Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

I Want to Be Helen Thayer When I Grow Up

At the Wolf’s Door (washingtonpost.com): “Thayer is an explorer-naturalist of a breed that in the modern age is more threatened than wolves. She is not a millionaire, an academic, a government scientist or the sponsored face of a large corporation. In the beginning, she wasn’t even a writer. Instead, she’s a self-taught, self-financed and self-effacing woman whose chief interest in life has been to do difficult and interesting things. Her adventures are a mixture of climb-it-because-it’s-there feats of endurance and quasi-scientific efforts to satisfy her own curiosity.”

This is very cool. First, the Washington Post refers to Thayer and her husband as “a middle aged couple”. Read on and you discover that Thayer is 67 years old. Her husband is 78. Yep, that’s right. She’s 67 years old and she’s trekking around the Yukon studying wolves and–this is the best part–neither she nor the Washington Post’s writer seem to think there’s anything particularly unusual about that.