We're both about six feet three. His eyes are greener than mine, and he certainly enthralls the ladies more than I ever did. We have the same taste for adventure, although his escapades are far more extreme than mine. I never raised the Titanic, for example. Nor have I saved the life of the President or found a great hoard of Inca gold at the end of an underground river.

I have, however, attempted some crazy things besides tramping through humid backcountry looking for old cannons or being tossed around a small boat during a Force 8 storm while searching for a sunken submarine. Like riding a bicycle over the Rocky Mountains and through the deserts to California when I turned fifty, taking the stick of a glider at fifty-five, and bungee jumping at sixty. I'm thinking of sky diving on my sixty-fifth.

How did this attempt to mirror fantasy with life begin?

Perhaps you remember me. I was the kid in your high school algebra class who stared out the window while the teacher lectured on fractions.

I was lost in another time, a million miles away, manning a cannon on John Paul Jones's ship, the Bonhomme Richard, charging up Cemetery Ridge with Pickett's division, or reversing the tide at the Little Big Horn and saving Custer and his 7th Cavalry. When called upon to recite, I could only stare at the floor like an amnesiac and mutter an answer so utterly out of context that the teacher thought I had wandered into her class by mistake.

I was lucky growing up when and where I did. Within four blocks of my family's middle-class, 1940s home in Southern California, there were five neighborhood boys my own age who had imaginations as varied as mine. Together, we built treehouses and clubhouses, dug caves, constructed a ship out of scrap wood in a vacant lot, constructed miniature streets and buildings out of mud and wooden molds, and devised ghostly scenes in my father's garage on Halloween. The Little Rascals had nothing on us. Only when five o'clock rolled around did we dash home to Turn on the radio and listen to the adventures of Jack Armstrong, the ' All-American Boy, picturing ourselves slogging through the Congo jungles at his side.

Sea stories had a particular allure to my wandering mind. I was always immersed in books describing ship-to-ship battles, which included the ironclads of the Civil War, the fights of famous American frigates against the British in the War of 1812, and the Napoleonic sea wars of Nelson, especially the fictional accounts of Horatio Hornblower by C. S. Forester.