The Spirit of Adventure
	Foreward by Will Steger

Posted Sunday, June 1, 2003; 2:31 p.m. EST
In the early '60s a buddy from Minneapolis and I shipped our 20-foot-long folding kayak to Juneau, Alaska. Young, short on cash, we hitchhiked and hopped a ferry to rendezvous with our boat. Our plan was to kayak Alaska's Inside Passage, which turned out to be a wild and dangerous trip. We fought storms and bugs all along the route and paddled among pods of killer whales. When we finally made it to Skagway, we had to portage a 40-mile trail that led to the headwaters of the Yukon River. From there we paddled to the Arctic Circle, where we packed up our boat and hitchhiked back home to Minnesota, just in time to begin another year of college.

It was a fortunate time for adventure because many of the areas we traveled across were marked unmapped. Just big, blank, white spots on the maps. It was in these vast sections of wilderness that we met some of the last remaining men who had moved north for the gold rush of 1898. These old-timers still lived in their log cabins, deep in the wilderness, and were glad for the company of a couple of innocent, weather-beaten young men. I have vivid memories of warming up next to their woodstoves, complaining bitterly about the mosquitoes and listening to their stories about the old days. This type of adventure was new to me. I was 18 years old, and for most of the trip I was miserable. During the frequent storms on the sea, I feared for my life. I missed home, with its warm, dry bed.

As we shared our complaints with our grizzled hosts, they muttered in reply, "Oh, you'll be back, boys. Mark my words, you'll be back." At the time I would have bet big money they were wrong.

That kayak trip changed my life. A couple of months after we returned home, I found myself ordering more maps and charting a route that would take us 3,000 miles by kayak the following summer, from Jasper, Alberta, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. Then it was trips to the tops of unclimbed mountains and down big-rapid rivers. It was tens of thousands of miles by canoe and dogsled. It was journeys to the North Pole and across the Antarctic continent. Thirty years of it.

Why? This is the question I am most frequently asked. "Why do you adventure?" It has never been an easy question to answer in anything less than a ramble, since, like describing the beautiful scent of a flower, describing the "why" of adventure must always fall short. It is all in the experiencing. So sometimes I try to duck the question with my own version of "Because it's there." Other times, I try to puzzle it out.

Adventure is natural and obvious to children, and it is rare that I get the "Why" question from anyone younger than 16. (Kids typically want answers to really big questions, like "How do you go to the bathroom when it's 50 below?") "Why adventure?" is an adult's question. When we grow up, our instinctual, go-for-it sensibility is replaced by an analytical, judgmental one. We grow out of the spontaneity that we knew as children. As a teenager I went looking for adventure. My goals were unclimbed mountains, remote wilderness rivers; there were risks galore and constant excitement. There was a sense of discovery: lanwas seeing for the first time, thousands and thousands of miles of trackless, untamed wilderness. I had, as many of us do at that point in our lives, a restless mind, and this beauty slowed me down, and for the first time I was able to live in the moment.

All I saw was beauty. Everywhere. In the hushed valleys through which the quiet green rivers flowed, and in the eternal snows of glacial ice caps. I was young, and so I was wide-eyed. If I were trying to explain this, now, to a young person, he or she would say, "Of course." There is a notion today that, since the highest mountains have all been climbed and the Poles have both been reached, there are no more adventures to be had. I couldn't disagree more. Adventure is in the individual. It is as close as putting on your boots in the morning and heading out the door.

And it's not about the prize, the trophy, the goal, the gold. Robert Service in his poem The Spell of the Yukon put it perfectly: "Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting/so much as just finding the gold." That's adventure—the finding of it.

And that, again, is a young person's attitude; a kid wouldn't know what to do with the gold if he had it. When I went to Alaska at the age of 18 and met with the old men who, long before, had come to Alaska for gold, I wondered why they had stayed. "You'll be back, boys," they said, perhaps sensing that what had kept them in a wild place such as that—their youthful spirit, their adventuresome spirit—was present in their guests.

After that adventure in the Yukon, I very quickly forgot the miserable times and spent the following year dreaming about repeating the experience. Getting back to a place—a place in the wild, a place in my spirit.

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