ERIC HELMS

was born wielding a pocket knife, looking out a train tunnel in search
of a final frontier, plain but sharp enough to connect the sublime
with his own sense of terror. By the second grade, he had pulled
out all of his baby teeth and graduated from any danger
the local playgrounds had to offer. The next year, he began to ditch
soccer practice, preferring to jump from rooftops and, ultimately,
the next town’s lighthouse, which led to the eight-year old shattering
his femur. The next morning a retired Admiral found him with an albatross
tied around his neck, mumbling uncontrollably in iambic pentameter–
something about aiming to vertically up the stakes on *The Rime

of the Ancient Mariner.* Through the halls of his middle school,
he kept the bird close while practicing his knots and proving true
to his word. With a garishly bright French horn, he became disreputable
for stopping two of every three of his classmates; even after the janitor
sent him to the principal, he kept on with his little pocket knife–opening
up a vain tale of glory about how his blood could be traced all the way
back to the parties of George Herbert Mallory and Ernest Shackleton.
That was when his parents shipped him off to live with eight monks
and two Sherpas at what they thought to be a cutting edge
boarding school on the border of Tibet and what used to be India.

Notwithstanding the lack of textbooks and seminars by the time
his contemporaries decided upon majors, our troubled young boy
had already become a wise old man, had even summited Everest
twenty-five times without the aid of ox or oxygen. Tragically, it was
on his last descent that he met his doom. Without the assistance
of fixed ropes or an ice axe, in one of his unshakable fits of grandeur,
little Eric decided to take out his pocket knife and began to etch
his memoirs into the nearly vertical face of the Hillary Step.

It was there that, struggling with altitude sickness and whether to write
in free verse or iambic pentameter, he froze to death. Nonetheless,
he’s left many lesser men feel the fulcrum of what he left carved
in stone, for them to face: I was born wielding a pocket knife, looking
out a train tunnel in search of a final frontier, plain but sharp enough
to cut the sublime with this, my very own sense of terror.