Less than a month ago, the world marveled at the fact Justin Romero, a 13-year-old boy from California, had just become the youngest person to ever climb Mount Everest. But now there is wild condemnation of a 16-year-old girl who just failed in her attempt to circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat. I, for one, just don’t get it.

I’m on record in applauding Abby Sunderland’s attempt, as well as her daring rescue in the stormy Indian Ocean after a savage wave snapped her boat’s mast and left her adrift, and alone, for three days. You see, I know something about “the top of the hill.”

When I had pimples and long hair and refused to wear socks, I hated school. So instead, I became something of my “own drummer,” at first learning the hard way why you oil and grease the fittings on a farm tractor before you use it, rather than after.

Soon my path would wind to our family’s enterprises. Every weekend and my summers were filled with farming and carpentry and the back-breaking construction work that are the perfect antidote to raging hormones, among other things.

I learned, in a very practical sense, how to order wet concrete by the cubic yard, why tongue-in-groove flooring is better, and, maybe most importantly, why electrical wires come in different colors. I still delight whenever I can remind a master electrician, “blue-to-blue, red-to-red,” because once you shock yourself a time or two a most vivid lesson is self-taught.

Soon I was promoted to the realm of a writer at the newspaper, which became my passion. My classroom was hundreds of books by the world’s greatest writers, every issue of Sports Illustrated, and sitting at the knees of the greatest wordsmiths who ever plied the trade. I still yearn to learn, but now, in my early 60s, I am more thirsty and eager than I have ever been.

That is why I am so aghast at the number of naysayers who walk among us. Who’s to tell a child not to climb a mountain or set a sail boldly?

Instead, that brings us to the greatest parenting tip I ever got in my life. When my son was in the ninth grade, he weighed 105 pounds and was a decidedly stringy five-foot-seven. One day he came home to mention he had gone out for spring football practice, and well, I didn’t say much.

By then I’d spent considerable time watching vicious practices on every football field in the Southeastern Conference and knew full well what a 6'4", 245-pound middle linebacker could do when fully loaded when mad. A guy like that, his eyes glazed and possessing speed my child would never know, could indeed cut my baby in half.

So I called the coach, a longtime friend who I knew would run my boy off, and told him my kid was too small, too slow, too dumb and too young. That’s when Pete Potter cut me down like a tree with the words, “Let’s let the boy decide.”

Well, I then tried to stammer an apology or an excuse, telling Pete I shouldn’t have ever called, and he said, “No, I was going to call you. If I ever see you come to even one of your son’s practices I’ll whip your butt. You pick him up every single day after practice, and always buy him a Coke on the way home, but let me be clear; practice belongs to him, not you. Don’t ruin it for him.”

About six years after that, about the same time during the spring, I was at Fort Benning to watch the same boy graduate from the U.S. Army’s Ranger school. They have an elite ceremony, where each dad pins on his son’s shoulder tab, and it is probably the most moving experience a proud father can experience.

Of the initial 280 hand-picked candidates in my son’s class, 119 hopefuls had “washed out,” unable to stomach the grueling demands that each Ranger must know about himself. How long you can stay awake without becoming delirious? How long can your body function without food? How fast can you go up a 5,000-foot mountain? These are among the nicer things each Ranger must know before that tab is earned because the soldier’s life, the lives of others who will accompany him, depend on it.

A couple of Andrew’s buddies didn’t have anyone to pin on their tabs so I was further honored, and one, whose dad lived too far away to come to the ceremony, grinned as I pinned on his patch. “Mr. Exum, sir, may I ask you a question, sir?” I told him I would be delighted and then came, “Sir, who was Pete Potter?”

I laughed, telling him Pete was Andrew’s beloved football coach. “Sir, I figured as much. In February it was about 36 degrees and we were in Dahlonega, carrying 110-pound packs up the Continental Divide. It was sleeting, we were wet and we hadn’t eaten anything all day.

“About 2 o'clock that morning, when they let us take a ten-minute rest, it was the worst minute of my life when they called us back in file. I whispered to your son I couldn’t take another step. I couldn’t do it. I was done. I was going to tap out.”

The now proud Ranger then recalled, “You know what happened? Your son hit me in the mouth with his fist as hard as he could, and yelled, ‘You never went through two-a day’s with Pete Potter! Get your pack and let’s get our asses to the top of this hill.'"

I tell that story not in a boastful way, but as a first-hand reminder that the naysayers, those timid souls who would hold another person back so they themselves won’t reveal their own shortcomings, are a far bigger danger to society than are the risks our young adventurers pose.

A 16-year-old girl is lost at sea, a huge wave destroying her boat’s mast and the communications equipment, and some Australians are now furious over the rescue costs. These wretched critics don’t realize the costs of not trying to find her, to save her, would be far worse because – etch this in stone - when mankind abandons the effort to save one another, all of us will soon become lost.

During my most formative years, this before I became a father but after I had driven a car at a speed in excess of 150 miles per hour, I began to wonder why I would attempt such things, like swimming across a lake or climbing the highest tree.

Seriously, why do we go to the moon, why does a traditionally weak team yearn to play against the giant, why does a 16-year-old defy calamity in the stormy Indian Ocean?

Long ago, the football coach Vince Lombardi gave me an inkling when he once told his world-champion Packers, “Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence. I am not remotely interested in just being good.”

But my favorite answer, the one I have cherished since reading back, when I had pimples, long hair, and refused to wear socks, came from the pen of a climber named Rene Daumal, a hippie type who is thought to have died from dabbling in drugs back in 1944.

Anyhow, somebody asked Rene why he was stupid enough to risk his life to climb a treacherous peak, and he gave me the answer to my “Why”. He said, “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again...so why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above.

“One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art to conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.”

royexum@aol.com