warming. But I think they may be addicted to adventure. I mean, other people sell raffle tickets or write pamphlets to save the planet; they’re not skiing across Siberia. Since Colin and Tim’s trip was sponsored in part by a satellite phone company, it was not going to be hard to contact them along the way, and we thought it would be interesting to stay in touch, but we had no idea how interesting the trip would get.
Before they even got out of British Columbia, forest fires forced them off the road, so they bought a canoe to carry them northward. Getting across the Bering Sea in an 18-foot rowboat also proved to be more challenging than Colin had anticipated, as wind and stormy weather kept blowing them in the wrong direction and threatening to cast them into water that was cold enough, Tim said, to bring on “an ice-cream headache in your hand” if you trolled it overboard for a moment.
This is definitely my kind of story. I’m the original armchair traveller; I love adventures, provided they’re someone else’s. I love talking to people like Tim and Colin and reading books like Joe Simpson’s
Touching the Void,
which is an account of a harrowing adventure Simpson and his friend Simon Yates underwent in 1985.
Simon and Joe have just completed a first ascent of the west side of Suila Grande in the Peruvian Andes, they’re heading back down and Joe falls and breaks his leg in several places. At first, they proceed downward, with Simon and Joe roped together, Simon lowering Joe ahead of him a few hundred feet at a time. This is agonizing enough, but then Joe goes over a cliff and is caught hanging in mid-air. Simon realizes that either they will plunge to their deaths together or he can cut the rope, let Joe go and hope to save himself. He cuts the rope. He hears a yell, then nothing. Simon continues his descent and returns to base camp, feeling devastated because he has had to leave his friend for dead.
Joe, meanwhile, lies at the bottom of a crevasse, not dead but without much hope of getting out. Miraculously, he does get out and then gets himself, broken leg and all, back down the mountain alone. It takes him three days. At the end of it, he is dehydrated and starving and half-frozen, but he is alive.
Touching the Void
is a thrilling tale of adventure and extreme peril, of human ingenuity, grit and determination. The title describes the feeling you get whenever you take a leap into the unknown, which is what we all do every time we embark on something we haven’t done before and aren’t sure we can do—starting a new job, getting married. But some people aren’t satisfied with the ordinary challenges life offers; they crave extreme challenges, and I crave the vicarious pleasure of hearing about them.
They must be a bit crazy, though, don’t you think? These climbers and sailors and the people who get themselves perched atop a million tons of rocket fuel and blasted into space? How else to explain why a young woman would wager her future against a race into the Southern Ocean, alone aboard a 60-foot yacht in high seas and biting, gale-force winds, knowing that if you have the good fortune to come out the other end alive and in one piece, you’re still not likely to have won the race?
That’s the race called the Vendée Globe, about which Canadian sailor Derek Lundy wrote a mesmerizing account in his book
Godforsaken Sea.
He was motivated to write it, he said, by the death in 1997 of fellow yachtsman Gerry Roufs, a former Olympic sailor from Hudson, Quebec, who was ploughing through a fierce South Atlantic storm in the Vendée Globe race when he lost radio contact. Roufs was never heard from again. Pieces of his boat were being collected by the Chilean navy at the very time that Derek Lundy came into the
As It Happens
studio to tell us about the book and the race.
The Vendée Globe is always exciting, but the ’96/’97 race was particularly intense. There were three sailors apart from Gerry Roufs