by Pam Houston
When I'm asked to choose my greatest adventure, my mind cramps up the way a mother's might if she were asked to pick her favorite child. I think, how could it not be my trip to Botswana, the days I spent floating in a dugout canoe between waterlilies and hippos; or sneaking up on two bull elephants playing water polo; or getting close enough to a pregnant lioness to reach out and scratch the hairs on her chin?
But if I selected Botswana, I couldn't pick Alaska and the month of solitude I spent floating the Tatshenshini River. I couldn't tell about the night I made camp at a place where 26 glaciers came together or the day I took my 16-foot inflatable raft into steel blue Alsec Bay while icebergs the size of the Sydney Opera House calved from 1,000-foot cliffs all around me.
If I picked the Tatshenshini, it would leave out my first trip to the Bahamas, when my friend Mary and I had $65 and 10 days of spring break between us, and talked our way onto cargo planes, army buses, and mail boats, and successfully dodged immigration officials, tariff collectors, and teenage bandits with switch blades. We relied on our guardian angels to keep us safe and fed and sheltered, and they did --- through 10 islands and 14 days (we were a little late for classes) and the entire 65 bucks.
I couldn't leave out this year's highwater trip down the Colorado through Cataract Canyon, where I was rowing and my good friend J.J. was my passenger. We flipped in the rapid called Big Drop #2 and had to swim through it and Big Drop #3 in our life jackets, bobbing like tiny corks through two of the meanest whitewater drops in America. In Big Drop #3 the name of the wave that kills everybody is Satan's Gut, and we got sucked straight into it, the water pounding over and around us, tossing our limbs and somersaulting us till we didn't know which way it was --- even to the surface. And all the time the voice in my head was saying, "It's not just you who's going to die today, but also J.J.," and in that moment, I saw not only adventure's pure heart but also its dark shadow.
How do we determine the greatness of an adventure? By number and intensity of thrills, by risk of death involved and uncertainty of outcome? By its distance or difference from whatever the thing is that we call home? And if I choose a "greatest" adventure from this list I've written, won't I be denying the potential of my future adventures, which I trust will be so big and so surprising that they will redefine for me both the word "adventure" and the word "great."
Last night I went to see Jerry Jeff Walker perform for his daughter's high school class in the oldest dance hall in Texas. Today I gallopped a headstrong Tennessee Walker throughbred mix I didn't know fast and wild across an open field --- and weren't both of these things great adventures?
What I can say with certainty is that it's not the magnitude of the adventure we embark upon that matters, but our own capacity for wonder when we engage ourselves with the world. What matters is not the details of the individual adventures, but that we continue to nurture our adventuring spirit in a society that rewards complacency and endorses routine. What is important is that we remember above all that the world holds adventure in every moment for us; we only need the courage to make it our own.
Pam Houston is a river guide an a contributing editor to Allure, Elle, and Ski; and she is the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, published by Washington Square Press. This article originally appeared in Women's Sports and Fitness.