Daring

On my coffee table sits a book people can’t resist. They reach for it before the tea cools. Its title seems to whisper what we all long for: Dare to Reach, by mountaineers Emmanuel Daigle and Theodore Fairhurst.

Ted is more than a name on the cover—he is my friend. Which is why this is no ordinary review. It is a story of daring, of not daring, of failing, of laughing, of friendship. It is a story of how cardboard wings sometimes carry us higher than we thought possible, and sometimes fold in the rain.

Ted once told me:

“Everest is a beautiful beast. Huge, glorious, unpredictable. It demands your mind more than your muscles. Angels and demons both show up. Which one you see determines if you live or die.”

But here’s the thing: Ted, the record-breaker, the septuagenarian who climbed the Seven Summits and the Volcanic Seven, is also the man who chickened out on Dam Square in Amsterdam in 1973. He walked away from a dream named Blue Goose—a blue Bedford bus that could have carried him across continents. He rationalized. He folded. Until fate tapped his shoulder, dropped the keys into his palm, and whispered: “Drive.”

That’s daring, too. The kind that begins after we’ve said no.

Later, in a snowstorm on Mount Washington, I watched my own dark thoughts spiral. Ready to quit, I was forced by Ted to take the lead. Eyes closed, breath deep, I searched without seeing—and the cairn appeared, hidden under snow. That day I learned: sometimes the mountain we need to summit is the one inside.

Not all of Ted’s stories are of triumph. Some are of miscalculation, dehydration, cliffs, torn knees, failures that sting. And yet, those stories are gold. Because they remind us that daring isn’t only about standing on a peak; it is also about limping back to camp, humbled, alive.

At his talks, audiences applaud Ted’s slides of summits and survival. They say “wow.” But I tell him—wow fades. What changes lives are “a-ha’s.” The moments when a listener whispers, “Me too. I see.” Not when they see a superhero, but when they see the human behind him.

Perhaps the truest story of Ted is not Everest, nor Blue Goose, nor the cliffs. Perhaps it is a child at four years old, unrolling toilet paper and filling it with color. Encouraged, not scolded. A mother saying yes to creativity. That was his first summit. That was the first dare.

Ted knows now, as I know: people change people. On mountains, in coffee shops, in storms, in silence. We carry each other, one cairn at a time.

So here is the nugget:

Daring is not about superheroes. Daring is about saying yes when your knees shake, no when your mind tricks you, and thank you when someone hands you the keys.

The cardboard wings are fragile. But when held with care, they catch the light.

Next: Downtown in my Speedo

 © 2025 Dominique Bel. Cardboard Wings: A Constellation of Becoming. All rights reserved.