and came to realize that
the Age of Discovery isn’t over
Did I tell you about the time I discovered the Eagletail Mountains? It happened toward the end of our first year of full-time traveling. Having traveled south as winter approached, we visited Laurie’s cousins and their families in Scottsdale, Arizona. When Laurie flew back to New York to be with her parents for a while, I decided to explore some of the desert country south and west of Phoenix. I knew there were some interesting mountains out there. For one thing, we had once seen the Eagletails’ zany skyline of knobs, peaks, and pinnacles from Interstate 10 and spent a few hours trying to drive a rental car to Courthouse Rock. Except for that, I had no idea how accessible the mountains would be. Although there weren’t many highways, our maps showed numerous roads, but they were only thin gray or brown lines. Experience had already taught us that such lines could mean anything. There was no way to know which, if any, of them would be drivable.
I succeeded in driving to a point near the base of Courthouse Rock and camped there overnight. No one else was around. Although I could see the lights of traffic on I-10, no sound reached me. The stars were brilliant overhead. The next morning I looked for a trail described in a book about BLM wilderness areas, but couldn’t find it. Instead, I simply bushwhacked through the desert, tracing an irregular circle around Courthouse Rock and investigating a valley between the rock and the main ridge of the mountains. I climbed to high points for views of the desert and the fanciful shapes of the mountains. I tried climbing to a saddle on the main ridge of the mountains, but gave up because of cliffs that blocked my way. I walked closer to dramatic freestanding rock towers and found one of them pierced by a rock window. I noted the way the shape of Courthouse Rock changed as I circled around it.
The next morning, I parked along a road east of Courthouse Rock and walked south across the desert as sunrise turned the mountains rosy pink and ocotillos flailed their spiny arms against the sky. I scrambled upward in the Granite Hills until I found a good view across an intervening valley to the pointed summits of Eagletail Peak. On a subsequent visit to the Eagletails, Laurie and I—with directions from a local rancher—drove along a desert track into a valley between mountains that I named Double Eagle (for a mine that maps showed near the mountain) and Middle Eagle (because it was situated between Double Eagle and Eagletail). We camped for two nights where the road was barricaded and spent a day walking in the surrounding desert. I made a circumambulation of Middle Eagle Mountain, walking beneath high cliffs with pinnacles and windows in them and climbing into a positively enchanting valley or basin between Middle Eagle’s cliffs and the soaring spires of Eagletail Peak. I found a way out of the upper end of the basin and descended across the desert to the barricaded road, which I followed back to our campsite. The next day, we walked westward along the barricaded road until we got views of a remarkable peak shaped like a parallelogram, which we had only glimpsed previously. Camping again at Courthouse Rock, we hiked in the valley that I had explored earlier, and I found a way to ascend the cliff that had blocked my way to the crest of the mountains. With a little searching, I found a way up past cliffs, hoodoos, and windows to a summit with views both east and west along the crest of the range. On another day, we found the trail that I had failed to find on my first visit. It led southward, across the Eagletail Mountains and into outlying hills, where we found a pair of windows that framed excellent views of the Eagletail skyline.
Discoveries like those are noteworthy because the “Age of Discovery” is supposed to be over. If you trace the history of travel far enough back, you encounter our nomadic Paleolithic ancestors in the days of hunting and gathering. It was the development of agriculture that made people sedentary. For the next ten thousand years, travel became a dangerous thing to do [Leed 1991; Leed 1995]. Most people stayed home because it was frightening to venture very far away. Beyond the fringes of medieval settlements was the wilderness: a place (in the case of northern Europe) of “immense old trees, rock cliffs, sucking fens, wolves’ dens, bears, and other dangers, some of them imaginary, such as dragons and waterbeasts in the style of Grendel, some of them real, such as escaped prisoners, mentally deranged outcasts, and brigands” [Mitchell 2001: 54]. Travel was done mainly for trade, war, and religion (in the form of pilgrimages and crusades). As late as the 14th century, Christian religious leaders “regarded curiositas as a venial sin, as ‘lust of the eye’” [Leed 1991: 179].
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, travel began to be valued as a means of gaining knowledge. At that time, in the great “Age of Discovery,” European nations sent explorers to unknown parts of the world, and “sixteenth-century humanists ... formalized the Grand Tour as a means by which young gentlemen could finish and polish an education through a course of travels” [Leed 1991: 184]. Gradually, the romance of travel and discovery attracted increasing numbers of people, and those who could afford it began to do it. Victorian England became the heyday of adventurous travel. With monumental endurance and courage, and equally monumental arrogance, travelers like Frederick M. Bailey ventured throughout Africa, South America, Asia, the Arctic, the South Pacific, and virtually every corner of the globe. Bruce Cocker: “The great achievement of Bailey’s education was not that it refined his sensibilities, but that it had blunted them. True, this made him less responsive to his environment, but equally it made him indifferent to discomfort, pain, and even danger” [Cocker 1992: 23]. Reports of the adventures and discoveries of men like Bailey prompted other people to desire exotic experiences of their own.
As traveling became easier, more and more middle-class people chose to do it. In 1845, Thomas Cook began offering organized tours, creating opportunities for many middle-class people (including women) who would not have traveled by themselves [Leed 1991: 288]. “Shrewd in guaging the drift of the travel market, professional travel brokers set about creating a special tourist world…. They encouraged the construction of grand hotels in Cannes, Monte Carlo, Baden-Baden, Carlsbad, and the great capitals of the world” [Lencek and Bosker 1998: 119]. In America, early attractions included Saratoga Springs, White Sulphur Springs, Virginia’s Natural Bridge, Niagara Falls, the Catskills, the White Mountains, the Delaware Water Gap, and the Adirondacks. Travelers “started to go on ‘the fashionable tour,’ as an American counterpart to the Grand European tour“ [Löfgren 1999: 38]. “As the Hudson panoramas and the mountainscapes of the East became too tame, the American tour expanded westwards, in search of ‘real wilderness’” [38-39]. Travel was being replaced by tourism. At sites such as Niagara Falls, “the elements of adventure and danger diminished and thus devalued the experience for some…. For some men the advent of women tourists signaled this change—it threatened the masculinity of the Niagara experience as wilderness adventure” [30]. Destinations labeled “virgin” were successively discovered and spoiled, and “paradise lost” became a common theme. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, railroads created opportunities for “day-tripping,” which allowed working-class people to invade beaches and other domains of the so-called better classes [Lencek and Bosker: 226]. “The classic elite tourist focus on stillness and serenity made flocks of common people a disturbing element…. Complaints often focused on noise, from the accordion to the ghetto blaster.... From a working-class perspective the middle-class tourists simply did not understand how to have fun or relax” [Löfgren 1999: 102].
Those who thought of themselves as travelers struggled to distinguish themselves from “mere” tourists. Paul Fussell’s description of the “anti-tourist” is too priceless not to quote at length:
[T]he techniques practiced by anti-tourists to assert their differences from all those tourists … [a]ll involve attempts to merge into the surroundings, like speaking the language, even badly. A[nother] useful trick is ostentatiously not carrying a camera. If asked about this deficiency by a camera-carrying tourist, one scores points by saying, “I never carry a camera. If I photograph things I find I don’t really see them.” … Perhaps the most popular way for the anti-tourist to demarcate himself from the tourists, because he can have a drink while doing it, is for him to lounge—camera-less—at a cafe table and with palpable contempt scrutinize the passing sheep through half-closed lids, making all movements very slowly. Here the costume providing the least danger of exposure is jeans, a thick dark-colored turtleneck, and longish hair. Any conversational gambits favored by lonely tourists, like “Where are you from?” can be deflected by vagueness. Instead of answering Des Moines or Queens, you say, “I spend a lot of time abroad” or “That’s really hard to say.” If hard pressed, you simply mutter “Je ne parle pas Anglais,” look at your watch, and leave [Fussell 1980: 48].What bothered travelers the most was the realization that any connection—even a spiritual one—with the “Age of Discovery” was over. Not only were there no longer any new lands to explore, but, as Bruce Cocker notes in a chapter aptly titled “The Coca-Cola Age,” visitors to the most remote corners of the globe repeatedly encountered traces of the same culture they thought they had left at home [Cocker 1992: 244].
Unfortunately, from my point of view, books about travel too often portray tourists as traveling overseas, flying and staying in hotels, and traveling in tour groups. None of that was what Laurie and I were doing. Domestic travel by automobile or other vehicle opens up an entirely different range of possibilities. Domestic travel is less challenging than a good deal of foreign travel and, of course, is less exotic. But what it loses in those dimensions it gains in freedom. When trains were replaced by the automobile and travelers took to the road, they were no longer confined by the schedules and destinations of the railroads. The automobile opened up all kinds of potential freedom for travelers to choose their routes, change their minds, and stop whenever and wherever they wanted. There must have been a significant change in people’s travel experiences—in what they saw and how they saw it and what they took home. It would be interesting to read the diaries of early automobile travelers and the letters they wrote to folks back home as well as the books they published. I’m aware that much of the potential was probably wasted. Those early diaries and letters might say far more about flat tires, engine trouble, road conditions, and how many miles were covered than they do about scenery or its impact on the travelers. The history of early auto travel tells me that motorists quickly fell into the trap of traveling long distances fast and of accepting commercial comforts such as motels, resorts, and motor homes as soon as they were available. John Jakle: “[N]ature, regions, cities, and history were reduced to isolated attractions … separated by landscapes of inattention” [Jakle 1985: 303]. I worry a little that such claims might be stereotypical, being based too heavily on early travelers’ reports of what “other people” did. For example, Jakle quotes an observation by Frederick van de Water “that most tourists saw only the major attractions as interpreted by guidebooks and signs, although he himself made a special effort to experience the subtleties of nature” [148]. Nonetheless, the main thrust of what Jakle writes is surely correct: “The standard ten-day or two-week vacation, coupled with improved automobiles and highways, invited rapid travel” [148]. And: “Nothing embodied the new travel syndrome [as much as] the National Park-to-Park Highway…. Such promotions, subsidized by the automobile and gasoline companies, were more for keeping tourists moving than for getting them to stop and look” [148].
I fear that many people spend too much time in well-known and therefore crowded parks and thereby miss the solitude that’s available elsewhere. (I can enjoy a crowded park if it’s a place I really want to see, but only if I can have solitude somewhere else. I pity anyone who experiences nothing but crowded parks.) It’s also a certainty, at least by my standards, that many people spend too much time in their vehicles and too little on the trails. William Saroyan once wrote of traveling by car in Michigan that he was mostly in his car and “only incidentally in Michigan” [Jakle 1985: 191]. I don’t know what percentage of travelers have hollow and disappointing experiences, or how many could be having a much better or more rewarding time. I do know that the people who complain about trails “packed with hikers,” about being “assailed” by signs saying stay on the trail, watch out for bears, or don’t drink the water, and about being “watched over by a cadre of rangers” [Mitchell 2001: 147; Turner 1996: 16] have not tried very hard to find more attractive conditions. I also know that there’s no danger of boredom or running out of places to go. The more Laurie and I travel, the longer my mental list of places to visit becomes. I keep hearing or reading about new ones (and I keep seeing them: every time I climb a mountain, I notice several other mountains that also look inviting). Furthermore, even if we’ve already been to a place—even if we’ve hiked all its trails—it can be a totally different place at a different season, in different weather, or at a different time of day. I also know that destinations are only a small part of travel. The whole process of reaching a destination is every bit as important. Even when a destination is disappointing—or exactly what we thought it would be—the context surrounding it and the process of getting there are almost always full of surprises.
Elsewhere in the southwestern Arizona desert, beyond the Eagletail Mountains, Laurie and I spent many happy winter days searching for and finding a seemingly endless array of fascinating sights and experiences. We learned more and more about the roads, those thin gray and brown lines. Some of them surprised us by being paved; others were well-graded gravel; some were nothing but tracks across the desert. Of the latter, some were as as good as a graded road; some were rocky or crossed washes where the traction was soft; and others were totally impassable. Nothing was predictable. A road that we counted on driving might turn out to be impassable, while another that we hadn’t known about at all was easily driven. We found drivable roads into the Big Horn Mountains, dominated by Big Horn Peak. I once scrambled to a summit with a good view of the peak. On another day, Laurie and I found a canyon that framed a view of the peak, and ended up hiking all the way to a saddle at the head of the canyon, where the peak loomed directly in front of us, across another canyon. Elsewhere, we camped at the foot of the lonely dark hulk of Woolsey Peak. In the morning, I walked into the desert to take pictures and found myself lured from point to point until I discovered a route all the way to the narrow cliffy summit of Signal Mountain. Below Table Top, we found a delightful BLM campground and an excellent trail to the summit. At Vulture Peak, south of Wickenburg, another trail led through extraordinarily beautiful Sonoran Desert and provided a route to the summit. Intriguing by the sight of an arch near the summit of Eagle Eye Peak, we climbed to the arch and were surprised when we got there to find it bigger than we expected. When the words “Natural Arch” on a map of the Little Horn Mountains invited a challenge, we succeeded in finding the arch—a delicate span of black lava. In the Sierra Estrella, we followed a trail to the summit of Quartz Peak after driving our two-wheel-drive van to the end of road that every guidebook insisted required four-wheel drive.
Frederick Bailey explored the Indian-Tibetan frontier and was credited with being the first to demonstrate that rumored waterfalls on the Tsangpo River were nonexistent [Cocker 1992: ch. 2]. Dangers that Bailey reported from his explorations included rugged terrain, monsoon rainstorms, and the people who lived in the region, some of whom were head-hunters and users of poisoned arrows. Did you catch the significant point in that last sentence? Bailey reported people who lived there. Laurie and I were not the first people to see the Eagletail Mountains. We met other people there, and other people certainly knew about the Eagletails. But other people were in Tibet, too, and other people knew about Tibet. Yet Bailey considered himself a discoverer and was assumed to be one. Laurie and I had never been to the Eagletail Mountains. Moreover, no one that we knew had ever been there. Wasn’t it pretty much the same with Bailey? No one that he knew had ever been to the Tsangpo Gorge. Is it any more of a delusion to think that Laurie and I discovered the Eagletail Mountains than for the British to think to think that Bailey discovered the Tsangpo Gorge?
Let’s face it, there’s a lot that all of the people in the world added together don’t know about, and even more that the people of a given culture don’t know about. At the individual level, there’s an unimaginable amount that each one of us doesn’t know about (to say nothing of all that we used to know and have now forgotten). How can anyone say the “Age of Discovery” is over?
PHOTO
Eagletail Mts, AZ 12/98
SOURCES
Cocker, Mark. Loneliness and Time. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
Fussell, Paul. Abroad. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Jakle, John A. The Tourist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.
Leed, Eric J. Shores of Discovery. New York: Basic, 1995.
Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler. New York: Basic, 1991.
Lencek, Lena, and Gideon Bosker. The Beach. New York: Viking, 1998.
Löfgren, Orvar. On Holiday. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Mitchell, John Hanson. The Wildest Place on Earth. Washington: Counterpoint, 2001.
Turner, Jack. The Abstract Wild. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.
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