What Would You Do Even if You Knew You Would Fail?

According to local legend, there was an all-white 18-point stag in the postage stamp-sized town of Waccabuc, NY, that was my childhood home.

Waccabuc is a little over an hour north of Manhattan and isn’t even a proper town; it’s a hamlet. We had a lake, a post office, a chapel, a country club, and a legend.

For a child who spent every waking moment outside, it was as close to heaven as one could wish for.

Everyone knew about the stag, hunters wanted to kill it and others, including me, just wanted to see it.

The stag remained an elusive mystery, but that didn’t stop people from trying.

Some people claimed to know people who claimed to have seen it, but in reality, it was probably nothing more than a hope and a dream. A beautifully crafted machination of the collective mind and what we wished existed.

The people who claimed to know people used stunning adjectives to describe the beast,

“Beautiful.”

“Powerful.”

“Majestic.”

“Magical.”

Those words are descriptive; they illicit images in our mind’s eye, but I believe they fall short of the experiential experience I imagine standing before this creature would…