Shameless Diary of an Explorer A Story of Failure on Mt. McKinley

CHAPTER 1 The Master Motive This is the story of a failure. I think that success would have made it no more worth telling. It is about an exploring party, the sort that so often fails. . . . Fountains of youth, or eldorados, or wider realms for cross and conscience-these seemed to lure a younger world to unknown regions. To-day men explore for the iron crown of science; they say that they do, at least. But I believe that neither biology to-day, nor gold nor the creeds of old, have ever been the explorer's master motive. His real ardor is more profound. It has revealed and civilized our sphere. It stirs the thirst to discover and subdue which vests the very fiber of our race; makes us ache for tumult and change, for strife for its own sake against big odds. The true spirit of the explorer is a primordial restlessness. It is spurred by instincts of pre-natal being and a cloudy hereafter, to search the glamour of unknown peaks and seas and forests for assurance of man's imperfect faith in immortality. It is a creative instinct. The explorer seldom speaks of it openly; he is not unwilling, but he cannot. He is inarticulate, like the victim of a passion. Few but he can understand his inspiration. The world asks of him purposes more obvious. He cites a widespread fervor; of old, perhaps religion; to-day, he will name science. And these are or have been his impulses, in part; and the world can grasp them. Science is the natural heir to the cross as the public avatar of exploration. Each is sponsor for the Unknowable; one was, one is now, the Aladdin lamp of the Improbable. But science is a cold ambition, remoter from our master motive than the world's old notions of exploration, vain as they would seem to-day were they not dead in us. Maybe no peaks remain, flushed with the light that forswears mortality; no unknown seas to shatter doubt with wonder. That I do not believe. For men still roam over a world too wide for any map, and when restlessness and action for its own sake inspire us no more, our race will deserve to die. All reverence to science! Yet I know this: The elder explorers related what quickened the life and visions of their time, and quickens ours, rousing men to ever harder ventures. Few who seek the iron crown stir us so now. Few men in the street see the "use" of exploration, in the North, especially. To many, explorers seem vain men seeking short cuts to fame, or persons who waste time, energy, and wealth, to win the Impossible, to learn the Unprofitable. And this cynicism appears to be not all the fault of laymen's apathy, or of explorers' dumbness. If the earth is smaller and tamer than in the old days, our sympathies are warmer and the whole world's heart is more alert. It craves, above all, knowledge of itself, for it is a more complex and interesting old world. The life of man as it is, naked and unshadowed, brutal maybe, life under every stress of fortune-that wins the hungry ear and the deeper charity of these present hours. And life has thus been searched and exploited almost everywhere all lands over, except: Among us who seek on enchanted rivers an answer to those under-thoughts that make life at once a tragic and an ecstatic thing, who dare for nothing but the cause of daring, who follow the long trails. Men with the masks of civilization torn off, and struggling through magic regions ruled over by the Spirit of the North or of the South; human beings tamed by the centuries, then cast out to shift for themselves like the first victims of existence-they must offer the best field of all to help this knowledge of ourselves. He knows life best who has seen it nakedest, and most exotic. So he that goes plainspoken from the city to the outer waste should become indeed quite wise. He might tell how the weakling's eyes blazed with courage and reproach when his leader turned back disheartened, or in what words the athlete of the avenueDunn, Robert is the author of 'Shameless Diary of an Explorer A Story of Failure on Mt. McKinley' with ISBN 9780679783251 and ISBN 0679783253.