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Lindbergh's flight was a kind of adventure with a purpose — to expand the horizons of aviation. Much of today's adventuring involves mere stunts. Even these can have a cranky grandeur about them, or can prove to the individual something about his limits. Several years ago, an English curate pushed a Chinese wheelbarrow 2,000 miles across the Sahara. Japan's Naomi Uemura, 36, has a gift for feats: alone, he has scaled some of the highest peaks of four continents (Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua and McKinley), and he joined an expedition that climbed Everest in 1970. Then Uemura alone dog-sledged all the way from Greenland to Alaska — 490 days across an icy 7,200 miles. Why? Says Uemura: "In an age when technology enables you even to reach the moon, an adventure is only possible where there is no technology."
Lindbergh and other adventurers proceeded in part out of what W.B. Yeats called "the fascination of what's difficult." The urge to explore, sheer curiosity, is genetically embedded in the human mind. As Ahab said: "This was rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before the oceans rolled." Sailor Tristan Jones is someone Lindbergh would have understood. "Out there," says Jones, "is a very great void. It's full of wonderful phenomena and it all belongs to us. If the single explorer didn't believe that, he would never bother going into the unknown." Lindbergh began as a boyish barnstormer of the new science of flight. "It took me years to discover," he wrote much later, "that science, with all its brilliance, lights only a middle chapter of creation, a chapter with both ends bordering on the infinite, one which can be forever expanded but never completed." That fusion of mystic and mechanic, so American, was what gave Lindbergh his fascination — the lit eral enactment of a spirit soaring, alone.
* In 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had made the much shorter flight from Newfoundland to Ireland.