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Adventure does not preclude a lofty aim. There is a whole new breed of Americans who seek adventure in politics or war abroad, including a small, constantly changing, necessarily anonymous group of American youths who have joined with European contemporaries to spirit East Germans through the Berlin Wall. Adventure is also constantly produced in the name of scientific exploration, but whatever the admixture of other causes, the true adventurer is an idealist only by the way; he is really after adventure for its own sake.
Cast of Characters
Plainly the only way to understand the adventurer is to hear him as he attempts to put his motivations into words:
∙ Richard Peck, 44, is a Princeton graduate, the father of three children and the owner of a Cincinnati advertising agency. He has spent the past 16 months trying to find the famed Lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona's barren Superstition Mountain range. "The more I read about the Lost Dutchman," he recalls, "the more I kept coming back to it. Finally, I was sure I knew where the Lost Dutchman was. I was going to tear this thing open. I thought I was going to have it wrapped up in two weeks." So far his search has cost him $80,000. "I had to try something like this because it was so impossible. But if this mine is ever found it's still going to hurt in a lot of ways. Something is going to be lost out of this world."
∙ Dr. William R. Halliday, 49, is a chest surgeon by profession; by avocation he is a spelunker in the caves of the limestone belt that stretches from Ohio and Kentucky to New Mexico. "Curiosity takes you underground in the first place," he says. "And once there, you're hooked. You discover one thing, and that's never enough; you're always pushing back, and then back beyond that. Everything underground seems to ask a question. I've seen this challenge change a motorcycle punk in Los Angeles into a Ph.D." A cave's size or depth is not what attracts the spelunker. "There can be a hole behind any rock," says Halliday, "and often we get as much satisfaction in going 400 feet as we do in a much more impressive distance."
∙ John Zink, the millionaire owner of a furnace company, finds adventure atop a 100,000-lb. bulldozer, clearing timber and building roads on a 12,000-acre tract near Tulsa that he is turning into a Boy Scout camp. That's not adventure? Well, it is when one considers that Zink is 72 years old, and that he has more than once had to throw himself clear when his huge dozer overturned in the rugged country. "Of course it's dangerous," snorts Zink. "But I haven't any time for country clubs or flitting off to Europe. I'd rather build roads for Boy Scouts. I feel sorry for the lame, the weak, the ill and the stupid; they aren't going to run the country for you. What I'm trying to do is make a place where the smart will get smarter, the strong stronger, and the swift swifter."