When Our Heroes Are Human

A little over one hundred years after the famous loss of the Endurance to Antarctic pack ice and the rescue of its entire crew of twenty-eight more than a year later, Ernest Shackleton remains the archetype for heroic leadership under extreme duress. He kept his men alive through months of polar darkness and a major crossing in open lifeboats of some of the wildest seas on earth, then sought rescue by sailing another seven hundred twenty miles and crossing the glaciers of South Georgia Island with screws driven into his boots and a fifty-foot length of hemp rope. His reputation is well-deserved.

There’s more to the Shackleton story, though. At home, he could be a tyrant to his family. He was an easy mark for cons and get-rich-quick schemes. He racked up a ton of debt. He had lady friends. He promised his wife he wouldn’t return to Antarctica, but he did. Shackleton, it turns out, was human.

John Muir had deep friendships and was devoted to his two daughters. Nellie Bly married a man more than forty years her senior. George Mallory may or may not have been bisexual (historians debate it), but certainly both men and women swooned at his beauty, and he enjoyed the thrill of ambiguity. In this issue, we take a closer look at pioneers of adventure, but not to gossip—rather, to better understand them as people, and perhaps, in so doing, to better understand ourselves.

Who are you? Who do you think you are? Skier, trail runner, trad climber, longboarder? Hardcore adventurer, weekend warrior, wannabe? What labels do you use to describe yourself to others? What do you tell yourself about yourself? If you’re like me, you pendulum between the satisfactions of experiences and skills hard-earned and the insecurities of not feeling good enough, strong enough, committed enough. You take pride in paying your rent or mortgage on time or saving for your kid’s college like a proper adult, then feel less legit because you missed the last three powder dumps. Or you finally get to the level of fitness you wanted and then are struck with guilt because you haven’t called your mom in months.

It all sounds so binary, so either/or, and maybe that’s just me, but I think that we humans need labels, we need the black and white. Sort life into things that matter and things that don’t. Distill something to its essence in order to grasp it, then move on. Shackleton, leader. Muir, mystic. Mallory, doomed. The problem with this reductionism, though, is that it doesn’t accurately reflect the world or the people in it. It doesn’t give full consideration to the beauty of dimension, and as we build and adjust and reflect our identities, it can create misunderstanding and dissonance.

Today, our concept of what it means to be a hero, at least as seen through the lens of recreation and adventure, is changing. We know now—and maybe we always have, deep down—that heroic acts are more common than heroic lives, that despite our hunger for simple narratives people are complicated, often contradictory, sometimes confounding. We also understand that the challenges of today, from environmental to political, demand a different response than in decades past, more nuanced and pervasive, and some of the industry’s biggest outdoor brands are reframing their roles and responsibilities, not just as purveyors of equipment, but as enablers of solutions. There are still plenty of elite athletes on company retainers, which is as it should be, since adventure is so often athletic, but now there are more scientists, artists, conservationists, and social justice activists. The multiculturalism of the wider world is slowly but surely impacting the long-insular outdoor culture. And for the outdoor industry, which has always worshiped the religion of hardcore self-striving, an embrace of the range of adventure and human complexities (and shapes and colors and genders) is a big, positive step forward.

Adventure will always be an escape, and Shackleton, if he was anything like us, took comfort in the focus demanded by the most elemental aspects of his time on the ice: feed yourself, move forward, stay alive. Even so, as he watched the Endurance sink, he must have been haunted by the knowledge that instead of finding fame and glory by becoming the first to cross Antarctica via the South Pole, he had failed. He must have worried about paying his creditors when he got home, if he got home, and how his wife would welcome him. A century has burnished his reputation, stripped away the distractions, put him on a pedestal, but in 1916 Shackleton was just a guy, with ordinary problems, who rose to accomplish extraordinary things. There was nothing simple about it, but if he could do that, so can we.