Tim Cahill > Quotes

“A journey is best measured in friends, not in miles. ”
― Tim Cahill

“An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.”
― Tim Cahill

“A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.”
― Tim Cahill

“Finally, consider your predicament a privilege in a world so shrunken that certain people refer to it as the 'global village.' The term 'explorer' has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a faray into the unknown, and a four-year old child, wandering about along in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“When you've managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown - either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude - there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“That's why the words "Let's go!" are intrinsically courageous. It's the decision to go that is, in itself, entirely intrepid.”
― Tim Cahill

“I like rainbows.

We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction…
Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge.
...
…We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall.

Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall.

Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall.
“It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots.
Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical.
Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light.
In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.”
― Tim Cahill, Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park

“It won't snow on us," I told my hiking companions, "because I lead a good and virtuous life."

"We're dead," Dave Long said.”
― Tim Cahill, Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park

“Elk were mating now - The males were fighting, and they had to chase the females, which depleted the fat that both sexes had accumulated over the summer and thereby diminished their chances of surviving the winter. "It would be better for the elk," Dave said as we prepared dinner, "if the females just gave it up."

All three women stared at him. A silence ensued. Dave said, "Or I could be wrong.”
― Tim Cahill, Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park

“A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea...Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don't go right now, we're never going to do it. And we'll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.”
― Tim Cahill

“It won't snow on us," I told my hiking companions, "because I lead a good and virtuous life." "We're dead," Dave Long said.”
― Tim Cahill, Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park

“The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“It was a great place to run red lights, which I count as a fine recreational activity.”
― Tim Cahill, Pecked to Death by Ducks

“Gacy’s”
― Tim Cahill, Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer

“Above the bar was a large motto: La selva es nuestra alidad (“The jungle is our ally”). It was one of those sentences you know is untrue on the face of it, sentences like “The policeman is your friend” or “The dentist won’t hurt you.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“There is an image that lives inside my memory as well. It is a vision of that slaughterhouse dump, those acres of death. The breeze I recall was heavy with the stench of rot, warm with the weight of decay. Propemex is still dumping bodies there, and, according to Dr. Pritchard, still dumping eggs. These eggs are said to be too immature to be buried in the sand; either that or too fouled with the mother’s intestines during the slaughtering process. So these eggs are dumped where the bodies of mothers are left to rot. But many of the eggs are not fouled; many are not immature. Many of them live, and hatchlings emerge to crawl over the rotting bodies of their slaughtered mothers. They crawl frantically, through the stench of death, toward a sea they will never reach.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“Oh yeah,” the native people told Pizarro, “a city of gold—you bet. It’s about a ten-day march over that range of mountains on the horizon there.” The expedition staggered around for more than a year, certain that the gold and spices were just over the next rise.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“Healthier, perhaps, to find beauty in life and feel it expand inside of us.”
― Tim Cahill, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg

“Tofino Expeditions,”
― Tim Cahill, Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered

“EARLY MORNING IN THE yard at the Men’s Reformatory at Anamosa, prisoners lounging about, doing lazy time, and here comes John Wayne Gacy, inmate number 26525, moving fast, a man with things to accomplish.”
― Tim Cahill, Buried Dreams: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer

“What good does it do to have led in the old pencil when there's nothing to write on?”
― Tim Cahill, Hold the Enlightenment

“The Third Count: Dolphins don't like humans that much and never have. In fact, people who have been in the water with wild dolphins have been bumped, rammed, bitten, and, in one case, even killed by dolphins. The permanent smile on the faces of some species of dolphin is purely anatomical, no more indicative of the animal's state of mind than are the tusks on an elephant. You moron.”
― Tim Cahill, Hold the Enlightenment

“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
― Tim Cahill

“He shook hands, invited us in, accepted our gifts of food and beer, then told us it was fine with him if we camped in his garden for a few days. He spoke good English, with just the trace of a central European accent. When we arrived, he was sitting at a homemade desk on a tree-stump chair. The book he was reading was about the structure of the cell. He wanted to learn about cells, he said, to better understand embryology, which he was studying because he felt that somewhere along the evolutionary line, mankind had lost track of the proper meaning of life.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“-isolated instances of beauty and in no urgent need of beholders.”
― Tim Cahill, Hold the Enlightenment

“Finally, consider your predicament a privilege. In a world so shrunken that certain people refer to “the global village,” the term “explorer” has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a foray into the unknown, and a four-year-old child, wandering about alone in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost. When you’ve managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown—either through the misdirection of others or, better yet, through your own creative ineptitude—there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when we are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early ’60s, there was very little in the way of literate adventure writing. Periodicals that catered to our adolescent dreams of travel and adventure clearly held us in contempt. Feature articles in magazines that might be called Man’s Testicle carried illustrations of tough, unshaven guys dragging terrified women in artfully torn blouses through jungles, caves, or submarine corridors; through hordes of menacing bikers, lions, and hippopotami. The stories bore the same relation to the truth that professional wrestling bears to sport, which is to say, they were larger-than-life contrivances of an artfully absurd nature aimed, it seemed, at lonely bachelor lip-readers, drinkers of cheap beer, violence-prone psychotics, and semiliterate Walter Mitty types whose vision of true love involved the rescue of some distressed damsel about to be ravaged by bikers, lions, or hippopotami.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

“The point was the most dangerous place we would have to negotiate in the kayak. It was also a great confluence of life, and this combination of peril and substance sent the spirit spinning off into various ethereal regions, in which a man might be tempted to commit philosophy.

From Baha by Kayak”
― Tim Cahill

“The Indian people east of Quito were left in peace for centuries due to this policy of misdirection. And I think the impulse survives in the folk who live there today. “Who knows what the strangers want? Let’s send them out to the nasty land where no one goes, send them so far away they’ll never come back.”
― Tim Cahill, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh