By now everyone on the planet, Down Under and Up Here, has heard of the untimely passing of "The Crocodile Hunter." Barbed through the heart by a stingray in shallow waters off the coast of his island-continent, Steve Irwin went out doing what he loved: bringing Australia's native fauna into the world's living rooms. He has been publicly mourned by his Prime Minister, by the devoted fans who've set up a floral shrine outside his Australia Zoo, by Russell Crowe, and by millions of people the world over who grew to love his quirky, controversial, frontier approach to wildlife conservation. His death came as both a shock and an inevitability, for this was a man who thought nothing of sidling up to 16-foot saltwater crocs, of handling taipans mambas vipers cobras, of diving with every predator of the deep.
The saying goes that we make our own fun, and everything else is entertainment. Steve Irwin made his own fun, crafted a life around bringing that fun to every couchbound entertainment-seeker who caught his show. You could see the gleam in his eyes when he had some monster in a close-up's foreground, the twinkle of a kid bringing home a frog in his lunchbox. "Isn't she a beaut?!" he would whisper with that ripe-for-caricature Aussie awe. "She's gorgeous!" For many, Irwin's exploits were legendary in the pop-culture sense of the term, marveled over for an hour or so and forgotten as soon as the channel flipped. There might be a lingering awareness of the fact that he had his smiling mug in the mouth of a huge reptile, or had grabbed a venomous snake by the tail, but the specifics could tend to fade with each successive televisual moment. Entertainment is, after all, entertainment. It is evanescent and mercurial by nature, lasting only as long as the pixels flicker before the eye.
For the rest of us, Irwin was--and remains--a hero by every definition. He did what we could only hope to do, given the opportunity and the balls-out willingness to stare Death in the face and say, "Not just now, thanks. You'll have your chance soon enough, but not just now."
"Daring" is a word too often used in this entertainment-driven world, a term applied most frequently to trivial pursuits of the mind, of creativity and essential passivity. That last Michael Winterbottom flick was daring, say, or the most recent frame hung on the walls at MOMA. Steve Irwin was Daring. His life required capitalization and, if available, block letters and boldface. And yet he also managed to come across as the most down-to-earth, self-effacing daredevil. He was wired differently than most of us, and it showed.
There's another cliché out there, that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. My fondest memory of Steve Irwin, the one I would cite to anyone who mentions his name, is of watching him snorkeling with sea snakes and diving to follow them--clad not in wetsuit trunks Speedo, but in his trademark khaki shorts and shirt. Underwater. Steve Irwin dressed for the job he had, and he did it well. If the clothes make the man, The Crocodile Hunter was more of a man than most of us can ever hope to be--and without ever sacrificing that childlike twinkle. The world is better for his having been here.
Crocs rule. R.I.P.
