Chance Happens » Staff

Everything Adds Up in Math of Chance Meetings

Staff — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:48:05 +0000

Written by John Flynn

The man’s face was naggingly familiar. There was something about his eyes. We met on a muddy Himalayan trail, halfway around the world from home, but I could have sworn we’d known each other in a previous life.

Then, out of nowhere, a long-forgotten math problem popped into my head: “If a train left Chicago heading west …”

That’s it! The man with the scraggly beard was Mr. Irvin, my algebra teacher from Saratoga High School. We hadn’t seen each other in 17 years, and back then he’d been standing before a chalkboard in a short-sleeved white dress shirt with, if my memory is true, a shirt-pocket protector. Now he was clad in Gore-Tex and Polarfleece, all caked with 2 1/2 weeks of trail dust. But it was definitely the same guy.

How infinitesimal are the odds of bumping into someone you know thousands of miles from home? Well, it’s more likely than you think. My former math teacher was the third acquaintance I’d met in Asia in the span of three weeks. And two of those encounters were, once I thought about them, perfectly explainable.

These seemingly chance meetings happen to me so often I’m no longer surprised by them. Those of us who love to travel are linked by an invisible web of connections that often sends us to the same remote places at the same time. The late photographer Galen Rowell, who experienced many of these encounters, wrote that like-minded people travel down hidden corridors that often converge unexpectedly.

If, for example, your passion is Mozart, or grand cru Bordeaux, or maiden voyages, chances are your travels will one day lead you to Salzburg, or St- Émilion, or the port of Miami. And the odds are good that eventually you’ll bump into a friend there who shares your passion.

In that light, my Nepal reunion with my old algebra teacher was not only foreseeable, it was almost inevitable.

In the 1950s and ’60s, before he settled down to try to teach second- order polynomial equations to bored teenagers, Dick Irvin had been one of America’s top Himalayan mountaineers. We tried to exploit this every chance we could: Our teacher would be handing out an algebra quiz, and we’d plead: “Can’t we take it tomorrow, Mr. Irvin? Tell us about that big storm on Makalu. ” Occasionally he’d fall for it.

But his stories were enthralling, and one day I asked him to recommend a few mountaineering books I could check out from the school library. Toward the end of the school year he took me and a few classmates up to Castle Rock, in the hills above Saratoga, and showed us some knots and climbing moves.

I’m sure Irvin had no idea what he was starting. Mountains took over my life, and I spent the next couple of decades hiking and climbing the great ranges of the world.

If mountains happen to be your passion, you’ll one day make it to Nepal to see the greatest range of them all, and it’s likely you’ll go in the fall, the best season for trekking. And there’s a good chance you’ll one day find yourself in the picturesque village of Ghorepani, which occupies a ridge high above the Kali Gandaki river, astride several of the most popular trekking routes. Which is where I happened to be standing, catching my breath, when Dick Irvin came bounding up the trail.

A few years after I graduated from high school, he’d resigned his teaching post and returned to the mountains, his original love. He took a job with Mountain Travel Sobek, the East Bay adventure travel company, and, at the height of the trekking season, was leading a group on a 21-day circuit around Annapurna. The standard stopping place on Day 18? Ghorepani.

In retrospect, that meeting seemed almost predestined. So did the one a week earlier, when I ran into my old skiing instructor, Mimi Vadasz, outside the Royal Nepal Airlines office in Kathmandu. She was also a climber, en route to Makalu, the same mountain we used to ask Irvin about. In those days, the Royal Nepal office was a reliable place to bump into old mountain friends: Just about everyone had a problem with their reservations.

My third Asian encounter, though, was one of those bolt-out-of-the-blue coincidences. One misty morning on Koh Samui, an island off the east coast of Thailand, I walked down to the beach and bumped into a guy I’d once shared an office with. I can’t think of any connection, any hidden corridor, that would have brought us both to that place at that time.

I’ve had a few other chance meetings like that, and it always makes me wonder how many near-misses we have: The sixth-grade classmate who strolls by while we’re peering into a shop window on the Champs-Elysées, the old girlfriend who strides into an Outback pub half an hour after we’ve left, the former neighbor who strolls down the dock in Ketchikan minutes before our cruise ship ties up. This sort of thing must happen all the time.

There’s another phenomenon that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever spent time on the world-traveler circuit: You’re constantly bumping into backpackers you’ve previously met in distant parts of the world. You have a beer with a Danish guy at a bar near the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and then you see him again on Kao San Road in Bangkok. You ride the overnight train from Cairo to Aswan with a pair of Irish women, and five months later you bump into them on the Milford Track in New Zealand. These reunions are far from mysterious: The world-traveler circuit really is a circuit, and the young vagabonds on it follow a well-established path.

But it points up one more aspect of travel: The more friends you make, the greater chance you’ll have a delightful reunion with them in some far corner of the globe.

This story originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Identity theft victim catches her thief

Staff — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:00:28 +0000

This story was written by Mike Brody and originally appeared on the WISH-TV.com website.

A Seattle customer service representative who was the victim of identity theft in January was able to help police break up a ring of ID thieves when a woman tried to open a credit card account using her stolen identity.Michelle McCambridge, 23, was working at J.C. Penney when a woman asked to open a credit account in McCambridge’s name with a fake ID, according to the Seattle Times .McCambridge was shaken when she realized what was happening, but she composed herself enough to excuse herself and alert store security to the situation.”I’m very proud of her,” said Joseph Velling, a special agent for the Social Security Administration. “It was heroic.”Police couldn’t arrest the woman right there, but they were able to get surveillance footage of her which directly led to her arrest along with several others who police say were responsible for victimizing at least 39 people.”Out of how many customer-service desks, out of how many registers she could have gone to, and she had to come to me?” McCambridge said. “It was fate.”Last year, 8.4 million people in the United States had their identities stolen at a total cost of $49.3 billion.On Friday, Albert Gonzalez, a former federal government informant and the alleged ringleader of one of the largest known identity theft cases in U.S. history, pleaded guilty to 19 counts of conspiracy computer fraud, wire fraud, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft related to theft of credit and debit card data from TJX Companies owner of T.J. Maxx, BJ’s Wholesale Club, OfficeMax, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports Authority, among other retailers.

Steve Jobs

Staff — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:42:15 +0000

A reissue of a book about Apple tells of a chance event.

Of particular interest to students of venture capital is the section of the book that cover’s Sequoia Capital’s involvement with Apple. Firm founder Don Valentine is credited with sending over Mike Markkula to the company and then more or less leaving it alone. The actual investment seemed to be the product of a chance meeting: When Valentine spotted Markkula, Jobs and Hank Smith dining together one evening at Monterey’s Chez Felice Restaurant, he sensed what was being discussed. He dispatched a bottle of wine to the trio with a note reading “Don’t lose sight of the fact that I’m planning on investing in Apple.” There were reservations at Apple about Valentine. Some had formed their own conclusions. Gary Martin said, “It was obvious he was out for the quick turn,” and Sherry Livingston recalled, “We were always wondering what board he was going to join next.”

via peHUB » Moritz Revisits Steve Jobs and Apple.

Do Angels Wear Spats?

Staff — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:30:49 +0000

This story comes from Kelly Simmons.

I am a writer who struggled to be published for over 15 years. One day, after my then-agent had summoned me to New York in near blizzard conditions, only to reject my latest book, I headed back to Penn Station at the lowest point in my career. Her hollow words rang in my ears, “Maybe you just need to write something more personal.” Please, I thought; my third-grade writing teacher could have given me that advice.

At the station, I waited for my delayed train and ruminated over my diastrous meeting when someone sat down next to me. I turned and saw Tom Wolfe, wearing an all-white suit, white overcoat, and white spats. At 2 pm, on a Thursday, in the middle of a freaking snowstorm.

I smiled at the ridiculousness of the situation, but before I could even think if there was anything I should say to him or ask him, my train was called. As we pulled away from the station, I decided it was a sign. Tom Wolfe was published late in life — and I would be too. I told myself I was going to come up with a new plot for a new book during the train ride — before I got to Philadelphia, I would know what to write.

And you know what? I did. And within two months, I had a new agent and a book deal. (Standing Still, published by Simon & Schuster)

Tom Wolfe, angel in white.

www.bykellysimmons.com

Combat PTSD

Staff — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:26:20 +0000

This story was submitted by Sue Hannibal of Fayetteville, NC.

In September of 2006, the coordinator of our upcoming 35th high school reunion at Kenmore East HS in Tonawanda NY (outside Buffalo) screwed up the reunion website email so that for about 3 days, all of us who had registered were getting slammed with all the emails of our classmates instead of the emails going to the site.

I happened to see an email written to the group by a classmate that I never met, (checked him out in the yearbook) and his military signature line indicated he was an Army officer stationed at Ft. Bragg. At the time, I was living in Vista, CA, north of San Diego.

I was and still am in private practice as an intuitive healer specializing in the treatment of childhood abuse/trauma and combat PTSD. I sent him a quick note to say that I didn’t remember ever meeting him in HS, but that if he had any PTSD or trauma from his service in Iraq, I would be happy to treat him for free over the phone. I referred him to my web site, and immediately regretted it because I figured that a conservative military officer would take one look at a medical intuitive clairvoyant healer and probably think I was a witch or something.

To my surprise, he did call the next day and we started chatting. Almost immediately, he said the word “ambush” and got triggered. His voice got louder, he was breathing hard and I could sense his distress. I said, “you’re in it.. do you want a sample of this healing stuff I do? All you have to do is repeat what I say and tap with your fingertips on the release points where I tell you.” He said, “OK, let’s do it.”

Knowing only that he was ambushed, I led him through a healing procedure to release the terror, anger, anxiety, etc. inherent in that experience. It took about 5 minutes of acupressure tapping, ie ” Iraq–the ambush–they tried to kill me– they tried to kill all of us–I thought I was going to die that day– but I didn’t die– they didn’t get me that day– all of a sudden they were everywhere– they hit us, etc. ”

After 5 minutes of tapping, (see YouTube from 2004, title Erase Combat PTSD with EFT) we stopped and after a moment he said, ” do you mean to tell me that I’ve been going to the VA twice a week for 2 years for nothing? It’s gone. What did you do to me?” His anxiety and explosive anger over that ambush and the death of a good friend was released and has not returned.

He came out to San Diego to meet me over Christmas/New Years 2007. We fell in love and were married in August 2007. So far, we’re living happily ever after. He is going to deploy to Afghanistan in January 2010 and I am continuing to treat combat vets for PTSD.