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ACTIVITIES
The Future of Adventure
A GORP Visionary Adventure by Kim Stanley Robinson
They are led through a beautiful landscape, hot air ballooning or taking some other form of transport out of the entire Jules Verne repertoire
© Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides |
Here's what will happen:
They will be marginally-to- comfortably middle class, still in their twenties or thirties, with some disposable income, urban/ suburban Americans but with a love of snowboarding or parasailing, and local athletic club workouts. While waiting in an airport for a flight to a meeting, they will see a book about Everest; they will buy it and read it and think, How interesting. Ads in The New Yorker will remind them that they too could join an adventure tour, and make their next vacation a trip to some place as exotic and wild as Everest. Adventure travel: just a matter of some vacation time, some disposable income, and a phone call!
They call or e-mail their travel agent and are put in touch with an adventure tour company, whose agent invites them to join one of their adventure tours, in a group with about a dozen other clients. They pick one and go to REI and buy lots of stuff, and fly to another continent, usually one starting with an A, and they join the other members of the group in a remote and exotic country. They are led by Western guides through a beautiful landscape, walking and perhaps also riding, gliding, kayaking, parasailing, hot-air ballooning, or taking some other form of transport out of the entire Jules Verne repertoire of maneuvers over the land, in devices the tour company provides.
Their Western guide has a local sirdar who makes arrangements with the local tourist industry workers they encounter en route (hoteliers or restaurateurs and the like) who deal with their own staff.
They don't have to talk to locals. They don't have to arrange their route.
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They don't have to talk to locals, and when they try, they find it awkward enough that, since they don't have to, they give up trying. Once, when they are off on their own, attending to the call of nature, they are approached by a young woman carrying a baby, who mimes that she and the baby are sick and have the runs. She's begging for medicines. They give her some Lomotils and mime that she should take only one a day, not all at once. They mime this the best they can and then retreat to their group and send a sirdar out to try to find the woman. But other than that, they do not talk to the locals, and they do not have to arrange their route, permits, rooms, food, portering, or any of the rest of that. After the trip they go home and develop the forty rolls of film they've taken. The slides are beautiful.
It was an adventure, right? They think about that when they get back to the office, remembering their wonderful trip.
Compared to their jobs, it was an adventure indeed.
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Compared to their jobs, it was indeed an adventure; white-collar work is physically very boring. The mind returns to the idea of taking trips, of having adventures by doing physical things out in the physical world.
They know that there are some little no-account mountains about half a day's drive to the east/ west / north / south. They buy more gear at the adventure sports shop, and start going up into these mountains for weekends, then extended weekends. Though smaller, these mountains in their way are as beautiful as the Himalayas. Well, not really. But they are nice. And the little creeks near their town are like the Baltoro, only smaller and calmer. Kayak and canoe trips on these creeks are leisurely but fun. Backpacking too. It's not exactly parasailing, but then again what is.
Meanwhile, remembering their big trip, they recall how their guides and porters seemed to be having adventures every day,
The guides and porters seemed to be having adventures every day
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getting their clients from place to place and getting them through their activities safely, while the clients watched them do these things and work through these problems, insulated under a kind of bell jar of aid and mediation. As if they were in a kind of 3-D TV show. Which ones had the adventure there again?
They remember that woman with the sick baby. They remember seeing the other local mountain women, with calves like baseball bats, hiking ten miles every day in order to gather the diminishing firewood in that region needed to cook their families' dinners that night. Millions of them. These women traveled, and they had adventures. Was what they were doing, therefore adventure travel?
No, of course not. Why? Because these days adventure travel is not just the simplest meanings of those two words combined. “Adventure travel” is a marketing category, an advertising campaign, a slogan, a genre of publishing, a wing of the tourist industry, a line of products and services, a registered trademark. ADVENTURE TRAVEL: It means “the effort of capitalism to package and profit from the fun people get from fooling around outdoors.” From doing stuff sort of like things people used to do on their own for practically nothing.
This is called commodification, turning things you do into things you buy, and it's long since been true that experiences in America are as commodified as things.
Is it necessary to go through the proper channels to have fun outdoors?
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That's been the growth area in recent capitalism, and part of what defines the watershed between modernism and postmodernism. But it relies crucially on convincing people that it is necessary to go through the proper channels to have fun outdoors; that if you buy your experience from professionals, they will arrange it so that you have more fun during your precious leisure time than you would out there trying to figure it out on your own.
They think about that some more during those long office hours, or at home reading the outside sports magazines when they should be working at their desk. If they did some of the work of the trip themselves, it would be a lot cheaper than if they bought another tour experience. All kinds of problems would no doubt ensue, but maybe those problems will turn out to be part of the adventure.
Is adventure an accident?
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It's a funny word that way,"adventure." They stumble across an online article that includes Dr. Johnson's definition of the term in the first Englishlanguage dictionary: “Adventure. (1) An accident; a chance; a hazard; an event of which we have no direction.”
They remember a quote from Roald Amundsen that indicates he understood the word in Johnson's sense of it; in his entire career of polar travel, Amundsen said he did his best to avoid adventures. For him adventures began when things went wrong. He wanted to cross Antarctica, reach the South Pole, and return safely, without having any adventures at all. He planned his trip in meticulous detail, hoping to experience it in somewhat the same way clients on modern adventure-travel expeditions experience their trips: nothing untoward, nothing unpleasant, everything foreseen. Just pure fun in the outdoors. He despised Robert Scott and his incredible adventures.
Move on to  Part II
Go to Visionary Adventures Introduction
Article copyright © 2000 by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Illustrations copyright © 2000 by Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides.
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