The year I turned fifteen was a particularly busy travel year at work for Dad. His work arrangement allowed him to exchange time away for extra holidays, and that year he had accumulated five additional weeks of time off. When these were combined with his regular allotment of vacation time we had a total of nine weeks for the sort of fishing and camping adventure I would never forget.
We toured the province looking for new fishing and camping sites, our journey taking us through the Okanagan, north to Williams Lake, west to Anahim Lake, northeast through Prince George and Carp Lake, then onward to Hudson Hope and Dawson Creek. Eventually we turned around and journeyed all the way back to Anahim Lake, which at the time was simply the most glorious fishing spot we could imagine.
I was the youngest of seven children, and with the older siblings moved away, such trips would be a bit lonely with just the two of us. As consolation I was allowed to bring along a friend for the entire nine weeks. My best pal Ed was a good sport and an excellent fisherman. He shared our affinity for adventure, and was not squeamish about worms, fish guts or cutting another chunk of his hair off to tie a new fly. What made Ed squirm was bees. He was allergic to their sting.
If he got stung by a bee, the offended area would swell up to two or three times its normal size and he would need to see a doctor immediately. Since there were no doctors in the bush, we carried around a small supply of needles for the entire nine weeks, ready to inject adrenaline intramuscularly if Ed should be stung.
It was a dicey arrangement at best. If Ed got bit in the head or neck area, his airway would probably close off due to swelling, and he might die. To mitigate this risk, we forced him to wear a towel around his neck at all times when we were not either in the truck or the tent. He resisted this at first, but relented when we agreed to also wear towels in sympathy. That's right. For nearly the entire summer the three of us fished, hiked, rowed, and camped with towels tied around our necks like some sort of oversized Liberace neck-tie.
Cleanliness is not a teenage boy's strong point. Fish guts, worm slime, blood and dirt was usually wiped on our pants or towels. In time, the front of our jeans became blackened with this accumulation of crud, which eventually hardened like a crab shell, and smelled about the same. In the entire nine weeks we showered and laundered twice, each in the same Williams Lake motel. On a third occasion we got semi-clean at my dad's urging by bathing/laundering in the frigid Williston Lake, fully clothed.
When we finally arrived home at the end of the summer, Ed's mother (a registered nurse) laughed at our scheme with the neck towels. But she was glad that we brought her boy back in one piece. She tearfully hugged her stinky son and later burned his jeans and that raunchy towel in the back yard.
Managing any sort of risk is an interesting project to say the least. Whether we are mitigating life and limb risks, or negotiating the bumpy tides of securities markets, the intention should never be to ferret out and eliminate every possible hazard. If there is one thing I have learned from my clients over the past twenty-two years, it is that a good business man will not only master his trade, but will seize upon opportunities before he has had a chance to strangle profit out of a deal by studying it too long. There is money to be made in the managed risk, and not so much in the over-managing of the same.
Mark Ryan is an advisor with RBC Wealth Management, Dominion Securities (member CIPF) and can be reached at [email protected].
