A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

poem—Robert Service’s “Rolling Stone.”

    The mountains are a part of me. I’m fellow to the trees. My golden years I’m squandering. Sun-libertine am I. A wandering, a wandering. Until the day I die. Then here’s a hail to each flaring dawn. Here’s a cheer for the night that’s gone . . . And may I go aroaming on. Until the day I die. . . .

    Despite her sunny disposition, there was a shadow that sometimes crept into the edges of Jane Costantino’s world. She had long had a premonition that she wouldn’t live to grow old. She wasn’t sure where it had come from, although it seemed an integral part of her, a kind of gut feeling that she didn’t fight. If she wasn’t meant to be an old woman sharing memories of her glory days as she rocked on a porch somewhere, that was the way the universe’s plan was designed.
    Jane had lived with an awareness of her own mortality for as long as she could remember. Maybe it was because by the time she was thirty, she had already had ample experience at jousting with death; she had come so close too many times. She took chances and she knew it. She probably assumed she would die at the hands of a capricious Mother Nature since she was a risk-taker. In the nineties, studies suggested that those addicted to danger are programmed genetically to be that way—that there exists a spot in the DNA of the mountain climber, the ski jumper and the race car driver that propels them into life on the edge. But, in the seventies, Jane Costantino’s family and friends worried and cautioned her and finally shook their heads; she was who she was, and she seemed to be living a glorious life.
    Jane was twenty-seven years old in 1974, when she was struck by lightning as she climbed the Grand Tetons. She was at the 14,000 foot level when it happened. She was hit by a powerfully searing jolt that would have knocked her off the mountain if she hadn’t clung tenaciously to her perch. Seriously burned and with her shoulder badly injured, she climbed and rappelled down the mountain and walked several miles to a ranger station. When the ranger on duty saw that the lightning bolt had burned her shoulder to the bone, he almost fainted. A lesser woman—or man—would have been dead, or at the very least, would have had to be airlifted off the mountain.
    Jane was hospitalized for a month. When she was finally released from the hospital, she carried the blazing keloid of a huge burn on her shoulder. She called the scar her “badge of life” because it served to remind her to live life to its fullest; she told friends that she knew that any day might be her last.
    There was only one thing that really frightened Jane Costantino, and that was water and her fear of drowning. So she forced herself to become adept at water sports—scuba diving and kayaking down white-water rivers—to overcome her phobia. Even when she nearly drowned while fording a river in the Katmai region of Alaska, she continued to risk her life in deep and raging waters, stubbornly refusing to give in to her terror.
    Jane Costantino taunted Nature. While she was mountain climbing in Yosemite, she slipped and literally fell off a cliff. Fellow climbers watched in horror as a cascade of rocks plummeted down on her, almost burying her—and yet she survived with only a broken ankle and a concussion.
    In 1979, Jane climbed Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, and Mount St. Helens all in one nine-day period, and then bicycled to Mexico for good measure. She missed the disaster that befell Mount St. Helens months later, and sometimes spoke a little ruefully about the fact that she hadn’t been there for all the fireworks. Jane was the kind of adventuress who would have happily camped in the shadow of Mount St. Helens even as the peak threatened to blow. If she hadn’t been so busy on her winter job, she would have been there when the mountain finally blew its domed top on May 18, 1980, spewing tons of lava and mud down its slopes, taking a number of victims. And, if Jane Costantino had died that way, no one would have been surprised.
    Because she was in great shape, it seemed to her that she would be in her twenties forever, but one day Jane woke up and realized that she was thirty-two, and in eight years she would be forty. It was a sobering thought. She was still young at thirty-two, but she knew that she wasn’t “young-young” any longer. Already, old injuries ached when the weather was changing, and she sometimes thought that