In case you were wondering, in 2004, British explorer Ben Saunders became the youngest and possibly last person to solo ski to the North Pole. This piece of knowledge is inspiring, crazy and somewhat sad. Traversing 204 kilometers of frozen wasteland on skis by yourself seems incredibly brave and lonely. The sad part is that Saunders’ expedition may be the last overland adventure to the North Pole because the rapidly decreasing sea ice will soon make such a feat impossible.
People sometimes wonder where my weird anecdotes and facts come from. Answer: from the Internet, from books and a not insignificant number from class, because if you actually pay attention sometimes you’ll learn things. But this one came from an NPR podcast. One of the things that I like to do, because I am lame, is go to the gym and ride the bike to nowhere while listening to the NPR TED Talk Radio Hour. To further illustrate how lame I am, the first time I set foot in the upstairs part of the gym was the first week of senior fall. The theme of last week’s podcast was “To the Edge” and featured Saunders, a spelunker and a lady who rowed across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans by herself in a 23-foot boat.
The great thing about reaching the legal drinking age is that you can hang out in your PJs on your friend’s futon, drinking your very own hard-earned $10 wine and watching Disney movies on Netflix instead of talking to people you don’t know in a grimy basement. We were watching “Treasure Planet” (2002), and I said something along the lines of, “Everything has been discovered already.” For those who don’t know, “Treasure Planet” is like “Treasure Island” but set in outer space and is a way better movie than it ought to be. I was sad because, (I’m sure the cheap wine didn’t help) nowadays, you can’t just hop on a pirate ship and go explore a whole new part of the world.
If someone were to ask me what my goals were in high school, I would have said “to be cool.” And I didn’t mean cool as in “cool,” but cool as in interesting and different, cool as in being the kind of person that people look at and say, “Man, I wish I could do something as adventurous/crazy/impossible as that.” But now that I am not in high school, I have lowered my expectations. I no longer strive to be “cool.” I strive for the bare minimum. I strive to be “not boring.” Because, my friends, we are soon coming to that awful grim part of the year, where my thesis proposal is due, and finals are fast approaching, and the leaves are gone, and there’s no sun and I have to break out my ugly Northface parka even though it is only November and still technically fall. I am terribly frightened that most of the rest of the world is, in fact, terribly boring. And I hate being bored.
Dartmouth is great and awesome, but it can be distinctly lacking in a sense of adventure. There are epic feats you can accomplish, if you put your mind to it. There’s the Dartmouth Seven, the Ledyard Challenge, the Lou’s Challenge, a circuit, the Blue Light Challenge, the Polar Bear Swim, the Fifty, touching the fire and streaking a final. I often wonder what it says about Dartmouth that so many of these “challenges” involve nudity. Also, several seem particularly unpleasant or life threatening: see the Fifty, the Polar Bear Swim and touching the fire. But I believe that all of these challenges have been accomplished before, by multiple people. One could always be the first to complete all of these epic feats, but I’m not sure if completing several acts of public nudity counts for the same as solo skiing to the North Pole.
Perhaps my grand adventure at Dartmouth will be to change my definition of grand adventure. Because, in all honesty, skiing to the North Pole seems really cold. Winters at Dartmouth are chilly enough. I’ve also heard that there’s actually not all that much to see up in the Arctic.
Caves also seem dark and cramped. I’m from Southern California, where rowing is not really a thing, so crossing an ocean (or, say, a small sea or large lake) is not for me. Also, from what these very adventurous people said, they spent a good deal of time on their great expeditions being exhausted and bored. Perhaps skiing to the North Pole is not all that different from spending approximately a gazillion hours in bio lab trying to identify bacteria.
Perhaps true adventurers are people who do things not because they feel they should be done, or because they want to brag about having done them. True adventurers are people who are willing to be bored and suffer hardship to get what they want. So, Dartmouth, bring on the papers and the midterms and the impossible requirements for Bio 46 lab. Maybe when the sun comes back and it’s senior spring, there could even be some acts of public nudity.
