Three weeks ago we were asked by a casting director to submit a video and application for a popular reality TV show on which teams race around the world against each other for a million dollars. Having never seen the show and in preparation for the interview, I watched countless episodes, plotted, dieted, ran, studied languages, scoured maps, and dreamed. For three weeks I plunged into a new weird archetype, with Lara Croft as my muse. In the end; we were not cast. The let-down was surprisingly devastating.
During that three-week period, this was our normal life: We took a backcountry horseback trip into the mountains for a week, leading a pack string and another couple over precarious ledged trails, climbing over deadfall and burned out forests, scouting for bears, viewing mountaintop vistas and numerous drainages, and catching fish from the rivers using grasshoppers for bait. At home, we landed our own bush plane in our field, created alliances with exciting guests from foreign countries for quid pro quo stay-overs, tasted rare vintages of excellent wine that were brought as gifts from worldly friends here for a shooting competition, charted numerous courses on maps for those taking their own adventures into various parts of the Rocky Mountains, and planned travel itineraries for next year’s foxhunt and horse drive from originations all over the world. We worked, negotiated agreements and trades with clients, fine-tuned strategies, gathered horses off of thousands of acres of pasture, loaded a zorse, rode and taught others to ride and pack, and perfected driving a brand new ATV. (Incidentally, I love using the 4-wheeler. Screw tradition.) I drove 14 hours straight to haul horses out of a remote mountain camp, driving my 1-ton dually manual diesel and hauling a 30 foot gooseneck through impossible places on one day, sailed the Missouri River at Canyon Ferry the next, then next risked being shot while trespassing and sneaking across one of the finest private ranches that butts up against NFS to pick up four daring girls and seven horses coming out from the wilderness to the wrong trailhead. I planned our two-week, multi-country trip up the Rhine River this October using boats, trains, planes, and cars. I even started looking at backpacks and planning “wing it” routes where we could practice navigation to obscure points of interest. We were preparing for high adventure.
After the clear casting error on Hollywood’s part, I recovered from my post-starvation carb coma and disappointingly returned to normal life. I think I even cried a little. Why is normal life so boring? Is it because we are not racing against other teams for a million dollars in front of a camera? Is it because at the end there is no clearly defined prize and no one to tell you in which place you arrived? My three-week account of real life looks a lot like high adventure to most. (Of course, our well-traveled friend Larry says the definition of high adventure is just a fuck up that you live through. He would know.) We race for money in our business, compete with others and negotiate, have a physically demanding fast-paced outdoor lifestyle, and travel all over. But it is just us, NORMAL, everyday, ho-hum, same-ol’ same-ol’, nothing new.
One of the questions on the application for the show was “What do you like most about travel?” My honest answer was “Encountering that truly novel moment that alters how I approach my life forever.” You never know when it will happen, but when it does it is the very elixir of life, the stuff that Lara herself would risk life and fortune to obtain. When the human brain encounters something truly novel, it CHANGES, and you are changed forever. Thanks to racing to race a race I won’t end up running, I am beginning to realize that novel can happen anytime and anywhere, but you have to leave normal. It happened almost every day over the last three weeks, but I missed it because I was seeking a novelty.
I won’t be running a race around the world against other teams for a million dollars, but I have decided to race anyway. I am running my own race and it starts every morning, wherever I find myself. I am running against normal. I am racing for novel. It is the priceless prize at the end of every day of all of our amazing lives.
R
