Using the Force to Find the Place

Near the end of a really long day deep in the Needles District of Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, Sinuhe Xavier and I were heading out, heading north, leaving the Chesler Park region behind. We’d hiked the shadowed stone corridors of the Joint Trail, which isn’t a slot canyon but feels like one, where shoulders brush the walls as you slide through, and then we watched the sun set over the sandcastle towers that give the district its name. The morning felt long distant, and already memories of the day’s activities were rearranging themselves into new chronologies. We were tired, dirty, and content.

“Shall we use the force?” he asked as we rolled down the dirt road in his old Land Rover.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

He reached down and turned off the headlights. For an instant, I was blinded by the blackness and the two-track shimmering on my optic nerve and then my eyes adjusted and the world began to resolve. The canyon walls were silhouettes and starlight glowed in an ebony sky. We could have been moving two miles an hour or twenty—it was impossible to tell.

This issue has two stories about roads and one about a trail, but as we were putting it together I found myself thinking less about routes, paths, and rights of way and more about how people are using adventure to find their place in the world. Benny Zenga and his brothers are evangelists for the power of kooky tall bikes to break down the self-consciousness that can hold you back. Artist Andy Davis puts his energy into intensely colorful renderings of surfing to spread joy and happiness. Krista Langlois swam out in the middle of the Marshall Islands at night to understand more about the people who hunt sea turtles to celebrate rites of passage.

Like many of you, I discovered what felt like my true self through adventure and outdoor recreation. My teen years were a period of rebellion and mischief, but then I found skiing and mountain biking and climbing, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that they saved my life. I learned how to place pro and duck-dive under a big set and ride up ledges without falling and landing on my head. I used those skills to spend fifty-plus days a year in the snow and one hundred and fifty on my bike and who knows how many in the water. But then, as I had kids and the gray came and I could no longer pretend to be young, I asked myself, how did that matter? Did that matter?

The mission of Adventure Journal is to explore what it means to live an adventurous life, and the key word there is “means.” We will always celebrate the simple pleasures of being outdoors, the sweet tang of fall leaves, the bracing shock of skinny-dipping in an alpine tarn. We will always honor hard-earned achievements. But our deepest commitment is digging to discover what matters most—which is almost always how you’ve touched other people. I’ve learned, accidentally and serendipitously, that the common ground we create through shared adventures can open the door to powerful change: to marriages, new careers, lives lived with more purpose. One of the great lessons of my life is that adventure can be a means, not just an end—a way to spread love, nurture others, and leave the world a better place.

Sinuhe and I began our friendship with a bike ride. It was a long one, nearly three hundred miles from Telluride, Colorado, to Moab, Utah, and we talked about a lot of stuff—and not just things like whether bringing one pair of bike shorts, one jersey, and one pair of socks each for a week in the saddle was a good idea (grody, but yes). We talked about life and values and relationships, and we laid the groundwork not just for more adventures but for a friendship that would stretch the rest of our lives. And when we went through our inevitable highs and lows, the births of children, the loss of parents, the successes and failures of work or relationships, we were there for each other.

I don’t know how long we drove with the lights out. I don’t remember what we ate or where we slept. All I really remember is the feeling that this was precisely where I was supposed to be, for a little while anyway, out there in the dark, navigating together.

###