"Strange and Dangerous Dreams" by Geoff Powter

This was the book that taught me the importance of reading the inside flap of the dust jacket.

I mean, just take a look at the cover. That’s Aleister Crowley, famous occultist and mystic, striking a dramatic pose while some sort of eldritch spiral … well… spirals out from his face. Add in the title (Strange and Dangerous Dreams: The Fine Line Between Adventure and Madness), and one could be forgiven for thinking this book is about Crowley or the occult. It turns out, however, that the most important visual element on the cover is actually the mountain behind Crowley (who was not only a sex-magick practitioner, cult leader, and enthusiast of recreational chemistry, but also an accomplished mountain climber); Strange and Dangerous Dreams is a collection of stories about the dark side of wilderness adventuring.

Why Climb Mount Everest? Because It’s There. Also, I’m Nuts

Author Geoff Powter — both an adventurer himself and a practicing clinical psychologist — has gathered a collection of eleven tales about people whose personal demons both drove and overshadowed their desire to conquer the wilderness (a desire that ultimately destroyed them). He divides them into three categories according to the driving issues and forces behind their characters:

• The Burdened were tormented by horrendous pressure to succeed in their attempts to conquer the wild — either pressure put on them by others or by themselves.
• The Bent appear to have been drawn to adventure and to have behaved as they did because of some fundamental flaw in their own psychological makeup.
• The Lost seem to have drifted into adventuring with the same lack of purpose that characterized other aspects of their lives.

Some of the adventurers Powter includes in Strange and Dangerous Dreams are famous, or notorious, figures whose exploits remain well-known to this day. Others are obscure footnotes in the history of wilderness adventure, now largely forgotten. All, however, are fascinating case studies in what can go wrong when an adventurer’s drive comes from a place of obsession, naiveté, arrogance or despair.

Strange and Dangerous Dreams: A Rogues’ Gallery

Some of the luckless adventurers Powter includes in this book include the following:

Meriwether Lewis

Lewis is well-known as one half of the exploring team of Lewis & Clark, whose expedition explored the territory of the Louisiana Purchase and also the Pacific Northwest. Readers whose knowledge of Lewis begins and ends with the expedition will be surprised to read that his life ended in suicide following what he saw as his failure to meet the expectations of his mentor and father figure, Thomas Jefferson.

Maurice Wilson

Powter calls Wilson’s attempt to scale Mount Everest “an elaborate suicide.” With an almost complete lack of preparation — he acquired no climbing equipment and his training consisted of little more than reading, along with walking several hundred miles from London to his family’s home town of Bradford. There’s no question, however, that he was an innovative thinker; his plan for conquering the mountain included intentionally  crashing his plane as high as possible on Everest’s slopes to save time in the ascent.

Robert Falcon Scott

Scott’s name will be familiar to readers as the leader of two ill-fated expeditions to Antarctica, the first of which accomplished much of scientific interest but failed to reach the South Pole. Scott’s expeditionary force did succeed in reaching the South Pole on his final voyage — only to discover that another team, led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, had been there first. Moreover, he and his team all died on the return journey. Scott’s journals reflect a quintessentially British mixture of fatalism and heroic adherence to an ideal of manly adventuring. As Powter notes:

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“If there was madness in the man, wasn’t there also a touch of madness in his nation’s deification of self-destruction? Amundsen certainly understood the pattern when he wrote this blunt assessment of Scott’s decision to walk to the Pole: ‘Never underestimate the British habit of dying, the glory of self-sacrifice, the blessing of failure.’ ”

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What is Wrong With These People?

Powter acknowledges that many members of the wilderness exploration community have little but contempt for the kind of ill-prepared, possibly crazy, gravely naïve people discussed in Strange and Dangerous Dreams, and in fact feel such people aren’t worthy of being included in the annals of heroic adventure. Powter clearly disagrees, finding that the impulses that drove these admittedly extreme examples of the adventuring mindset cast light on the motivations of their more common brethren. After all, Powter points out, many of these colossal failures would be considered in a very different light if their mad attempts had succeeded; as he puts it:

“Lit by the favorable spotlight of conquest, ragefully obsessed sailors become ‘driven,’ suicidal climbers are reinvented as ‘committed,’ and the arguable immorality of extreme risk gets re-spun as heroic dedication. But when the climber falls, the sailor disappears, or the desert explorer perishes of dehydration, then the verdict is obvious: The person was mad for having the dream in the first place, or was foolish for having pursued it.”

Whatever one might think on the subject, it’s well worth an expedition through the pages of Strange and Dangerous Dreams, if only to marvel at just how nuts people can be (and to feel better about our own safe but boring lives).

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Worth a buck?

Yes, for the chance to look through a peephole at a mindset that’s completely alien to most.

Worth full price?

Probably not, but it’s worth at least half price.

Who would like this book:

Fans of aberrant psychology, fans of wilderness adventure, fans of schadenfreude

How to get it:

It’s available through Mountaineers Books; you might also look around the base of a mountain, although a copy you find there will probably have “This is NOT me!” scribbled on it.

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