GORP - Visionary Adventures - The Future of Adventure, Part II


	Visionary Adventures Introduction

	A View from the Bridge by Terry Bisson

	Romance of the Century by Lucius Shepard

	The Future of Adventure by Kim Stanley Robinson

	The Going will be Good by Paul Theroux

	Top Ten Adventures for the Next Thousand Years by Bill Greer

	Contributors
Dreamed up your own visionary adventure? Tell us.


	Summer's Top Parks
	Summer Mountain Festivals
	Beach Travel Blog
	Parks and Outdoors Guide
	2008 Summer Buyer's Guide from Outside Online

ACTIVITIES

The Future of Adventure
Part II
A GORP Visionary Adventure by Kim Stanley Robinson

In the teahouses, they have the most amazing conversations with the locals, who seem quite well-informed
© Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides

So: what can they make of this? An industry providing safe outdoor travel in exotic places is not really about adventure after all! They should all be called “Amundsen Travel Services.” The word adventure is being misused, one might say, but as use defines meaning, that wouldn't be quite right; in this case, as with many words, its use in American advertising has made the word come to mean the opposite of what it used to mean. The Greenland Principle.

So, the next time they plan a big trip, they get several friends together, and talk about things to try doing. Then they get on the Internet and find the sherpacoop.com in the country they plan to visit, and make arrangements through them for a guide and a hotel for their arrival. When they get to the country's capital, they find the co-op has put them up in a small strange questionable hotel in a cheap part of town. In their bathroom they have to sit on the concrete floor to get under the shower head. People on the street keep offering to change money and/or sell drugs to them. They bike around the city getting together last-minute gear and permits for their trip. Everything is a hassle. All right, they say every night over dreadful dinners, this is more like it. They curse all day and laugh all night.

In the countryside they walk carrying their own loads, and hike for over a week to reach their destination. They carry a translation box with them, a handheld computer programmed to translate between English and the local languages. And at every rest stop, and every night in the teahouses, they have the most amazing conversations with the locals, who seem quite well-informed, in some ways, while at the same time living in a different century or reality.

Several of them have brought along cell phones and continue to work part-time every day while they are walking. Afterwards everyone recalls the hike in as one of the best parts of the trip, despite the various aches and illnesses endured.

If the yak herders come to visit, it will be an adventure.

In the region of their destination, they fool around in kayaks in a gnarly little glacial river and meet their guide's cousins, who live nearby herding yaks. They churn yak butter and try to eat it. They walk wearily back out to the capital, after promising to host their guide when he and his cousins come to America. Afterwards they get e-mail from the yak herders. If the yak herders come to America, well-it will be an adventure.

Because now they're interested in those people. They were impressed by how friendly people were in that country, despite the shocking poverty there. They want to help somehow. They've seen firsthand that although we all live together in a global economy, our dollars are worth vastly more than their rupees.

How come dollars are worth so much more than rupees?

In the global economy, middle-class Americans are the aristocracy of the world; most people are extremely impoverished in comparison to us, partly because their country's money isn't worth as much as our money when scaled to the same activities. How can that be? It can be because American corporations (bolstered by our pension plans and all our little individual capitals and labors) own so much of the world's manufacturing capabilities and natural resources that we can afford to buy majority ownerships of all the new manufacturing capabilities starting up around the world; so even when people in impoverished countries create new production of goods and services, the money gained from that production belongs mostly to us. Amazing but true!

But hey, they say-despite all that, we want to travel. Life is not meant to be puritanical denial just because the world is in a very uncanny, unstable, unsustainable moment of its history. Everyone deserves to travel; these days some of us can, so we do; hopefully someday all of us will. Right?

Whatever. Meanwhile, more adventures. The future of adventure has arrived for them.

The near mountains are small and dear and wild.

The near mountains, so small and dear, so unexpectedly wild, are easy and cheap to get to. Sporting about in these protected regions of one's home country makes them aware of many things, including (a) how beautiful the Earth is, everywhere; (b) how much the existence of empty land is now a matter of conscious decision on our part, of political battles, of ideologies; (c) how crowded the world is, so that wilderness now is, among other things, an ethical category; and (d) how nice it is to spend time outdoors in the wind, just wandering without much of a plan.

So they spend more time outdoors. That first trip to the exotic wilderness on the A continent seems a bit silly to them now, also superb and wonderful and extremely adventurous-but not really necessary to get what they went looking to get.

Is a backyard sunset as beautiful as any in more exotic parts of the world?

Sitting in the backyard, watching a sunset as beautiful as any seen in the exotic parts of the world, they say to each other: Surely it ought not to be that we declare certain small distant portions of the world to be sacred wilderness and incredible fun, while everywhere else, especially the stuff nearby, is profane and exploitable and no fun at all. The little dammed-up creek at the edge of town, for instance-it has a lot of birds migrating through.

So even though they live in one of the most boring parts of the United States, the Great Plains, or the eastern half of the nation, or Texas-even then, they live in a very beautiful spot. And the more they look at it, the more beautiful it appears.

They take weekend drives with their new kid, and walk half a mile exploring, and the kids think it's as exotic as Outer Mongolia.

Maybe boomers weren't the sellouts they appeared to be.

Most of the mammals have been killed off, of course, but the birds continue to live on the land, very beautiful alien creatures co-existing with us; dinosaurs, in fact, and about 30 billion of them with us on the planet. They get a bird guide, and they start to vote environmentalist when they can, which worries them because it's hard to find a way to act politically on these new feelings. They begin to think that the boomers were not entirely the hypocritical sellouts that they appeared to be when they were younger. Mostly so, but circumstances make every generation give up a little on their youthful ideals. Really the question is: What do they do after that?

Move on to Part III