I personally wouldn’t be, if I could possibly help it, involved in a serious pursuit in which there weren’t a few people who could laugh a bit about it. Because I can remember many occasions — maybe we’ve been stuck in a tent or we’re up on the side of a mountain, this heavy snow, avalanches all around us, and we can’t get up and we can’t get down, but we just sat in the tent and reminisced about occasions and days gone by and laughed about old jokes and all the rest of it. Then you really have a very good time, even though you’re sort of poised there between disaster both up and down. People who can make you laugh under those circumstances are very valuable indeed in an expedition.

Their willingness to put up with my endless explanations about why I can’t see them because I’m under deadline.

Availability. Just kidding. Character.

Their humor and that they are smarter than I, but not by too much.

Quickly, without warning, maybe even in my sleep, and while we're putting in requests: before I lose my mind and my ability to gallop across the countryside on horseback.

On the island of Bequia—one summer, out of the blue, a benefactor (thank you, Charlene) flew our entire family there and put us up in a cliffside house that was a weird mixture of Gaudí and Fred Flintstone and where we went to sleep at eight and got up at five. In between we read, swam, hiked, and unknowingly enjoyed the last moment before the irrevocable shear of adolescence set in.

Reading. And, in particular, reading on the deck of the cabin while my children play in the river below.

The loss of a child.