Life, Feb 1986 v9 p19-21

Something in the sound of that voice--wistful, middle-aged, dripping with the residue of unfulfilled dreams--made Goddard flip his yellow pad to a clean page. At the top of the page he wrote three words: "My Life List.'

His skin tingled. His heart raced. He felt exactly as if he were about to ford a treacherous river.

"One,' he wrote. "Explore the Nile. Two. Explore the Amazon. Three. Explore the Congo.'

As he wrote down each goal, he pictured himself, John Goddard the World-Renowned Explorer, actually doing it. He climbed Mount Everest (No. 21). He rode an elephant, a camel, an ostrich and a bucking bronco (No. 77). He read the complete works of Shakespare, Plato and 15 other great writers (No. 111). He milked a poisonous snake (No. 117). Helit a match with a 22 rifle (No. 118). He visited the moon (No. 125). By the time he got to Goal No. 127 ("Live to see the 21st century'), it was long past dinnertime, and his biology homework was still undone.

The five-hour epiphany during which John Goddard mapped out his entire life took place in a Los Angeles suburb in the winter of 1939. Goddard was not the first woolgathering adolescent to harbor grandiose dreams. Unlike the rest of us, however, he did not shelve them when he grew up. He did them. Goddard is now 61, and he has completed 108 of his original 127 goals.

The Life List did not materialize out of nowhere. When Goddard was five--the only child of a mortuary executive and a housewife, neither of whom exhibited any overt tendencies toward swashbuckling--he announced that he was going to become an explorer. His parents did not tell him that someday he would see the light and become, say, a stockbroker. Instead, they bought him a pith helmet, to protect him from the fierce equatorial sun of the Hollywood Hills. They bought him a knife, which he wore strapped to his belt as he swung from the clotheslines he strung across the backyard, practicing his Tarzan yell. They bought him an extensive library of books with titles like Diving to Adventure, Ten Years in the Congo and A Thousand Miles Up the Nile.

As Goddard read the biographies of the great explorers, he imagined that he was Marco Polo crossing the Gobi Desert; Kit Carson riding the Santa Fe Trail; John Hanning Speke fighting off marauding tribesmen in Somaliland. He made an inventory of the skills he needed to acquire. An explorer must be strong, so he rigged a set of dumbbells from a pair of cement-filled tomato cans. An explorer must not fear heights, so he practiced handstands on 10th-floor balconies. An explorer must subsist on survival rations, so he made pemmican in his mother's oven. An explorer must understand animals, so he trapped king snakes and fed them mice. An explorer must be a trained scientist, so he transformed his bedroom into a natural history museum, carefully labeled with genera and specie. Its star exhibit was the skull of a dead owl that he had cleaned by leaving it for a week in an ants' nest.

John Goddard has interested me for a long time because when my brother and I were children, we, too, had an overweening ambition to spend our lives in the wilderness. Like Goddard, we made pemmican, fed mice to our pet king snake (who was nearly banished from the house when our mother discovered him curled up asleep in her warm dishwasher) and amassed a collection of taxonomically classified bettles, birds' nests and skulls, all displayed in a room with a sign on the door that said, "The Serendipity Museum of Nature: No Smoking Please.' For my 10th birthday I requested, and received, a pickled human tapeworm.

I also made long lists of goals for the improvement of my character. One prefeminist example will suffice, penned at age nine: "He who puts his whole-hearted effort into anything can preform [sic] miracles.' My signature bore the following annotation: "I CANNOT SIGN MY NAME IN BLOOD, BUT TO PROVE I MEAN WHAT I HAVE JUST SAID, I SHALL SIGN MY NAME IN INK THAT CAN NEVER BE ERASED.' Now you understand the difference between John Goddard and me. He would have signed in blood.

When I was 12, I read "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' by James Thurber. Walter Mitty, as you may remember, was a meek little man who daydreamed that he was the daredevil commander of the SN202 Navy hydroplane. The various engines and weapons he encountered all went ta-pocketa-pocketa, a sound inspired by the car he drove on his real-life mission to purchase Kleenex. I always felt that Thurber had stacked the deck against poor Walter. You could tell from his very name that he was a wimp. But John Goddard--with a name like that, as all-American as Clark Kent, how could he be anything but square of jaw, red of blood and bulging of pectoral?

I'd wanted to meet Goddard for years, and when I finally did, I almost burst out laughing because he looked exactly as I'd always imagined him. If Indiana Jones were to age 30 years, cultivate an Errol Flynn mustache, pay continuing attention to Goal No. 102 ("Weigh 175 pounds stripped') and spend 60 minutes every morning redefining his muscle groups with barbells, dynamic cables and a chinning bar, he would closely resemble the man who drove up to my Los Angeles hotel. His hands were scarred with raccoon, rattlesnake and (no kidding) piranha bites. While one of them squeezed a spring-loaded grip strengthener, the other, weighted with a turquoise ring heavy enough to constitute an exercise in itself, cradled the steering wheel of a sports car that went utttooooom instead of ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. Goddard informed me that his car steered just like a fighter plane, and he ought to know. During World War II, he flew 33 combat missions as a gunner and radio operator on a B-17 Flying Fortress. Since then he has flown 46 different aircraft (Goal No. 40: "Fly a plane'), including an F-111 at 1,500 miles an hour--faster, I was gratified to hear, than a speeding bullet.

Driving slightly slower than a speeding bullet but considerably faster than Walter Mitty, Goddard was en route to Etiwanda High School to deliver one of his year's more than 200 lectures. Like his beloved Victorian explorers, most of whom published their journals and addressed London's Royal Geographical Society, Goddard earns his livelihood (in the high five figures) by informing the world of his exploits. Kayaks Down the Nile, his book about Goal No. 1, has sold 65,000 copies. On that 4,145-mile expedition, made in 1951, Goddard achieved the equivalent of a Triple Word Score in Scrabble by also knocking off No. 13 ("Study primitive cultures in the Sudan'), No. 68 ("Swim in Lake Victoria') and No. 120 ("Climb Cheops' pyramid')-- not to mention No. 97 ("Write a book'). He has made films about many of his expeditions, and audiences ranging from gum-snapping junior high students to the business executives in his Corporate Motivational Seminars have heard him describe, in a matter-of-fact voice, how he has been charged by hippos, nearly eaten by crocodiles, buried in blinding sandstorms, mired in quicksand and pursued by bandits-all while subsisting on a diet that featured fried locusts, roasted termites, stewed pythons and barbecued warthogs.

Goddard has bulging files of letters from children who have been inspired to set goals of their own, from "Finding out what it is like to be a dentist' to "Being the first woman on Mars.' Adults are more likely to temporize. Three years ago, one man came backstage after a Goddard lecture on scuba diving to say he'd always wanted to dive. The next year, after a lecture on mountaineering, the man said he'd always wanted to climb. Last year, after a lecture on skydiving, Goddard was prepared.

,"Don't say it,' he said. "Next Saturday at eight a.m. there is a parachuting course at Lake Elsinore. Here's the phone number.'

The man told Goddard he couldn't possibly do it. He was too busy. He couldn't afford it. That Saturday night, he phoned Goddard and said, "I did it. When that chute blossomed over me today, it was the greatest moment of my entire life.'

During the week I spent with John Goddard, I discovered that beneath his almost parodistically macho exterior there beats the heart, if not of a pussycat, at least of a domesticated ocelot. (Goal No. 94: "Own a horse, chimpanzee, cheetah, ocelot and coyote.') It is true that the walls of Goddard's home in La Canada, a sedate Los Angeles suburb, are rather aggressively decorated with such items as a blowgun from Ecuador, a fighting ax from New Guinea, and a machete from the Philippines whose previous owner had used it to lop off 13 heads. But I hope that the proprietor of this arsenal will not come after me with a blowgun if I reveal that he always orders milk instead of whiskey, never fails to fasten his seat belt, refers to people he dislikes as "bloobs' and, when he gets really worked up, exclaims, "My word!'

Goddard also cries when he mentions Jack Yowell, the kayaking partner who drowned in a whirlpool during Goal No. 3, the exploration of the Congo River, in 1956. And when he speaks of his "dream girl'--a blond, 39-year-old, home economics teacher named Carol--his eyes invariably mist. Goddard's first two wives, the mothers of his five grown children, shared the opinion that he would someday outgrow his adolescent fantasies. Carol, to whom he has been married for what he says are the four happiest years of his life, not only endorses the Life List but also plans to learn to fly (No. 40), skin-dive (No. 78) and sky-dive (No. 82).

I have an inkling that one of the keys to John Goddard's character is Goal No. 73 ("Become an Eagle Scout'). He really is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. Another key is his two personal mottoes: "To dare is to do, to fear is to fail' and "It can be done. It should be done. It shall be done.' When he achieves the sweet satisfaction of putting a red checkmark next to a goal, he says to himself, "It has been done.' He believes that his parents' friend, the man who triggered the Life List in 1939, was thinking to himself, "It could have been done. It should have been done. What a bloob I am. Why didn't I do it?'

Another secret of Goddard's success is the lists of weekly and monthly goals that he keeps in a small, black, looseleaf notebook. About once a week he weighs himself, inventories his wardrobe, analyzes his diet and assesses his moral status. When I asked him if he didn't find this a little, well, rigid, he said, "Not at all. You need a plan for every-thing whether it's building a cathedral or a chicken coop. Without a plan, you'll postpone living until you're dead.' Goals for the week I spent with Goddard included "Eat more oranges' and "Contact people about North Pole.' This last is half of Goal No. 54; the other half is visiting the South Pole. Both are on the agenda for the next year or two, as is No. 5 ("Explore the Yangtze River'). Goddard is saving more sedentary goals like No. 114 ("Compose music') for the period after the completion of No. 127 ("Live to see the 21st century').

One day, as we were hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains 10 miles east of his home, my guide revealed to me the sine qua non of the Goddard System. "I lie on my bed,' he said. "I close my eyes. I imagine that I'm, say, shooting a deadly rapid.' (In Goddard parlance, rapids are always "deadly,' just as jungles are always "teeming' and wilderness is always "untamed'.) We picked our way across the deadly currents of Santa Anita Creek, which was all of eight inches deep. "If I capsize, what are my options? I run through them in meticulous detail. Then, when I'm actually on the river, I've rehearsed it so often in my mind that I know just what to do. I pre-visualize all my goals.'

"Including No. 125'? I asked.

"My word, yes! I love pre-visualizing myself on the moon, bouncing along in my space suit, weighing twenty-nine pounds.'

One dark and stormy night, a few days after I returned to New York City from my visit with Goddard, I was talking on the phone with my brother Kim, co-curator of the Serendipity museum of Nature and co-dreamer of many of my childhood fantasies. After college, we worked together at a backpacking school. Now I type articles on a word processor on the 31st floor of a Manhattan office building, while Kim teaches mountaineering in the Tetons.

"So how many of Goddard's goals have you done?' he asked.

I counted. "Ten. And parts of another thirteen. But most of them are things like No. 81 ("Type 50 words a minute').'

"Which one do you most want to do?'

"No. 23. Climb Mount McKinley.' McKinley is the highest mountain in North America.

"Well, how about the summer of'87? That would give you plenty of time to brush up on your iceclimbing. A six-person expedition would be just about right. You, me, Lars, Emery, Ann, Lannie . . .'

"I couldn't possibly do it. I'm completely out of shape. I could never get a month off work. I'd fall in a crevasse.'

"What would you think of the West Buttress Route?'

I said goodbye. I lay on my bed. I pre-visualized myself at 20,200 feet, carrying an iceax as sharp as a prianha tooth and a backpack as big as a hippopotamus. The entire Alaska Range lay spread beneath my feet. There was raind drumming on my bedroom window in New York City, but it sounded an awful lot to me like a pair of crampons clicking up the icy ridge to the summit of Goal No. 23, going ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.