Saving a Chinaman’s life with fishlike eyes

February 18th, 2011: Waking up this morning I thought I was going to do a lot of things in Antarctica but one of them was not saving an old Chinaman’s life. Did I really save his life? – well, let me say that I saved him from some great discomfort and perhaps some broken bones perhaps limiting himself from some late night action with his 70 year old wife in his suite on our ship.

Clearly Mr. Chinaman was walking up a snowy trail to a summit that he obviously shouldn’t have been on. Telling by his drunken walk of exhaustion, swaying left and right I was waiting for the obvious fall off the side...in which the right side of the trail was a steep angled slop supporting a high number of incalculable degrees with some rocks patiently awaiting a visitor.

Tipping over, he went to the right going face first with his $3,450.89 Canon camera necklace. My brain conveniently slowed time as he began a slow motion penguin slide on his man boobs down the slope. Quickly I lunged forward off the trail grabbing his toe of his boat with my pencil like fingers that somehow locked as if my hands morphed into the strength of pitbull’s jaw. His eyes became bigger than his oversized circular glasses as he looked at me in a panic.

As a scene from a poorly written action movie starring Keanu Reeves, I calmly said, “I got you buddy” to the old Chinaman. He tried to curl up to me with the abs that he lost some 40 year ago. As I managed to switch my grip to his frail forearm, I felt someone else grabbing my ankle to keep me from doing a head slide down the slope with the Chinaman.

Today, I was a hero to the Chinaman with big fishlike eyes as he graciously thanked me, when I should have been thanking him for a little bit of unexpected excitement for the day.