My family and I just came off a long weekend in New York City, returning late Monday night. We wrapped up the vacation by spending the day at the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan before a late flight out of Newark to LAX.

It was a long awaited visit for me and AMNH was a highlight for us. My children love the Night at the Museum movies, so they were excited to visit the museum in person. For me it was all about my favorite president, Theodore Roosevelt, and his connection to the museum.

TR has been a favorite of mine since I read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris as a teenager. Like so many young men, I was instantly captivated by Roosevelt’s ideal of the Strenuous Life and the vision of the rugged outdoorsman and man of action who also happened to be a learned and published historian and natural scientist. Since that time I’ve read nearly every major biography of Roosevelt. Studying the life of our 26th President has truly been a passion of mine.

One of my favorite books on TR is The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard, which chronicles the then former Presidents ill-fated attempt to explore and map the then unknown Rio da Duvida (River of Doubt), in present day Brazil. If you like a good real-life adventure story I strongly encourage you to pick up the book. The reluctant Roosevelt, coming off the election of 1912 and his loss at the top of the Bull Moose Party, initially turned down the offer to be part of a trip since it was slated to cover known areas of the Amazon basin. He would change his mind when the decision was made to explore the River of Doubt. For TR the chance to follow in the footsteps of the great explorers tapped into his sense of adventure.

The journey was largely doomed from the start due to poor planning, poor choices from a personnel standpoint, and poor decisions regarding equipment and logistics. Less than one-hundred-miles into the journey disaster struck for Roosevelt. When two of the large dugout canoes became stuck in rocks while traversing whitewater, Roosevelt jumped into the water to try to set them loose. He slipped on the rocks and opened a large gash on his thigh. The cut wasn’t terrible by then current medical standards, but the fear of infection due to his remote location was the concern, and infection came during the night, leaving the former president with a fever as high as 105 degrees and slowly fading in and out of consciousness for the next two days.

Screen Shot 2019-01-10 at 6.26.09 AM.png

With barely any strength and dealing with potential emptiness of impending death, Roosevelt repeated a line from a poem he learned as a child, Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree

Over and over Roosevelt recited the opening stanza of the romantic poem he learned in his youth, which tells of sacred river that runs past Khan’s capital of Xanadu.

As he faced death our most prolifically published President turned to his love of reading and poetry as his salvation. TR, in a practice that went back to ancient times, memorized the verses of the great poets. It’s a novel concept these days, the act of memorizing poetry. At that moment, next to a remote river in Brazil, the Coleridge classic became a way to deal with the thoughts of impending death. The man who led a life of adventure turned to a poem that detailed a fantasy land that came to Coleridge in a dream. It was very fitting for a man of action.

The Bull Moose would live to fight another day. Summoning his last reserves of strength, Roosevelt rallied and survived. In a remote jungle, thousands of miles from his family, the former President had stared at the impending blackness of death and survived.

When I think of TR, this anecdote stays with me, more than his face on Mt. Rushmore, the legacy of the National Parks and the bullet he took while campaigning. Roosevelt represents an ideal of the man of action, exploration and wanderlust. It’s about getting out and moving and exploring and climbing the nearest hill or mountain simply because it is there.

For TR the strenuous life wasn’t just a life of physical exertion. He was a voracious reader, a naturalist, a great historian and an involved and loving father. Even during his times as president he would often drop everything and take off on a romp through the Washington DC countryside, staff following behind him. Several of the displays at the Natural History Museum are credited to the work of Roosevelt, with many specimens collected as a young child. He authored an incredible thirty-six books, including well regarded works of history like The Naval War of 1812 or the Winning of the West. His book topics were diverse and represented an always active mind. With all the duties of a president, TR still found time to write.

So what is the lesson here? In the end, when Roosevelt was near death, his mind went back to his love of knowledge and adventure. The man who lived a life of action, scholarship and adventure turned to a well known verse that perfectly captured this spirit. It’s all about a sense of wonder that never should be lost, even during advancing age.

Find Me on Twitter