The Dash

The Anchorage airport greets you with stuffed bears in glass cases. Apex predators—brown and white, enormous even in their staged poses—each one featuring a small placard showing the date of its harvest. Not its death; its harvest. As if the word changes what happened. It doesn’t. An ungracious welcome to a week in the Alaskan interior where I pondered that gap—between the word and the thing, between being adjacent to death and avoiding it. Not because something happened. But because something easily could have—and the gap between those two things felt narrower than I had ever experienced.

I was based at a lodge on the southern edge of one of the many finger-shaped lakes that emanate like exclamation points from the shadow of Denali. On a map it would be easy to miss—a light blue smudge on a topo map that barely contained the wilderness around it. From a float plane descending toward its southern shore, it was immense. Surrounded by wilderness that neither knew nor cared that humans existed. No streetlights. No roads. No trails. A wayward forest service sign. A raft put-in. Nothing else made by human hands. Thankfully.

On the first evening I entered a wood-fired sauna set up on the shoreline—designed to make a lake plunge convenient. Plunge is generous. Forty-five seconds was all I could manage in water measuring under fifty degrees. I couldn’t submerge my head. I could barely control my breathing against the mammalian reflex that fired the moment I lowered my body into the water. That’s when the math of this place became clear. A fall into that water while fishing with my son and our guide—puttering around an eight-mile lake in a small boat, or paddling down the river that was fed by it—could be fatal within an hour. Submerged in frigid water, the human body has roughly thirty minutes before hypothermia begins shutting things down. After that, blood shunts to the organs. The limbs stop working. Swimming becomes irrelevant.

Getting lost carried slightly better odds—though not by much. Alaska is quick to remind you of the predatory hierarchy. Humans rank well below the bear, the moose, and the wolf. And then there is the cold—not a threat so much as a constant, the backdrop against which every other risk operates. You don’t fight it. You accommodate it or you don’t survive it. The brush along the shoreline was impenetrable. Hiking was impossible. Bushwhacking was theoretically an option, though briefly. Everything here operated on a simple and unforgiving logic: small mistake, large consequence. That week, food took on a different meaning. My Whoop registered an unusually high calorie burn—no CrossFit, no barbel. Food was calories. Calories was warmth. Warmth was life. I requested seconds at every meal.

I was strangely comforted by the wildness, which reminded me of my insignificance. Alaska made my home state of Colorado—a place I love and have seen most of—look like a pleasant suburb with fourteeners scattered between coffee shops and ski rental outfits. Having spent one unplanned night lost on a Colorado climb decades ago, I thought I understood wilderness. I didn’t. Up here, you could die and nobody would know you were missing.

Which is how I came to think more seriously about my own death.

The other prompt was the seasonal salmon run. Our guides were encyclopedias of earned knowledge—they knew the fish by species, by behavior, by the difference between what the internet says and what the river actually shows you. What neither they nor any human scientist could fully explain was how the salmon knew exactly which river to swim upstream to spawn and die. An evolutionary intelligence that defies explanation, but demands reverence. The native perspective is the accurate one: there is a natural cycle to living and dying, and the salmon simply abides by it.

We no longer respect this cycle. We live in the safest era in human history and we've largely stopped thinking about death as something that will happen to us. Antibiotics, heart stents, pharmaceuticals for every chronic condition—and a few that exist primarily to treat the side effects of other pharmaceuticals. It’s genuinely hard to die today regardless of how thoroughly you neglect yourself. Modern medicine’s promise isn’t exactly to heal you. It’s to not let you die. That is not the same thing as living. Somewhere in that promise we lost our relationship with the natural arc of a life.

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild came to mind—the account of Christopher McCandless, a young man who walked into this same wilderness without experience, without preparation, and without the humility that Alaska requires. He lasted 113 days. Most people wouldn’t survive a week. I tell myself my wilderness survival training would give me an edge. Alaska doesn’t care.

What this place gave me was a close-up view of a world where dying is easy and the margin for error is thin. That proximity—not to death itself, but to its realistic possibility—is something I hadn’t felt in a long time. And it clarified something.

The Stoics called it memento mori—the active contemplation of your own death, not as morbidity but as a practice of supreme clarification. The idea is simple: if you hold the fact of your death close enough, the things that actually matter become harder to ignore. The things that don’t become easier to let go.

A Navy SEAL friend once asked me: what’s the meaning of your dash? The line on a tombstone between the year of birth and the year of death. That small mark represents everything a life amounted to. Or didn’t.

I think about my dash more often now—not morbidly, but with the kind of attention it deserves. Every day spent with the people I love becomes more deliberate, more present, more insistent that I not squander what remains. Not because death is imminent. Because it isn’t abstract anymore. One of those float planes that buzz around Alaska like a flying taxi goes down in bad weather. One blood value comes back wrong. The freak accident you read happened to someone you don’t know. That’s all it takes.

The salmon returns to its birthplace to spawn and die. It knows only this cycle. And despite our best efforts to manage what we don't fully understand, it does everything it can to complete what it came here to do.

I’d like to do the same—having given everything I had to give, to the people who mattered most, in the time I was given to give it.

That’s what the dash is for.