Foolishly letting myself be strapped onto a rope seat dangling a mile high above the Costa Rican jungle and shot from tree to tree on an apparatus that certainly had no safety regulations. I was already 80 – “the oldest person ever to go on the treeline,” they assured me. They told me after I got off that several people had died when they first began this thrill ride over the jungle. I was very happy to be back on terra firma after this thrill which I had done in order to impress my very brave little godson. That is, until I walked off the grounded platform and someone said, “Watch out for the rattlesnakes right here!” and sure enough there were quite a few babies squirming around on the ground. I wondered where their mother was and stepped very lightly and quickly. Though, honestly, this probably wasn’t as dangerous as the time writer John Berendt and I landed on one wheel on Martha’s Vineyard with all the firetrucks waiting for us. Commercial aviation is probably more dangerous than the Costa Rican treeline.

Long after I should have known better, I got into cars with drunk drivers. As a teenager, I sat in cars without seat belts while the drunk driver sped all over the deserts and streets of Phoenix. Several friends were killed and one was severely injured. What I’m embarrassed to admit is that in my 30s and 40s, I continued getting into cars with my then husband, an alcoholic, at the wheel on highways, in traffic, you name it. It is a miracle that I’m here.

The most unlike-me thing I’ve ever done is go hot air ballooning in France 17 years ago. Like most stories of challenges faced and met, it ends happily. We spilled out into a French farm field and the old farmer said he hadn’t seen Americans here since Normandy, and toasted us with Calvados. I was lucky to have such an up-close experience of how Europe used to feel about us. As for danger, I think I’ve done a number of dangerous things, but they don’t have to do with a felt sense of physical danger; more with the chances you take in terms of your faith or your work, acts or writings that can draw unwanted attention, or hostility, or opposition. Sometimes you just have to do those things, at risk of not being who you are.

The scariest thing I ever did was exploring a prehistoric burial chamber in Ireland with friends when I was 14, dragging myself through tiny tunnels on my elbows in pitch darkness. But it wasn’t dangerous. The most reckless thing I ever did was to climb around the roof of a small opera house in Paris in spike heels, teetering above the Paris rooftops between Werner Herzog, a man afraid of nothing, and Philippe Petit, who had some years before walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers . That was totally stupid. The most dangerous thing I ever did was trusting that someone was a friend when they were not.