T emerity: reckless boldness, rashness. Syn. audacity, effrontery. Temerity: They were there in the bright sunlight as I rounded the curve on the way back from the morning's fetching of newspapers.
The forest thick behind them, the two women and two children were bent over on the sloping, moss-covered ledge. Parked beside the road was their van. Its license plates bore a religious message.
What they were doing was scraping up great sheets of moss that rolls down that ledge and captures morning dew and evening rain and afternoon sun and early frosts that turn its velvet green into an everchanging tableau. They were putting the sheets of moss into cardboard boxes.
I could not believe it. I stopped and asked what they were doing.
Taking the moss, they told me.
We (being my family and neighbors) treasure the wild we live in, I told them. Put the moss back or else, I said. I did not know what ''else'' was, but I stayed and watched them replace it, slab by slab. They glowered at me, no doubt hating what they saw as my temerity in challenging their own.
Temerity: They held a debate among most of the Republican presidential hopefuls in Hanover a couple of weeks back. It was notable that Governor George W. Bush of Texas was a no-show.
Didn't have the influence back in Texas to get the date of an awards ceremony for his wife changed. So he stood up the voters of New Hampshire.
That did not seem to bother the folks in charge over at WMUR-TV.
Can't make it governor, front-runner, sir? No problem. We'll come to you.
All the way to Dallas, in fact. So while other candidates waited on debate night to face each other right up close, prepared for battle beneath the hot lights of live television, Channel 9 gave Bush a cool break: five free minutes of television time, at the top of its newscast, to make sure he got to visit even though he'd turned down an invitation.
Temerity: The dark shadows of the wings of his ambition flapped over the death of Senator John H. Chaffee, the Rhode Island Republican known as a consensus-maker and man of great integrity.
Here was Senator Bob Smith, moving with some stealth to not only rejoin the Republican Party he so decried when he left it, but also to assume Chafee's chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee - a panel responsible for the nation's environment.
Smith, who dropped his independent run for the White House saying he was out of money, came slinking back to the GOP, a party whose platform he had called ''a fraud'' while adding, ''Maybe it's a party in the sense of wearing hats and blowing whistles, but it's not a party that means anything.''
I wonder what changed in the party to bring him back? I don't recall any rewriting of its platform.
It's curious that Smith says that he had spent weeks privately discussing his return to the GOP and that Chafee's death just happened to come in the middle of those discussions.
Does that mean that even as he was out there spending money on his ill-fated presidential bid - money given by folks supporting his independent run - that he was brokering a deal that would render that run and spending meaningless?
And does this image loom in our future: Senator Bob Smith, environmentalist, waving a young pine sapling in an outstretched hand on the floor of the US Senate? A proliferation of ''Save the Elephants'' bumper stickers?
Temerity: You are a doctor. You are supposedly an experienced mountain climber.
On a late October day, you decide to climb Mount Washington. You gear up for a day hike, assuming a jaunt to the top and back this time of year does not require special gear.
You forget the days in August when it has blown snow atop the mountain. You forget the folks who have died in the cold atop the mountain even as the day below remained balmy. You forget that October should be regarded as winter when you go above treeline.
So despite what you say later - ''I did have appropriate clothes, but not for stopping and hunkering down'' - you are ill-prepared. You should always assume you might have to spend a night or two, hunkered down in snow and cold and winds.
Maybe it was the glory of the fall day that confused you.
Maybe you were overconfident because you had a cell phone with you.
Maybe you didn't realize (though you should have) that 85-mile-per-hour winds, blowing snow and rime ice, do happen in October.
Maybe you didn't think that a call from your cell phone would drag volunteers who defend your right to be stupid out of their warm homes and into the very weather that would come so close to taking your life.
Twenty of these folks spent hours searching for you and had just about given up when they found you on the precipice of death at Ball Crag.
I know you know you made a mistake. I know you are grateful to your rescuers.
But please, don't tell us you had the appropriate gear. If you went up that mountain in late October and weren't ready to spend the night if the weather got bad, you were ill-prepared.
And others had to risk their lives to rescue you from your own temerity.
Royal Ford is a member of the Globe Staff. His e-mail address is ford@globe.com
