Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map

by Rick Ridgeway

“Crises are things that usually rally people to find solutions,” he said. “Predicaments are a little more difficult.”

“Crises are things that usually rally people to find solutions,” he said. “Predicaments are a little more difficult.”

poem by Robert Service. There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don’t know how to rest.

Deep Ecology, a way of looking at humans as only a thread in the fabric of nature, a species with no moral right to dominate other species.

“Living on the extremes is where you want to be,” Yvon answered. “You just got to be careful about spending too much time in the middle.”

“Every start upon an untrodden path,” he wrote, “is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to be successful.

asked Frank why he climbed, and Frank quoted the last line of his favorite Robert Service poem that he had learned from Dick. ‘I want to see it all,’ he said.

To do that, he made the commitment, just as he turned fifty, to leave the road he had been on all his adult life and take an entirely new one. No maps, no signposts, absolutely no guarantee he would reach the destination. How many among us has the courage to do that?”

“Personal computers are what I call ‘compulsory technology,’” Doug said after we had been served. “You are forced to use them in order to function in society. But then they become another cog in the wheel of the global economy that is ultimately overusing the planet’s resources, reducing habitats, and making species go extinct.”

“When those guys got back,” Yvon says, “they were pretty shot. Any mountain at certain times is safe and other times it’s super dangerous. They were just there at the wrong time. Maybe they were disappointed, but it’s like the quest for the Holy Grail. Well, who gives a shit about the Holy Grail. It’s the quest that’s important, the transformation within yourself.”