Risking It All

(2 of 10)

Today's adventurers must contend with the irksome truth that much of what is grand and gallant has already been done. What remains is to repeat the great feats of the past in a more difficult manner or to invent stunts whose nature is often, necessarily, more than somewhat bizarre. Thus we see the attempt by Mountaineer Tabin's group to climb Everest by an approach once thought foolhardy, and the astonishing accomplishment of Italian Superclimber Reinhold Messner three years ago of reaching Everest's summit alone and without oxygen.

The variety of labors that the new adventurers think up for themselves these days is rich and nutty and, in contemplation, forms a splendid fruitcake of the hu man spirit. Mighty aerial voyages are undertaken in planes as fragile as moths, and transatlantic crossings are made in sailboats only marginally longer than their pilots. There are specialists in climbing frozen waterfalls and skiing slopes too steep to stand on, and in exploring underwater, with scuba gear, caves so deep that helium must be mixed with the oxygen that is breathed, to forestall nitrogen narcosis. A couple of canoeists have just lined their craft up the Grand Canyon and portaged the Rockies. An unemployed actress named Julie Ridge swam twice around Manhattan Island this summer (about 28 miles); although the publicity did not bring her a job, she said she felt better about herself.

Glittery-eyed monomaniacs jump off cliffs and buildings with parachutes, because this is more dangerous than humdrum skydiving. People climb skyscrapers, both on the inside (in organized races up stairways) and on the outside. One of the nerveless outside operatives, "Spider Dan" Goodwin, managed to lever himself up the Sears Tower in Chicago despite efforts of affronted city firemen to hose him away. And at an airfield in New Jersey, Pilot Grace McGuire, who bears an eerie resemblance to the late Amelia Earhart, will assemble a 1936 Lockheed Electra 10E, the kind of plane Earhart used, with the intention of next year completing the famed barnstormer's fatal last flight in the Pacific. She plans to take only equipment identical to that on Earhart's plane. Her fuel will give her 21 hours of flying for the 2,556-mile first leg from Lae, New Guinea, to Rowland Island in mid-Pacific, which allows "not much reserve."

These are the extremes of adventuring, but people who consider themselves ordinary are doing things that would have been thought outlandish ten years ago. Rafting the Colorado River now seems almost sedentary, and trekking in the Himalayas is no more than an extended outing. Sane and prudent citizens sign up for ice-climbing lessons and for bicycle tours across China. Your neighbor's teen-ager hang-glides. It is hardly worth mentioning when a 50-year-old man or woman runs a marathon, although the triathlon, which may consist of a long swim, a bike race and a complete running marathon on the same day, still raises a few eyebrows.