Risking It All

(4 of 10)

Possibly. The fact is that even highly intelligent adventurers are notoriously bad at answering one of two questions that they are always asked (the other question is whether they have a death wish, and that answer is easy: no). Everyone remembers ad nauseam that Mallory, perhaps in some brown mood of irritation or boredom, intoned "Because it is there" when asked why he wanted to climb Everest. The pomposity of the answer is so far out of character that it seems likely that what he meant to convey was "Go away and stop asking good questions."

Peter Bird, 36, is a London-based photographer who was rescued on June 14 on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, after 296 days of rowing 9,560 miles alone across the Pacific from San Francisco. He had abandoned a successful photography business and left a girlfriend ashore, and he recalls fretting for months about why he was risking his life. "I invented all sorts of answers, but none of them was honest." The truth dawned in midocean, as he was listening to a radio interview with a man who, as he remembers, had resailed the route Captain Bligh followed after he was cast adrift from the Bounty by mutineers. "He had come up with all these reasons, to prove Bligh's logs were right, to prove Bligh was a good sailor, but none of it sounded right. It didn't fit. I thought, 'It's an adventure. You don't have to justify it. It's just an adventure.' "

Fair enough, but because the physical and psychological costs can be so high, the search for an explanation is understandable. Bird had done one long row with a friend in 1974, from Gibraltar to St. Lucia. By 1980, he says, the idea of rowing across the Pacific had filled his mind until "I couldn't think of anything else. It almost shouted and screamed at me all night."

Bird's first try ended in wreckage on the rocks at Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He spent 15 months building and outfitting another boat, sleeping on floors because he had no money. Last August, he set out again. He was delayed for three months by the troublesome El Nino current and spent the time listening to the BBC and brooding about nuclear warfare and Israel's invasion of Lebanon. In tapes he made at the time, his speech is painfully slow; photos he made of himself show a sad and serious face. When his boat broke up on the Barrier Reef, as he is careful to say, he was a mere 33 miles short of landfall.

Bird clearly feels well repaid for the three years of obsessive effort he spent on the rowing project, even though he must now lecture his way out of debt. He will not row the Pacific again ("There's nothing more to be learned"), but he admits cheerfully that the germs of more adventures are stirring in his head.

Australian Electronics Millionaire Dick Smith, 39, is another sort of swashbuckler. He landed his Bell Jetranger III helicopter in Fort Worth not long ago, after flying around the world in three stages. Smith is notorious for his publicity stunts, but his troubles were real enough. He was shot at by fishermen off Greenland, he landed in quicksand in Burma, and over the northern Pacific bad weather nearly forced him to miss a refueling ship. Smith's understated conclusion: "I was extremely lucky to get back. I would never try it again."