'It's been coming for years, but you just don't expect it. Superman just doesn't die, right?"
This is Billy Rundle, commenting on the tragic demise of his close friend Evel Knievel, called "the ultimate American Daredevil" by the Smithsonian Institution.
Knievel, who suffered from diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, died Friday in his Clearwater, Fla., home before an ambulance could reach him.
His physical ailments were legion: He underwent a liver transplant in 1999 because of the rigours of Hepatitis C, which he probably contracted from one of the innumerable blood transfusions he received after breaking an astonishingly large catalogue of bones.
Some, incredibly, may not be familiar with the Motorcycle Hall of Famer, who was once the subject of a biopic and a rock opera, and the inspiration for, among many pop-culture simulations, Happy Days' then-aging Fonzie's (mortifying) decision to jump his bike over a shark tank. In his heyday, a pinball machine was named after Knievel and he also inspired a bendable action figure.
"I forget all of the things that have broke," Knievel once said of his injuries.
Yet so many of us remember, all too clearly, what he has broken in us. In the 1970s, he was a god to most; that is, adults and children, who believed he could jump the Grand Canyon, as he once proposed, and or any mere physical barrier he chose. His first stunt, sailing his Triumph over mountain lions and a huge crate of rattlesnakes, made him the only white man who ever came close to the kind of "graveyard mind[ed] blues figure who used a "cobra skin for a necktie" while walking "47 miles of barbwire."
His final incredible stunt, before his life slowly declined into ignominy and illness, was the Snake River Canyon jump, on Sept. 8, 1974. Everyone I knew watched this: At the time, it was of a piece with the moon landing or the Canada-Russia Summit hockey series.
Or maybe it just felt that way: I watched the "sky-cycle" take off, saw its parachute rise, then catch, and then remember nothing but ambulances and hushed commentary. To this day, I believe Knievel did make the jump; I realize all that had ever mattered was that he attempted such things.
All that mattered was that this star-spangled maniac was blazing a new trail out of the muck of the 1960s and, effectively, ushering in a new, cool-noir decade intent on showing us the ways in which heroism and violence collide. In 1978, the film Coming Home would make this decade's postwar sentiments clear, but Jon Voight, as the first of many wretched, crabbing, disconsolate vets, could not compete with Knievel's paramilitary performances of nihilism and joy.
No, he was more like Robert Duvall's Lieutenant-Colonel Bill Kilgore (in 1979's Apocalypse Now), shouting, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!" - that is, a man determined to live in the thrall of danger to elucidate to us the possibility of being fearless at any cost.
Knievel is one in a large list of those who have died, ultimately, in the lion's mouth that is extreme risk, and in death, joins, among so many others, Dale Earnhardt, Amelia Earhart, Harry Houdini, explorer Robert F. Scott and boxer Ernie Schaaf.
As noted, Knievel's life, after his last, anti-climactic jump in 1981, was rife with controversy and disaster, squalors that I do not wish to recount, as Clark Kent's business is his own.
His son rose to the challenges created by his father, though the two were deeply estranged. Robbie Knievel's lurid tours and ardent followers, or "Knievelettes," are reminiscent of the bad old days, on the one hand. On the other, not so much; Evel's most distinct talent was to transcend the cult of what we now call extreme sports and captivate everyone. When he converted to Christianity in April of this year, it was reported that he started a deluge of similar baptisms - strong evidence of the man's charisma, unbroken, to the end.
I found myself incredulous at the news of Knievel's demise: remembering with a pang the boys in my Montreal neighbourhood chanting "Eeeeeeeeeeevel Ka-nieeeeevel!" as they rode their bikes, hell-bent, over little risers and popped wheelies; remembering a poem Knievel wrote, called Why, which I always regarded as pure camp, and which returns to me now, plodding line by line.
"For you" he states in the recorded verse, "to do what I do is wrong."
"But for me to do what I do is not wrong. What I've been trying to tell you all along," he adds, "is I've gotta be me."
Knieval wrote this poem, he boasts, "in about an hour," while sedated in the back of an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser. It is a fuzzy tribute to God's will, a staunch defence of (and moral caution about) one man's extraordinary mission.
Through the glory and disaster, Knievel was, of course, true to himself, a daredevil act in itself.
And I am missing him today; I am missing my life.
As president Ronald Reagan said of the Challenger Seven (all of whom died in January, 1986) and of the very idea of risk: "The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted."
The future is an attenuated crate of rattlesnakes that the very few transcend; that others, like me, stand before, idling, and petrified of what it contains.