And the following summer—after three straight years in the wild—Manuel Lisa convinced him to do the same thing. Even Colter’s narrow escape didn’t scare him off; soon after recovering from his ordeal, he returned to the Three Forks area to retrieve his traps and had to flee from the Blackfeet once again. And in April 1810 he survived another Blackfeet attack on a new stockade at Three Forks, an attack that left five men dead. Finally Colter had had enough. He traveled down the Missouri and reached St. Louis by the end of May. He married a young woman and settled on a farm near Dundee, Missouri. Where the Blackfeet had failed, civilization succeeded: He died just two years later.
Given the trajectory of Colter’s life, one could say that the wilderness was good for him, kept him alive. It was there that he functioned at the outer limits of his abilities, a state that humans have always thrived on. “Dangers…seemed to have for him a kind of fascination,” another fur trapper who knew Colter said. It must have been while under the effect of that fascination that Colter felt most alive, most potent. That was why he stayed in the wilderness for six straight years; that was why he kept sneaking up to Three Forks to test his skills against the Blackfeet.
Fifty years later, whalers in New Bedford, Massachusetts, would find themselves unable to face life back home and—as miserable as they were—would sign up for another three years at sea. A hundred years after that, American soldiers at the end of their tours in Vietnam would realize they could not go back to civilian life and would volunteer for one more stint in hell.
“Their shirts and breeches of buckskin or elkskin had many patches sewed on with sinews, were worn thin between patches, were black from many campfires, and greasy from many meals,” writes historian Bernard De Voto about the early trappers. “They were thread-bare and filthy, they smelled bad, and any Mandan had lighter skin. They gulped rather than ate the tripes of buffalo. They had forgotten the use of chairs. Words and phrases, mostly obscene, of Nez Perce, Clatsop, Mandan, Chinook came naturally to their tongues.”
None of these men had become trappers against his will; to one degree or another, they’d all volunteered for the job. However rough it was, it must have looked better than the alternative, which was—in one form or another—an uneventful life passed in society’s embrace. For people like Colter, the one thing more terrifying than having something bad happen must have been to have nothing happen at all.
Modern society, of course, has perfected the art of having nothing happen at all. There is nothing particularly wrong with this except that for vast numbers of Americans, as life has become staggeringly easy, it has also become vaguely unfulfilling. Life in modern society is designed to eliminate as many unforeseen events as possible, and as inviting as that seems, it leaves us hopelessly underutilized. And that is where the idea of “adventure” comes in. The word comes from the Latin
About ten years ago a young rock climber named Dan Osman started free-soloing—climbing without a safety rope—on cliffs that had stymied some of the best climbers in the country. Falling was not an option. At about the same time, though, he began falling on purpose, jumping off cliffs tethered not by a bungee cord but by regular climbing rope. He found that if he calculated the arc of his fall just right, he could jump hundreds of feet and survive. Osman’s father, a policeman, told a journalist named Andrew Todhunter, “Doing the work that I do, I have faced death many, many, many times. When it’s over, you celebrate the fact that you’re alive, you celebrate the fact that you have a family, you celebrate the fact that you can breathe. Everything, for a few instants, seems sweeter, brighter, louder. And I think this young man has reached a point where his awareness of life and living is far beyond what I could ever achieve.”
Todhunter wrote a book about Osman called
Colter of course would have thought Osman was crazy—risk your life for no good reason at all?—but he certainly would have understood the allure. Every time Colter went up to Three Forks, he was in effect free-soloing. Whether he survived or not was entirely up to him. No one was going to save him; no one was going to come to his aid. It’s the oldest game in the world—and perhaps the most compelling.
The one drawback to modern adventuring, however, is that people can mistake it for something it’s not. The fact that someone can free-solo a sheer rock face or balloon halfway around the world is immensely impressive, but it’s not strictly necessary. And because it’s not necessary, it’s not heroic. Society would continue to function quite well if no one ever climbed another mountain, but it would come grinding to a halt if roughnecks stopped working on oil rigs. Oddly, though, it’s the mountaineers who are heaped with glory, not the roughnecks, who have a hard time even getting a date in an oil town. A roughneck who gets crushed tripping pipe or a fire fighter who dies in a burning building has, in some ways, died a heroic death. But Dan Osman did not; he died because he voluntarily gambled with his life and lost. That makes him brave—unspeakably brave—but nothing more. Was his life worth the last jump? Undoubtedly not. Was his life worth living without those jumps? Apparently not. The task of every person alive is to pick a course between those two extremes.
I have only once been in a situation where everything depended on me—my own version of Colter’s run. It’s a ludicrous comparison except that for the age that I was, the stakes seemed every bit as high. When I was eleven, I went skiing for a week with a group of boys my age, and late one afternoon when we had nothing to do, we walked off into the pine forests around the resort. The snow was very deep, up to our waists in places, and we wallowed through slowly, taking turns breaking trail. After about half an hour, and deep into the woods now, we crested a hill and saw a small road down below us. We waited a few minutes, and sure enough, a car went by. We all threw snowballs at it. A few minutes later another one went by, and we let loose another volley.
Our snowballs weren’t hitting their mark, so we worked our way down closer to the road and put together some really dense, heavy iceballs—ones that would throw like a baseball and hit just as hard. Then we waited, the woods getting darker and darker, and finally in the distance we heard the heavy whine of an eighteen-wheeler downshifting on a hill. A minute later it barreled around the turn, and at the last moment we all heaved our iceballs. Five or six big white splats blossomed on the windshield. That was followed by the ghastly yelp of an air brake.
It was a dangerous thing to do, of course: The driver was taking an icy road very fast, and the explosion of snow against his windshield must have made him jump right out of his skin. We didn’t think of that, though; we just watched in puzzlement as the truck bucked to a stop. And then the driver’s side door flew open and a man jumped out. And everyone started to run.
I don’t know why he picked me, but he did. My friends scattered into the forest, no one saying a word, and when I looked back, the man was after me. He was so angry that strange grunts were coming out of him. I had never seen an adult that enraged. I ran harder and harder, but to my amazement, he just kept coming. We were all alone in the forest now, way out of earshot of my friends; it was just a race between him and me. I knew I couldn’t afford to lose it; the man was too crazy, too determined, and there was no one around to intervene. I was on my own.
Before I knew it, the man had drawn to within a few steps of me. Neither of us said a word; we just wallowed on through the snow, each engaged in our private agonies. It was a slow-motion race with unimaginable consequences. We struggled on for what seemed like miles but in reality was probably only a few hundred yards; the deep snow made it seem farther. In the end I outlasted him. He was a strong man, but he spent his days behind the wheel of a truck—smoking, no doubt—and he was no match for a terrified kid. With a groan of disgust he finally stopped and doubled over, swearing at me between breaths.
I kept running. I ran until his shouts had died out behind me and I couldn’t stand up anymore, and then I collapsed in the snow. It was completely dark and the only sounds were the heaving of the wind through the trees and the liquid slamming of my heart. I lay there until I was calm, and then I got up and slowly made my way back to the resort. It felt as if I’d been someplace very far away and had come back to a world of tremendous frivolity and innocence. It was all lit up, peals of laughter coming from the bar, adults hobbling back and forth in ski boots and brightly colored parkas. “I’ve just come back from some other place,” I thought. “I’ve just come back from some other place these people don’t even know exists.”
