“Who wants to come?”
This was the question posed by modern-day explorer and adventurer Paquale Scaturro to those gathered to eat lunch and listen to his stories during the U.S. Potato Board’s annual meeting in March in Colorado Springs. Scaturro had just finished sharing his experiences exploring the wild rivers of Africa. Probably the most impressive of his adventures was the navigation—from its source in the mountains of Ethiopia to its mouth on the Mediterranean—of the entire 3,200-mile length of the Blue Nile in 2004, the first expedition to accomplish the feat. It was clear Scaturro relished sharing his adventures with others and wanted everyone to feel the same thrills he had felt.
So when this 21st-century Magellan extended an invitation for a roomful of American potato growers to join him on his excursion down the Congo River this May, it was without a hint of patronization or condescension. I couldn’t help but chuckle a little at the man’s obvious chagrin when not a single hand was raised. Not that I took any joy from the man’s disappointment; his childlike wonderment that anyone wouldn’t want to share in his grand adventure was what made me smile. It genuinely didn’t make sense to him.
It got me to wondering: Why didn’t anyone present at least explore the possibility? Why hadn’t I raised my hand? Had I turned into a stick in the mud? Didn’t I want some excitement, some adventure, in my life?
For a while there, I was enamored with the idea of adventure. I went to the local library and checked out an audiobooss to listen to on my daily commute: Endurance, by Alfred Lansing, which told the remarkable story of the survival of explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew after their ship was crushed by Antarctic ice in 1915. Shackleton and his men survived for months on a floe of ice, adrift in the South Atlantic, before making their way in lifeboats to tiny, virtually uninhabitable Elephant Island. Shackleton and five other men subsequently set sail in what was deemed the most seaworthy boat for the whaling stations of South Georgia, over 800 miles away, leaving the rest of the crew to await rescue. After sailing—if it could be called sailing—through a hurricane, Shackleton and his men landed on South Georgia and made the 32-mile hike over treacherous mountains and glaciers to Stromness, where they were finally able to recruit a rescue mission for their shipmates on Elephant Island.
The stories had me hooked on the idea of adventure, of beating the odds, of doing things no one had ever done before. I was listening to tales of when men were really men, and kept wondering what had happened to the breed of men who thirsted for exploits that would be celebrated for generations. My original query remained unanswered: Why had not a single hand been raised when Scaturro invited us all on a simple boat trip down a little old river in a war-torn jungle?
The more I thought on it, the more I realized that it doesn’t necessarily take some new or life-threatening voyage to make a guy an adventurer. When Scaturro’s trip down the Congo was starting, most of the good folks who had turned down his invitation in Colorado would be in the midst of getting spuds in the ground, not exactly the straightforward proposition it may sound like.
Shoot, Scaturro’s and Shackleton’s big adventures were largely paid for out of someone else’s coffers. Where’s the derring-do in that? Adventure for adventure’s sake—even for the sake of science—is certainly a noble thing. But no one can tell me that making the decision to raise a family on the very literal fruits of one’s labors is not a magnificent, downright heroic exploit. Farm and ranch families, full of the same faith and audacity that has been lauded for generations, boldly take the risks necessary to provide for themselves and feed the world year after year after year.
Seems you ought to be the folks asking of society’s less adventurous ilk (skydivers, rock climbers, big wave surfers—you know the type), “Who wants to come?”