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The Outside Adventure Canon The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer: 10-6 By Brad Wieners & The Editors
Wilfred Thesiger (1959) THE LAST GREAT British explorer? Eric Newby, for one, might jokingly beg to differ, but that's because Thesiger called him a pansy when they met in the Hindu Kush. Sir Wilfred, the now-92-year-old troubadour who explored Arabia's Empty Quarter before the oil fields tamed Bedouin culture, valiantly resists the lame camel jokes made by so many of his contemporary countrymen and, in contrast to many of today's travel diarists, rarely makes himself the subject of his own stories. Thesiger's love of the desert is never easy, always hard-won. "I climbed a slope above our camp and bin Kabina joined me. I was hungry; I had only half my portion of the ash-encrusted bread the night before. The brackish water which I had drunk at sunset had done little to lessen my nagging thirst. Yet the sky seemed bluer than it had been for days. The sand was a glowing carpet set about my feet." For us, the question was merely, Which Thesiger? Yes, Marsh Arabs may be, as some critics claim, the better book, but Arabian Sands is electric. And sure, we love those pithy quotes from T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but we're in no mood for that bombast cover to cover. Stick with Thesiger: He'll make you wish you were born 50 years earlier and could make the trips he did—with him. 9. COMING INTO THE COUNTRY John McPhee (1976) LIKE THESIGER, there's no question that McPhee belongs on this list—the struggle comes in choosing which book. We were charmed by the slightly obscure Survival of the Bark Canoe. And certainly we heard from those who agitated for Encounters with the Archdruid, about environmental guru David Brower. But in the end our vote went to Coming into the Country. Drawing on a marathon canoe trip down Alaska's Salmon River and a season in a cabin on the Yukon River, McPhee knits together a passion for the backcountry, an unsentimental yet stirring view of Alaska's native tribes, and a hard look at the many misguided attempts to manage the Last Frontier's natural resources (with a brilliant recap of the pipeline saga). McPhee pretty much tackles all the big questions here: "To a palate without bias—the palate of an open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian—which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou's eye?" Really, no one has done a better job of combining ride-along backcountry hijinks and lucid parsing of enviro policy than McPhee does here. Four hundred thirty-eight pages, and nothing less than the fate of Western civ, on a canoe trip. 8. INTO THE WILD Jon Krakauer (1996) IS INTO THIN AIR the more influential book? Absolutely. Is it the more thrilling? Arguably. However, not only is Into the Wild more arrestingly written and reported than its more famous cousin, it also stands up better to rereading. And whereas Into Thin Air delivers a stinging indictment of what's wrong with modern mountaineering—including ill-prepared individuals trying to "buy" the world's summits—Into the Wild, which follows the final days and nights of a young idealist named Chris McCandless, speaks to anyone who has ever yearned for something pure, to be free of the affluenza of American life, to be self-reliant. Like Into Thin Air, Into the Wild began as an article in Outside. But the book combined that investigation with material from new sources, people McCandless had met en route to Alaska who were brought out of the woodwork by the article. One of those whom McCandless touched most profoundly was Ronald Franz (not his real name), an 80-year-old so taken with the young man that he waited at McCandless's campsite in the desert near the Salton Sea for his return. From the accounts of people like Franz to close readings of McCandless's underlined copies of Doctor Zhivago and Walden ("No man ever followed his genius till it misled him"), Krakauer not only gets why McCandless retreated to the bush, but makes use of his own backcountry experience to empathize with him. Some readers have suggested that Krakauer is too easy on the kid and that McCandless ought to be viewed as suicidal, manipulative, or ridiculous, but Krakauer keeps it all an open question. Into the Wild reminds us that the very qualities of being in the wilderness that thrill and restore us—or lead us, as Roderick Nash wrote, to "either melancholy or exultation"—can swiftly take our lives.
Captain Joshua Slocum (1900) A CENTURY LATER, Slocum's account of the first-ever solo circumnavigation of the earth, and then some, on his 37-foot sloop, Spray, remains the title by which all other sailing books are judged—not only because of its derring-do, but because it's completely winning. "The day was perfect, the sunlight clear and strong," Slocum writes. "Every particle of water thrown into the air became a gem, and the Spray, making good her name as she dashed ahead, snatched necklace after necklace from the sea, and as often threw them away." Few contemporary sailing accounts come close to matching Slocum's logs, not least for the captain's sly wit: "Some hailed me to know where away and why alone. Why? ...The shore was dangerous!" This coming from a man who'd previously suppressed a mutiny and survived an ocean storm in a canoe. Sailing Alone Around the World only improves with age, because reading it is like being present at the creation of the modern explorer-adventurer. Thoreau may have convinced us to return to the wild; Slocum revealed how that journey could be a feat of endurance, and a lighthearted spectacle to boot. If only the multitudes who followed his example did so on the page. Slocum never sells you on his story; he just tells it.
F.A. Worsley (1931) FIRST OFF, he was there. Sure, Alfred Lansing's 1959 Endurance has stood the test of time as a journalist's chronicle, and Caroline Alexander broke new ground four years ago with her own Endurance's comprehensive retelling of Sir Ernest Shackleton's epic survival story. But as captain of the real HMS Endurance and navigator of the lifeboats he and Shackleton used to effect a rescue across the Southern Ocean, Frank Worsley proved himself not only one of the finest small-craft sailors of the 20th century, but also a less official, more anecdotal, and, ultimately, more electrifying diarist than Sir Ernest himself. By now, most people know this story down to the last dog and cat, but the immediacy of Worsley's account revitalizes it. If you don't feel his sorrow in losing his ship to the ice pack, share his delirium glissading down to the South Georgia whaling station that would be their salvation (a scene to which Shackleton, ever careful not to seem whimsical, gives only a cursory line in South), or tear up when the two men return to their friends on Elephant Island 128 days after they set out, you don't love adventure.
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