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∙ John S. Crawford, 36, spends weeks at a time as a wildlife photographer in the remote reaches of Alaska, Canada and the Pacific Northwest. He has suffered eleven bone frac tures, and frostbitten toes are a commonplace. Once, when stranded for eight days at the tip of the Alaskan peninsula, he survived by fishing safely while a grizzly bear pack lurked near by. He rarely carries a rifle. "A rifle," he says, "is a crutch. If you've got one, there are likely to be times when you break down and use it. If you just say, 'Hell, I'm going to take pictures no matter what happens,' there is a mystic rapport, somehow, between you and the animals. At that point, I am just as high as a human being can be."
∙ Linn Emrich, 34, was a commercial-airline pilot, but quit because "it took all the satisfaction and joy out of flying. You always had to fly where they wanted. You sat there in this big plush seat with your earphones on, the radio chattering, and the engine noise drowning out almost everything." Now, in the lovely lake valley near Issaquah, Wash., Emrich operates an airport devoted exclusively to sky sports—flying, sailplaning, parachute jumping and ballooning. He is his own best customer, and was the first pilot to fly a sailplane across Mount Rainier. "I see so many people who are in ruts and aren't having fun," he says. "One of them is my own brother. He's still an airline copilot, and he grinds away in bad weather, smelling smoke from the captain and not complaining, because he doesn't have the rank."
∙ William J. Gordon Jr., 47, left Virginia Theological Seminary 22 years ago on assignment to Alaska, where he is now Episcopal bishop. He lived five years in an Eskimo village, once made a 35-day trek from Point Hope to Point Barrow by dog sled; he flies 50,000 miles a year, much of it in bad weather and to isolated areas. "Most people," he says, "wait on their islands of insecurity for the world to overwhelm them. In most of the U.S., no one has to take risks. Up here, you feel challenged. When I fly in bad weather or when I rough it, I feel that I have beaten something that was my adversary."
Conflict of Interest
Because the adventurer has deliberately removed himself from the stream of society, society is not always friendly toward him. Few hostile critics have gone so far as Denver Poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril, who was sure that "if a mountain persists as a challenge to a man over 26, it implies some psychic deficiency or sex frustration ... I am further convinced that the adult who feels under compulsion to lick formidable mountains invariably enjoys as unsatisfactory a love life as a lady harp player." The obverse of that notion is that sex itself is the real, perhaps the last great adventure, the "last frontier" that permits modern man, hag-ridden by civilization, to explore, to dare and to conquer.