When David Sanders was seventeen, a junior in high school, his English class had been assigned Walden.
Most of Sanders’ classmates found the book dull and lifeless, a collection of maxims to be underlined, memorized, regurgitated on an exam paper, and forgotten.
But Sanders had found Thoreau’s attitudes toward life so inspiring that he had two plaques made.
One said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; the other: “…I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Though they had chipped and faded with time, the plaques still hung over his desk.
When he was a junior in college, Sanders went to a lecture by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and by the end of the evening he knew that Cousteau’s was the life he wanted to live. He wrote letters to Cousteau (none was ever answered) and drove two hundred miles or more to hear Cousteau lecture and see one of his films. Once, after a lecture, he had spoken to Cousteau, who told him—graciously but firmly—that there were hundreds of applicants for positions aboard the Calypso and that unless Sanders had credentials as a marine scientist or underwater photographer, he had no chance of being considered.
Immediately after graduating, Sanders entered the Army’s six-month program. When his active duty was over, he married the girl he had been dating since his sophomore year. He didn’t particularly want to get married, but, now that it was obvious that he would have to seek routine employment, Sanders thought of marriage as an adventure: at least it was something he had never done before.
David and Gloria moved to Washington. The romance of Camelot was in full flower, and David fancied himself in the Kennedy style. He swam, sailed, played touch football. He even brought with him a letter of recommendation from one of his history professors who had been a classmate of JFK’S at Harvard. He thought he might become a speech writer—junior, of course—sitting at Ted Soren-son’s right hand, writing quips for the Leader of the Free World. He was advised that the best way to get into the government was to take the Foreign Service examination. He passed the written exam but failed the orals. He never knew why he had failed, but he guessed that one of the examiners had disapproved when he responded to a question about his outside interests by saying, “Scuba diving and killer whales.”
A letter from a friend of his father’s got him a job at the National Geographic.
After a year of writing captions-chafing at the sight of full-time writers returning, tanned and leathery, from exotic assignments-he asked his boss how long it would take him to become a staff writer. He was told there was no guarantee he would ever become a staff writer. The best way to demonstrate his talent to the editors, said his boss, was for him to write a free-lance piece for the magazine.
He quit his job and began to deluge the editors with one-paragraph story ideas about far-off places, but he soon discovered that before the editors would consider assigning a piece, they wanted an outline so extensive and so detailed that only someone intimately familiar with the place in question could prepare the outline. Sanders had never been west of the Mississippi, and the only place he had visited outside the continental United States was St. Croix. He started to work on a novel. He had written nearly twenty pages when Gloria announced that-despite the diligent use of every birth-control device known to science except abstinence-she was pregnant.
Sanders first considered Wall Street during a glum, drunken evening with a college classmate.
The bull market of the mid-sixties was just beginning, and Sanders’ classmate was making thirty thousand a year for doing, by his own admission, practically nothing. Certainly, Sanders reasoned, he was no less qualified than his classmate, and he found a roguish appeal in the stories about the young “gun slingers” on the Street. He moved to New York, rented an apartment in the East Seventies, read a few books, made a few contacts, and found a job-all in less than a month.
To his surprise, Sanders liked the work. It was easy and exciting and remunerative. He was gregarious, liked to take chances with money, and his early successes (accomplished simply by following the advice of more experienced brokers) brought him as many clients as he chose to service. He was bright enough to realize that though the Dow might hit the fabulous 1,000 mark, something would eventually happen to bring the market down, so he learned about hedge funds and selling short. The slide that began in 1968 made him, on paper, reasonably well off.
He took himself off salary and became a “customer’s man,” surviving solely on commissions received from buying and selling stocks for his clients. He was very good at his job (he believed he had a special gift for sensing impending changes in the market, and he relished taking risks based on hunches), and three rival firms tried to hire him at handsome salaries. He refused, preferring the unpredictable life of the customer’s man. The fact that he never knew, from one month to the next, how much money he would make, excited him.
He viewed it as freedom. If he failed to make a living, he had no one to blame but himself. If (as was the case) he succeeded, there was no one with whom he had to share credit.
His wife, Gloria, however, regarded this freedom, this so-called courage, as madness. She was an orderly person who did not take chances, who liked to know exactly how much money would be in each of the envelopes she kept in a file drawer labeled “budget.” There was envelopes for food, clothing, toys, entertainment, and schoolbooks.
By 1971, Sanders had two children, a co-operative apartment on West Sixty-seventh Street, and a house in Westhampton. He knew he should have been a happy man, but he was bored. Gloria bored him. She was interested in, and knowledgeable about, only two things: clothes and food. Their sex life had become routine and predictable. Gloria professed a fondness for sex, but she refused to discuss—let alone attempt—ways of making it more interesting. Sanders found himself, during love-making, fantasizing about movie stars, secretaries, and Billie Jean King.
Soon his work began to bore him. He had proved to himself that he could make money in every kind of market, and he enjoyed both the making and the spending of money.
But the challenge was gone. He grew restless and began to do careless things.
He still dreamed, from time to time, of working with Cousteau.
He kept himself in excellent physical condition, as if in anticipation of a phone call from Cousteau.
But he was not satisfied with fine-tuning his body: he liked to test it. Once, he intentionally gained ten pounds, to see if, as he believed, a special diet he had concocted would strip off the poundage in three days. Another time, on a bet, he set out to run ten miles.
He collapsed after six miles, but took consolation in a doctor—friend’s statement that—considering that Sanders hadn’t trained for the marathon-he should have collapsed after two or three miles. He saw a television show about hang-gliding-soaring through the air suspended from a giant kite-and determined to build himself a hang glider. He built it and intended to test it by jumping off an Adirondack cliff, until a hang-gliding expert convinced him that his kite was aerodynamically unsound: the wing struts were too weak and probably would have broken, causing the kite to fold up and Sanders to fall like a stone down the side of the mountain.