I decided to make this trip in the first place because I felt my résumé for adventure wasn’t keeping pace with my advancing age. Unlike my last trip, which I viewed, somewhat contradictorily, as both a young man’s errand and a farewell to youth, this one, at age 57, has been about my encroaching mortality, no doubt about it, and when I compare the two journeys I recognize in the current one the frailty of age.
