In this column distributed by the Elon University Writers Syndicate, Professor Rosemary Haskell examines what we as a society gain by the triumphs of those explorers who brave danger to accomplish new things. The column was published by the Fayetteville Observer and other media outlets.
A radio interview with Frank Rubio, the astronaut who last year had his stay on the International Space Station unexpectedly doubled, recently caught my attention. Rubio lived on the ISS for 371 days in all, a record for an American astronaut, because his ride home had broken down. He waited for NASA’s version of AAA to arrive.
I find such a situation unnerving, not to say terrifying. The message “You can’t go home” strikes fear. Rubio was coolly matter of fact in his telling of the story, but I shudder when I remember the 1970 Apollo 13 moon mission, which returned safely on only a wing and a prayer.
Whether becalmed in the vastness of space, clinging to a mountain ledge, sunk deep under the ocean, or snow-dazed in the Antarctic, the explorers and voyagers out there are a special breed. They encounter the natural world as the opponent who will challenge them to endure and survive the meeting.
Most people don’t want to volunteer for this assignment. I certainly never did, but I want to understand those who do, mainly because we can’t really comprehend our world if we don’t grasp its extremes as well as its familiar middle. Adventurers demonstrate whether people can plant footholds in the wilderness, teaching us about human nature as well as about places most will never experience.
Why do people go to these outer edges? Because that “edge” is there. As Edmund Hillary said of Everest — to claim firsts, or fastests, or longests; to prove that we are smart, capable, resilient and masters of our destinies. Some have practical goals — to find a new road through or to locate a unique object.
Extreme encounters may do more. In the words of Romantic poet William Wordsworth as he described a disorienting climb — “While on the perilous ridge I hung alone/ With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind/Blow through my ears.” His body becomes porous, its very fabric altered.
Iconic bravehearts including Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and Edmund Hillary exemplify the pioneer mentality. They are the 20th-century heroes who wanted to get there or do it first.
In a brutal irony, death and failure burnished some of their reputations. Scott’s 1912 party died returning from the South Pole while Shackleton’s 1914 plan to cross the Antarctic was thwarted when ice floes seized his ship and wouldn’t let it go. But Shackleton and his men all returned safely, after a brilliantly-navigated journey in an open boat through savage storms to South Georgia Island. Earhart disappeared into thin air, though yet other explorers may now have found her plane at the bottom of the ocean.
These people’s lives and deaths measure humans’ willpower and capacity for suffering. Their stories are worth reading.
Antarctic explorer Apsley Cherry Garrard’s 1922 “The Worst Journey in the World” is a riveting read. It makes you reach for extra blankets as you, too, experience the brutally cold and dark scientific expedition to retrieve emperor penguins’ eggs from a rocky ledge.
In recent years, outdoorsman Jon Krakauer has vividly anatomized the “man and nature” stand-off, chronicling in “Into Thin Air” his participation in the deadly 1996 Everest climbing season. His 2019 collection “Essays on Wilderness and Risk” analyzes the mentality of people who scale vertical rock faces, surf turbulent oceans, live near active volcanoes and descend to labyrinthine caves.
What could possibly go wrong? Krakauer harrowingly tells us, calibrating “risk” as he goes. He shows us how the wilderness may offer escape from the modern postindustrial landscape, a glimpse into other worlds, both heavenly and hellish, and even, for “problem teens,” a moral corrective.
Adventurers also have to accept the challenge of finding or creating the technology for their endeavors. Amundsen and Scott argued about dogs vs. ponies as Polar sled-pullers, and Amundsen got it right with his Nordic dogs. Steam and sail powered the Fram, Terra Nova and Endurance ships in their journeys to the South Pole. Electronic technology now means that there are helicopters on Mars, rovers on the Moon, and, of course, the ISS smoothly orbits the Earth.
But only last summer, Stockton Rush’s Ocean Gate submersible expedition to the wreck of the Titanic ended tragically. The craft made of carbon fiber and titanium appears to have imploded with the loss of all on board, while the rather routine failures of unmanned space probes — blowing up, losing contact — signal that relentless research and testing must support the voyage out.
Even at its most domestic and mundane, the relationship between people and the natural world is curious. We nurture our gardens. We watch birds, enjoying their strangeness and beauty. We walk by rivers. Only a relative few hazard the sharp edge of the natural world.
Frank Rubio and all the ISS crews, past, present and future: I take my hat off to you.
—
Views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not necessarily those of Elon University.