Guts and glory
AS MIDDLE-AGERS at the Beijing Olympics exalt the iron abs of 41-year-old swimmer and mother Dara Torres, the gold medal for guts goes to 81-year-old Vahram "Vee" Sookikian. Three days before the games began, Sookikian jubilantly bore his backpack on spindly legs back into base camp at the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, N.M., the oldest national high adventure camp of the Boy Scouts.
He finished a 10-night, 60-mile trek in the mountain wilderness with one of the four, 12-person crews from our Boston Minuteman Council. Sookikian's crew included his 50-year-old son Steve and 15-year-old grandson Julian. There are families where three generations can chat on a porch. There are three generations capable of a gentle stroll or a genteel round of golf.
Few are the families in our sedentary nation where three generations share a trail, undulating between 7,000 and 10,000 feet under a withering sun. Few families have an octogenarian who can carry 40 pounds on his back for a week and a half to sleep on the ground under the stars. Vee was sturdy enough to fall off a log bridge into a stream, right himself, wipe himself off and keep hiking, only complaining that he drowned his digital camera.
Few families have a grandson who thinks this was another walk in the park. "He's always been out there with me," said Julian, a sophomore at Waltham High School. "I remember him in my earliest memories, camping out, sleeping in an old station wagon, fishing, hiking around in Vermont. It's a big deal to other people around me. To me it's just normal."
Sookikian, a retired electronics engineer, never stopped walking from the time he joined a troop in Brooklyn, in time to be part of the 90th birthday celebration in 1940 of Dan Beard, a founder of American scouting. By age 16, as World War II sapped the adults from the troop, Sookikian played scoutmaster, leading younger Scouts onto subways and buses in full backpacks to woodland camps out of New York City.
"My dad walked everyday in his life and lived to 86. I never knew him to be sick until just before he died," said Vee, whose Armenian parents escaped genocide in Turkey. "When I started, I never thought I'd make a good Scout or hiker. I never made Eagle (Scouting's highest rank) because I could not do a standing broad jump . . . My family being Depression-poor, we had no equipment, no mess kits, not much food, slept in blankets pinned together, and wore city shoes with leather soles with no grip."
He stayed in shape over the decades by starting a troop in Watertown and completing a Philmont trek at age 45 with Steve. Vee section-hiked the 2,175-mile Appalachian Trail until he finished it at age 64. At age 74, he hiked Philmont again with two other grandsons. He vowed to do it with Julian as well. On the last day, even Julian as amazed. "We gave him a big head start but we'd always thought we'd catch him," Julian said. "But we were huffing and puffing and when we got to where he was, he was sunning himself with our sister crew from Texas. On his good days, he was a speed demon."
Sookikian said the one time he was scared was also on the last day, when a storm of lightning, hail, and 40-mile-an-hour gusts hit the crew atop an exposed, 9,000-foot peak. "I was slipping and falling several times," Sookikian said. "My knees were starting to fail. I was mad at myself because I thought I might create an emergency."
The storm subsided, allowing the jubilant victory steps down to base camp. Philmont has no record of the oldest person to finish a trek. Sookikian needs no record or gold medal to know how rare he is. "I knew so many people who, when they turned 65, all they could talk about was sitting in a lounge chair and smoking a pipe," a glowing Sookikian said. "To me, that was like preparing to die. I hope to do this until the day I die."
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com. 