THESE DAYS, it’s possible to dwell in a high-rise, sleep hundreds of feet off the ground, and never experience mud or a spider in one’s house. Skyscrapers themselves generate their own weather, buffering us from the true bite of the cold. If you live in the heart of a modern city, it is possible to exist almost totally isolated from what we’ve come to think of as nature.
But, as the American poet Gary Snyder reminded us decades ago, “nature” is a human conceit. When we say wilderness, we mean the terrain beyond the familiar. It’s a word we now associate with landscapes severe and extreme—because mostly that’s what’s left of the wilderness, the marginal outlands. In just a few centuries we have tamed Earth’s more benign latitudes with asphalt, electricity, and agricultural fields. But what we call the “environment” is a kind of invention, too. We are a part of our planetary living space, and it is a part of us, written into our DNA.
This evolutionary connection to the wild must be one of the reasons people feel compelled to venture out to the edge of our habitable realm in crampons and Gore-Tex, on skis and in kayaks or on foot. When we go climbing, paddling, on walkabout, we crave an unmitigated, free-range connection with the outdoors. We want to be reminded of what it feels like to be human, as we’ve been human for almost two million years. This urge is so compelling, apparently, that many of us will risk frostbite, drowning, and altitude sickness—often at great personal expense—with no promise of glory or reward beyond the trip itself.
Why do we do it?
First, there is the mountain, the glacier, the desert, the long trek across the steppe. A landscape passes beneath our feet. In the thick of it, we have no choice but to engage, to breathe the air, feel its jagged surfaces in our hands, to hear it crackle underneath our feet. We are present and immersed. Perhaps we explore merely to break records, to be the first to reach the summit. Or, we want to dip into some hidden well in ourselves that is never accessed indoors. Maybe, when some of us return home, we’ll put our fingers to the keyboard.
For thousands of years, people have been doing just this, going on expeditions and then coming home to tell the tale. I imagine the first campfire stories originated this way. Tribal scouts travelled out, explored the beyond, and returned to report on what they’d found. These would not have been mere yarns—the clan would have depended utterly on this knowledge for food and safety. Perhaps storytelling has its roots in this imperative—to create a narrative map of our environment. Even now, wilderness and mountain writing—what we sometimes call adventure stories—seems made for narrative. The act of departing and coming home, climbing up and coming down, coincides perfectly with the shape of a story.
In the twenty-first century, wherever we go on the planet, chances are someone will have gotten there before us. Sometimes our destinations aren’t wild places at all. They’re wild only to us: unknown. But we can turn this into an advantage. We can take advantage of our unique point of view to create the story. Mount Everest is a fact of geography, buckled up from the earth’s crust millions of years ago. That tale isn’t new. The mountain has been climbed thousands of times since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s first ascent. And yet this isn’t the heart of the story, either. Everest is only the raw material. Until a man and a woman see the sun collapse along the ridge, until the place comes alive in their gaze, until then, the mountain is just a hunk of rock. Until they warm their frigid hands with tired breath as spindrift whirls all around, the tale doesn’t exist.
It is this potential alchemy—human being plus natural world—that gives the stories in this collection their dramatic, suspenseful magic. Jan Redford writes about the difference between climbing El Capitan and making the wrong moves in love; Karsten Heuer paddles across Canada with his family, revisiting the rivers and paths author Farley Mowat wrote about; Masa Takei explores, as part of his experiment in sustainable living, the complicated emotions of hunting. These essays recapture wild journeys in all their sensory vividness, so that when the writer’s heart races, our pulse quickens, too. This intermingling of the printed word and life itself is the hallmark of creative non-fiction, and it has the power to transfix and move us. It’s not just the snow on the trail or the sand blowing across the desert, but the experience of it, which is as singular as every one of us who slings on a backpack and steps across the threshold into the wind.
Even then, the adventure alone is probably not enough. An explorer who chooses to tell her story now must be deeply aware of the context. Wherever we go, chances are we’ll find humans who already live in these locales. This kind of writing is also an exercise in sensitivity. We must examine the footprints we leave behind, environmental, economic, and cultural. And any story in which a human protagonist struggles valiantly against nature is inevitably flecked with the irony that this wilderness is losing its tug-of-war with us and shrinking every day. In response to these complexities, the genres of mountain and wilderness writing are becoming more hybridized and fascinating by the day. When we pick up an expedition book or essay, chances are it will be part travelogue, part history or ecological saga—and part memoir.
A writer may even come to question her very motives for wanting to venture out in the first place. As readers of nonfiction, we have come to expect that the author will speak to us directly, guilelessly. She must be as brave on the page as she is on the slope. Why hit the trail? Why climb the mountain? Everyone has his own reasons. We must explore those, too. When we tell a true story, often enough it’s because we were changed by the experience. And it is that change that readers want most to discover. An expedition is often matched by a corresponding inner journey. A man crosses the trail of another young adventurer who disappeared in the Alaskan backcountry. A woman embarks on a journey of self-exploration as she climbs El Capitan, whose sheer granite face was once considered unassailable. The stories in this collection will take you to the high and far places we long to explore—and, sometimes, to the unmapped places within us as well. The explorers may also find more than they bargained for. En route to a goal that may never be reached, they discover something better, emerging from their voyages enriched and deeply affected by their experience.
All the better for the reader, who comes along for the exhilarating ride.