‘America’ Shows That Adventure Isn’t Dead

While watching the two-hour “Overland to America,” the video account of the 1993-1994 London-to-New York “Overland Challenge” expedition, you might ask yourself: Is Richard Creasey mad?

It might happen when Creasey’s team is stuck in a Siberian storm so fierce that truck interiors are full of snow. Or maybe when the crew thinks it can cross the Bering Strait in a giant amphibious tank and not sink into the deathly cold water.

If Creasey appears mad from our collective armchairs, imagine what Creasey’s frost-bitten colleagues think. A full-fledged mutiny never happens during “Overland to America,” which is testimony to human patience--and the obsession to complete a project.

Of course, Creasey’s brand of madness is the kind shared by all record-breaking explorers. Going where no one dared go before, Creasey mapped out a plan, in cooperation with the United Nations and such sponsors as Ford Motor Co., to travel by van, truck, tank and motorized sled across Europe and the giant Russian land mass to Alaska and on to New York.

As periodic narrator, Creasey suggests that he had socially redeeming motives for this unprecedented trip, such as proving that an international group of people could work together.

But the real motive--and here lies his journeyman’s madness--is that he wanted to do something no one had done, like the hard cases who want to climb Everest via the impossible route.

Still, for all of the team’s gutsiness, goodwill and Creasey’s obvious care for his followers, their brushes with death seem almost insanely senseless. When the amphibious Arktos tank breaks down for the umpteenth time while traversing the terrifyingly risky Bering Strait, Creasey and his navigator, Jeff Macinnis, actually consider walking across the rest of the strait by foot, just so the “Overland Challenge” can stay overland.

What Creasey’s journey really proves is that there are still adventures to be had, including Creasey’s plan to do this trip all over again. That’s right. Again.

* “Overland to America” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.