A Dangerous Appetite for Adventure

None of them wanted to die.

Not on Everest, not sailing out of Sydney, not in the misty mountains of southern Uganda.

But like thousands of us, they went where it was dangerous. Danger was part of the deal. For some, it was central to the deal.

A few died. It will not deter others.

“Adventure.” The word describes a booming school of outdoor activity and travel. It is a trend, and not a superfluous one in the 1990s. Often the word is paired magically with other words like “extreme” or “exotic,” beckoning us from tedium, from the worldly claims of scattered lives, from job, commute, information bombardment, fund-raising solicitations, dirty garages and retirement planning.

There is more to it, of course. Resort vacationers are similarly pressured. They choose safe destinations as escape. Adventure travelers are those who seek. I’ve been bumping into them on the trail for years.

The two Portland, Ore., adventurers who were slain in Uganda this week with six other travelers were, in ways, typical of the breed. They were not on their first such journey. They had honeymooned in Africa. They went back a second time for an East Africa sightseeing safari. Their third and fatal trip was months in the planning, according to friends. Surely those were months of sweet anticipation for their guided tour into one of the last habitats of the world’s remaining 600 or so mountain gorillas.

They were brainy people; they worked at the computer-chip company Intel. Yet they dared the wilds in a place of unstable and violent politics. The park where they camped borders two countries torn apart by years of ethnic slaughter.

The chances of being killed may have been no greater than from a traffic accident in Rome or a heart attack on the beach at Cancun--the kind of deaths that most Americans risk abroad. But their chances of dying an exotic, extreme death were greater indeed.

“People are looking to tap into something that’s primal,” says Sid Evans, an old wilderness hand and deputy editor of Men’s Journal, one of a growing number of national magazines that appeal to adventurers. “People need danger. It’s all about feeling alive. It’s the same reason that being close to a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park is an experience that stays with you.

“I’m not talking about seeing a bear from a car, but waking up in the morning and seeing grizzly tracks outside your tent. It’s something electric. And people are desperate for it because it’s something that’s not part of modern life. It clarifies things.”

A Quest for the Authentic Experience

The recipe is not so simple as the old wheeze about risk being the spice of life. If it were, we could save vacation air fare and run back and forth in front of freeway traffic for our adventures.

Rather, it’s the quest for what people perceive as authentic experience, of which risk is but one component, if usually submerged and unspoken.

The outdoors provides the most common backdrop because the wild is our link back to, yes, the natural, the primordial, the authentic.

Culture is another component because adventure often brings us close to people who are different, sometimes very different, by geography or experience. Because they are different, they challenge us to open our eyes and thinking from the everyday.

Adventure is a test of oneself--letting go and assuming chance in ways that cannot be replicated in the chambers of virtual reality or amusement park rides. These tests vary widely by degree: What ties a knot in the stomach of one person may not raise a flutter in another, but combined into a delicious mix, the adventure experience is savored and remembered by the instant. This is when life wells up and engages us wholly in the present. Unless danger steps into the foreground with gunshots or frostbite or howling winds.

I can attest to these sensations. I have hiked into those same Central Africa mountains to see the gorillas. It was in neighboring Rwanda, south of where the eight were killed. I was on assignment to see if the mountain gorillas had survived a grotesque and continuing civil war between the Hutus and Tutsis.

The threat of attack was real. Not from the gorilla. These majestic herbivores are habituated to people. The chest slapping by the silverback males is breathtaking in its loudness and authority. But almost always harmless. If charged, you roll into a ball on the wet mulch of the jungle and maybe get swatted.

The threat was from Hutu soldiers, countryless and desperate to bring havoc to the ruling Tutsis, a government supported by Uganda and helped by the U.S. This is the same strife that spilled into Uganda’s tourist camps this week. The Rwandan army sent a small patrol up the rainy flank of the gorilla mountains with me. Four years ago, a traveling American was, as now, a target for those out to destabilize the government.

Here, on that day, was the whole of adventure: the legendary fog-shrouded mountain redoubt of the gorilla; eye to eye with a family of some of the world’s rarest creatures; listening to their grazing sounds and moving as they moved through a jungle landscape that had become the violent battleground of cultures, whose fight was as sad as it was incomprehensibly hateful but which also, lest we forget, is a part of our imperfect natural world. Emotions rise to such exaggerated intensity in these circumstances that ions crackle under the damp fabric of one’s shirt. Awe fuses with anxiety; wonder swirls through the spirit at gale force. As always happens, one feels profoundly fortunate.

I would not trade five minutes of that day for a BMW.

Neither, though, did I expect to die.

I’m sure that no one in Uganda expected that either.

Our conceit? Perhaps. But sometimes we are harsh on ourselves after a tragedy. Affluence and the technology of air travel have opened adventure’s door for thousands of people, where it used to be the province of only the elite. Adventurers sometimes complain about the crowds, but they also honor kinship with one another.

Tragedy Doesn’t Deter Those Who Love Risks

When someone’s luck runs out, others are not daunted. In May 1996, 11 people perished in a sudden storm on Mt. Everest. Some of them were climbers of limited experience who hired guides to take them to the top. Afterward, commentators and seasoned high-altitude mountaineers expressed doubts about these kind of climbs, but people still demand to go.

Scott Fisher, owner of the Seattle guiding company Mountain Madness, perished while leading paying climbers off the summit of Everest in 1996. The woman who purchased the firm from his estate, Christine Boskoff, says client interest has grown “significantly,” although would-be climbers are screened and prepared as never before.

Various thinkers have labored to explain the psyche of risk. Many conclude that, for at least some, it is essential.

Evolutionary psychology is an emerging field of study in which behavior is explained in terms of needs that evolved in humans over tens of thousands of years. By this thinking, wanderlust is built into many of us since the days of cave dwellers. This is the impulse that drove our progenitors to explore.

Restless beings, we are. Our ancestors for millennia were self-selected to wander into places just like Uganda’s mountains. The urge, the satisfaction, the serenity and the edge that people find in such undertakings are, therefore, the most natural of things.

Sally Foster, evolutionary psychologist at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, explains that some people along the way evolved enlarged appetites for both “novelty and status,” ancient drives that are satisfied by adventure.

“Novelty” is another word for curiosity, status for achievement and leadership--linchpins to civilization. We emerged from the wild to make our cities and nations, but the wild remains our long-ago home and birthplace of our instincts, including, no doubt, our homing instinct.

Adventure travelers form their own social order, apart from the competition of career, education and standing at home. It is one of those endeavors where people learn about each other not with the question “What do you do?” but with “What have you done?”

For Foster, camping with her sons is adventure plenty, lying in a tent at night, feeling her senses heightened by the circumstance of being vulnerable. Others need a bigger jolt, and, as with many things involving the emotional chemistry of the brain, pleasure stimulates the desire for more pleasure, meaning that adventure, in its own way, is also naturally “addictive.”

Students of human behavior sometimes try to lump people into the categories of “risk takers” and “risk avoiders.” That may be oversimplified.

‘A Life-Changing Experience’

Not so long ago, I worked part time as a river boatman for a wilderness guide in the Brooks Range Mountains of the Alaskan arctic. I remember one client, the wife of a friend, who was bedridden sick with anxiety before our departure. She was, by her own admission, timid and had never done anything so wild as to venture into grizzly bear country and willingly forfeit her favored rung on the food chain.

We coaxed her along, from one bush plane to another, as we worked our way into the most remote part of America. She arrived under ominous conditions: with pelting rain, the sky forbidding black and the air throbbing with the flash-booms of lightning. Something snapped in her. A joy rose up in her that was palpable. Her teeth flashed not with a smile but a rejoice.

She slept hardly at all during the next 10 days. I remember her crouched in a cloud of mosquitoes, watching a pair of nearby grizzlies, her eyes as keen and alive as anything I’d seen.

“A life-changing experience,” she called it. It is a familiar phrase.

Perhaps for this reason, the Travel Industry Assn. of America, in a 1997 report, found that 98 million American adults took an adventure vacation within the last five years. That’s 50% of the traveling population. In the West, the number jumped to almost 60%.

By the industry’s rather loose definitions, 31 million took a “hard adventure” trip and 92 million a “soft adventure,” while 25 million did both. Not inconsequentially, 12% described themselves as fanatics who live for adventure.

Degree of Danger Becomes an Issue

One question looms over all inquiries into this subject: What degree of danger do adventurers actually expect, or deserve?

Many, no doubt, are seeking the taste of it without consciously relinquishing anything by way of security. Drivers do the same, enjoying the exhilaration of greater speed without calculating the risk.

“The insulated arrogance of yuppies,” says Robert Young Pelton, publisher of the guidebook “Fielding’s: The World’s Most Dangerous Places.” The 1,000-page volume was launched in 1996 and now sells up to 80,000 copies a year, with Pelton roaming the planet’s most turbulent landscapes, not in search of where to stay or eat but what to look out for.

He described being in Uganda himself last year on a hotel terrace when a bomb exploded and killed four. Still, Uganda is not a dangerous place by Pelton’s statistical calculations. After all, President Clinton stopped by last year.

The difference in such struggling Third World countries, Pelton says, “is that when things go wrong, they go terribly wrong. There is no 911. People are making their decisions after watching the Discovery Channel, and they’re not thinking of the consequences until they smell death.”

Surely, the tourists who went gorilla trekking on this ill-fated week were not seeking the full-armed embrace of danger. For that, one can choose many riskier places by far. But neither should danger have been discounted. Disease, extreme poverty, a suspicious blood supply are all commonly understood threats in Central Africa. In January, the magazine Conde Nast Traveler, which appeals to the well-heeled, began a feature on Uganda with an abundance of doubt:

“The U.S. State Department had issued a travel warning that spoke of troop movements in national parks and banditry in the Mountains of the Moon. Hospitals were primitive, roads dangerous . . . where AIDS is rampant and bugs are known to lay eggs under your skin or crawl up your nose and eat your brain.”

Some travelers would be repelled. But for others, obviously, that passage reads like an invitation.

“Travel is not more dangerous than it used to be. It’s safer, if anything,” says Mark Campbell of the long-established California company Mountain Travel/Sobek. “That’s why when awful events happen they go right to the front pages.”

Still, many adventure tour companies relentlessly push danger, or the illusion of it. Scuba magazines advertise dives with sharks. “Fly a MIG-25 to the edge of space,” reads an advertisement in another adventure magazine. “Climb a volcano!” “Piranha! Anacondas! Jungle!”

In December, it was sailors, not mountaineers or gorilla trekkers, who paid dearly for their thrills. Off the Australian coast in the Sydney-to-Hobart race, six died, six boats sank and 60% of the entered sailboats withdrew when a storm hit the feat with 90 mph winds.

Bruce McPherson, a Seattle yacht broker, has raced in the Sydney-to-Hobart four times, as well as most of the other great blue-water sailboat races. Was he shocked by the toll of the storm? Yes. Was he the least surprised that people risked venturing into waters famous for storms? Hardly.

“Life has become so stressed, we’re all like zombies. You have to do it. We need escapes. I think it’s in us all.”

Times researchers Anna M. Virtue and Lynn Marshall assisted with this story.