Not All Barriers Are Built of Concrete

In 1941, during World War II, an officer in the Italian colonial government in Ethiopia named Felice Benuzzi was captured by the British army and sent by train to a prisoner of war camp in Kenya, about ten miles from the equator. Benuzzi was a climber and dreamer and romantic, and Camp 354, while humane, was numbing and monotonous and gray. What was it like for this young father, who’d felt the thrill of air beneath his heels on the craggy walls of the Dolomites, to wake up that first morning of incarceration and not know when the war would end or how long he’d be held there? What was it like on the second day, when he woke again and it was identical to the first? Or the third, when he faced the same gruel of routine and knew that it stretched as far into the future as he could see?

Benuzzi’s response to his situation was radical, implausible, and more than a little mad: The moment the rainy season clouds lifted and he saw seventeen-thousand-foot Mount Kenya for the first time just twenty miles away, he vowed to break out of camp and climb it. Never mind the rifle-wielding guards or the lack of equipment, maps, and beta. Never mind the barbed-wire fence and insufficient nutrition. For most of the next two years, he thought of nothing else but escaping and climbing that peak.

In 2009, when I started making the moves to turn my blog into what would become Adventure Journal, I spent about eighty hours a week at my desk or in front of a screen. With no budget for outside help, I did everything myself, like learning to code and building the design. Twitter was the big platform of the day, and every night I’d spend hours on my laptop, clicking to follow other users so they’d follow me back. Write, post, click, repeat.

This was my life for the better part of the first five years of AJ. My right wrist became inflamed with carpal tunnel syndrome. A groove developed in the floor between my home office and the fridge. I gained so much weight—thirty-five pounds—that my knees ached from the bulk. I wasn’t having adventures. I hated who I’d become, hated how I looked, and I found myself locked in a spiral of embarrassment and shame. Worse, I couldn’t find a way out.

Not all walls are built of concrete. Benuzzi’s story, which he shared in the book No Picnic on Mount Kenya and is related in depth elsewhere in this issue, has continued to resonate across the decades because, I think, we all live inside prisons of our own making, at least to some degree. Perfectionism, overwork, insecurity, body shame, fear, pride, free-floating anxiety, sloth, inertia. Social media dependency. Obsessive news reading. Binge watching. If we aren’t careful, and sometimes even if we are, we’ll fill our days with pursuits that seem right, or rewarding, or fun, but that in reality block us from who we want to be. And over time, those invisible walls can become invisible even to us, and we stay inside them, not knowing to look out.

I know that my value is not dependent on what I weigh or how I look or how fast I can run, and neither is yours, but my happiness is reliant on being outside testing myself in new places. Stuck in that unhealthy rut, reading Benuzzi’s story for the first time felt like being shaken awake from a deep and dark dream. What are you doing, man? Is this what you want for yourself? Is this worth the cost of your health, your life, your spirit? That guy made crampons from scrap metal he found in a prison camp, broke out, and climbed a mountain! You can find another way!

Benuzzi’s lessons must be applied broadly, of course, as his situation was unique. Most of us are complex human adults with multiple passions and identities, and we aren’t bound to just one responsibility, but many. Scaling a mountain isn’t a cure-all, no matter how beautiful the simplicity of trying to get to the top and then back down. We still have to give ourselves to our work, to our families, to our friends, and we are better for it. But what Benuzzi knew, and why his story will last as long as there are words to tell it, is that there’s a hunger in the soul that can only be fed by having an adventure, and a big, ambitious, crazy one at that.