What Color is Your Pith Helmet?

Some of us, I suspect, are drifting in our careers. I know I am. Maybe we just fell into something 30, 40 years ago and we’re still doing it. Drifting in spite of our ambition because drifting is relaxing, ambition is unsettling, and the two don’t necessarily get along.

I know there are dentists who avow that the profession is the most compelling thing in their entire lives, and they could not imagine themselves in any other environment. They are lying, or have completely forgotten their earlier ambitions. What about being a fireman, eh? Or growing a fine mane of hair and emitting impassioned spittle while beating a guitar to death? I never heard of a kid who wanted to grow up to be a dentist. Nowadays, of course, a child expressing such an ambition would be promptly put on some medication and guided carefully through his formative years by expensive psychotherapists.

When I was a lad, it was my intention to become an African explorer. My role models were Osa and Martin Johnson, a ruggedly handsome couple more at home in the wilds of Africa than their hometown of Chanute, Kansas. Later, jungle adventurer Frank "Bring ’Em Back Alive" Buck came to represent everything a red-blooded American boy could aspire to, much as Pee Wee Herman did for later generations. As soon as I could assemble a safari jacket, a pith helmet, and a gun with a larger caliber than my current Red Ryder Model II BB ordnance, I was certain my future lie along the banks of the Zambezi or in cohabiting with the Pygmies in the Congo.

How it was, then, that I found myself bent over a lab bench, eyes squinched up, carving a tooth out of wax, my whole world measured in millimeters rather than gazing rapturously out over the Serengeti from atop Kilimanjaro is a mystery. Maybe you can’t see the Serengeti from the top of Kilimanjaro. Maybe you can see it more clearly from the Empire State Building with the sun rising over the crest of Annapurna. All I know is I can’t glimpse it from my third-story operatory, and it has been eating at me for 50 years.

Now there is nothing wrong with drifting, but don’t assume you can just drift along forever. Sooner or later you will need a plan, even if that plan is how to drift indefinitely. Ambition has a way of reasserting itself, so one of these days you may find yourself wanting to update your resume, or actually considering a change of careers. Fine! It may be time to Think Big; we are all capable of doing more than we think.

I called the Bureau of Labor Statistics to get the latest numbers.

Me: What are the current job opportunities for African explorers?

BLS: What?

Me: You know -- African explorers. Market demand, chances for advancement, benefits, health plans -- that sort of thing.

BLS: Ha, ha!

My theory is that since Osa and Martin and Frank, et al. left the exploring business in the late ’30s, the entire continent of Africa has been overrun by women’s tour groups from the Soroptimists and Rotaryanns looking to find where Clark Gable was making out with Ava Gardner in "Mogambo." A wannabe explorer would find more action at a taxidermist’s.

That’s the trouble with 10-year career plans, they should have been started 10 years ago. If I worked for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I’d be recommending these growth opportunities:

* Computer nerds who come out to your house and undo the stupid things you’ve downloaded or deleted by mistake.

* Handymen who can fix appliances that were designed to be disposable, owned by people who can’t bring themselves throw them out.

* Llama ranching.

This business of llama ranching vaguely appeals to me in an outdoorsy sort of way. There’s a three-year apprenticeship and final exams. I’m not sure I want to be a llama rancher. I just want to fantasize that I could. Think of what a conversational ploy this would be:

Stranger: So, what do you do?

Me: I’m a dentist, but I’m thinking of moving to Peru and becoming a llama rancher up there in the Himalayas.

Stranger: You mean the Andes?

Me: Whatever.

Stranger: That’s your dream?

Me: Not really.

I know I’m never going to be a llama rancher. It’s probably too late anyway. I saw a llama once. It had a face like a camel and I am very frightened of camels. They spit, and as a dentist I’ve had quite enough of that.