The crocodile farm in the sky

A good friend of mine once made a remark about Batman’s ultimate fate. He reasoned that, should DC Comics ever decide to kill Batman, the character should not die at the hands of one of his maniacal arch-enemies…but rather, from a bullet fired by a random criminal in a random alley. Such a demise would be most fitting for the character, providing a very appropriate and ironic coda for his life and his mission up to that definitive, final point.

I cannot help but recall my friend’s words when thinking about the very recent death of Steve Irwin, Australia’s beloved and wacky Crocodile Hunter. The man spent his life wrestling crocodiles and engaging in other daring acts that some dismiss as foolhardy. Yet his fatal encounter was not with one of the countless crocodiles, lions, tigers, or other highly dangerous animals he spent his life chasing. Ironically, Irwin met his end in an unprovoked attack from a short-tail stingray, a normally docile creature that only fights in self-defense. Irwin and his cameraman were snorkeling in Queensland’s Batt Reef while shooting a documentary titled (aptly enough) The Ocean’s Deadliest, when the aforementioned stingray punctured Irwin’s heart with its barbed tail. Irwin’s is only the third such fatality in recorded Australian history (I cannot for the life of me find a reference for this, but I assure you that I did read it yesterday while scouring news reports of the incident).

Thinking on these freak circumstances, Irwin’s death makes perfect sense: He was never going to meet his end from some ferocious carnivore in one of his outback excursions, because he had control of those situations. No matter how foolhardy or insane some people believed Irwin to be, the man always knew what he was doing…and he was good at it. The only way nature was ever going to get the better of him would be in some completely unpredictable accident that came out of the blue. And that’s exactly what happened.

“Celebrity” deaths usually do not move me, but Irwin’s is somehow different. By all accounts, he was the genuine article; what you saw was what you got, with nothing contrived or staged about the guy. He really was the rugged, gung-ho, and highly entertaining outdoorsman we saw on TV, and I imagine that, to many people (myself included), “Steve Irwin” is synonymous with “Australia.” He’s a man who certainly died too young at 44, and one that a lot of folks (his wife and two young children most of all, no doubt) will miss. But he went out doing what he loved, which I suppose is about as noble an end as anyone could ask for.