pain I was worried about, it was the fear. When I felt the horn inside me, I was so scared I thought my heart would stop and I would die of the fear."

José Meiffret on his record bike is scared--he carries his last will and testament in his jersey pocket. The ironworker, Eddie Iannielli, is scared by every accident: "When something happens, all your fear comes back, but you suppress it. You just put it out of your mind." He talks about his most recent accident. He was sitting on top of a beam about two stories up, and the bolts at the base of the uprights broke or pulled out and the whole thing fell over sideways. Eddie suffered a back injury that kept him out of work for many weeks. "No matter how much you're prepared for something like that to happen, it happens so fast you're not prepared for it. A lot of guys get killed, and I'm still alive and I'm very grateful."

The climber, Bonatti, has known as much terror as any man alive, perhaps more. Climbing K2 in the Himalayas, he was unable to find two other climbers higher up, as night fell. At 27,000 feet, unable in the darkness to go up or down, without any food, heat or shelter of any kind, he was forced to spend the night in the open on an ice shelf, beating himself with his arms all night to keep himself awake and alive. That was prolonged terror.

Innumerable times, Bonatti has found himself clinging to some sheer wall, certain (for the moment) there was no possible way to go either up or down. On the Lavaredo in Italy, he had t6o inch across a fragile ledge of snow. On the Dru in France, he had to lasso a jutting projection and swing across the void like Tarzan, while wondering if the rope would slip off or the projection snap. Once, he was caught in a storm with six other men on a narrow ledge on Mont Blanc. Lightning was attracted by the group's sack of pitons, ice axes and such. Bolt after bolt blasted and crackled around the group. The air was saturated with electricity. They could not get rid of the cursed sacks of steel--without them, they could get neither up nor down the mountain. They simply had to huddle there, terrified, waiting to be fried or blasted off the ledge. Again and again, lightning crashed about them. Bonatti found himself screaming. Everyone was screaming.

I have known a good many people who habitually take risks; and although I have heard a number of them say they enjoy the danger, I have never heard one say he enjoyed the terror.

Habitual risk takers are able to do what they do, first because they suppress (or, in some cases, eliminate) certain fears that are normal in all of us: fear of height, fear of the depths of the sea, fear of excessive speed, fear of bullets and bombs, fear of wild beasts, fear of snakes. All of these fears, in them as in us, are basically fear of the unknown. Once all the facts and details are known, the fears become much less fearsome and a reasonable man is often able to ignore them. As Severin says, snakes are not slimy, and once you know that, there is no reason to be afraid. In fact, he says, almost all feared creatures "will scram out of there at the approach of man. If sharks were as dangerous as written, most of our beaches would be unsafe."

In other words, at least part of Sever in's bravery is only knowledge. Similarly, the bullfighter is not normally afraid of the bull, because he has spent years learning how to handle bulls, just as the racing driver has spent years learning how to control speed that would frighten most of us. The mountaineer knows rocks, knows which fissures will hold a piton and which won't; and he also knows that once anchored to a piton, he is absolutely safe, no matter what the height. David Douglas Duncan goes in to photograph wars knowing in advance approximately what he will find there--he was once a U. S. Marine trained for combat. He knows he won't be surprised by anything, he knows he won't panic and he knows instinctively now how to recognize places and moments that he judges overly dangerous; these he avoids. In other words, he knows when to stick his head up and when not to; he obeys certain rules, and these rules keep him alive. Occasionally, he will expose himself to get a picture; but by moving fast, he cuts the risk to a minimum. He is, of course, a brave man, but he is not a foolish one, and he accepts risk only when certain he understands it exactly and has put all odds in his favor. I once heard him tell Guy Lombardo that he would never drive one of Lombardo's speedboats: "I would be terrified. I'm not trained for that. I don't know anything about it." In combat, Duncan is obviously as vulnerable as each GI to some stray shell; but while in combat, he runs no risk of being sideswiped by a taxicab, or mugged in the park, or hit on the head by a suicide on his way down from the roof. The odds can be said to come out almost the same, once you realize, as Duncan does, that life is not very safe.

In addition to possessing knowledge and technique, most of these risk takers approach each dangerous place only after having taken every possible precaution in advance. Bullfighters always have a surgeon present in the arena infirmary (indeed, surgeons are required by law in Spain) and the richer bullfighters often travel with their own personal horn-wound specialists--just in case. Sitkiewics hangs around for an hour after his act; then, when the show ends and the audience empties out, he goes up and rerigs his rope himself for his next dive. No one else is allowed to touch it.

The racing driver, Jackie Stewart, feels that the modern, monocoque Grand Prix car is so strong that the driver can survive almost any crash. The only danger then is fire--so Stewart wears fireproof long underwear, fireproof coveralls, fireproof gloves, socks and shoes and a fireproof bandanna covering all his face except his eyes. Inside all this in a three-hour race he nearly suffocates, but he wears it. "I'm very safety conscious, as perhaps you've noticed," he told me once. "But in a fire, a man ought to be safe for thirty seconds, dressed that way; and by that time, somebody ought to be able to get him out. Thirty seconds is quite a long time, actually." That was the day of the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix. Stewart crashed in a rainstorm and the car crumpled around him so tight it was 15 minutes before they got him out. The fire suit wouldn't have saved him. The next year, he turned up for the same race wearing, in addition to his fire suit, a patch over his breast, giving any eventual surgeons his blood type. Precautions, Stewart feels--all risk takers feel--are important.

Why do men such as these seem to search out danger?

Psychologists will tell you that each of them first selects a difficult profession in order to separate himself from the mass of men. Later, each raises his stake up to and beyond the danger line, in order to separate himself further from other men within the same profession. Psychologists will give you many such explanations, overlooking what are, in most cases, the two basic ones: Most men who search out danger do it for money and for the pure pleasure of it. For the standouts, the money comes only one way: big. The pleasure usually comes big, too, sometimes even orgiastic, stupendous.

Start with money, the simplest of all human motives. Car racers and, even more so, bullfighters earn fantastic sums. Sitkiewicz may earn only a bit over $200 a week, but what else could he do, in Poland, to earn so much? Some photographers earn good pay also; but David Douglas Duncan, having taken the precaution (that word again) of selling his photos in advance to both Life and ABC television, will earn ten times as much by going into sticky combat zones most others want no part of.

By working high up on narrow beams where not many other men will go, Eddie lannielli earns (counting bonuses and extra vacation time) roughly $20,000 a year, almost twice what laborers like himself earn below. He risks a quick death, yes, but his special skill is so rare that he never risks being out of work, a possibility that haunts--and terrifies--much of mankind all the time.

There is money in most danger and sometimes, paradoxically, even a little security. And there are pleasures, many pleasures. Start with the simplest of these.

To control anything--anything at all--delights man. He is delighted to control the way a plant grows or the shape of a bush or a dart thrown at a dart board, or a car driven fast and well. So do not be surprised to hear that there is pleasure in controlling a very hot car, indeed, or a raging bull or one's feet on a beam. The controlled forces are tremendous, unpredictable, and therefore the pleasure of control is that much greater. A man thinks: "Look at me, fragile and puny human being that I am! Look what I am controlling!" This is never said aloud, because the fragile and puny human being in question would much rather have you believe him a hero. But this is the way he feels. He gets a kick out of controlling something hardly anybody else can control. It's nice that you down there are watching him and cheering his control, but he would feel pleasure whether you were there or not, for the principal applause he is listening to is his own.

There is pleasure in accepting challenge. At a world convention held in London, on undersea activities, the inventor Edwin Link spoke of sending a man to live at a depth of 400 feet. Listen to the diver Robert Stenuit: "All heads turned to me. Four hundred feet! The very idea made my insides itch. Did I really want to descend to that awful depth, to shiver night and day and perhaps to furnish headlines for the journals that specialize in catastrophe?

"I really did. Always I have found joy in danger lucidly accepted and prudently overcome. And when a reporter put the question to me, I heard myself answer: 'Of course. Yes.'

"To me, it was the most extraordinary adventure of which a diver might dream."

There is pleasure in provoking terror in others, too. The gasp Sitkiewicz hears when he dives from the roof is pure pleasure to him. Most of the risk takers I have known delight in talking about danger, delight in mentioning death casually, delight in watching listeners' eyes go wide. Eddie lannielli says: "Windy days, of course, are the hardest. Like, you're walking across an eight-inch beam, balancing yourself in the wind, and then, all of a sudden, the wind stops--and you temporarily lose your balance. It's some feeling when that happens." Eddie always enjoys the admiration, the near worship, when he talks like this. All of these men are aware from such reactions, from the questions they are constantly asked ("But why do you do it, why?") and from the hypothesizing psychologists in the background that so-called normal people don't understand who they are or how they can accept such risk, and this is very pleasant. It is nice to feel so singular. The desire to feel singular is basic to the human personality; but the timid clerk at his desk may have to do without fulfilling this basic need every day of his long, safe life, subsisting on his Mittyesque fantasies.

There is also the simple pleasure of physical activity. All of the risk takers are easily bored. They go crazy in static situations and normally they go on taking risks however long they may live. Duncan and Meiffret are over 50. Kurt Severin is over 65 and on Medicare, and on a trip, as has been said, to the Far East to see more snakes: "I have always had an urge to do things, to be in all sorts of funny situations. It's curiosity, it's--I don't know. I want to see things others haven't seen, and that involves danger, because one goes into the unknown. I'm a senior citizen. People tell me I should sit on my big fat ass and digest what I have seen and not expose myself anymore. But I can't do it. I have to go out."

There is pleasure as well in the belief of most risk takers that they are contributing to the world by doing something dangerous that has to be done. Stenuit believes one day men will colonize the continental shelf, thanks to his pioneering dives. If he is wrong, he may be accused of having risked his life for nothing. Nonetheless, at the time, he believed he was contributing his best and most important talent to the world. So does Duncan believe he is contributing by bringing back photos that may throw some light on the awful struggle in Vietnam. So does Walter Bonatti believe that he and all mountaineers contribute: "We demonstrate in the most stunning way of all--at the risk of our lives--that there is no limit to the effort man can demand of himself."

Now we come to pleasures that are not so simple and, therefore, not so easy to describe.

"I think we appreciate life better, because we live closer to death," the late Marquis de Portago once wrote of racing drivers. Does this make any sense to you? Danger heightens all the senses. A man feels extraordinarily alert and alive. Up to a certain point, alcohol does this, too, and I suppose drugs do, although I do not know this personally. But I firmly believe that nothing stimulates a man as much as danger does, and it doesn't even have to be very much danger.

One extremely hot day last January. I was hunting quail on the King Ranch in south Texas. There were other shooters, most of whom I did not know, and I was worried about possibly getting my head blown off by accident, or blowing off someone else's, and this made me alert. I was watching everybody very carefully, and then the girl nearest me jumped back and blasted a rattlesnake.

She stood there trembling, unable to move. The rattler, tail buzzing, writhed brokenly near her feet, and I ran over and shot its head off.

At lunchtime, we gathered in a grove of oaks and dined on a stew made from kid goat and on broiled baby lamb chops and drank cold Rhine wine, and talked of rattlesnakes. There were nine of us shooters in all, hunting in groups, and the total score in rattlesnakes so far was four. Much of the King Ranch was still under water from the fall hurricanes and the rattlers seemed to have come up onto the higher ground from all over; the sun had brought them out of their holes and it was plainly very dangerous to continue shooting. But nobody wanted to go home yet. Our excitement was too high.

In the afternoon, hunting through a grove of mesquite trees. I did not see what turned out to be the biggest rattler of the day, a six-footer, until I was with in a stride of it. The diamondback rattler in that kind of country is almost impossible to see.

I gave it both barrels. This disturbance set off a bevy of quail, which flew all about me. People were shouting "Shoot!" but I was quivering too much even to reload.

But this emotion passed and we went on hunting, often through high, hummocky grass. "Some chance of seeing a rattler in here," I thought, but I plowed through it, anyway, eyeballs working over every blade, every shadow. I have never felt so alert in my life, presumably because my life depended on my alertness. I also have never felt so keenly aware of the sun on my back, or the smell of gunpowder, or the color of birds, or the buzzing of insects. I felt hungry and thirsty and tired in a very pleasant way, enjoying food and drink and rest in advance, while still slogging through fields, trying to flush quail.

When night fell, the groups came together at a dirt crossroads in the dark and drank gin and tonic mixed out of the trunks of the shooting cars. The total score was seven rattlers. We all agreed it was madness to have hunted in there that day. We were all glad we had done it. Ice tinkled in glasses. They were the best gin and tonics I have ever tasted. I was excited, alert, aware of all of the sights. sounds and smells of the night. This lasted until I fell asleep later back at the ranch, and even until the next morning, when I lay awake in bed, listening to the dew drip off the roof and feeling good all over.

This is one level of the excitement that exists in danger. There is another that is perhaps impossible to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it.

Years ago, in the streets of Jerusalem, Jewish terrorists waved David Duncan to take cover, then mowed down the three Arabs he was with. Duncan raced after the terrorists' car, photographing the whole show as police and bullets came from all directions. Later, Duncan cabled Life: "What a Beautiful day to Be Still Alive."

Now, some will assert that danger is a drug, that a man gets so he can't leave it alone; and this is true, though not in the way the speaker usually means. I have never heard a habitual risk taker articulate what the "drug" is, or what the sensation feels like; but to me, it is purely and simply the extraordinary exhilaration a man feels to find the danger gone and himself still alive. I have felt this exhilaration.

For many years, I have gone to the fiesta at Pamplona each July and run in the streets with the bulls most mornings, and this is not particularly dangerous. There are many tricks for keeping well clear of the horns, and normally the bulls, obeying their strong herd instinct, run flank to flank and ignore the runners completely. The only real danger is a bull separated from the herd. A bull alone will gore anything it sees.

There was one morning I ran in front of the bulls and, when they were close, I leaped high up onto a window grating, hoisting my derriére out of danger. When the herd had gone by, I dropped down into the street again and sauntered between the barriers toward the arena into which the herd had disappeared. There were other men in the street with me and mobs of people crowding the barriers along both sides of the ramp that goes down to the tunnel under the stands.

Suddenly, the men on the fences started shouting: "Falta uno!" There was one bull still loose in the street.

The men in the street scattered and there I stood, face to face with the bull, who, for a moment, could not decide what to do.

I searched for an empty spot on the fence. There was none. What to do? Where to run? I remember thinking: Be calm. Think it out carefully. If you panic, you are lost. I saw I was the only man in the street. The bull was ten yards away. In the other direction was the ramp under the stands and the arena floor beyond. I thought: Can I beat the bull into the arena? If I could get into the arena, I could perhaps hurdle the barrera to safety. But I saw that the bull would catch me in the tunnel or before. I thought: It's the only chance you have; start running.

I ran.

The tunnel was 20 yards away ... ten. I could hear the bull.

Suddenly, I spied a gap atop the fence. I leaped up there. The bull rushed by under my feet. A moment later, the wooden door slammed behind it. I was safe.

I felt none of the quivering one feels after losing control of a car or nearly stepping on a rattlesnake. Instead, I felt a flood of exhilaration. I did it! Look at me, I'm still alive!

It was one of the most stupendous feelings of my life, accompanied by much of the wonder of first sexual intercourse: So this is what all the talk has been about.

It wasn't a feeling of relief nor of gratitude. It was exhilaration. I had faced real danger and got out of it on my own two feet and I was still alive and I felt great, absolutely great.

Then I thought: This must be the drug they speak of. It is a sensation I could get to love entirely too much; and the next day, I was afraid to run with the bulls (though I have run many times since), fearing that I might go for that extraordinary exhilaration again and this time, possibly, do something really stupid.

And so some of the habitual risk takers go for this feeling sometimes and some of them find it occasionally, but it must be rare. A feeling as glorious as that can't be common, and I suppose you can call it a drug, if you want to.

On a more practical level, you can't have a safe world and a progressive one. (Probably you can't have a safe world under any circumstances, so you might as well try for the progress, whatever the cost.) And you must admit that most progress comes from risk. This has always been the case. Five hundred years ago, Columbus risked his life and his ships and crews to discover a new world he didn't know was there, and that's why all of us are where we are today. The men of his time later called Columbus a hero. But there must have been a hundred other captains who never found the new world, because they looked in the wrong place; and some of them didn't come back, and no doubt "normal" people of the time called such men daredevils obeying some stupid death wish.

Or think of Edison fooling around with high voltage he didn't understand, high voltage that had killed several men before him and would kill many after him. Edison was obviously a daredevil. Was he acting out a death wish as well?

All of progress comes from pushing a little closer to the edge than the guy before you, and this involves risk. The world needs risk takers, needs an oversupply of them, and the spillover becomes the circus performers and daredevil athletes, all of whom have the same temperaments, basically, as all explorers and most inventors.

Cut off the right to risk one's life, and progress would end and society would atrophy and die. The right to watch men risk their lives on mountains, in car races, bullfights and circuses is equally important. We need to know where death is, if only to avoid it; and such men show us that and much more. Often accused of having a death wish, they make careers out of staying alive. And that is the simplest, most singular thing about them. It should not be overlooked.