WILDNESS

MANSFIELD'S BOOK OF MANLY MEN (149-160)

• The childhood of Theodore Roosevelt...He was an intelligent child with a fierce curiosity and zeal for investigating life, but his body failed him. Exertions brought on breathlessness, which left him weak and bedridden. Even when he paced himself, he quickly ran out of energy. 
• Finally his father intervened..."Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body, the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it."
• Theodore devoted himself completely, he lifted weights, hammered away at punching bags, swung dumbbells, and spent hours grunting himself into position on the horizontal bars.
• Years went by with little improvement...Finally in his freshman year at Harvard, he began catching up.
• It is also not going too far to say that those dreary years of exercise, hour after hour each day, made him into a man who knew the power of work, of will over body, and of the need for a man to live a strenuous life.
• February 14, 1884...His mother died shortly after midnight. His wife died the next afternoon. Two days later, Theodore roosevelt sat in a pew at New York's Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and endured a double funeral. The next day, at the same church, he participated in the baptism of Alice Lee Roosevelt, his new daughter. He would write of these days, "The light has gone out of my life."
• He handed his beloved daughter to his sister, sold nearly everything he had, and moved to the Dakota Territories, where for several years he had been investing in a cattle ranch that overlooked a bend in the Missouri River. He would remain there for three years.
• Roosevelt needed to restore and rebuild and he knew only one way to do it: return to the strenuous and the difficult. 
• ...he needed space, wilderness, difficult tasks, and looming danger. He knew this was the key to healing. He had experienced this truth in his life before.
• He grieved and got through it. He lived in the moment, in the physical, and in intimate connection with nature. It forced him from living entirely in his thoughts to living a rooted, earthy life in which thoughts come only after work is done.
• Roosevelt would return to the East. He would accomplish many things. never would he forget the Dakota years.
• "In after years there shall ever come to mind the memory of endless prairies shimmering int the bright sun; of vast, snow-clad wastes, lying and desolate under gray skies; of the melancholy marshes; of the rush of mighty rivers; of the breath of the evergreen forest in the summer; of the grooming of ice-armored pines at the touch of the winds of winter; of cataracts roaring between hoary mountain passes; of all the innumerable sights and sounds of the wilderness and of the silences that brood in its still depths."
• ...all men need what Roosevelt found - a strenuous physical life, the possibility of harm, challenges to face, enemies to oppose, land to conquer. Our lives push us away from this. We work in cubicles or comfortable vehicles. Technology serves us and keeps us from exertion. We live in an opulent blandness - overfed, overextended, over entertained, and overly preoccupied with ourselves.
• It will awaken the masculinity in us. It will help us to untangle our inner knots. It will remind us that we are men. Perhaps the women and children in our lives are waiting for this, waiting for us to recover ourselves. This alone would be worth the battle.