The Privilege of Age

A week or two ago I heard Chesley Sullenberger III on the radio. You remember our man Chesley – he's the stone cold ace who seemingly without flinching dropped a 747 smooth as silk into the Hudson when he lost power over Manhattan. Saved something like 200 lives, minimal drama, all in a day's work or so it appeared.

He was receiving yet another accolade or honorarium when I heard him, and with characteristic humility he said something like the following:

"I have had the privilege of living long enough to become very good at something that is extremely difficult to do well. My profession may be one of the few in which grey hair is considered an asset rather than a liability".

Amen, Chesley. I have doubtless butchered the quotation, and I am sure that one of my more astute friends (that's you I am talking about, Quigg) will find the actual speech on a podcast and link to it just for the pleasure of calling me out. Anyway, his words brought to mind a couple more choice ones from my halcyon rock-climbing years:

"Good Judgement is the result of experience. Unfortunately, experience is all too often the result of bad judgement"

Or:

"There are old mountaineers and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers"

And lastly:

"Go big, or go home".

The gist of this all is that we live in a world where youth and vigor are all too often confused with skill and capability. The cult of youth has long since overtaken our cultural fascination– we lionize the teenaged basketball prodigy, the twentysomething software genius, the barely pubescent pop star whose woman-child persona is a form of temporal androgyny trapping her somewhere in the twilight zone between schoolgirl and sexpot. This is far from news, and as I creep up on forty I spend an increasingly disproportionate amount of time reflecting on the failed promise of my own early years. I seem destined to wrap up my fourth decade without the Great American Novel to my credit, sure as I was that I had it in me. Likewise, I never managed to pioneer a new route on a major alpine wall, nor did I develop some seminal piece of game-changing technology. Ditto the heartbreakingly insightful collection of essays which would define my generation, and along with it the archetypical hit record of my era. Instead, I find myself just another guy raking leaves in the suburbs on a Sunday afternoon waiting for the Seahawks game to start and worrying about the CV joints in my pickup.

I am ten years too late for Boy Wonder status no matter how you spin it.

And yet, as Chesley so adroitly phrased it, I have had the privilege of living long enough to become very good at something which is difficult to do well. And I increasingly have reason to take satisfaction from this.

As of this year, I have been cooking professionally in one way or another for a full twenty years. Restaurants, boats, hotels, corporate dining…at the end of the day it is all food, and I haven't done anything else for my entire working life to date. For nearly ten of those last twenty years I have been managing cooks and kitchens, first as a fine-dining restaurant chef, later as a banquet chef overseeing massive high-end functions and an executive sous chef responsible for the 24/7 chaos of a luxury hotel. I may not have seen it all, but I have seen enough to have some perspective. I have lived through enough hairball situations that I know from experience what to do and more importantly what NOT to do. My first instinct is more often than not a good one, and I find that I can increasingly foresee and troubleshoot potential problems before they evolve into full-blown crises.

When I was just starting out at the hotel, I had a sous-chef who was thirty years into the life and had spent his whole career hammering it out in the big hotels. One December in the midst of a full-on Saturday banquet meltdown I innocently said to him: "Hey, at least it can't get any worse".

Chris turned and looked at me with eyes as big as saucers, caught in mid-stride between the ovens and the dishup line, moving like a man with his hair on fire.

"Oh, no", He said. "No, it can always get worse!"

He was right, of course. It can always get worse. The skill lies in recognizing this and having the presence of mind to see it coming and the decision-making ability to keep it from getting there. The food press may buzz with the under-thirty hotshots who are making the scene in Seattle or Chicago, but look around. The true heavy hitters – the guys that guys like me look up to? They're all Old! Thomas Keller? Eric Ripert? Jean-Georges? Older than me and then some, and they all did their time in the trenches. Aging golfers and tennis players have to soak their arthritic joints and watch the superhuman ascent of Tiger and Rafael Nadal, but chefs have the satisfaction of watching their idols grow old before them and aspiring to get there themselves.

A few weeks ago my Dad and my buddy Dave and I went out to the Sunset to see Jonathan Lethem give a talk and afterwards we retired to a Mexican joint around the corner for a bowl of oxtail pozole and a few margaritas. One way or another the conversation turned to commercial fishing and the story of a young scalloper whom my father had known several years back. He was good, he was bold, and one day he went out for one last set with the weather turning foul and he never came back. Everybody's best guess was that he snagged something on the bottom and with the seas running hard his boat took on water and went down in minutes.

My father paused, an older man with two younger men, themselves both fathers of young boys, hanging on his words as he reflected.

"A guy who had been fishing like that for forty, fifty years – he might have had a chance. He might have felt that drag start to hang up a split second sooner and cut the winch loose before it stopped him. He might have just felt something funny in the way the gear was running and decided to slow it down a touch, and that would have been enough. At a time like that there just isn't any substitute for time out on the water".

Let the boy wonders have their moment in the sun. There are old fishermen, there are bold fishermen, but there sure as hell aren't a lot of old, bold fishermen.