Limits of the Known
Page 26
That choice almost cost the two men their lives. Only a series of desperate rappels through waterfalls, followed by an irreversible traverse to escape the canyon, delivered them to safety. Back at base camp, they learned that their teammates had given them up for dead, and had built a small shrine in their memory.
A similar experience, though not so perilous, befell a team of adventurers trying to explore a jungle plateau in Honduras in 2015. Inspired by an old legend of a lost Ciudad Blanca, or White City, and galvanized by new lidar (ground-penetrating radar) images obtained by airplane that revealed the outlines of a massive complex of buildings buried under dense tangles of trees and roots, the team helicoptered into a clearing in the rain forest. Their remarkable story is blithely told in Douglas Preston’s Lost City of the Monkey God (2017). On the ground, the searchers at once noticed something strange about the wildlife. One of the men was an ex-soldier in the British Special Air Service named Andrew Wood. In Preston’s telling:
Woody said he had spent a large part of his life in jungles all over the world, from Asia and Africa to South and Central America. He said he had never been in one like this, so apparently untouched. As he was setting up camp, before we arrived, a quail came right up to him, pecking in the dirt. And a wild pig also wandered through, unconcerned by the presence of humans. The spider monkeys, he said, were another sign of an uninhabited area, as they normally flee at the first sight of humans, unless they are in a protected zone. He concluded, “I don’t think the animals here have ever seen people before.”
In this case, the corner of the wilderness the team explored was not a place where no humans had ever been. But it had been lost to human ken for many centuries after the still mysterious founders of the civilization that built the lost city—evidently contemporary with the Classic Maya to the west and north—had disappeared.
During all my expeditions to Alaska, I’ve often climbed on ridges and walls that I knew had never before been touched by human hands. But I’ve never entered a wilderness where the animals themselves seemed to have no awareness of the threat of man the intruder. (I would value such an encounter as one of the magical experiences in my life.) Yet as these two examples prove, in the twenty-first century you can still find a meadow in Pakistan, a rain forest in Honduras, where Homo sapiens has never set foot, or set foot so long ago that the ecology itself has swallowed any echo of his passing.
In terms of the future of adventure, the ultimate frontier is outer space. As the son of an astronomer, I daydreamed throughout my childhood about flying in a rocket ship to distant galaxies. Even a quick jaunt to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star in our own Milky Way, would have gladdened my restive spirit; or for that matter, a year or two to hike among the red buttes and craters of Mars. From age thirteen to fifteen I read virtually nothing but science fiction. But even in my juvenile world of wish-fulfillment, I knew deep down that humans would never get to Andromeda, let alone to the galaxies on the other edge of the universe that were fleeing from us at close to the speed of light. And I knew that the cosmonaut heroes of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and A.E. van Vogt owed more to Tom Mix and Roy Rogers than to the reality of the first men who might set foot on the moon or Mars.
In the 1960s, I felt only a lukewarm enthusiasm for the space program that culminated with the moon landing in 1969. John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin were no heroes of mine. I shared my father’s admiration for their courage and technical skill and willingness to die in the service of exploration. But they seemed to lack (necessarily, given the demands of space) the fundamental traits of independence and hardiness and athletic prowess that made Hermann Buhl and Lionel Terray the paragons I dreamed of emulating, or, for that matter, John Wesley Powell and Sir Richard Burton. Strapped into their Apollo rockets, the astronauts seemed to me sentient automatons whose every decision was made by programmers in Houston, and whose bouncing jogs on the lunar surface required less nerve or stamina than a ramble in the Lake District.
Half a century later, I cling to my skepticism about space. The greatest mysteries of all lie hidden among the stars, the strangest of all unknown worlds, and I hang on every new revelation that scientists can wring from the cosmos. But the discoveries out there will be made by telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, by theoreticians cogitating at CERN and JPL. The exploration of space, alas, will have little to do with adventure as we know it, or at least as I wish to celebrate it in this book, and everything to do with machines and laboratories and brilliant men and women laboring over computers and scribbling with pencils on pads. Einstein was the Columbus of space.
In a previous chapter I saluted the deeds of Sam Meacham and his band of cave divers probing the cenotes of Yucatán. But I did not address the wilderness that remains by far the greatest unknown region on earth. That is the deep sea depths. After all, 71 percent of the surface of our planet is covered by oceans. The divers who first seriously explored the underwater wonderland were true adventurers. No one has written more rhapsodically about the undiscovered earth than Jacques Cousteau, and William Beebe made his expeditions by bathysphere sound as exciting as Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the West. Within the last forty years the discovery of bizarre creatures thriving near hydrothermal vents in total darkness far below the surface—tube worms, shrimp with eyes in their backs, and the like, as well as all kinds of strange microorganisms—has revolutionized the most basic theories of the origins of life on earth.
The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near the island of Guam is the lowest known point on the underwater surface of the globe, at 36,070 feet beneath the surface. It was visited by two daring men, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, in 1960, by means of a contraption called a bathyscaphe that protected them from a crushing pressure of eight tons per square inch. Those two pioneers were able to spend only twenty minutes on their inverted “summit,” and silt stirred up by the device prevented them from taking any photos. In 2012 James Cameron, director of the film Titanic, piloted a submersible to the same location, where he managed to collect samples and shoot footage in 3–D.
Here, and among all the rest of the unknown places in the ocean depths, lies a frontier as challenging as the polar regions loomed in the 1880s, or the Himalaya half a century before that. The discoveries that lie ahead of us in those unfathomably remote regions promise to be as profound as the ones that probes will find on the moons of Saturn or beneath the Red Spot on Jupiter. But my skepticism about the role of adventure in outer space extends to the ocean depths. The great breakthroughs are likely to come not in the visits of aquanauts such as Piccard and Cameron, but thanks to the deployment of unmanned submersibles capable of shooting film and gathering specimens. There will be no room, I fear, for deep-sea John Wesley Powells in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. I hope I’m wrong—but more than one scientist has already voiced the same idea.
The fear that there are no more undiscovered worlds to explore is an age-old bugaboo for restless adventurers. Wilfrid Noyce was one of the leading British mountaineers of his day, as well as an eloquent writer. On the 1953 Everest expedition, he played a crucial supporting role in the well-coordinated effort that thrust Tenzing and Hillary to the summit. His memoir of that campaign, South Col, is a far more interesting book than Sir John Hunt’s official account, The Ascent of Everest. In 1957, with David Cox, Noyce made what is credited as the first ascent of Machhapuchare, one of the most striking peaks in the Himalaya, though the two men stopped 150 feet short of the summit out of respect for the local belief that the mountain was sacred. (It has long been closed to climbers for that reason.)
In The Springs of Adventure, a quirky personal survey of discovery and exploration worldwide, Noyce wrote in 1958, “All the really obvious points on the earth’s surface having been reached, people . . . go out privately, in which case the lone sailor and explorer, caver and diver, hail each other as fellow lunatics in a sane world (or vice versa) . . .” The success of Everest five years earlier seemed to Noyce to
herald the end of an era. “Now that the greatest giants have fallen, public interest has on the whole waned, and it needs public interest to fan competition. The climbers themselves sink back into a welcome obscurity.”
How cloudy Noyce’s crystal ball turned out to be! Since 1958, mountaineering has exploded in popularity, claiming the attention of a public once indifferent to or unaware of any challenges other than Everest. Today, even formerly arcane facets of the climbing world such as bouldering inspire international competition and motivate men and women to devote their lives to perfecting their arts. In October 2016, a Finn named Nalle Hukkataival succeeded in climbing a bouldering route less than 25 feet long. Hukkataival spent four years on Burden of Dreams, as he named his “project,” in the course of 4,000 attempts, before everything came together on a single magical go. He claimed the world’s first V17, upping the grade rating for bouldering by a single digit. Climbers all over the world, almost none of whom had ever seen the boulder, let alone attempted it, tipped their caps.
The forms that adventure takes are so manifold that sometimes a whole new discipline must be invented to embrace them. Although thousands of years ago daredevils must have jumped into underground lakes, holding their breaths as they tried to see what lay below and beyond, cave diving as a serious pursuit in quest of unexplored regions is less than eighty years old, and it did not become a highly skilled endeavor until the 1970s.
Years ago I had a conversation that has lodged in my imagination ever since, when I chatted with John Kramer, one of Sobek’s founding whitewater rafters and the strongest hand on our unsuccessful attempt to descend the Tua/Purari River in New Guinea in 1983. In a few places on earth Kramer had seen major streams churning with rapids disappear into limestone caves. For my benefit, Kramer speculated about the future of a new kind of adventure—whitewater kayaking underground. The very notion gave me the willies. How would you save yourself, I wondered, from unforeseeable death traps such as a sudden waterfall, or a rapid that squeezed down to a chute that the current filled like a water hose? Pitons hammered into the walls, ropes to lower the boat cautiously toward the void ahead? In the face of some apocalyptic impasse, could you use ascenders to climb the rope back to safety against the raging current?
The ancient Greeks imagined underground rivers as loci of the ultimate. The Styx, the Acheron, the Lethe carried men toward the afterworld. Coleridge, in “Kubla Khan,” saw one such torrent in an opium-
induced dream, “Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.”
The John Kramers of some future generation may actually set out on journeys through such landscapes of the unthinkable . . . and emerge to tell their tales.
By February 2017, thanks to regular doses of Pembrolizumab, the still experimental immunotherapy drug, my body had settled into what felt like a shaky truce with cancer. Several CT scans over the months since September had revealed that the deadly nodules in my lungs had grown not at all. Nor had they shrunk, however. Some mechanism within the cells that combat invasive threats deep inside one’s tissues had won a temporary armistice. I was still dependent on the feeding tube taped to the hole in my stomach, though I had reduced the cans of oozy supplement from six to two per day. I had learned to swallow all over again, though it had been a year and a half since I had felt even the faintest pangs of hunger. Eating was a tedious daily chore, an exercise regimen rather than a pleasure. Rotating through the same insipid menu of soups, soft pasta, eggs, yogurt, and smoothies, I struggled to ingest 2,200 calories a day. I knew that I would never again eat a cheeseburger, and because radiation had killed my saliva glands and left my mouth hypersensitive to sharp tastes, I doubted whether I could ever reacquaint my palate with wine, which I had savored throughout my adult life. The hormonal dysfunction called SIADH was still at work, forcing me to limit the liquids I drank and to bolster my sodium with salt tablets crushed and dissolved and flushed down the feeding tube.
Gradually after September I had gained strength, though I was nowhere close to matching the fitness of the previous May, before the metastasized cancer had torn me down. I could walk or hike for about a mile and a half, but no farther. Trips to the climbing gym were grim reminders of the feebleness I had to accept, as even a 5.6 route pushed me to the limit and left me gasping for breath and on the verge of throwing up. (The previous May I was climbing 5.9.) But for six straight months I had not had to be hospitalized—the longest stretch free from incarceration in the antiseptic wards of Brigham and Women’s that I had enjoyed since I first noticed the lump on my lymph node in June 2015.
Amidst all this erosion of my powers, a blessing lay in the fact that my mental faculties seemed undimmed. My memory was as sharp as ever; the scraps of poetry that had lodged decades earlier in my brain responded promptly to each summons; and I was reading more voraciously than ever. Best of all, I kept writing, even though neuropathy in my right arm had robbed me of the laborious one-finger pecking technique with which I had delivered all my books and articles to the keyboards of the typewriter and computer. Now I write longhand on yellow legal pads, then dictate my scribblings to Sharon, who tirelessly types them up. And though every session leaves me exhausted, I count the hours spent in our living room trading ideas and stories with my closest friends—the endless riffs that climbers spin about bivouacs and bergschrunds, the boundless flights of fantasy wrung out of literature and music—as among the happiest in my housebound life.
Each morning I arise with the hopeful formula several friends have sent me like billets doux imprinted on my mind: “Every day is a gift.” But all too often, by nightfall, the Puritan superego that stands in the wings of my psyche scolds, Another whole day wasted. The cruelest reminders of what I have lost come to me in my dreams. Once fatigue puts my superego to sleep, my id takes charge. I am striking out batters again on the sandlot, or tossing perfect spirals on the touch football field. I am camped out on a high ridge watching the Perseid meteor shower. I am hiking down a canyon I have never seen before, and around the next bend I spot petroglyphs. I take the lead on the seventeenth pitch and solve the headwall that leads to the summit. Then I awake, and know that the gift of another day on earth promises no adventure more stirring than a five-block walk through the streets of Watertown.
Often now, in unbidden moments, a surge of grief washes over me, as I recognize that I will never hike Bowdie Canyon on the Dark Canyon Plateau, that I will not climb the routes in the Dolomites that were on my tick list, that I may never travel (as I was sure I would) to South Africa or Thailand or Mongolia. But if there is recompense in that loss, it is the mandate the gift of each day thrusts upon me to assess what my life was all about. After all, no matter how soon I die, I’ve had at least seventy-three years on earth. Schubert, Mozart, and Keats were given less than half that span to pour their visions into eternity.
I think of myself—of my vocation—not chiefly as a writer, or a climber, or even a husband or a friend, but as an adventurer. This book represents my effort to get at the core of the elusive phenomenon we call adventure, both past and future, both in the lives of explorers and in the wayward paths along which my own wanderlust has propelled me.
The temptation, especially for us Puritans, is to divine some higher purpose served by all those journeys into the wilderness, those vagabond rambles that at the time seemed pure fun or, as they grew sterner, pure compulsion. Climbers have long subscribed to a weirdly self-congratulatory distillation of the meaning of ascent. The mold was set by Mallory who, bridling against the metaphor of mountaineering as conquest, penned his second-most enduring apothegm in an essay published in the Alpine Journal in 1918: “Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves.”
This quasi-mystical affirmation evolved over subsequent decades into the claim that the reward for flirting with death in the pursuit of summits was the discovery of self. Reinhold Messner, one of the greatest mountaineers in history, was particularly addicted to this formula. He c
limbed at the most extreme level, Messner swore in book after book, in order to dig deep into his own soul to find out who and what he really was. He came back from his ordeals on Nanga Parbat and Everest with the inestimable treasure of self-understanding. The trouble is that Messner never goes on to define the self that he went to such desperate lengths to excavate. The reader is left wondering, Is that all? Is the Messnerian core simply the driven, rivalrous, haughty egomaniac that sprawls across page after page?
I remain deeply skeptical about the facile proposition that through the trials of extreme adventure we learn bedrock truths about ourselves. Climbing, along with other forays into wild places, has given me the most piercing transports of joy I have ever felt. But when I came home and tried to settle back into the petty pace from day to day, I would have been at a loss to articulate what I had learned about myself—or about any other important matter. Perhaps joy itself is the reward. Mallory said as much, in a less well-known quote about the purpose of ascent: “What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.”
And yet . . . Joy for its own sake is a selfish thing. What does it have to do with others? What good does it do in the world?
The notion that adventure leads to the discovery of self is closely allied to the lazy but commonplace bromide that travel broadens the mind, that journeys to other lands open our eyes to the richness and diversity of the human condition. I’m skeptical, too, of this pious recipe. In my experience, travel often reinforces prejudice and xenophobia. In the eighteenth century, some of the best British poets, essayists, and novelists advanced the notion, heretical to our own Pelagian age, that travel left a man, in Pope’s phrase, “in endless error hurled.” The classic text is Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. That masterpiece only pretends to be the adventure story that its transmogrification into a children’s book posits. In Swift’s deeply pessismistic satire, Lemuel Gulliver is a fool, a voyager whose limitless adaptability seduces him over and over again into confusion. In Lilliput and Brobdingnag, in Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms, after his initial shock Gulliver adjusts to the crazy worlds into which he has blundered. When he returns to England, he has lost his moral compass. It is no coincidence that Swift gave his antihero a name cognate with “gullible.”