Limits of the Known: David Roberts

The cover of the book shows us a megalith sticking up into the sky with snow-covered peaks dimly visible far below. It looks almost fake; something out of Photoshop by way of Lord of the Rings.  It happens to be the Great Trango Tower, a peak in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. (I looked it up.) At first glance we might fail to notice the two tiny men standing on the narrow patch of flat rock on top. When we do, our attention is likely to be drawn immediately to the almost sheer walls dropping away on every side. How did those guys get up there? How are they going to get down? Call it a moment of minor frisson.

The book’s publicists have made an effort to characterize it as a tour de force of derring-do on the order of John Krakauer’s best-selling Into Thin Air. But in Limits of the Known journalist and self-styled “adventurer” David Roberts blends three or four elements into a robust if uneven whole.

In the early going Roberts shares stories of his youthful climbs in Alaska, which have become legendary, emphasizing how remote and daring they actually were. He more than occasionally compares these “light and fast” expeditions, during which he and a small group of friends were often out of communication with the outside world for weeks at a time, to more recent expeditions that are logistically complex and almost invariably rely on contact with support teams­­—and sometimes the world at large—on a daily basis.

“It is tempting to see the state of exploration today as a played-out endeavor,” he writes, “a stage on which latter-day imposters try to emulate the heroes of yesteryear by manufacturing artificial challenges that grab headlines but add little or nothing to terrestrial discovery.”

Roberts gnashes his teeth a little at the fact that later in his career he more than occasionally earned his living as a journalist providing copy for these transmissions.

Subsequent sections are devoted to the history and current state of different realms of exploration: mountain-climbing, river-running, caving, Arctic exploration. Roberts draws here on his years writing for Outside and other magazines, but he also spends considerable time detailing the early history of these “sports”: Shipton in the Karakorum, Mick and Dan Leahy in New Guinea, Nansen in the Arctic. For a reader like me, who reads a mountaineering yarn only occasionally, these straight-ahead historical overviews are among the best parts of the book.

In the midst of these overviews, Roberts punctuates his memoir with a blow-by-blow of his battle with throat cancer, describing each phase and issue in excruciating medical detail, almost as if the illness were an indominable mountain peak to be faced and somehow overcome. It’s not a pleasant picture.

Only in the last few pages of the book does Roberts say much about his domestic situation. It seems he and his wife led independent lives. At one point he writes:

“I think of myself—of my vocation—not chiefly as a writer, or a climber, or even a husband or a friend, but as an adventurer. This book represents my effort to get at the core of the elusive phenomenon we call adventure, both past and future, both in the lives of explorers and in the wayward paths along which my own wanderlust has propelled me.”

Though many parts of the book are engaging, it strikes me that in his attempt to get at the “core” Roberts has failed. In the book’s final pages he uses phrases like “vocation” and “ultimate things” in passing, but he shies away from probing what those concepts might mean. (Well, it isn't a theology text!) (Well, why not?) Nor does he give sufficient emphasis, in summing up his life and career, to the value of the pleasure he’s brought to the thousands of readers who, sharing his love of adventure, have relished his many popular articles and books.

What, in the end, is the value of adventuring? It can hardly be merely to bring back a report of a place no Westerner has visited before. It needs to be a good story, involving risk, and effort, and fear, and fortitude as well. This tussle of emotions is a critical element no less that a heart-expanding view from a lofty peak.

Though I haven’t read it, I suspect that Roberts’ first book, the now classic The Mountain of My Fear (1968), covers this ground admirably.

Does such adventuring bring us closer to the divine? Maybe so. But it’s usually a fleeting sensation, devilishly difficult to capture in words.

Those who can do so have reaffirmed the value of art.