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Adventure today? There are those who say that adventure's day is done in America. The West has long since been closed to the pioneer, and its closing was mourned more than a century ago by Francis Parkman, a sickly Harvard law student who became a Western adventurer: "We did not dream how commerce and gold would breed nations along the Pacific, the disenchanting screech of the locomotive break the spell of weird mysterious mountains, women's rights invade the fastnesses of the Arapahoes, and despairing savagery, assailed in front and rear, vail its scalp-locks and feathers before the triumphant commonplace." Or, Parkman might add today, how a security-minded society and government would seek to remove all risk from the life of the citizen. Have prosperity and a plenitude of leisure softened the American, converting him into a creature fit only for paper shuffling, patio living and petunia potting?
Indeed not. The instinct for adventure and excitement remains. In Victorian England, with its relative wealth and opportunity for the leisured, complacent life, the compulsion for adventure was far from stifled; rather, it flared forth in a golden age of English exploration and mountaineering. Similarly, but even more so, many Americans of the 1960s refuse to react to prosperity as though it were the smoke from the poppy seed, and instead feel it as the thorn that goads them toward the bold, dangerous and somehow immensely satisfying fundamentals of existence.
Admittedly, the very fact that adventure nowadays has to be searched out can make the whole thing self-conscious and artificial. When the lights went out along the East Coast last week, city dwellers were almost pathetically glad to be released from their routine and from their machines, finding adventure of sorts in the simple business of walking down stairs or directing traffic in darkened streets. Adventurers are driven to figure out ever new, ever more outlandish forms of excitement, from using jet engines to shoot up, not down, the wicked rapids of the Colorado River, to musk-ox wrangling. The latter was said to be impossible since the musk ox is a strong, quick animal with a very short temper. But John Teal, a Harvard man who did graduate work in anthropology and geography at Yale, captured 67 musk oxen on Nunivak Island in the Bering Sea, mostly by driving them into the freezing water, then swimming after them and wrestling them ashore.
Statistics cannot sum up adventure, but they do give a notion of the American thirst for excitement. Take skindiving. There are now some 8,000,000 U.S. skindivers, about 1,000,000 of them skilled with scuba. Merely to minnow about underwater is no longer enough, and such sports as octopus wrestling are coming increasingly into vogue, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, where the critters grow up to 90 Ibs. and can be exceedingly tough customers. Although there are several accepted techniques for octopus wrestling, the really sporty way requires that the human diver go without artificial breathing apparatus.