The Rake Magazine

Tag: exploring

  • Chasing Life

    Dan Buettner is best known as a writer and extreme adventurer who rode his bike around the world from east to west and from north to south through the Americas and Africa and Europe and Asia. He has crossed the roadless Sahara desert, numerous jungles, and active war zones. He has contracted dozens of diseases and hosted plenty of parasites. He has written three books, and has had his every move monitored by millions of schoolchildren. But Dan Buettner really got his start in croquet.

     

    The first time I’d heard of Buettner, things were looking up for the crew of AfricaTrek, a record-setting bicycle trip from the Mediterranean Sea to the Cape of Good Hope. In April of 1993, the Star Tribune published one of its periodic dispatches from the trek, with this introduction: “They forded eighty bridgeless rivers, survived on roast monkey meat and bananas and gashed their legs crashing off muddy rainforest paths. Now the four men bicycling across Africa think the tough part is over.” But what stuck with me about this report was the account of a stretch through Zaire (now Congo), where dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s rule was violently crumbling, when the team’s wounds would not heal because of the intense humidity they were encountering. It sounded like pure hell.

    Thirteen years later, at a coffee shop near Macalester College not far from where he lives, Buettner relayed even more gruesome outtakes from AfricaTrek. He enumerated the various parasites and sicknesses that caused the four riders to lose eighty pounds among them by the time they reached the Congo. He told me a horrifying story about seeing corpses on the highway while biking through Nigeria, where no drivers stopped to investigate or even move this “human roadkill.”

    “I am not going to lie, it was hell, and if I had just been on my own doing it for fun, I would have quit,” he said, in a momentary departure from what one of his friends calls his ruthless optimism. “But when you make commitments, I think they really drive you through times of hardship. I had all these sponsors, I had a staff of people, I had all these classrooms following us along with CNN. Knowing we would let them let down if we quit—that was kind of our saving grace.”

    Dan Buettner is forty-five years old, though he could pass for a decade younger. He’s the father of three kids ranging in age from elementary school to college. He typically dresses in a way that most baby boomers can no longer pull off. At the coffee shop, for example, he wore an ironed aquamarine shirt unbuttoned one button too far, with a beaded necklace threaded through a weathered Asian coin. But hey, I figure a guy who pushed his bike across the Sahara, which he calls “a sandbox the size of the United States,” is entitled to a lifetime’s worth of open shirts. On top of that, he dates seventies supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, who presumably requires some bold fashion choices from her companion. And that bauble around his neck? No doubt it’s a precious gift from a friend he made in some exotic, far-flung destination.

    For Buettner, life gets more interesting as he gets older, and his most recent project is all about aging. “About two and a half years ago, I came across an article about baby boomers and how there were seventy million of them and every seven seconds another one turns fifty,” Buettner said. It occurred to him that these baby boomers, whose interests are shifting from the recreational drugs of their youth to prescription drugs like Prilosec and Cialis, would be interested in learning how to add a few years to their lives. He was able to enlist as sponsors and partners such respected organizations as the National Geographic Society, the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the University of Minnesota School of Public Health to create what he calls the Blue Zones project.

    Buettner says there are at least four regions on the planet that are demographically confirmed to lead their respective continents in life expectancy, in disability-free life expectancy (a measure of the quality of life in later years), or in concentration of centenarians. He has dubbed these regions “blue zones.”

    This month, Buettner’s account of his initial visits to three blue zones—Okinawa Island in Japan, Sardinia in Italy, and the city of Loma Linda in California—will be published in National Geographic. Among other things, the work examines how the diet, lifestyle, spirituality, and social relations of people in these regions may hold clues to their longevity. (He declines to name the fourth blue zone at present.)

    But the twelve-hundred-word article is only the beginning for Buettner. Starting October 31, he’ll be leading a new expedition back to Okinawa Island in Japan. It’s his first adventure in more than two years, and the first of four blue-zone educational “Quests” he’ll lead this and each subsequent fall (Sardinia is scheduled for 2006). This portion of his work is the real nut of the subject. He and his team of fourteen adventurers will spend ten days conducting intensive research and trying to learn more about how longevity works. Through his Blue Zones website, millions of students and interested adults will follow and supervise the quest.

    In 1984, Buettner was a recent graduate of the University of St. Thomas who had returned from a year in Spain, where he had backpacked, discovered a latent talent for bike racing, and learned Spanish, among other things. As he describes it, he “blundered” into a dream job with National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. His assignment was to help the legendary literary editor and participatory journalist George Plimpton organize a celebrity croquet tournament. The event was a fundraiser for NPR but was backed by a developer in Boca Raton, Florida, who wanted to draw attention to a new development. Buettner helped recruit forty celebrities who were each paired with three big-dollar donors. Why croquet? “It was one of these sports that’s semi-aristocratic,” he said, adding that it required no special ability from either celebrity or donor.

    Buettner cultivated a special knack for connecting the rich with the famous, and for getting his travel expenses paid. In addition to being flown regularly from Boca Raton to Washington to New York, where he was put up in the San Moritz Hotel, he also swung a deal where the tournament’s sponsors would fly him and several of his fellow organizers home every weekend. “But instead of saying that home was St. Paul, where it was freezing, we rented an apartment in Freeport, Grand Bahama Island. So every weekend we’d get to fly to the Bahamas, and it was a fabulous experience!”

    The life of the leisure class had fallen into his lap. “I think that, like most college graduates, I aspired to the same kind of life of wealth and ease that Americans generally strive for,” Buettner told me. “But this year was so wonderful to me. I got to ride around in limousines all week. We had an unlimited expense account, ate at the finest restaurants. And after nine months I was sick of it. I didn’t give a damn about nice restaurants—I mean, I wanted to go home and make a sandwich! I was living the life of someone who was fifty-six and very successful, so I had this wonderful opportunity to look ahead. It was almost like one of those Ebenezer Scrooge epiphanies where you see where you’re going to be in the future and see you don’t want to end up there. So you change your path.”

  • What’s a “Transect”?

    Mille Porsild agrees that the life of an explorer can seem awfully selfish. “You think about it all the time, leaving your loved ones behind,” she says. Most of Porsild’s immediate family is halfway around the world in her native Denmark. But some of them are right here: Her husband Paul Pregont and, arguably the most important part of the team, their thirty sled dogs. Like most modern explorers, Porsild and Pregont wrestle all the time with balancing a spiritual love of wide open (empty) spaces with a professional calling to educate and interact. The trick, of course, is finding a way to make a living doing both. To that end, they founded an online adventure education program called NOMADS.

    In the past, explorers simply found someone with deep pockets to sponsor their treks. But in the modern age, especially as sponsorships have dried up along with record-book opportunities, they often fund their projects through teaching, lecturing, writing, or some other form of motivational soapboxing. Many though, like Porsild, Pregont, and Steger, are actually teachers by training and temperament. Ironically, they go into the wild specifically to connect with students around the globe—the children at the other end of the satellite uplink.

    In fact, the expedition itself may be the easy part, compared with the heavy burden of Transect’s educational mission. The expedition has an education director. He is Dr. Aaron Doering, a University of Minnesota expert on instructional systems. Doering is more educator than adventurer—this will be his first major expedition. But he lends real brainpower and technical skill to the team. He and Pregont will manage all the technical hardware and software that allows the team to connect, through Porsild’s curriculum, with millions of schoolchildren who will follow the expedition on the Web.

    The team has two main missions—one educational, the other scientific. In addition to the extensive curriculum in social studies and geography, they’ll conduct some hard science designed to confirm the reality of global warming and climate change. “We’re actually working with NASA to ground-truth the information they have about snow depths and UV radiation,” says Dr. Doering. He explains that some recalcitrant politicians still claim global warming is speculative, because no one has taken measurements on the ground in these remote locations. This expedition will help put to rest this insidious form of denial.

    There are two other members of the team. Hugh Dale-Harris is a Canadian explorer and educator with much experience in the Nunavut region. The youngest member of the team is Eric Dayton, a gifted young adventurer who has partnered with Steger many times in the past. Dayton’s father, Sen. Mark Dayton, has been a longtime friend, supporter, and tent-mate of Steger’s. The three have made numerous trips together, including a memorable trek in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The younger Dayton graduated this year from Williams College and has already shown signs of political mettle. Having spent a season working for the Natural Resources Defense Council, he recently made a few phone calls and secured the final round of funding for Transect—money the expedition desperately needed to make it back next spring. “It was the first time I’ve had a team member pick up the phone and get funding like that!” says Steger. “He’s an amazing young man.”

  • Will Steger: The Rakish Interview

    You’re the greatest living explorer, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jacques Cousteau, Robert Peary, and Amelia Earhardt. Now you’re heading back to the Arctic.

    I see dead deer everywhere, their yawning red abdomens, stiffening legs, their black eyes. It’s one of the hazards of driving around Ely on opening weekend. I went literally to the end of the road in northern Minnesota, to the homestead of Will Steger, and I found hundreds of men already there, in the woods, in blaze orange. With high-powered rifles.

    An outdoorsy guy from the city starts to develop a neurotic view of wilderness, that it’s growing too scarce, that the cities are too crowded and they’re spilling over. An outdoorsy guy from the Range laughs and says relax. You can go days—weeks—without seeing another soul up here. It’s still possible to get lost in this world. Even with GPS and cell phones and Gore-tex, nature is a dangerous thing. Somehow that’s reassuring.

    Still, everyone around here knows where Will lives. He is a legend and a local hero, even if he is a bit of a lefty and a treehugger. Even the rednecks can appreciate what Steger has done in his decorated career as an arctic explorer. Later, sitting with Steger in the Ely steakhouse among quietly gawking admirers and spoiling roughnecks alike, I am not surprised to learn that Steger has never been in a fistfight in the forty years since he moved to Ely from Minneapolis. He is not surprised to hear me ask it.

    There is no other way to describe Will Steger than to say he is a sort of self-taught Zen master. His life in the harshest climates seems to have softened his soul like the silkiest chamois from deer hide. He is a modest and compassionate man, a natural leader with brilliantly disguised management skills and a mind for a million details. And somehow he seems not to have aged in his twenty-year career as a professional explorer. The skin on his face is taut, the crow’s-feet around his eyes have been there since his thirties, his body is lithe and powerful.

    Steger shuffles around his property in an unspeakably filthy mountaineering jacket, his long hair feathering into a kind of salt-and-pepper halo. Iron Will has been unofficially retired from exploration since 1997, when he aborted a solo trek that would have taken him from the North Pole to Ellesmere Island, towing and paddling a kayak sledge. After the rescue ship was called, he told himself he’d never return to the Pole. He’s been hanging out on his property ever since. Until now.

    And what a property it is. Today, it stretches to three hundred acres and includes numerous cabins, a sauna, a boathouse, a lodge, a guesthouse, and countless barns and shops. It is, as they say, entirely off the grid. Solar panels and wood stoves provide for the most quotidian needs. But there are numerous gasoline-powered generators, and a recently installed satellite uplink for serious Internet access available for moments like this—when the homestead is buzzing with volunteers, staffers, and expedition members. In a sense, this is precisely what this place was built for. What the man himself was built for.

    Sitting in the middle, at the highest point of Steger’s rolling, rocky property, is “The Castle.” It is a Gothic, Cinderella edifice built with raw timber, glass, and granite, with flying buttresses, balconies, cupolas, and a riot of copper-plated dormers. The physical reality of this building—so nearly complete, in its twentieth year—goads Steger. It represents the hard reality of a dream he’s had since his first polar expedition in 1986: To not only go into the wide open spaces and conquer them, but to bring people of the world together. Never has that vision and mission felt more focused than now. As an educator, scientist, explorer, and writer, Steger is absolutely convinced of the reality of global warming. He’s just as convinced that a quick and effective response is not merely possible; it’s the only morally responsible thing to do.

    Last year at this time, Steger was feeling restless. He’d written four books, he occasionally lectured, but he pretty much lived in isolation at the end of the road. He’d seen the Internet coming for years, and saw the brilliant possibilities it offered. At the same time, he was increasingly disturbed by global warming, now an established fact that only the most stubborn and selfish politicians deny.

    Meanwhile, the growing field of adventure education intrigued him. In 1999, Steger was approached by Dr. Aaron Doering, an education professional at the University of Minnesota who specializes in information systems. At the same time, Paul Pregont and Mille Porsild were in touch. Down in Grand Marais, they’d founded NOMADS and PolarHusky.com, an online education program connected to their dogsled expeditions. The four discussed the possibility of a new expedition. But funding was scarce. They came close to landing a major sponsorship from Coca-Cola, but it all fell apart after September 11th. By spring of 2002, it looked like a bust.

    Then last December, Steger was in Minneapolis for the holidays when he accidentally bumped into another legend of exploration, the trans-global cyclist Dan Buettner. Their brief conversation was the final, decisive push Steger needed to go ahead—with or without the funding in place. He realized his restlessness of the previous year had had a purpose. On a personal level, he wanted to get back on the ice and into the headspace of a long arctic expedition. On a professional level, he wanted to prove what could be done with all the modern tools of adventure education.

    Arctic Transect is a massive educational undertaking—as much an epic classroom curriculum as a dogsled adventure. An estimated ten million children from kindergarten to twelfth grade will be tuning in on the Web. This kind of approach is not new. NOMADS has been doing it with dogsleds since 1999. Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen had online components on their last two expeditions. Dan Buettner’s most recent exploits have been webcast through ClassroomConnect.com. In fact, way back in the dark ages of 1997, Steger himself had one of the earliest satellite uplinks to the Internet on his solo North Pole trip.

    Arctic Transect will travel 3,000 miles through five communities in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The expedition leaves Yellowknife on December 15 and arrives next spring at Pangnirtung, Nunavut, on the Arctic Ocean—with any luck, before the ice begins to break up. Transect’s mission is to show how connectivity is changing our world—both for better and for worse. But the real goal is not the Arctic Ocean before the ice breaks up. It is human understanding before global breakup.