EDITOR’S LETTER
The edge of things
The lands falls away into a river valley before rising up towards a line of trees on the horizon. Right before the wood, there’s an open field that follows the contour of the hill. A pair of Scots pines grow tall and strong in the centre, marking out this place as distinct from the landscape that surrounds it. From the edge of the school yard, as a nine year-old kid, I would often stare at this singular piece of open ground, my eye drawn, perhaps, to its marginal quality; a place where farmland dissolves into forest, where the cultivated merges into the wild. As such, I became transfixed with this liminal field in those suspended, dreamlike moments between maths and science. It was a representation of the possibility of adventure in the outer world, beyond the exigencies of school. It was also a representation of what I might discover one day, somewhere in the open country over those hills, as the story goes, and far away.
The extraordinary events that have taken place since you read the last issue of BASE – published a year ago, in February 2020 – have reminded me of that place I once contemplated from primary school, for a simple reason. The field on the edge of the woods was one thing above all else: a way out. If you're a naturally adventurous person, difficult and complex questions arise from a state of enforced captivity within national or local boundaries. How to escape? What does freedom mean? To what extent can the state control the individual? Who can you trust? What really matters in your life? Interestingly, these were also questions of enormous relevance to intellectuals and dissidents in the former USSR and 1930s Germany, and they remain of huge relevance in China today. That's a deeply revealing perspective on the policy of lockdown.
In an era where long distance travel has been made, temporarily, much more inconvenient, it's become more valuable than ever to explore the world close to your home; to reimagine your stomping grounds. It's a theme that runs through this issue.
Local exploration, in any case, often reveals more than its global counterpart. By looking into a place you already know with fresh eyes, you sometimes discover more than jumping on a plane to the other side of the world. Rather than seeking journeys to the ends of the earth, the experiences of the past year have suggested that it’s often more worthwhile to look inside the map, to rummage around, and to dig a bit deeper on your home turf.
Several years ago, the author and political thinker David Goodhart came up with a fascinating way of describing the human relationship with place. He defined those with a global outlook as ‘anywheres’; their opposite are ‘somewheres’, or people with a more local outlook. For most of 2020 and into early 2021, we were all forced to become ‘somewheres’ for a while. And it was not, I’d suggest, an entirely undesirable experience, in the sense that it reset our relationships with the places we call home. Local captivity, for a lot of adventurous people, revealed new places and possibilities once disregarded in the rush to the next intercontinental flight. Hinterlands, after all, can be wild places.
It also might have revealed the value of time spent alone or with a partner – time to reflect, to contemplate, to make plans. For many introverts, and even for socially recalcitrant extroverts, the benefits of 'social distancing' are pretty obvious. Many of the greatest adventures of modern times have been accomplished by people who set out by themselves, or in a very small group, to experience a wild place on the most direct possible terms. Solo explorers can be counted amongst the greatest adventurers of all time: Reinhold Messner’s Himalayan climbs, Bernard Moitessier’s single handed ocean voyages, Mike Horn's Antarctic crossing, or Robyn Davidson’s camel expedition across Australia’s Western Desert come to mind. But there are very many others.
Remarkable journeys undertaken alone often stand out not just for what they are, but also for what they represent: a desire
to be at the frontier not only of exploration, but also of human experience itself. One of the finest books ever written about the inner journey in a wild environment is Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, an account of a journey he made to Dolpo in the Nepal Himalaya in the mid 1970s. It's more of a work of Zen philosophy than an adventure travel book. Whilst Matthiessen’s trip wasn’t a solo one – he travelled with the legendary field biologist George Schaller in pursuit of the elusive snow leopard – he spent a great deal of time alone in the mountains, meditating and observing the world around him. His writing highlights the mystical experiences that process began to generate. By being alone in the mountains, Matthiessen suggests that we begin to remember our visceral being: 'There is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth... The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air – the earth is ringing.' This passage is a powerful expression of the instructive nature of solitary endeavour. On a solo, 100-mile hike along the edge of the Patagonian icesheet a few years ago, I felt I knew what Matthiessen was talking about as I filled a flask from a freezing stream. Alone in a wild place, you come closer to what a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer might have experienced physically, if not psychologically, 25,000 years ago. Today, with the new interest in natural navigation, traditional bushcraft, and re-wilding, there is a resurgent sense of the importance of that ‘forgotten knowledge’ Matthiessen wrote about over 40 years ago.
In another remarkable piece of writing about solitary experience in the natural world, J.A. Baker explains his fascination with observing peregrine falcons in a small area of rural Essex in the notoriously cold winter of 1962-63 in The Peregrine. Long overlooked, this one-off, indefinable book is now regarded as a classic of British nature writing.
‘I shut my eyes and tried to crystallise my will into the light-drenched prism of the hawk’s mind’ Baker recalls, trying to imagine, in an impressive perceptual leap, what the bird he is observing is itself seeing. He explains how 'I always longed to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things.'
The italics here are mine, not Baker's: I've not heard a better explanation than this for why an adventurous life is something worth striving for. A more recent solo adventurer stretched the outer limits of human capability to an extraordinary degree. His name was Andrew Mccauley. A proficient sea kayaker and mountaineer, in 2007 Mccauley set out to achieve a seemingly impossible feat: to paddle a modified sea kayak alone across the Tasman Sea, the notorious thousand-mile passage of water between Australia and New Zealand. Incredibly, Mccauley very nearly made it to New Zealand; he was lost without trace after making a distress call to the New Zealand coastguard around thirty miles off Milford Sound on South Island. Mccauley clearly intended to have the most demanding adventure imaginable. Whilst he did not physically survive his journey, in one respect he succeeded. His voyage was a one-off triumph of solitary endeavour, and it’s hard not to feel more than a degree of admiration for his outrageous mission. The following year, the Tasman Sea was successfully crossed by a two man team using a larger, purpose-built vessel, and by the less dangerous route between New South Wales and North Island. Mccauley’s solo journey between Tasmania and South Island has not, unsurprisingly, seen another attempt. If J.A. Baker reached the edge of things through his birdwatching, Mccauley certainly did so in his kayak in the Southern Ocean.
Many of the most memorable adventures of my own have also been solitary ones; adventure motorcycle journeys, free solo rock climbs, big ski descents, and long distance paddleboard trips. What made all these very different experiences valuable was their purity of purpose, their logistical simplicity, and their psychological intensity. Without a support structure, a solo adventure in a wild place is elevated into a different realm of human experience. On your own, you can be truly out there at the edge of things; a falcon-watcher, a shape-shifter, a visionary. And on your own, I think, it's easier to notice a place on the edge of the woods like the one I once observed as a school kid: the way out.
On that note of optimism, enjoy this action-packed issue of BASE. It’s great to be back.