In 1895, a lean, quiet sailor named Joshua Slocum cast off from the harbor of Gloucester, Mass., in a 37-foot sloop named the Spray. A group of people called out to him, “Where away and why alone?”
Where away and why alone? That’s what most of us wonder, I think, when we scratch our heads over those people who don’t seem to be made of the same stuff as the rest of us. They have a wild gene dancing on the spiral staircase of their DNA, a rogue chromosome.
What they have is something beyond courage, even though it takes courage to make it manifest. It’s a kind of ceaseless zeal that keeps the fingers drumming on the tabletop while everybody else is putting their feet up, the kind that makes a certain nerve in the leg twitch, even when they’re asleep.
I don’t know exactly what to call it, but I know the seven astronauts aboard the Columbia space shuttle had it. Slocum, who wrote about his adventures in a classic tale called “Sailing Alone Around the World” (1899), had it, too. Like the Columbia astronauts, who perished Saturday when the shuttle broke apart minutes before landing, Slocum died doing what he loved: He was lost at sea in 1909.
They all had it. It cost them their lives, but not following their hearts would have cost them far more. They took risks not because they were daredevils or showoffs or crazy fools, but because they knew instinctively that there is something crucial and exquisite about pushing limits, about defying all kinds of gravity: not just the atmospheric kind, but the opinion kind, too, the staid, dreary, authoritative directives that insist, “No, no, no.”
They are not like you and me, these explorers, and it’s no use pretending otherwise, no use trying to make them seem like regular folks who just enjoy a thrill every once in a while, like visitors to an amusement park.
The seven astronauts, like the Joshua Slocums, like the Robert Falcon Scotts and Ernest Shackletons — British polar explorers who weathered unimaginable hardships in some of the least hospitable places on earth — and like the Lindberghs and the Earharts, stand apart. They occur in nature only rarely.
From a Darwinian standpoint, that may be a good thing: The failure rate is high among intrepid pioneers, and the price of failure often is death. The future of the species, you could argue, depends as much upon the more cautious as it does upon the bold, fearless adventurers.
But then again, it’s the adventurers who make the species matter.
It’s the seven Columbia astronauts. And it’s people such as Lynne Cox, the long-distance outdoor swimmer whose article “Swimming to Antarctica” is found in the Feb. 3 New Yorker, an essay that many may have read, as I did, just a day or so before the Columbia catastrophe. I was already thinking about the casual gallantry of explorers and adventurers, about how calm they are in the face of the unknown and its attendant swarm of perils, from Cox’s story. “I was forty-three years old, and I needed a project that was more challenging, one that would draw on all my experiences,” she writes, “and it suddenly occurred to me that what I wanted to do was swim to Antarctica.”
That is not what would occur to most of us on our 43rd birthdays. And it isn’t just an adrenaline junkie’s aim for the vein, either. As Cox explains, the water in the Antarctic Peninsula can hover just above freezing. “No one knew how far someone would be able to swim in those temperatures, and I wondered what the effect of the cold would be for every degree below thirty-eight degrees.”
In the aftermath of Saturday’s tragedy, the family members of the shuttle astronauts were magnificent in the many interviews they gave. They were mourning, to be sure, but they were also absolutely steadfast in one idea: Their loved one had died doing what she or he wanted to do, what she or he felt was important. Their sentiments seemed to echo how an anonymous admirer had described Slocum: “A courageous and tenacious confronter of life, a resolute battler with the elements, an asserter against a world he did not make, he had led, not a comfortable life, perhaps, but one from which he demanded meaning.”
Meaning, for many of those who undertake extraordinary ventures, is derived from their spirituality — an ever-evolving sense of something greater than the individual. That’s what keeps high adventures from being purely selfish endeavors. They lead outward, not inward, and have the potential to take the rest of us along with them.
The debates have already begun, of course, over the safety of America’s space program, especially manned space flight. Many scientists find the latter silly and wasteful; we can get the same information from unmanned flights, using computers and robots. These debates spilled across the Sunday morning talk shows and will continue to rage in the coming week’s news stories.
But in another sense, the debates are irrelevant: No matter what anybody says, adventurers will have their way. They’ll do what they do, regardless. Certain funding questions must be settled, priorities set forth, but the essence of space flight — like the essence of ocean and polar exploration before it — is passion, and it is easier to countermand gravity than passion.
“We will fly again,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who flew aboard Columbia as a congressman in 1986, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “It’s important to us as adventurers and explorers. . . . The nation needs a vision.”
The great thing about the adventurous spirit that so enlivens and enlightens our world is that even if you don’t have it yourself — and most of us don’t and never will — you can behold it and appreciate it. The late Carl Sagan never went anywhere in a rocket, but the acclaimed astronomer could tell you why it was important that other people did. “In all the history of mankind,” he declared, “there will be only one generation which will be the first to explore the solar system, one generation for which, in childhood the planets are distant and indistinct discs moving through the night, and for which in old age the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration.”
And then there are those who have the hunger, but the plate is held just out of their reach. As scientist Saunders Kramer told William E. Burrows, author of “The New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (1998),” “Would I volunteer to go on a starship? Give me a microsecond to think about it.”
Where away and why alone? The Columbia astronauts, you may say, weren’t alone as Slocum was. They were backed up by billions of dollars worth of equipment and manpower, they were supported by breathtakingly sophisticated technology and by the full resources of the most powerful nation in the history of the world. They had all that, and they had each other, too.
But every adventurer essentially flies solo. From raft to rocket, every craft that bears a questing human soul is its own isolated entity, its own solitary encampment. We all make a private accommodation with our idea of destiny — no one else can do it for us — and for the restless explorers among us, that accommodation is always made on the equivalent of a starboard bow under the night sky, alone.
Where away and why alone?
The answer to both: If you have to ask in the first place, you’d never understand the answer.
– – –
“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
— T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia, 1888-1935).
“That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.”
— Joseph Conrad, “Lord Jim” (1900)
“Beware of the man whose God is in the sky.”
— George Bernard Shaw, in “Man and Superman” (1903)
“Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
“I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
“Where never lark nor ever eagle flew —
“And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
“The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
“Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
— John Gillespie Magee Jr., from “High Flight” (1941), an American pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, who was killed when his Spitfire collided with another plane over England a few months after composing the poem. He was 19.
“We will fly again. It’s important to us as adventurers and explorers . . . The nation needs a vision.”
— Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who flew aboard Columbia as a congressman in 1986
“The same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth, but we can pray they are safely home. . . . The cause in which they died will continue.”
— President Bush
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
— Ernest Hemingway, “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952)
“The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.”
— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Russian scientist, credited with developing the basic theory of rocket propulsion
“I felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before.”
— Astronaut James Irwin, about his trip to the moon on Apollo 15
“Very cold. Set out early, the wind still hard.”
— Captain William Clark, Oct. 1, 1804, in his journal
“The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars.”
— Norman Mailer, in “Of a Fire on the Moon” (1969)
“There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.”
— Former astronaut James Lovell, commander of the near-catastrophic Apollo 13 lunar space flight, in a speech to Girl Scouts in DuPage County in 1997
“[In military flight training] the idea here seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull in back in the last yawning moment — and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite — and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that means something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God.”
— Tom Wolfe, in “The Right Stuff” (1979)
“There are times when you devote yourself to a higher cause than personal safety.”
— Astronaut John Glenn
“While billions of us struggled this week for life and meaning upon the land’s surface, a handful of lucky explorers were privileged to enjoy that lofty perspective.”
— Rabbi Jeffrey Ronald, of Kol Tikvah Temple in Woodland Hills, Calif.
“There’s a lot of different things that we do during life that could potentially harm us and I choose not to stop doing those things.”
— Columbia astronaut Dr. Laurel Salton Clark
