At Random column for Jan. 6, 2012
Celebrating explorers among us
Last month, our 11-year-old son finished the year in the 15th century, plodding the Atlantic with Christopher Columbus in search of fame and fortune. As part of a class project, our fifth-grader was required to make a model of the kind of ship Columbus and his contemporaries might have used to travel to the New World.
With a soda bottle and craft paint, wooden dowels and lengths of felt, some pipe cleaners and a bit of glue, we fashioned a passable miniature of the Nina, the Pinta or the Santa Maria.
It had been a great while since I’d given any thought to Columbus, the man who, for better or worse, had launched me into a life of writing nearly 40 years ago. Answering a grade school contest that sought essays in honor of the iconic Italian explorer, I inked out a composition that drew in equal parts on Funk & Wagnalls, boyish speculation, and a rather odd reference to the pop singer Neil Diamond.
Perhaps because few other classmates entered, I managed to win the blue ribbon and a $25 check, which struck me as a reasonably easy way to earn cash. I have, thanks to Mr. Columbus, been scribbling ever since.
I belong to perhaps the last generation of American students who learned about Columbus with unblinking admiration. Newer versions of the Columbus story point out that his exploits, in paving the way for European settlement of North America, also brought considerable pain to native peoples.
I welcome any understanding of the past that acknowledges its ambiguities. Children need to learn, from an early age, that history, like humanity itself, is full of mixed motives and mixed results.
But I hope new thinking about the very old story of human exploration doesn’t diminish the drama of exploration itself, an enterprise that still needs attention in the classroom and elsewhere in our public life.
The explorers among us keep a relatively low profile these days. While children of my generation once followed astronauts like sports stars, my own children would be hard pressed to name any American who’s traveled into space. We’ve retired our shuttles and are now hitching rides into orbit with the Russians, a grim reality I couldn’t have fathomed as a youngster.
Even back here on Earth, the vastness of the rain forest and the ocean depths call out for new generations of the curious and the enterprising. If we want the age-old tradition of exploring to flourish, we should give today’s explorers at least as much attention as the Kardashians or Tiger Woods.
I’ve been thinking about this these winter nights as I read an advance copy of “The Ice Balloon,” a new book that recounts the Swedish explorer S.A. Andree’s colorful but ill-fated 1897 attempt to fly over the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon.
Because of such explorers, intensely inquisitive and often a little crazy, the sum of what we know about our world is gradually expanded.