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Outside Magazine December 2001

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Seismic Shift (Cont.)

ON AN ADVENTURE you are self-selected, a volunteer; you participate of your own free will. In war, the challenge is to overcome the enemy, which directly or indirectly means killing others. On an adventure the challenge is not to take life, but to enrich it, to test one's will and skill and stamina against the immutability of the earth. Yes, there is sometimes pettiness, selfishness, pride, and hubris, but the gestalt of adventure is still the antithesis of war.

Fascists and fetishists of war have smugly described adventure as an adolescent surrogate for war—as if war were the apogee of human engagement. But even with all the staggering acts of heroism that warfare can engender, even if giving your own life so that others may live is irrefutably the highest sacrifice a human can make, anyone who has been through a war knows the mendacity of such thinking. The boy I'd met on the border of Sierra Leone who'd had his hands chopped off by the rebels knows. The legless soldier in Russia knows. The nine-year-old girls in northern Burma who had been raped by government soldiers know. To all the victims, war—even when morally obligatory and politically unavoidable—is the zenith of human failure.

Adventure opens doors to some of the highest human instincts—courage, camaraderie, patience, tenacity—without simultaneously opening a Pandora's box of atrocities. I remember Andy Lapkass, retching with pleurisy, warming soup for me on the north face of Everest when I was too weak to even light the stove. I remember Belgian hang gliders rescuing me and my brother Daniel after he broke his leg deep in Morocco. I remember the maroon-robed Buddhist monks hiding me from the police in Arunachal Pradesh.

And yet adventure is largely a luxury of peace. And when peace fails, the spirit of adventure is inescapably twisted into the martial form of war.

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