#4 The Coddled Man and the Sky …

Twice before, I followed this steep path to the ruins of the castle of San Salvador in the north of Catalonia. Twice before, the wind around those ruins was so strong that I gladly descended all five hundred meters of elevation back to Palau-saverdera, where all hikes started and where there was no wind to speak of.

Mild wind today and my heart is pounding in my throat as I sit on the weathered stones of a castle wall and take our Stanley thermos from my backpack. I fill the cap of the thermos with coffee and can’t help but feel overwhelmed by the beauty around me. Palau-saverdera, I realize, is perhaps too Olympic a starting point to end up here, but no one spending time near the mountains of Rodes will regret a car or bus ride to the ruins of Mas Ventós—a centuries-old farm behind me—to ponder the lives once lived there. On foot, from Mas Ventós to the ruins of the medieval village around the church of Santa Helena. From there, to the monastery of San Pedro, and finally the last few meters up to the spot from where I now look out over Cape Creus and the bays of Selva and Roses, enjoying my coffee.

How were people able to build what was once built within a few hundred meters around me? The self-evident meaning of life of those days! What, in the conditioned yet false certainty that we live better than our ancestors, do we make of our lives today? Why ... Forester, the author, intervenes. He keeps my thoughts on track by pulling them toward his naval hero Hornblower, who, during a storm just off this coast, towed his commander's dismasted ship away from the threatening cannons of Cape Creus.

But the thought of the imaginary storm in which Hornblower found himself brings me back to the gentle breeze that is real, and my heart is suddenly pounding in my throat once more. I screw the cap on the thermos, slip the thermos in a side pocket of my backpack, throw the backpack over my shoulders, and walk west along a path through low bushes, the sun on my face. To the right, the monastery of San Pedro comes into view, and everything in me screams that I should abandon my plan, take out the thermos again, and sit on a rock to ponder the reason for that monastery on this specific location, to then ponder ... I'm there! A small, steeply sloping gravel field. My heart pounds harder in my throat and my stomach tightens.

Alienated from myself—that’s how it feels—I take my paraglider out of my backpack and spread it out on the gravel. With trembling hands and stumbling over my own feet, I sort the lines of the glider. Since I broke my ankle during a landing with this glider, I haven't flown it, and eh… right. It's not truly smart to launch into an unfamiliar flying area from an unfamiliar launch site without someone by my side familiar with both.

The wind comes roughly from the south, but it’s more easterly than I had hoped, which means that as soon as I pull the glider up, it will veer to the left. I take my jacket, altimeter, and emergency parachute from my backpack and turn the backpack inside out, converting it into a harness. I put on the jacket, hang the altimeter around my neck, buckle myself into the harness, and attach the emergency parachute to it.

Man, I'm scared. To properly think is a challenge. Still, I cross the glider’s lines and hook them to the karabiners on my harness, my back in the wind. I take a steering line and a set of A-lines in each hand, step backward, put pressure on the A-lines, and see the glider rise with way too much power. Intuitively, I release the A-lines and pull both steering lines to break the glider’s power. The glider is fully deployed, good, no knots in the lines, no line over it, also good, and as I turn around, the glider swings to the left. I release the left steering line, pull in the right steering line, scurry to the left across the gravel, let myself fall forward, and feel that I’m lifted off the ground.

I'm flying—my relief immense. My altimeter is beeping erratically. Altitude is safety, sure, but how high will the wind carry me? Just as my relief gives way to fear, I hear a voice in my head, the voice of Mr. Bernardini, an American who taught me to fly helicopters in a previous life.

“Fly the aircraft first,” he says. Not only is he right, he also brings me back to the essence of existence. As was the case for the people who lived beneath me in times gone by, the struggle with nature now dominates my life. That struggle, I realize, gives more meaning to life than today’s coddled man will ever derive from it, and fear turns into focus.

Over the last few decades—after having been groomed for a much longer period—we Westerners have wholeheartedly surrendered to the role of coddled man, celebrating idleness and rejoicing in a conditioned yet false sense of safety and security while in fact we’re in greater danger than the people who lived beneath me in times gone by ever were, and ... “Fly the aircraft first!”

Roger!

I adopt the posture that gives me the best chance of responding to whatever nature has in store for me. However fast the air carries me upward, it’s not turbulent today. Still, I must be aware that the glider could collapse at any moment. How I respond when that happens—if—will partly determine who comes out of this struggle a winner, nature or I. I check how the glider responds to my steering impulses and grab the handle of my emergency parachute a few times, in order not to miss that handle should I have to deploy the emergency parachute.

Glancing sideways at the shrinking castle of San Salvador, I fly a figure eight. My altimeter keeps beeping, but I'm barely pushed north. That’s a relief until I realize I could end up in a layer of air where the wind is strong enough to push me over the Rodes mountains into France, which ... “Yes, yes,” I hear myself mutter before Mr. Bernardini tells me what to do, and I steer south. Soon after, the intervals between the beeps of my altimeter grow longer, which means that I’m flying out of the updraft created by wind colliding with the Rodes mountains. I steer back into the updraft, and flying elongated figures eight between Mas Ventós and the castle of San Salvador, I enjoy nature’s constant threat until my altimeter shows I have climbed to over eleven hundred meters above sea level.

Early March 2024, five o’clock in the afternoon. Counting on thermals to keep me aloft, once I fly out of the updraft, would be ridiculous. Without thermals, though, I won’t be able to bridge the gap to the village of Roses, not even from this height. But what if I follow the ridge below me east, in the direction of the Mediterranean? I might stay in the updraft and hold my altitude to a point from where the crossing to Roses is shorter.

The glider behaves well, and my view is phenomenal. I can see where Hornblower once landed with a battery of cannons from his ship to cross Cape Creus and fire on the citadel of Roses from an elevated position in the mountains. Not a coddled man, my friend Hornblower, and perhaps because in my mind’s eye, I see him in his uniform, trotting through the mountains below me on a borrowed horse, I think of my own uniform, which almost turned me into a coddled man.

After I returned from Afghanistan, where I served on temporary duty with the Dutch armed forces, my superiors suggested I take a course at the Defense Academy to be promoted to major and to be employed on a permanent basis. Flattered, I agreed, but I soon discovered that the level of education at the Defense Academy hardly exceeded that of elementary school. What made matters worse was that the four or five officers among my fifty fellow students who had served in Afghanistan were discouraged from talking about it. As a coddled man in the making, I should have resigned myself to that ...

An HR manager from The Hague intervened. He convinced me to keep quiet, promised I’d be deployed again immediately after the course, and even leaked me a document showing that the course I was taking would soon be restructured for lack of quality. All right then. A four-month course, three more months to go. I became a master of keeping quiet, but as the end of the course drew near, panic took hold of me. Was I not growing too attached to my uniform, to the growing collection of medals and decorations on it, to my life as a coddled man perhaps? Only a few more weeks to go and I’d be back in Afghanistan or on my way to Mali, ranking major. Wonderful! But then what? Did the armed forces really give meaning to my life?

At the height of my panic, which manifested as a depressing feeling of self-contempt, salvation came out of nowhere. A week and a half before the end of the course, a new batch of students arrived, and attendance at their welcoming party was compulsory. I had served with one of the new students in Afghanistan, and by way of greeting me, he said, “I understand it's quite a mess here.”

Over my shoulder, I saw three course supervisors shaking their heads, and I knew that despite my exemplary behavior over the past months, I was screwed.

The following Friday, an excursion to the city of Vlissingen was on the agenda. In the drizzle, fifty officers stood staring at a canal, arguing about how they would cross the canal with the imaginary unit under their command—a canal that had been crossed by Allied soldiers in November 1944. The day ended with an hour of free time in Vlissingen, and after a colleague and I had used the toilet in a café, the bus that had brought us to Vlissingen drove off right in front of us, forty-eight officers in it pointing at my colleague and me in the drizzle while arguing with the colonel in charge of the excursion.

My colleague and I traveled by means of public transport to the Defense Academy in the city of Delft. From there, I drove to Antwerp, in Belgium, where I was living at the time, to celebrate the weekend. When I reported for my last week of the course the following Monday, I was told that I—only I—had been suspended from the course for missing a bus. A civilian lawyer accompanied me to a meeting in The Hague. During that meeting, HR managers, colonels, and even a general discussed how I could be promoted to major while at the same time, future students at the Defense Academy would be warned that the type of behavior I had exhibited was unacceptable. Halfway through the meeting, the lawyer indicated he wanted to speak to me in private, and once we were alone in a hallway, he asked, “Do you want to work for this outfit?”

No, was the first thing that came to mind—and that's what I said.

“Good. Let’s get back in then and end the relationship.”

Gratefully, I brought my uniform to a thrift store a few days later. I dumped my medals and decorations into the trash, and ... just over nine hundred meters above sea level, my altimeter tells me. The thing has long since stopped beeping erratically. The glider is still behaving well, and I feel happy. Slowly, I veer in the direction of Roses, where Heidi and Moos the German shepherd are waiting for me. To my right, the sun sinks toward the horizon, and I assume the wind will soon die down. Without updraft or thermals, I have about fifteen minutes of flying time from this altitude, enough to cover the few kilometers to Roses, and … unrest assails me when I catch sight of the citadel of Roses. To stifle that unrest, I force my thoughts toward how I escaped a possible life as a coddled man a second time.

While in Afghanistan, I had started studying psychology and cultural studies at the Dutch Open University. Military psychologists constantly tried to prove that my extended stay in Afghanistan damaged my mental health. By regularly passing university exams—which I took in Afghanistan, studying while in the passenger seat of military vehicles that crossed the Afghan dasht—I hoped to prove that my mental health was fine. But collecting study certificates proved as addictive as collecting medals and decorations, and two years after I ended my relationship with the Dutch armed forces, with both studies almost complete and my graduation theses written, panic once again took hold of me. What if completing my studies led to career proposals from third parties? What if I felt flattered again? Salvation came out of nowhere.

Heidi, those days, had a female acquaintance who had met a man—demented, in his eighties, and rich—whose mansion she had moved into. Heidi and I were invited to that mansion and were shocked by what we saw. The professed love turned out to be mainly for Heidi's acquaintance's piggy bank, and her demented lover was forced to live in conditions that—as we saw it—were hardly humane. Our proposals to improve the old man's living conditions fell on deaf ears, and shortly after Heidi broke off the relationship with her acquaintance, she received a call from a psychologist who said he wanted to mediate on behalf of Heidi's acquaintance, wanted to help restore the relationship. The psychologist would not budge, and Heidi became upset.

“Is a psychologist allowed to just call people like that?” she asked me after managing to end the call.

“No idea,” I replied truthfully. “But there surely is a body overseeing the conduct of psychologists. Call them if you want to know.”

That body existed, and Heidi was advised to file a complaint. She did, the psychologist was reprimanded, and shortly thereafter, I received a call from a professor at the Open University.

Several consecutive Saturdays, I had traveled to Ghent, in Belgium, to take part in the second module of the course Clinical Interviewing, one of my last psychology courses. I had completed the first module with an A, but according to the Dutch professor who called me, I had done so poorly on the assignment to complete the second module that she recommended I quit my studies altogether.

“Strange,” I replied politely. “I never hand in poorly done assignments, and neither did I this time. Even so, there could be dozens of reasons why even a student on the verge of graduation might fail an assignment, and like every student, I’m entitled to a make-up assignment.”

“No, no, no make-up assignment. I had a colleague look at your work, and he agrees with me.”

“Great. But I suspect you won’t give me the name of that colleague, and I need all of one minute to email the assignment I did so poorly to all the professors at the university. Perhaps we'd be better off spending that minute discussing the details of my make-up assignment.”

Suspecting the world to be small, I consulted Google after the professor and I broke the connection, learning within seconds that her maiden name was also the surname of the chairman of the body overseeing the conduct of psychologists in the Netherlands. A bit more Googling completed the puzzle.

After my make-up assignment earned a C—the highest possible mark for a make-up assignment—I gratefully ended my relationship with the Open University. I refrained, though, from dumping the stack of study certificates I’d collected into the trash, and ... just over two hundred meters above sea level, my altimeter tells me. The citadel of Roses lies directly south of me, about four hundred meters away. Everything in me screams that I should abandon my plan …

There truly is little room to land in the citadel if I want to steer clear of the possible turbulence behind its entrance. The slightest bit of thermal activity during my final approach and I’ll overshoot that little room—with all dire consequences. Yet, I know I can do it. Focus! That bit of focus in the battle with nature that makes the meaning of life self-evident. But there also is the coddled man—uniformed if luck turns against me—whom I will inevitably have to deal with once I land in the citadel. Celebrating idleness and rejoicing in a conditioned yet false sense of safety and security give meaning to the life of the coddled man, and her or his primary emotion, when confronted with someone behaving out of the ordinary, usually is indignation—often followed by rage.

After a long battle with four French ships of the line, which had broken through the English blockade of the harbor of Toulon, in France, Hornblower surrendered his shattered ship, the Sutherland, in the bay of Roses. Man, I don't like to surrender, especially not to the coddled man because ... with a strange sense of pride, I veer west, into the sun now touching the horizon. Three or four fields where I can land and pack my glider before anyone confronts me with indignation or rage ...

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