Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder

Knowledge feeds me. It’s as necessary to my existence as oxygen. It thrills me.

Long before Gene Roddenberry put me on a starship to explore the galaxy, long before I actually ventured into space, I had been gripped by my own search for knowledge, for even a fraction more understanding than I’d had before. Perhaps, even more, for meaning. If I never succeed, never discover the answer to the age-old question of why, to be always learning, always wondering… well, the quest itself keeps me vital. I get a tingle down my spine when I’m presented with an opportunity to learn something new, a daily occurrence for me, even at ninety-one years old. Open your eyes, your ears, your mind, and you’ll quickly be overcome by the wonder that surrounds us. I am never so thrilled as when the word wow escapes my mouth. It’s an almost involuntary expression of childlike delight at learning something new. I probably say wow more now than when I was a child, and I am absolutely enchanted by that fact.

These wow feelings are not all intellectual. I could sit at home reading, hour after hour, immersed in knowledge, but that’s not enough. To me, experiences must be felt. They must be lived. We need to reach out for love as well as fear if we want to stay vibrant.

Shortly after my ninetieth birthday, I went swimming with sharks—in the most dangerous and frightening of ways. I was invited to be a featured guest on an episode of Shark Week. My philosophy has long been to say yes to new possibilities. The adage that you’ll regret the things you didn’t do may be a cliché, but I really believe it, so I strive to answer the phone when opportunity calls. Soon after accepting the offer, I found myself on a boat, ready to go into the water with fifteen-foot tiger sharks—some of the most ferocious beings in the ocean, second only to the great white.

The dive organizers had dressed me in a wet suit, complete with scuba gear. I had dived many times in my life, so I was familiar with the accoutrements, but my previous experience could not have prepared me for what lay ahead, and what lay beneath. The guides threw ground bait (or chum) out onto the surface of the water to attract the fish they were looking for. In this case, sharks. Right away, we succeeded in enticing some smaller sharks to the surface.

“There are two difficult points in this exercise,” announced our Bahamian guide, Neal Watson. “Going into the water, and coming out. Because all of these sharks on top of the water are looking for chum, and if they think you’re their chum, they might bite your ass.”

Great. These chummers are not really my “chums” in the traditional sense, I thought.

“You take the same risk getting out of the water, because the last thing to disappear out of the water is your ass, so they might want to take a bite out of that.”

Wonderful. I dropped down into the water and sank forty feet to the ocean floor. Right in front of me were four massive tiger sharks. Suddenly, being on the surface with my “chums” didn’t seem so bad. Neal came down with us, and I felt a modicum of comfort knowing he’d spent his whole life doing this. He was a real pro.

Then again, my brain chimed in, things only have to go wrong once.

In front of us, one of the handlers fed the sharks to keep them in the area (it’s better TV if they don’t swim away). I watched as each shark made a beeline for the handler, who would pull out of the way at just the last minute, allowing the shark to grab its food and pass by.

I sat down on a rock in the sand, watching with awe and a great deal of fear as these massive creatures swam around me. When they opened their mouths, the sharks appeared to have fangs that looked like something out of a horror movie. One of the handlers had positioned himself behind me, and later explained he did so because tiger sharks are ambush predators, who like to circle around and get you from behind. He literally “had my back” to prevent an attack from the rear. Fantastic.

At one point, the tiger sharks started coming toward us, taking particular interest in one of our cameramen. One moved at him like a charging dog. I was able to think only two things in that moment. First, At least the shark isn’t charging toward me! And second, What the hell am I doing down here at ninety years of age swimming with sharks? Why on earth am I doing this?!

The best answer I can come up with is that I don’t know how not to be doing. I really would regret not giving myself a chance to experience something new and to learn in the process. I’ve spent my entire life taking what seem to be unnecessary risks. I’ve done things that should have killed me. I’ve been skydiving, even though I’m afraid of heights; I literally screamed all the way down. My fear of doing it was very real, but my fear of not doing it was worse. It’s as if I have an inverted instinct for danger. My mind doesn’t run screaming away from it; it somehow forces me to run toward danger.

Years ago I was making a film called Disaster on the Coastliner, starring Lloyd Bridges, Raymond Burr, and other heroic actors of the age. We were shooting on a deserted Connecticut rail line, which we were using for a big action sequence with a moving train. (You didn’t think I was going to give you the whole shark story up front, did you? I’m an actor; we have to create suspense!)

In Disaster on the Coastliner, my character had to run across the top of the train, making a mad dash across to the engine compartment to rescue Paul L. Smith’s character, all the while being pursued by a helicopter. This was clearly going to be a hell of a stunt.

I asked the director, Richard C. Sarafian, “How are you going to shoot this?”

He said the stuntman would do it in the wide shot, then he walked over to check the camera setup. Okay, but I really wanted to know how he was going to do the close-up.

I watched the stuntman, and I can tell you, this was one brave guy. The train was going about forty miles per hour, and he was bent over against the wind. Now, I’m a pilot, so I could tell that the stuntman was creating an airfoil—the wind coming at him was lifting him slightly off the surface of the engine. It’s not dissimilar to flying a single-engine Cessna 150; once you’re going about thirty to forty miles per hour, you already start to get lift. It must have been terrifying for the stuntman—he was basically a light aircraft at this point, with none of the controls!

They got the shot and it looked terrific.

Now I said to the director, “Okay, how are you going to shoot me in this scene?”

He wasn’t sure. “Background projection, most likely,” he decided, which meant going back to the studio, building a train rig, and simulating the effects of it moving with lights, wind machines, and other Hollywood gimmickry.

This is where my inverted instincts suddenly kicked in. “Well, you know,” I said, “I can get on top of that thing, if you want.”

The director’s eyes lit up. “You can?”

“Sure!” I exclaimed with undue confidence. “How fast is it going to go?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to go faster than ten miles per hour.”

“I’ll do it. I’ll get on top of the moving train.”

So, there I went. Up on top of this locomotive—a Diesel. It’s important that you know that it’s a Diesel, since those things are built in such an aerodynamic way that there are no protrusions on the curved surface of the cars. There is nothing to tie cables to, so there were no cables attached to me. I was up there completely alone. No harness. No net. Let’s face it, no brain. Frankly, I can’t believe they let me do this. There is no way this would happen today, whether I’m William Shatner or William Jones. It just isn’t done. But back in Connecticut in 1979 with a crazy ambitious director and my own inverted instincts for danger, there I was.

The train started up, the helicopters—one to chase me, the other one to film the first one chasing me—rose into the air, and we did the scene. I was running across the train like my life depended on it (it did), giving my absolute all as an actor to this scene and this thoroughly ill-advised stunt.

We finished the scene; the train came back to the starting point; I climbed down and walked over to the director.

“How was it?” I asked eagerly.

“It was great. It was terrific,” he said.