Proof of adventure’s impact, for me at least, can be found on the bulletin board that hangs to the right of my desk. It’s cluttered with haphazardly pinned mementos from past adventures: a photo of an Anasazi pictograph snapped from inside a cave in Utah’s Salt Creek Canyon; a 1986 Boston Red Sox media pass; a postcard print of a Harvey Dunn painting — Just a Few Drops of Rain — from the South Dakota Art Museum; a room receipt from the Taos Inn; several favorite ski area patches; a backstage pass for Red Rocks; a ticket stub for the Grateful Dead at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center; a decal from northern Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park; several photos of writer Hunter S. Thompson’s backyard snapped during an impromptu tour of his grounds given by a female guest at his house who warned of landmines and claimed one of Thompson’s squawking peacocks ate her missing front tooth.
Noticeably absent are reminders of the ordinary. No fast food receipts. No television lineups. No photos of friends sitting around a computer screen reading pithy Facebook posts.
Each memento represents a story. A memory. A flight from the usual, allowing life, as writer Jim Harrison would say, to feel like a wild season rather than a ruse.
Yet even with this visual reminder, after turning 50 I slipped into an adventure slump. I had somehow allowed the pursuit of adventure to tumble down life’s priority list, treating it like some ill-advised fad on par with platform shoes and belief in the political system.
The low point for me occurred last summer in a Missoula, Montana, Holiday Inn when I realized that for the first time in my life I preferred hotel rooms over tents. The awe of waking to a choir of birds amid a cathedral of pines had been supplanted by the awe of waking to free packaged muffins and powdered egg formations.
Ye Gods, I remember thinking, I’ve become that type of person — the type whose idea of expanding their comfort zone means upgrading to a king mattress.
Age steals a lot from us — sight, hearing, the inability to notice we’re wearing pants too high above the waist — yet I was not ready to have it fleece my understanding of the importance of exclamation-point moments.
To snap my adventure slump, I sat at my hotel room’s desk and wrote the following reminder:
When complacency, mankind’s biggest dodge, begins to reduce life to a cheap approximation, remind yourself that on the other side of inconvenience lies an adventure.
Of course, I thought after writing this, adventure when stripped down is nothing but an inconvenience — the speed bump to motivation. And any perceived inconvenience becomes fodder for the left-brain — the mind’s eternal wet blanket. Regaining the zest for adventure requires nothing more than muzzling the left-brain.
To accomplish this, I decided to visualize the left brain as an annoying person who so chafes me that I’ll do the opposite of what he or she demands out of spite. I immediately pictured it as a Texas homeowners association president named Vanessa, who wears an I-sell-real-estate hairdo and spends her evenings crocheting Dallas Cowboys tissue box covers while watching Nancy Grace.
Zingo! It worked. Two days later while hiking in Teton National Park I was approached from the opposite direction by two out-of-breath hikers. “Turn back,” they warned. “There’s a bear and her cub in the meadow ahead.” Sound advice. But since the left brain demanded turning back, I went forward.
As I entered the meadow, I made my presence known by clapping and singing. (I only chose to sing because the left-brain thought it foolish.)
Midway through, I suddenly heard claws on a tree. About 30 yards ahead, on the far side of the meadow, I spotted the mother and its cub scurrying up a lodgepole pine. Instant wow. But in my amazement, I forgot that every bear has its own line of demarcation. I took one step forward and by the speed in which the mother vaulted down the tree, you would have thought I had yelled, “Your cub is ugly!” The bear bluffed a charge, stopping after a few feet.
Acknowledging the danger, I slowly backed away, not making eye contact, while rehearsing my Darwin Award acceptance speech.
I survived, of course. Would I do it again? No. But its lesson against the tyranny of complacency was invaluable, a permanent reminder that, good or bad, adventure revives the soul and colors the minutes, freeing us from the ruts of routine, making every moment, regardless of our age, feel like a wild season.
