Essay: ADVENTURE & THE AMERICAN INDIVIDUALIST

I would have no pay in money for hurling my body into space. There would be no crowd to watch and applaud my landing (there was later). Nor was there any scientific objective to be gained. No, there was a deeper reason for wanting to jump, a desire I could not explain. It was a love of the air and sky, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of men—where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.

SO wrote an authentic American hero of the moment he contemplated his first parachute jump. As the star of a barnstorming aerial circus, he became known as "Daredevil Lindbergh" long before he flew the Atlantic. In his writing he came close to describing the indescribable spirit of adventure that is instinctive to mankind and has been intensified in America, which was discovered and explored and grew to greatness under adventure's drive. De Tocqueville translated adventure into "individualism," and suspected it would lead to despotism. But Count Adam Gurowski, a Pole who settled in the U.S., wrote in 1857: "Excitement is one of the most powerful springs in the American. It is so contagious that newcomers, after a comparatively short residence, are affected and carried away by it."

Against the Commonplace

Adventure impelled Daniel Boone, in his eternal quest for a solitary fire near a fountain of sweet water, to move ever westward. Lord Byron, who had more than a passing acquaintance with adventure, eulogized Boone and his breed:

And tall and strong and swift of foot were they Beyond the dwarfing city's pale abortions Because their thought had never been the prey Of care or gain; the green woods were their portions.

Adventure was Tom Sawyer—and every adventurer has in him a bit of the runaway boy. Adventure was "Bigfoot" Wallace, the Texas ranger who went East "to see how people managed to live without the excitement of an occasional Indian fight, or a scrimmage with the Mexicans, or even a tussle with a bear now and then to keep their blood in circulation." Adventure was that incorrigible traveler and taleteller, Richard Halliburton, whether swimming the Hellespont or crossing the Alps à la Hannibal on an elephant.

Adventure, perhaps the greatest of all time, is the astronauts—even though they function as part of an intricate human and electronic network that supports them. Indeed, they deny that they seek the stars in adventure's name. "We are test pilots," says Astronaut Charles Bassett. "And the job of a test pilot is research."