Decimal-Point Adventuring
for EXPLORE magazine, April 2010
Geez Louise. Have you been following the chatter about Ottawa adventurer Meagan McGrath’s exploits in the Antarctic? She’d have made more friends if she’d stayed home and organized a reading of Never Cry Wolf.
McGrath, if you missed it, is attempting to walk, solo and unassisted, from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole. She set out December 1. Two days later she fell into a crevasse. When word emerged that she’d been rescued and was ready to resume her quest, the armchair critics cleared their throats.
“Is she going to see if she can get herself rescued sooner this time?”
“‘And for my next attention-seeking adventure watch me strap myself to a JATO rocket and blast myself into “whogivesaratsassville.’”
It was as if McGrath were some kind of Sandy Pittman-like socialite out of her depth, instead of what she in fact is: an aerospace engineer and Canadian Air Force Major who has climbed Everest. McGrath was the first Canadian woman to bag the Seven Summits in both ways people count these things.
Clearly, the getting-rescued part touched a nerve. People can’t stand the idea that there are “unsupported” rogue wanderers out there with their fingers poised over 911 on the sat-phone speed-dial. But the reaction speaks to something bigger, I think. It suggests that the whole enterprise of amateur adventuring has reached some tipping-point, where high-concept becomes low comedy.
Wanna cook up a record-breaking expedition? (And really, who doesn’t?) In an increasingly explored, mapped and packaged world, the novelty is on the margins. But the media’s not much interested in that unsexy peripheral stuff, so you’re left with trying to do the oft-conquered icons differently — with qualifiers (youngest, fastest, shod-in-period-footwear, etc.) ensuring your place in the annals.
Jerry Kobalenko calls this decimal-point adventuring. “You can twist anything so that nobody has done it,” says the Banff-based author and photographer (The Horizontal Everest), a veteran of some 30 independent expeditions in the Canadian Arctic. “‘First woman to do Everest?’ Well, yeah, that’s impressive. What about ‘First woman from China to do Everest?’ Well, okay. What about ‘First woman from China under twenty to do Everest?’ The further you go with these decimal points, the less interesting it becomes as a gimmick.” What results, finally, is a Gong Show populated by an endless line of contestants waiting to be canonized for something unique.
Let’s talk about this impulse to boldly go where none have gone and pee on the ground there. As Mallory and the more articulate astronauts have reminded, it is just in us. It practically defines us. But surely there’s a sweet-spot moment, between the time some barely erect hominid tracked a tiger an unprecedented distance to impress the babes, and Jackass culture made extreme “firsts” cool to a certain kind of fame-seeking wiener with a high threshold for both pain and shame, when its expression went viral.
My vote’s for 1951. That was the year a brewing family created a record book that was really worth getting your name into. The Guinness Book of World Records (now called simply Guinness World Records), perennially the best-selling book next to the Bible, trumped even the Olympics in fetishizing the highest, fastest, strongest and first. (Also, in Guinness’ case, the ickiest: see “socks: continuous wear.” *)
The GWR people receive 65,000-odd enquiries annually from people trying to claim their slice of immortality. Ninety-five percent are rejected. What gets you in the book? Doing something not just staggeringly challenging but interesting, and, trumpable, and unique. Bagging a measurable “first” is not enough — it has to be, in the estimation of the judges, a “significant” first. (And contrary to popular belief, dangerous is just fine– so long as you’re only endangering yourself.)
Not long ago, GWR editor Craig Glenday – who had just returned from getting drunk in Inner Mongolia with the world’s shortest man—mused about all of this with the Freakonomics guys on their blog. People try to break records, Glenday speculated, to figure out their place in the mix. “Without knowing the extremities, it is impossible to know where you stand.” Was there a type of person who goes superlative-hunting? Well, all possessed a kind of restless drive, a sense of “not wanting to sit through life as a casual observer but to grab at every opportunity to try something new.” There’s some simple truth to that apple-pie recipe. I asked Canadian Pat Morrow—the first human to climb the Seven Summits —why he did it. “I was a curious guy, with a camera,” he said. “What better way to see the world?”
But record-seeking, especially of the compulsive, serial kind, doesn’t always come from a sunny place.
The guy who holds the Guinness record for most Guinness records is Ashrita Furman. He’s a middle-aged health-food-store manager from Queens, NY who was, by his own admission, an inveterate nerd who got the crap beaten out of him on the first day of high school. A furious Captain Everything was born. Thirty years later there he was, somersaulting nonstop for twelve miles along the route of Paul Revere’s ride outside of Boston, trying but failing to keep down the previous night’s pizza dinner. (Furman’s motivations seem to have ripened over the years, to the point that pushing his limits has become for him almost a spiritual quest.)
A lot of times, noble intrinsic reasons for adventuring seem to get mixed up with commercial interests.
I met up in Yellowknife a few years ago with the Norwegian explorer Lars Monsen, who was partway through his attempt to be the first person to walk and sled across Canada above the treeline. It was a low-tech adventure. His main sponsor made wool underwear. Lars was a man more comfortable building a fire at minus-40 than ordering chicken wings in some small-town pub. He gave the impression that he just liked to be out there, in the wild, with the dogs, and if it were up to him he’s just noodle around in the Arctic for a year or two without the formality of a “record-breaking” adventure defining his days. “It’s important for the sponsors that no-one has done this before,” he told me one night over a beer. “It’s not so important for me.”
Few adventurers can afford to spurn sponsors entirely, and the ones who do you may never hear of, unless their eccentricities, rather than their accomplishments, draw interest.
That was the case with David Perlman, a.k.a. “Poppa Neutrino.” Neutrino is a high-school-dropout turned street musician, vagabond, philosopher, football strategist and sailor. He is one of those “decimal-pointers,” but his score for originality gives his most high-profile quest a certain legitimacy. “He was not the first man to build a raft and sail it across the Atlantic,” writes his biographer Alec Wilkinson, “but he was the first to cross the Atlantic on a raft built from garbage.”
Neutrino wasn’t so much an adventurer as a culture-jammer: he was tackling a planetary problem (if his garbage raft could cross the ocean safely, then maybe people would be moved to “build more rafts of the same design, for floating orphanages for all the scrap children of the world.”) But he was also throwing down a personal challenge. He aimed to get people questioning the way they were reflexively living, and the standards by which they measured “success.” (I shouldn’t use the past tense. Neutrino is still around, and hopes next to pilot a garbage raft across the Pacific.)
A sort of purity of intention drives Neutrino’s exploits.
And purity of intention is part of what, I think, gives any particular adventure credibility in a lot of people’s minds. What are the other dimensions of a winning formula?
Well first, the thing has to be really hard—so hard most of us couldn’t imagine ourselves under any circumstances pulling it off. Problem is, really hard isn’t always easy to recognize. Most of us are vulnerable to the hype machine to tell us what we should be impressed by.
Take the Arctic. As Jerry Kobalenko tells it, there are true, quietly path-breaking Arctic adventures, and then there are contrived outings that sound dangerous, and which earn the adventurers fame and lucrative careers on the lecture circuit, but are in fact no great shakes. How do you tell the difference?
“Ninety-nine percent of Arctic expeditions are just people doing the same thing,” Kobalenko says. “Polar travel is not technical. It’s essentially walking and winter camping. Not only could I ski to the South Pole, but you could too — even if you’ve never worn skis before in your life!
“The South Pole has panache because it was the challenge that stymied Shackleton and killed Scott. It was one of the great stories in polar exploration. But it’s not very hard. All you need is the money.”
Kobalenko has sledded tens of thousands of kilometers over polar ice. “Put me in Antarctica and set me free and I’d at least come close to breaking speed records,” he says —“and in my fifties, that’s pretty strange. It’s very easy. It’s flat. The only hazard is crevasses and with certain exceptions nobody seems to fall into them cause the snow is usually bombproof.”
“Lately some polar types are tacking on the Seven Summits,” Kobalenko added in an email afterthought. “That’s another non-technical list that nowadays requires mainly basic fitness, a couple of climbing lessons and good luck with the weather.”
You can tell he’s pissed about all this. It’s not the way he himself approaches adventure. He prides himself not on any single accomplishment but on a “body of work” up there in the Arctic — hard stuff that doesn’t get much press. His criticisms can sound like the kind of sour grapes visited by, say, historians, on those bestselling hacks who popularize their research, flog it on Oprah and retire to Brunei to work on their short game. But you can see where he’s coming from. “I’m sure mountaineers are pissed that people who walk up Everest are more celebrated than someone like Peter Croft, who’s doing these incredible free solos.”
Conversely, some things that look like trivial, goofball stunts are staggeringly impressive. The aforementioned Ashrita Furman once climbed the CN tower in Toronto in under an hour on a pogo stick. Michal Kapral of Toronto ran a 2:50 marathon – that put him in 44th place among finishers overall – while juggling.
An Austrian electrician named Christian Stangl, who speed-climbed the Seven Summits in 58 hours – total!—was at press time acclimatizing in Katmandu before climbing K2. He aims to get up and down in under a day. Stangl calls this sport of free solo mountain speed-climbing – wherein you beat the effects of weather and oxygen debt by literally outsprinting them—“skyrunning.” In some ways Stangl’s accomplishment is not so much the records as the preparation required to get there. Stangl may be the world’s fittest person. His training includes running uphill dragging a 40-kg truck tire. He tries, in the peak of his workout cycle, to keep his heart-rate at 164 beats per minute for 20 straight hours. He is a science project, basically, and must earn our grudging respect, whatever we think about the value of running up mountains.
The “grudging” part is my own qualifier.
In 2001 my wife and I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro on our Honeymoon. It was both as cool as advertised – nosing up through all those climatic zones into a time-blasted landscape above all the clouds in Africa— and harder than expected because of the altitude. Jen coped better than I did. On the summit, in the delirium of hypoxia, I mistook the snow for puzzling piles of salt, and then puked on my shoes. But it felt like a significant achievement. We’d wanted to see those mythic snows before they were gone. At no point did we think, Hey, we just knocked off one of the Seven Summits. We thought: What a privilege this is, and what a nice way to inaugurate our life together.
But I’ve gotta say, in the last few years I’ve come to feel almost embarrassed about it. A week after climbing Kili, as we lounged, satisfied, in Arusha, we learned that an Italian guy had gone up and down in four and a half hours. (It had taken us six days.) Pretty soon the pleasure of the memories was diminished. The whole story changed shape, and we as actors within it slid toward the villainous end of the spectrum: just another couple of schlubs knocking off some utterly predictable life-list-y thing – neither the youngest nor the fastest nor physically disabled and not even raising money for anything — pleased to have conquered a mountain you can walk up, for pity’s sake. We had a guide (you can’t do Kili any other way). We had porters. We are a cliché, below even the class of what the Russians call the “extreme tourists” who fly to Antarctica and are shepherded the last degree of latitude to the South Pole. We made no claims on immortality, but the truth is we could have climbed slightly shorter though still beautiful Mt. Meru instead, and saved some dough and avoided the crowds. But we’d drunk the Kool-Aid like everybody else — “To the roof of Africa, baby!” — and now are left to wonder: Was this a good outlet for those nagging midlife stirrings, the impulse to do something singular with our ALLOTTED YEARS? I never, ever felt like a hero. But the culture of superlativization has made me feel like a putz.
The trick, I guess, is not to care.
There is a martial-arts saying, or maybe it’s just a David Carradine quote, about how the archer who aims at nothing never misses. But as soon as someone tacks a silver buckle to a tree to aim at, he starts getting nervous. A tiny gold coin, tossed into the air as a champion’s target, blinds him. He retires to Jupiter, Fla. on a tiny pension. Some nights, when traffic is light, he can hear the sea.
It still feels like climbing Kili had value to us, just as what Megan McGrath is doing in the Arctic has value to her. And some people will be inspired by her exploits – if only to get off their butts and clean the garage.
Look, those Starfleet-command impulses to go beyond ourselves and others are there. We can’t ignore them and it’s self-defeating to try. We should do new stuff. I say, get out there and explore and see the world’s diminishing natural beauty. Set some sort of idiosyncratic goal and then knock it off.
And then don’t tell anybody.
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