You're Too Old Not To Head Into the Hinterlands: One Man's Journey

You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!

The view from Kirk’s hand-made kayak

An inspiring story from Eastern Canada

Years ago, back when Sierra Trading Post was still a family-owned company based in Wyoming and you could trust them not to fill the stores with baby clothing and psuedo-manly-man facial products, I saw a wooden canoe.

The real thing, made in Canada. This is a good approximation. For those of us who value handcrafted goods, it was a piece of art. Man, I wanted that thing.

It was in the window of the first brick-and-mortar store in the company’s history. That was just before the TJ Maxx companies bought them out and ruined them for all of us loyalists, mostly in adjacent states. Colorado among them. We loved STP. A day trip to Cheyenne always ended with a car full of amazing deals.

That canoe was gorgeous cedar. I nearly bought it, but I knew that wasn’t my sport. Still, like the Greenland paddle that leans against my wall, I wanted it for the sheer beauty of the thing.

The above photo reminded me of that story. Longtime reader Kirk Fredericks, who has been kind enough to read my stuff for a few years now, sent me a note that I just had to share. I’ve passed his story along to a different storyteller as well,

Ray Glier

over at Geezer Jock, so stay tuned.

This, however, appealed to me for a variety of reasons.

This is Kirk’s handmade kayak:

A thing of beauty

At 68, a retired fireman (and full-time grampy), Kirk recently spent a few weeks off the Atlantic Coast of Canada. He was paddling, consuming his morning coffee while balancing it on the deck of his boat, and keeping his sharp eyes peeled for a couple of tagged Great Whites known to be in the area.

I can’t speak for you but that’s one hell of an adventure.

Sea temperatures this time of year can get up to 72 degrees. At the time of this writing, which was late afternoon Kirk’s time, they were in the low fifties. Even in a wetsuit, that’s cold and can suck the warmth out of you swiftly. So there are real dangers, even if a Whitey doesn’t decide to take a bite out of your boat.

That said, Kirk shared this with me:

At 68, I recently retired for the sixth time from a variety of careers. I'm in arguably the best shape of my life, weigh what I did in my early 20's, and concentrate on health, exercise and living my best life.

I would agree that this is living his best life.

Are we living ours?

Kirk, getting read to launch

You and I make daily, critically-important decisions about food, exercise, attitude, social structure and purpose. Every single day those tiny decisions flow into the river of our lives and move us in a given direction. While there are inevitable sideswipes which none of can avoid, the basics we can manage.

Kirk is the perfect example of why I write: at nearly seventy, he is setting an example for his family and his grandkids. None of us is guaranteed anything, but the work we put into being well and having a powerful, positive attitude about our later and final years will sustain us when or if something does flatten us.

When I turned 68, I indeed got flattened with the beginning of a series of surgeries. They jerked me out of the life I love and stripped me of a good bit of my ability to walk, work out, and do much of what I had taken for granted.

Now, four years later I’m gearing back up again. There is no way I could have done that had I not invested time and energy into fitness and healthy eating.

Fitness and healthy eating do NOT prevent all of life’s vicissitudes. They do NOT guarantee you a perfect life.

They do give you the ability to weather the shitstorms, which we all get, with age being the toughest and lasting the longest.

You can start any time. It is never ever too late to take better care of ourselves. The payoffs for moving more, eating less and better are almost immediate. Don’t believe me. Google it. The science backs me up.

Kirk’s story is why I write what I write. It’s the perfect example of the options that I sincerely want for us all, options better-served when we make better choices. There are no guarantees, not for me or anyone else. What we can do, however, is put “money” in the bank for our future.

That money is all about small, critically-important daily choices: being around positive, energetic people, eating carefully, moving much, loving even more and finding a thousand reasons to be grateful that you ARE aging, and not planted in some plot.

Those hinterlands will come all too soon to all of us. I want all of us to fill our time with amazing experiences before our tickets are punched.

I hope you find a hinterland that appeals to you and give yourself permission to explore it. Whether that’s a late-in-life love affair, a new job, volunteer work, writing the Great American Novel or….just learning to say no to more things so that you can indeed take better care of your precious self, please….

Let’s play.

Photo by Marisa Howenstine on Unsplash

Thanks to Kirk for sharing these marvelous pictures with us. I hope you took pleasure and I also hope that you were inspired, as I was. If this article appealed, please consider

If you know someone who might appreciate a little inspiration, please also consider

Either way, let’s please play as much as we can before we can’t.