The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer: 25-21

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Outside Magazine January 2003

The Outside Adventure Canon
The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer: 25-21

By Brad Wieners & The Editors


	(Kim Kurian)

25. OLD GLORY
Jonathan Raban
(1981)

THERE ARE GRANDER adventures than Raban's on this list, but few as eloquent. "I found that I had landed up in a tree slum," Raban writes during his journey in a 16-foot aluminum boat down the Mississippi, "where overcrowding and miscegenation had made it almost impossible to make out the individuals in the tangled mass....They didn't seem to be aware of the opportunities for trees in North America." Though Raban's wit is always intact, we do sometimes question his fortitude. (What's up with his mortal fear of birds?) But we're suckers for his Brit's-eye view of America—and for his Huck's-eye view of the Big Muddy: "I drifted downstream, just letting the river unroll around me....The charts and tree book seemed hopelessly thin and theoretical when set against the here-and-now of the Mississippi itself. The river was simply too big, too promiscuous...it would never tamely submit to posing for its portrait."

24. A WALK IN THE WOODS
Bill Bryson
(1998)

HANDS DOWN, far and away the funniest book you'll ever read on long-distance through-hiking. In his lazy, TV-addled pal Stephen Katz, Bryson couldn't have picked a less prepared partner for an attempt on the Appalachian Trail—nor a better comic foil. "For two days, Katz barely spoke to me. On the second night, at nine o'clock, an unlikely noise came from his tent—the punctured-air click of a beverage can being opened—and he said in a pugnacious tone, ÔDo you know what that was, Bryson? Cream soda. You know what else? I'm drinking it right now. And I'm not giving you any. And you know what else? It's delicious.'"



	(Kim Kurian)

23. ALIVE
Piers Paul Read
(1974)

THE PERFECT STORM
Sebastian Junger
(1997)

YEAH, SO WE CHEATED. Try as we might, we couldn't break the tie between these two blockbusters of disaster. Fact is, they've both outlasted their initial sensational appeal— and one reason, we suspect, is that they're stories of people confronted with great danger they did not seek. British author Read's subjects—members of a Uruguayan rugby team whose Fairchild F-227 crashed in the Andes in October 1972—had no intention of conducting a ten-week, cannibalistic survival course above timberline. Especially grisly—aside from, yes, the consumption of "raw meat"—is the avalanche that buried the survivors on their 17th day stranded: Read gives a paragraph or more to each man, and you may have to remind yourself to inhale: "Pedro Algorta, still buried beneath the snow, had only what air he held in his lungs. He felt himself near to death, yet the knowledge that after his death his body would help the others to survive instilled in him a kind of ecstasy. It was as if he were already at the portals of heaven."

Junger's Massachusetts fishermen were out trying to make a living when a "once in a century" nor'easter hit in October 1991, and their hard luck deepens this account of their loss. Perilous work is Junger's grand theme, and his abiding respect for it enables him to go beyond the events at hand, whether deciphering complicated meteorology or reporting the angry sorrow of wives and brothers seeking justice that isn't coming. In the paperback, eager to get it right, Junger cleared up controversies surrounding his facts, but he'd already taken what could have been a maudlin story and banged it into a thriller.

22. MY JOURNEY TO LHASA
Alexandra David-Neel
(1927)

FRANKLY, SHE'S NOT in the demographic. She's 54. She's stout. She's a former opera singer, for crying out loud. Who cares? A scholar of Eastern religion and Tibetan language, David-Neel was indisputably a fearless traveler, a rogue's rogue who, in 1923, disguised as an illiterate pilgrim, became the first Western woman to reach Tibet's forbidden city.

Mind you, My Journey to Lhasa doesn't reinvent the form. David-Neel sets down what happened in the order it happened, and her attention to detail is almost anal. She even has the requisite adventure sidekick, a young Sikkimese monk. An unlikely pair, they're stuck together in an escapade that involves everything from fooling the locals with their disguises to crossing 19,000-foot passes at night. "Was the lama far behind?" she writes. "I turned to look at him. Far, far below, amidst the white silent immensity, a small black spot, like a tiny Lilliputian insect, seemed to be crawling slowly up....An inexpressible feeling of compassion moved me to the bottom of my heart....I would find the pass; it was my duty."

David-Neel's prose is of its time, in the best and worst ways, but her account has the power to awe even today.



	(Kim Kurian)

21. KON-TIKI
Thor Heyerdahl
(1950)

"JUST OCCASIONALLY you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about."

So begins Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, the very prototype of the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time fool's errand. Heyerdahl, of course, set out on a balsa raft in 1947 to prove that the South Pacific could have been peopled by natives of Peru. Along with five equally loco Norwegians and a parrot, he survives on fish that literally hurl themselves on deck, meets up with a few sharks, and endures a beaching in Tahiti. Though the trip proved inconclusive (to say the least), it created such a sensation that lecture halls around the world sold out for debates on Polynesian history. Heyerdahl's antics can have a hand-me-down quality, something vaguely remembered from seventh-grade social studies, but just because everyone's supposed to read him doesn't mean he's not great company. Heyerdahl's happily aware that his is an absurd cosmic prank, but it's still one heck of a story of men and the sea.

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