Wanderlust Kings

I have begun to feel that the adventurous mind is a diseased mind. The adventurer sacrifices safety and comfort for the perilous, often dangerous. They seek to pit themselves against odds stacked against them, they like to walk as close to death as possible and come back to share the story. How then can such people be thought of as reasonable, even cultured. Of course there are many types of adventurer, there are the mad, the vainglorious, the courageous, the list could go on and on. However it is the willingness in most to strive beyond normal goals that makes them so intriguing.

Of course fame and privilege is a powerful motivating factor in many such people, they will only leave their doorstep if it means they will come back with money in hand. I am more interested in the people who trek without expectation of reward or recognition, they plunge head first into the wild places to see them. Though now we live in a culture that thinks that adventuring is a cathartic process, meant to be an almost religious experience, a person communing with nature. I don't like that idea, when I explore a new place I look at it in wonderment, I marvel and consider who went before me. To hope for an afterlife for myself would be to surrender to the possibility that I can see all of this when I am dead, to put off what I should do in this life for another, to surrender to the fear of the unknown.

I am so badly inflicted with this disease, this need to explore I am certain it would be the death of me in any other time. If a person suggests that a passage is impossible I will be the first to volunteer to conquer it. Is it though, conquering, do I seek to subjugate, or control what is deemed beyond me? I think I want to show the limitless potential of humanity, a path deemed unworkable has its way, we need only apply ourselves to it. I burn with the desire to shuffle off the trappings of society, the pathetic joke that is 'modern life' for the places rarely seen, the mile just beyond the horizon.

Perhaps this isn't a disease, a corruption of thought. Perhaps the explorer isn't a vestigial part of society, in a world downloadable to a desk top. Perhaps we simply too keenly feel the need human urge to learn, to know. I want to see the world, but not as a tourist, I wish to see the peoples and culture, I wish to understand their society and their history, swim in their lives and envision their history. I am not the Victorian explorer, I can't judge the lives of those I meet by my own standards. We cannot discriminate against the cannibals and naked peoples of the Amazon or East Asia. We are only worthy of viewing it, containing our fear or misunderstanding and returning to the world and informing. I want to fill in the blank spaces on the map, though non are left, they are the holes in my map, my understanding of this world. I want to see the crown jewels of Europe, the seats of Empires long laid to waste by time and environment. I wish to pass through the deserts of Arabia, to feel the blistering heat of the Nefud, so I can understand what it meant to those who would dare to have done it. I wish to see the decadence of the oil barons, their poor hidden from the rich contractors, man made islands, like Ozymandias warning against the desire to be timeless. I want to see the spice markets of India, the open sewers, and the jungles in the north that hid the Thugee from British view. Nepal, Burma, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Ulanbatar. I want to ride a train into Siberia, and ponder on the Romanov's, visiting Moscow I would look for black cats and checkered suits. Africa, the jungles and gorillas, the booming diamond industry, the crushing debt and fear of witchcraft. Name the town and I wish to see it, no matter how small or far removed ask me to go there for a day and I will, so that I can tell the world what lies just outside their border.

The rainbow array of flags, tied to the mountains, when each one blows away a wish is granted. Gold hammered day and night into thin strips to be applied to statues of the Buddha. the bones of Saints and pieces of the 'true cross, in reliquaries, thousands passing by in reverence. Xingu tribesman, sitting in a canoe, fishing with a string and hook, a trick they learned from a dead Englishman eighty years ago, they store the catch in ceramic pots, identical to ones they made seven thousand years ago. I am desperate to not read these stories, you cannot hope to ever know it all, but knowing even a fraction of what it means to see the sun rising over Alexandria, Tokyo, Kinshasa or the Mato Grosso can sustain a soul their whole life. The search is endless, the empty space in a persons knowledge can never truly be filled, but it is the journey that makes it worthwhile.

I cannot be one of those who satisfies themselves with stories, with imagined empires, I cannot sustain my being with mere illusions as so many do, with games, movies, half hearted promises. I fear I will burst if contained too long without the road before me, locked in a job, locked in a life not even worth contemplating. I live only in fear that I will never leave these shores, or that if I do, I will never come back to tell my story to my close few friends who would care to hear it. i sit now, looking out the window at the trees, blowing in the wind. In my mind I am floating past them, over them, looking forward, traversing the miles in seconds. Rushing over everything, taking it in and I am seeing the world fly by, the people, the animals, the rugged mountains and soft green hills. Yet I am here, and must remain here, with this one tree. To me now, the rest of the world is as distant as the Moon, visible, but too far to touch, to see the powdery silt of its surface fall through my hand and fall like a microscopic snow. This is the anguish of an explorer, to know that there is a beyond, but to not have the means to attain it. It is what brought Walter Raleigh to the executioners block, it sent Magellan to his death at the hands of natives, it guided Percy Fawcett to his unmarked tomb in the Amazon. So it is for the explorer, let the mind perish with inactivity, or send the body to perish in pursuit of the next horizon.

I am not an ordinary man.

The Great Race!

What's that, you don't know this film? Well you should watch it! Because if you don't you probably won't understand what this is all about, but then again this isn't actually about the film "The Great Race" it's about another race.

Apparently for the last few years there has been a race going on, which I have not been made aware of, and which by my understanding would be precisely the kind of race that I would expect to be involved in. In essence this is an event or activity that is essentially me, an adventure so intriguing that I feel compelled to find a way to make it happen.

The race is called the Mongol Rally, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Rally, and it appears to be perfect in execution. You select what is described as a "crappy car" and arrive in Hyde Park in London. When the flag drops and the 200 contestants "go" as it were, you begin a trek to Ulan Bator in Mongolia. There is no route, no plans, just people all trying to make it there in one piece. Some take routes through Istanbul, others have gone to the top of the world to try and make it. Many racers are forced to quit, and once you've arrived your car is left and given to the government of Mongolia to use as it needs.

Imagine the adventures that await you, you begin huddled in your dilapidated hunk of junk, held together by duct tape and glue then speed off over uncertain roads and strange vistas. No guides, no plans, no rules except get there!

Apparently the whole thing is organized by this company, http://www.theadventurists.com/index.php

Who although being something akin to an "organization" have what sounds like my kind of philosophy. There isn't a competition on there I could think of that I wouldn't want to try. these are the things dreams are made of, harrowing pursuits for fortune and glory, dusty places better left untrod, unexpected events and unlikely scenes.

Standing astride the mountains of mundane thumb biting mollycoddles I would stretch my legs and take long bounding steps in fine pin striped slacks and immaculately polished boots. Brushing the heads of the common crowds, content to watch their prime time TV my black frock coat would catch the breeze and direct me like sail. Perched crookedly on my brow a top hat, to let everyone know that this was not a gentleman to be taken with a grain of salt, oh no! This was an extraordinary gentleman with extraordinary plans! People would look to me and swatting at malaria infected mosquitoes, their t-shirts clinging to their backs and say "What's this, the ghost of an adventurer! Isn't he hot under all that wool?!" and I would stoop to greet them, my filthy Fiat rumbling behind me and I would toff my hat to them and say "Never hot! To be hot is to be nervous, to be nervous is to have lost faith in the adventure! Here my good men, take a sup of water, my treat." and before they had time to eek out a 'thank you' I am gone in a cloud of dirt and the sound of distant brass bands.

Why I Am Dumb

There are quite a few reasons I am dumb, my rudimentary math skills are certainly a strong sign. Then of course there's the unbelievable notion that more than four or five people come here in a given week, one of them is usually me might I add. However these reasons aren't completely satisfactory for my description of myself as being dumb.

I rarely visit ebay, usually I cross paths with it when I have a need unfulfillable by regular businesses. This equates to me walking away from the standard economy of big box stores, past the home town economy of Mom and Pop shops, and straight into the shadow economy of guys with neck beards and cheetoh stained fingers, living in lightless caverns selling rare trinkets. About 90% of the time things work out, I make a deal with the pasty Deep Ones and go about my business, but every once and again I make some foolish discovery and then through a series of idiotic decisions I end up in a world of hurt.

So, in the past few weeks I have been analyzing my need to adventure and cut a figure again. Which then leads me to wonder what I don't have, that I have wanted in the past, but previously been without the means to acquire. In this case, I have been reading The Lost City of Z, the story of intrepid explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest to find a lost city in the Amazon. Naturally he dies and no one sees him again, but the mystique and intrigue around him is tangible and potent on certain weak minds. In the book there are a handful of pictures of Fawcett, and although in my own anachronistic nature I have steadily come into the possession of plenty of interesting articles of clothing, one which has eluded me, Jodhpurs, otherwise known as riding breeches. You still probably have no clue what these are, so I'll further the description, they are those riding pants which flare at the thigh and tie at the knee, creating something of a puffy side.

I decided to head to ebay to look for some antique breeches, as modern riding breeches are merely tight white pants. Well, much to my surprise, and future chagrin, I found two pairs. The first pair is made entirely of wool, unlined, light green in color, it's from early 1918, and belonged to a poor enlisted American officer. The second pair, from the same dealer, are made of a more traditional and vastly less itchy material, and are from 1927, also U.S. Military in nature. Both in fine condition. The dealer also had a woolen sleeping bag from World War II, which I decided would do well in the back of any future automobile I had, because you never know where you may have to lay your head when adventure calls you.

So, based on previous experiences on ebay I assumed that all of these items would soon be on the block and skyrocketing in price. so i placed a single bet on each, with the intention of maybe only actively focusing on one, but leaving it open to snatch another should my main attention get to far ahead. Well damnation, no one has bid but me, or rather the one person who bid, bid a dollar more and gave up, not even making it close to my upper limit on the item. So now, with less than 23 hours to go i am winning all three items, when I really only intended on getting 1. Now I could simply buy the one I actually wanted and leave the rest unpaid for, but that's bad eggs isn't it? I don't want to get on Lady ebays bad side, she's probably where I will be getting my next car from.

Now I will also add a little addendum, riding breeches only come to the knees, and I have no knee boots (decidedly more expensive than breeches), so in the end to actually wear them I will have to find a low price pair of knee high boots, which will then open another line of reasoning...black boots or brown? If black won't i look quite a bit like a Nazi? But I would assume it would be easier to find black. Oh well, this is all in the future and who knows, maybe you've always wanted a pair of riding breeches and now I've informed you and you can save my bacon.

Death of Adventurism...

"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look

behind the ranges-"
Rudyard Kipling

Perhaps it's merely me, or my human brains own ability to create links between unrelated events, but I think part of the decline of society as of late stems from a few things. Of course the obvious one is that the economy is in the dumps, then there's Fox news asking that we plunge a stake into Obama's heart because he is a vampire coming to take our guns (no lie, their words, not mine). then there's the surveillance and internet censorship...I could go on for days about all the manifest ills that plague the West and modern society. But maybe, just maybe, this is all because we have colored in the map all the way.

Perhaps once satellites went circling and the last of the explorers returned home to their societies is when the nervous energy started building in us. There were no more monsters, or ruins to be found in lost places, untouched, unseen in jungles or deserts. We were asked to look skyward and in the deep oceans for uncharted expanses. The problem with space is that once you're in it there is really nothing there, no ruins, no animals, no sound. Every planet we reach is dead, and all the places we can see are beyond our grasp or intellectual facilities to fathom. Also, as with the deep, we cannot go there. Less than a handful, a fingernail sliver of society can go either to the stars, to sit idly looking back at the completed map, or into the deep (more satisfying I'd say). But the common cannot do this, we can't set our sights on a distant place spoke of in rumor and shrouded in a fog of mysterious talk, they no longer exist. Now when gripped by that need to venture far from home, or seek new shores we turn to media, or worse yet we bottle the need and redirect it towards our fellows unexpectedly.

That is to say that exploration, mapping, true Adventurism is dead. It was natural for people to want to learn more about their world, and the things within, but how sad it is to know that when the last photo was taken on a flyby that the world shrunk, and shrinks still.

How cloying it must be to all who want to read the exploits of an explorer, or if we have the resolve to, explore ourselves. I'm of course not implying that we look inward for vast unexplored areas, you can only explore those by interaction with your fellows. Nowadays when you think of nature or the wild it is painted as quest of man versus his own demons. Hiking, climbing, kayaking are all sold as therapy now, they are for us to look inward and connect with that part of us that wants to explore. What then arises is an industry and an ideology around it, with expensive gear, GPS navigation, pole-less tents and the like, sending businessmen off on weekends to exotic places so they can be back to the gold course on Monday and tell of their "adventure". Adventure isn't like that, it's going where you don't know what's behind the next turn, and bringing back the information for others to follow in your footsteps, it's the pursuit of illumination to lost secrets. Today we have tarted up adventure to sell pick up trucks or energy drinks.

Or I'm probably just rambling, but I know what I want. I want there to be sights unseen, I want there to still be blank spots on maps and ruins in the jungles. I want to explore, and show the world what was once missing is now found, but I can't, because mankind has moved on. We don't care for stories like that now, we have our internet and can connect with any place we want, sate our needs with photos or videos.

I want to go on an adventure again, to outfit myself with a means of transport and a loose idea of what lies on the other side of the mountains and go for a little while. To pick up ideas and memories, holding myself to no schedule but my own, and stopping at my whim to see what is out there. But can I is the question that is most troubling, for at some point a persons life is traded out and replaced with a new one whose sole responsibility is to be responsible. Everyday I hear about the accumulated wealth of my neighbors and fellows, I hear about their doctors appointments and concerns about whether they'll be back from lunch or dinner on time. They talk about short vacations and weekends as if those were the only thing to live for, two days here and there for however many years they have before them. How then does someone weigh their life against this, when afraid of such a life a person lashes out and pursues adventures and irresponsibility to escape or to retain their identity.

I however don't know, I am uncertain about all of it. Perhaps I would be dead in a jungle somewhere if born earlier, more than likely I would. That is part of the adventure, to move past fear and keep going, battling against a world set on killing you. Weekend adventurers never have to fear about going this far, neither do I, because there is no point and no place to push oneself that way, or at least if there are there's no actual purpose to do so.

So perhaps in no short time I will gather my resources and disappear for a week and explore the countryside on my own, perhaps then I won't feel as though I'm not putting my youth to good use. We only have a single life, and death waits around every turn, if you can't do what you want in life why are you doing what you're doing?