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The Outside Adventure Canon The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer: 20-16 By Brad Wieners & The Editors
Ian Frazier (1989) TALK ABOUT A ROAD TRIP: Frazier begins this gem with an ode reminiscent of Whitman—"Away to the great plains of America, to that immense western short-grass now mostly plowed under!"—and ends with 65 wonderful pages of notes on everything from Dodge City's other nicknames ("Bibulous Babylon of the Frontier") to how Native Americans used their bodies as alarm clocks by drinking lots of water before going to bed. In between, he cruises from the Black Hills to Turkey, Texas, holding forth with visionary zeal: "Personally, I love Crazy Horse," he writes, "because, like the rings of Saturn, the carbon atom, and the underwater reef, he belonged to a category of phenomena which our technology had not then advanced far enough to photograph." Sure, we fought over whether Frazier packed enough red-blooded adventure into this book to make the cut. He gets around mostly by car, so we might just as easily have tapped Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, or Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, or gone straight for the source of our adolescent wanderlust with On the Road. Well, we could have, and we didn't—not because we don't love those other asphalt serenades, but because Great Plains both delivers a song of the open road and defibrillates the heartland like no book we know.
Norman Maclean (1992) MACLEAN MAY BE be best known for the novella and short stories collected in A River Runs Through It, but the nonfiction Young Men and Fire, an unfinished work written in his "antishuffleboard" years and published two years after his death, has every bit the passionate following River did before Redford brought it to the screen. In many ways, this is the original smoke- jumper story, reopening the file on one of the worst firefighting disasters in history, the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949. Some of the earliest jumpers chuted in and set to work on the massive Montana blaze not far from Maclean's cabin; two hours later, 12 of the 15 had been burned "like squirrels." By turns intensely beautiful—rarely is something so dangerous rendered so lyrically—and exquisitely erudite on the physics of fire, Maclean's affecting book is full of taut passages that jack your pulse rate as the men try to outpace the runaway blaze. "The grass and brush of Mann Gulch could not be faster than it was now," Maclean writes, as the smoke jumpers realize they are hemmed in by a ridge. "It could run so fast you couldn't escape it and it could be so hot it could burn out your lungs before it caught you." 18. RUNNING THE AMAZON Joe Kane (1989) AS RUNNING THE AMAZON opens, our man Kane is something of an Outside Everyman. He's been editing a newsletter for the Rainforest Action Network; he arrives in the Andes toting a copy of The Portable Conrad; he's joking about being shot at by the Shining Path. (Soon enough this won't be a joke.) He's also the only American among nine men and one woman attempting the first descent of the Amazon. Not a splashy writer so much as a sharp one, Kane starts slowly but soon has you gulping down chapters the way the team knocks back pisco: "At the beginning at least, whitewater adrenaline comes cheap. It's the river doing the work, of course, but like a teenager with a hot car, one forgets what the true power source is. Arrogance reigns....You think: Let's get on with it." And Kane does, observing how arrogance gets chastened to humility, and noting each snag of dysfunction in a team of which only four go the distance. It's that combination of interpersonal struggle and poignant scenes of life on the river that elevates Running the Amazon above the deluge of first-descent books. That and the fact that he had 4,200 miles of material to work with.
Bernard Moitessier (1971) "WHEN YOU HAVE long skirted vast expanses stretching to the stars, beyond the stars, you come back with different eyes." So writes Moitessier, contemplating his return to dry land after ten months on the open ocean. We love this book because of its sheer boldness: At the head of the pack in the 1968 Golden Globe, the first round-the-world solo yacht race, the author passes up the chance to claim victory and just keeps going. Moitessier ultimately puts ashore in Tahiti, having slingshotted a farewell note aboard a passing ship and jettisoned his clothes and many cases of good red wine along the way. At sea the Frenchman is a holy fool, disillusioned by society and reluctant to let go of the ineffable feeling of well-being he gains at sea. There are any number of supposedly more gripping, can't-put-it-down seafaring stories (see the sad tale of his fellow racer Donald Crowhurst on page 65), but we challenge you to find one more appealing than Moitessier's thoughtful and high-spirited log. And that goes for the man who inspired him, Joshua Slocum, number seven on this list. It's no coincidence that Moitessier named his 40-foot steel ketch Joshua. 16. TRACKS Robyn Davidson (1980) YOU READ Robyn Davidson and think: I've had friends like you. Friends around whom fun tends to metastasize. Friends you facetiously hate, because they blow into town and stage weekends it takes weeks to recover from. No question, she's plumb crazy—"gone tropical" as she puts it—but crazy in the best sense of the word. At 27, the young Australian arrived in Alice Springs with six dollars, trained two wild camels (you try it), and set off for the Indian Ocean with the semiferal dromedaries, two tame ones, and her dog. But behind the madcap drama of the "camel lady," as Davidson became known, are a young woman's complicated emotions about the end of adventure and the arrival of fame. Reaching the ocean after 1,700 miles, she "rode down that stunningly, gloriously fantastic pleistocene coastline with the fat sun bulging on to a flat horizon and all I could muster was a sense of it all having finished too abruptly, so that I couldn't get tabs on the fact that it was over." Just weeks later she'd be feted in New York, realizing that she "was forgetting that what's true in one place is not necessarily true in another. If you walk down Fifth Avenue smelling of camel shit and talking to yourself you get avoided like the plague." Davidson is the world's most reluctant darling—but walking wild, ragged, and alone, she blew the dust off the tired, musty feet of white-male adventure.
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Reproduction of material from any pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.
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