Imagine the Adventure

Most of us, ordinary people, wonder what propels and compels and impels some small section of a population to become adventurers. Those for whom the greatest pleasure seems to be to imagine themselves struggling against the most difficult of physical circumstances, and prevailing. From those who seek to cross vast oceans unaccompanied, climb the world's most inaccessible mountain peaks (accessible to those endowed with physical prowess and mind-boggling determination), and those who set out to reach the Arctic, the South Pole.

Incredibly strenuous activities that most of us would far prefer to read about, rather than ourselves to engage in. It takes the most dauntless of spirits to embark on such expeditions fraught with potential danger, and exacting every bit of energy and courage from those who set out to relish the triumph of accomplishment in these endeavours. We admire such people at the very same time that we wonder what exactly it is that motivates them.

The quest for adventure, the curiosity of what certain landscapes look like, the imagination of placing yourself there, in the very landscape that looks so inaccessible, obviously appeals to certain individuals. And for some of these individuals it becomes the motif of their lives' ambitions, to surmount all physical difficulties and to prevail in their attempts despite very real dangers, the evidence of which they also occasionally see for themselves.

In the mid-19th Century intrepid, educated and experienced world travellers, both men and women, travelled to the far corners of the world, where "civilized" people rarely ventured, to staunch their curiosity and satisfy their indomitable spirit of adventure. Many of those people wrote books recounting their adventures, their impressions, their fascination with their journey and their immense satisfaction at having set out and completed their destinations.

Occasionally, one reads such an accounting, published one hundred and fifty years earlier, by such explorer-adventurers and one such account was that of an overland journey from parts of the United States, on into the territory of Canada, well before the provinces were gathered into confederation. Where people set out from Britain with the intention of seeing for themselves the grandeur of the prairies, the mountains, the lakes and the forests of Western Canada.

In the process experiencing incredible hardships of an extent quite impossible to imagine today with modern communications and modes of transport, and highways and communities settled in areas that were not all that long ago, the province of the few. The original people of the country, the Sioux, the Assiniboine, the Shushwap, meeting up with the voyageurs, the white men and the Metis who worked for the Hudson's Bay Company.

Imagine the primeval forests where veritable giant trees thrived, fell over with their venerability, or from the effects of violent storms, so thickly covering the forest floor that access through the forest would be impossible. Veteran adventurers, skilled in the use of axes might attempt to cut and thrash their way through the forest, only to come across the dreaded Devil's club, whose sharp thorns would tear their clothing and their skin to shreds.

The Fraser and the Thompson river canyons affording hopeful avenues of progress for staunchly determined adventurers to travel from Edmonton, with its handful of hunters, not yet even a village, to FortKamloops , a journey of hundreds of miles on foot, with tough little Indian horses employed to carry supplies for a half-dozen people, hoping to supplement their pemmican and flour with game and fish on the way.

One has the idea that game would be plentiful, but there were winters when the aboriginal populations, skilled at life in their familiar territory, found insufficient game to maintain life and they faced starvation as surely as did the less capable adventurers moving laboriously through the landscape. Their horses starving for lack of decent pasturage, becoming skin and bones, but valuable, as were the dogs that accompanied them, as comprising an emergency food source.

Imagine the desperate condition of attempting to travel through such thick forest growth that pack horses would constantly stumble and fall, and refuse to continue and attempt to hide themselves within the forest; in the summer set upon by blow flies and utterly miserable from starvation and accidental injuries, yet they would carry on, even after tumbles down mountain sides and fording rivers with swift currents threatening to carry them and the travellers' provisions off.

Imagine the travellers, desperately seeking game, setting out from a winter's temporary location to follow game, only to be able to snare a marten, a skunk, a few partridge. Cooking up the predator-animals, finding their cooked stench detestable, but forcing themselves to partake of it to preserve their lives. Imagine that they have no provisions left and must contemplate butchering the horses that have served them so well.

Imagine, in dire straits, wondering whether they will somehow survive their travails, coming across the sitting corpse of another who had been in the same circumstances, before him the remnants of a fire, and the skeleton of his pack-animal before him, his desperation availing him nothing, in the final analysis. Imagine the misery, the determination, and the hope that compelled them to continue.

You needn't merely imagine: Read The North-West Passage By Land - Being a Narrative of an Expedition From the Atlantic to the Pacific (Viscount Milton and Walter Butler Cheadle, Prospero Canadian Collection)