Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  If I have ever found an endeavor that led me to a better understanding of myself, it was not adventure but psychotherapy. Over the decades, I’ve spent serious time in the offices of half a dozen shrinks. I signed on because I was unhappy, or because I felt caught in some aimless drift. Several of the therapists to whom I poured out my troubles were in the end helpless to assuage my condition; one or two were a complete waste of time. But two of them made a difference. In the armchair or on the couch, as I recited stories that were buried in my past, they guided me, slowly and fitfully, toward something new. It wasn’t a cure for unhappiness. It was the next best thing—or perhaps a better thing: a comprehension of why, at the deepest level, I behaved as I did, why I kept heading down the same dead-end paths, why I banged my aching head against the unyielding walls of reality. Somewhere, I think, Freud argues that that outcome is the aim of psychoanalysis. His great contribution to humankind, in my view, was the discovery of the unconscious.

  But back to adventure. There is little point, I think, in trying to unearth an overarching purpose in our madness. We go off again and again on our voyages in quest of the undiscovered world because we can’t help it. We cannot claim that it does anybody besides ourselves any good. We are all, as Lionel Terray put it in the title of his autobiography, “conquistadors of the useless.” Yet we share our outcast state with other pursuits that are equally useless but equally wonderful. As W. H. Auden wrote in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “For poetry makes nothing happen.”

  I take heart from the ironic answers two of my heroes offered to the implicit question, “What is the value of adventure?” In 1946, bursting with impatience to launch a new expedition after the grim hiatus of World War II, Bill Tilman sensed the disapproval of his peers. In Two Mountains and a River, he wrote:

  In the late war . . . anyone was free to indulge in careless talk about the new and better world which would emerge refined, as they put it, from the crucible of war. . . . My survey of the war-shattered world in the autumn of 1945 was directed naturally to the Himalaya, to the ways and means of getting there, and to the chances of finding like-minded survivors with the same extravagant ideas. So loud was the din raised by the planners of the new world that it was hardly possible for me to avoid absorbing something of the spirit of the times, so that I did feel some slight uneasiness at attempting to do once more what I wanted to do. But I argued as Falstaff did about stealing, it was my vocation.

  A dozen years earlier, Eric Shipton struggled with his conscience on the eve of the expedition with Tilman that opened up the hidden valley through which the ascent of Nanda Devi would be accomplished. In Upon That Mountain, he recalled:

  Then the thought occurred to me, “Why not spend the rest of my life doing this sort of thing? . . . It was a disturbing idea, one which caused me much heartsearching and many sleepless nights. . . .

  I do not know how long I fought the temptation. I certainly suffered qualms of conscience, but they were due more to the mere prospect of such exquisite self-indulgence than to fear of the consequences of abandoning the search for an assured future, provision for old age and other worldly ambitions. I had always rather deplored the notion that one must sacrifice the active years of one’s life to the dignity and comfort of old age. . . . So the decision was taken, albeit with a faint heart.

  Whatever the costs of spending half a life in adventure, I have few regrets about all the time and energy and passion I squandered trying to figure out how to get from the base of some mountain to the top. But cancer forces another kind of reassessment. What great adventures did I fail to pursue because of the demands of humdrum daily existence? What challenges did I shirk?

  From 1981 onward, I made my living as a freelance writer. One of the delights of my trade was the opportunity to plunge into the esoteric worlds of other people’s passions. Because they were only too glad to have some magazine pay attention to the labors to which they devoted their lives, but of which the general public remained indifferent or unaware, those experts usually welcomed my intrusion. But if the chance to tag along on other folks’ high-octane journeys into the unknown and the unsolved was often a delight, it could also engender a deep frustration. If the subject of a magazine assignment captivated me, I read everything I could about it, interviewed everyone who would talk to me, and often went into the field to watch it happen. For several weeks, or even several months, that world engrossed me. Vicariously I took on the challenges that kept the experts awake at night. Then I wrote the article—and after that it was time to move on to something else. The rupture of tearing myself away from the universe I had so briefly visited could be painful. And too often it damaged my self-esteem, as I wondered if I was, after all, a professional dilettante.

  My one-day trip into Lechuguilla embodied just such a heady immersion and rude withdrawal. It was not that I wished to become a caver, but I could see why nothing mattered more to Rick Bridges than finding a new passage in what might be the deepest cave in the United States. I could feel in my nerve endings why exploring the underground fulfilled the dreams of its fanatics as mountaineering had mine. Likewise, my brief journey into the Mato Grosso stunned me with the complexity of the culture of a tiny tribe of unassimilated, marginalized people in Brazil. Ten days with the Suyá was enough for me, but I could see why Tony Seeger had devoted his life to comprehending and championing the tribe’s cause.

  For Atlantic, I dived into the frenetic world of the epigraphers who were cracking the code of Maya hieroglyphics. For Smithsonian, I trundled through the deserts of Yemen in 100-degree heat to hunt for stelae marking the frankincense trail that stitched together the Near East two thousand years ago. For Life, I searched with Percy Trezise for lost panels of Aboriginal rock art in Queensland. Also for Smithsonian, I climbed to the ruined castles left by the Cathars in southwest France who defied the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century, and mused upon the standing stones and passage graves from Avebury to the Orkneys that linger as the inexplicable testament of Neolithic Britons to posterity.

  For National Geographic Adventure, I interviewed the German photographer Carsten Peter, who dared to get closer to active volcanoes than any sane person should in order to capture the fury of the earth’s molten core exploding through its placid crust. I asked Peter what scared him most. His answer surprised me: “Teenage border guards in Africa high on drugs carrying Kalashnikovs.” Sometimes I got so involved with my assignment that I lost all touch with what my readers needed to know. For National Geographic, I spent four months spread across a year crisscrossing central Europe talking to archaeologists who specialized in the Copper Age, when Ötzi, the Iceman found intact melting out of a glacier on the Austria–Italy border, had lived. Toward the end of my travails, I was chatting with my editor in his office in Washington, DC. “You know,” I said, “the wheel was invented in the Copper Age. But what’s really fascinating is that the French archaeologists think that the first carts had two wheels, while the Swiss insist they had four.” The man gave me a withering look. Then he said, “I don’t think our readers give a goddamn whether the carts had two wheels or four.” But wait, I started to plead, before perspective snapped me back to earth.

  If dabbling in the worlds that others think matter more than anything else in life is both the bane and the glory of the freelance life, what all those encounters gave me was a glimpse of the endless richness of adventure. I came away from each immersion filled with admiration for the men and women who counted the days before one more expedition into the heart of their mysteries. In another life, I could have spent years trying to fathom what the runes on the hieroglyphic staircase unearthed just yesterday at Dos Pilas really said, or figuring out how the bluestones at Stonehenge were hauled 200 miles from southwest Wales, or trying to find the deepest cave on earth.

  Even when I’ve spent years on a subject for a book, rather than a magazine article, the fear that I’ve only scratched the surface bedevils me. In 1997, I came across a forgotten story of
an episode in Arctic Svalbard (Spitsbergen) that I decided at once was the most astounding true survival tale I’d ever come across. Its heroes were four Russian walrus hunters who were shipwrecked off the uninhabited island of Edgeøya in 1743. I spent years ransacking libraries from Harvard to London to Paris, then weeks in Russia searching for lost primary sources, ending with a trip to the sailors’ remote home town of Mezen, which no American had ever before visited. Most of the time, the journey spawned by the insatiable itch of the old story felt more like a wild goose chase than a proper quest.

  At the end of my research, with three companions, I spent thirteen days on Halfmoon Island, just off the coast of Edgeøya, where I believed the walrus hunters had fetched up, as I searched for clues to their ordeal. All four of us agreed: Edgeøya was the most godforsaken place in which we’d ever spent time. Yet when I wrote Four Against the Arctic, I was haunted by the knowledge that I had only peeled away the outer skin of the enigma.

  The men from Mezen had been cast into their fate carrying only the clothes on their backs, a handful of tools and gear, and 20 pounds of flour for food. They had survived not just for thirteen days, not for a few months, not just through the iron cold and darkness of a single winter, but for six years and three months. Nothing I had ever done, not even the climbs in Alaska of which I was proudest, could compare to that achievement.

  An illness that may well prove fatal nudges one into this sort of appraisal. And more than other diseases, cancer scares people—not only its victims, but the bystanders who hold their hands, even as they say to themselves, Thank God it isn’t me. The most empathic of comforters cannot resist the temptation to soften the stark reality of cancer. A few months into my treatment, I was a dinner guest at the home of one of my best friends, a woman who would have dropped whatever she was doing to rush me to the emergency room or just given me a hug whenever I was feeling sorry for myself.

  As I picked at the food that was so hard to swallow, she said, “We all get a chance to ride along with you on this journey you’ve undertaken.”

  I knew she meant her words as staunch support, but I was in a grouchy mood. “It isn’t a journey,” I snapped.

  She took a long sip of wine. “What is it, then?”

  I searched for the right word. “It’s an assault.”

  Language means too much to me, perhaps. In my pedantry, I was cruelly fending off my dear friend’s love. But death was in my thoughts. If only the course of a terminal illness should unfold as a journey! Instead, it is something else, something more frightening, something that tears apart one’s dignity, loss by tiny loss. Yet even our greatest poets cast the spiral toward death as a journey. For Shakespeare, it is a voyage into “that undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” For Tennyson: “And may there be no moaning of the bar, / When I put out to sea.”

  Even before I got sick, another metaphor about cancer set my teeth on edge, one that is so pervasive in our culture that it emerges in obituaries like a default setting: “So-and-so died after a long and courageous battle against cancer.” For some reason, that trope clings uniquely to cancer. We do not read about long battles against Alzheimer’s, or hepatitis C, or diabetes. What’s so pernicious about the metaphor is that it implies that if one had only fought harder, one might have (in John Wayne’s memorable phrase) “licked the Big C.” If twenty months of cancer have taught me anything, it’s that will is powerless against the blind proliferation of devouring cells. By casting the course of the illness as a battle between the self and an invader, our culture implicitly blames the patient who dies rather than recovers. In her brilliant polemic Illness as Metaphor (a book I fear too few oncologists have read), Susan Sontag nails this point: “Cancer is the ‘killer’ disease; people who have cancer are ‘cancer victims.’ Ostensibly, the illness is the culprit. But it is also the cancer patient who is made culpable.”

  The insidious truth about metastasized cancer is that no matter what kind of temporary stay the best care and the cleverest drugs can effect, the malady lurks in the body. And sooner or later it comes back. When it does, it usually appears in a more virulent guise. Of course, we must all die, and few are the endings that arrive as the ones we would script for an exit from this world.

  What does adventure have to do with all this? For me, the days when I was afoot in the wilderness, headed toward some uncertain goal, were the ones when I felt most alive, furthest from death, even when mortality hovered over my shoulder, as it did on the most dangerous of my climbs. During those days, the precious spark of existence hummed in my fingertips. Though it may be a romantic delusion, I’d like to think that what we call the zest for adventure lies dormant in all human beings, numbed by the creature comforts of home and the tedium of the job. I’d like to believe that wanderlust is encoded in our DNA, the legacy of the countless eons we spent as nomadic hunter-gatherers, when life itself depended on finding out what lay beyond the horizon, in the next valley over or on the other side of the high hill—so infinitely longer a span than the mere eleven millennia since our ancestors first turned to agriculture and tried to live in dwellings for more than a few weeks at a time. If my romantic notion has any merit, then it would recast “adventure” not as some exploit we choose to pursue, but as the response to an instinct embedded in our genes. It would help me understand why it’s so hard to articulate what drove me to adventure and what it gave me in the end.

  Consider the monarch butterfly, which rides thermals and wind currents to travel over 2,500 miles from its winter habitat in Mexico to summer destinations as far away as Canada—a journey unthinkable for modern humans unaided by motor vehicles. The butterfly sets out on its epic pilgrimage not by choice, but in response to a genetic injunction as basic as the need for sun and food—an injunction so precise that the fourth generation of monarchs returns to the same oyamel fir trees in Mexico from which its ancestors fled, where it begins the cycle anew. This in a creature whose life span covers at most eight months.

  Or consider the gray whale, whose annual migration takes it over 12,000 miles round-trip between its birthing grounds off Baja California and its feeding grounds in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. We know now that whales are intelligent animals, and that they communicate with one another through eerie vocalized cries, some at frequencies lower than the human ear can detect. But what are they saying? Not, I think, “Let’s go have an adventure.”

  I take comfort in the fact that even the greatest explorers have been notoriously poor at explaining why they set off on their quests. Mallory’s famous quip about Everest, “Because it’s there,” may be as good an answer as any.

  No one ever wrote about adventure more eloquently than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Wind, Sand and Stars is an elegy to aviation in the age when flying still depended as much on the nerve and pluck of the pilot as mountaineering or caving does on the skills of its adherents today. His account of his crash landing on a remote plateau in North Africa, and the desperate trek to safety performed by his mechanic Prévot and himself, is as stirring a tale of survival as anyone ever committed to print. A loner by instinct, Saint-Exupéry nevertheless found in the comradeship of the sky the ultimate rationale for risking his life to fly the mail to distant outposts in Africa and South America. In a passage eulogizing his friend Jean Mermoz, who had disappeared in an attempt to fly across the Andes in a malfunctioning airplane, Saint-Exupéry wrote:

  Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. . . .

  We forget that there is no hope of joy except in human relations. If I summon up those memories that have left me with an enduring savor, if I draw up the balance sheet of the hours in my life that have truly counted, surely I find only those that no wealth could have procured me. True riches cannot be bought. One cannot buy the friendship of a Mermoz, of a companion to whom one is bound forever by ordeals suffered in common. There is no buying the night flight with its
hundred thousand stars, its serenity, its few hours of sovereignty. It is not money that can procure for us that new vision of the world won through hardship . . .

  Across the fifty-five years during which I pursued adventure in one form or another, companionship of the sort that Saint-Exupéry extols has been the deepest reward, deeper even than, or rather inextricable from, the glory of a first ascent. At the age of nineteen, I formed the first bond with a partner whose kindred passion seemed to transform the act of inching our way up a mountain wall into a transcendent quest. Don Jensen and I met as sophomores at Harvard, and on our first expedition, to Denali’s Wickersham Wall in 1963, we shared the rope whenever we could. That blithe success, on top of winter first ascents in the Colorado Rockies, filled Don and me with the youthful conviction that we were invincible, that no mountain could defeat us.

  To test our perfect partnership, in 1964 Don and I tackled a smaller but far more difficult challenge, Mount Deborah by its unclimbed east ridge. Instead of rounding up a party of seven, as we had on Denali, we chose, against our mentors’ stern advice, to plunge into the Hayes Range as a team of two.

  Deborah defeated us 2,000 feet below the summit. During the course of our forty-two-day failure, locked in grim silence next to each other in the too-small tent, roped together on every step we took across three unexplored glaciers, we slowly grew to hate each other. The very sound of Don’s chewing as our rations dwindled sent me into a wordless fury, and he signaled his contempt for my days of weakness by shouldering his load and plodding onward. At last a 60-foot crevasse fall that nearly killed Don wrote the end to our misadventure. Yet even in the abyss of that dark dead end, he wanted to go on. It was I who declared the halt and escape that I thought would save our lives.