From The Horizontal Everest: Extreme Journeys on Ellesmere Island, © Jerry Kobalenko

Extreme endeavors such as manhauling four hundred miles across the Arctic puzzle most people. Many are just curious, but occasionally some old sobersides will ask why when what is clearly meant is, Why do you want to do something stupid like that?
The big Why dangles over all our heads, but adventurers seem to be fairer game for the question. Yet one might just as properly ask, Why run marathons? Why birdwatch? Why work at a job you don’t like? Why believe in God? Why help the under-privileged? Why get up every morning?
Now and then I run past a line that seems to buzz around the Why of adventure. “To circle or cross a place meaningful to you is a reverential act.” “The difference between vice and virtue depends on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain.” That Ellesmere travel is a pursuit of virtue sounds a lot more impressive than, “I like it.”
British poet and mountaineer Wilfrid Noyce identified thirteen adventure motives (comments mine):

1. The ascetic streak. Hard travel teaches self-control and gives a purifying glimpse of life as a hair shirt – refreshing for pampered Westerners.
2. Enjoying the contrast of civilized and primitive. Meeting a little ship after months of living on raw seal meat, Knud Rasmussen describes with pure joy how, “Ten minutes later I was on board, with my teeth deep in an orange. A little later, I sat staring with wide eyes at a real cup of actual steaming coffee. There were such things as Bread, and Cheese, and Butter…” Unless you eat the seal meat, you can’t fully experience the Orange.
3. The spice of danger. Unlike mountains, the Arctic presents little danger from falling, avalanches, rockfall and deadly winds. Arctic travel is more the endorphine high than the adrenaline rush.
4. Pleasures of technique, pursuit of excellence, physical movement. You feel like a sorcerer’s apprentice every time you sleep comfortably at 40º below. Also, trekking twelve hours a day is very different than exercising for an hour: The physical being awakes.
5. Lure of wild country. High altitudes are more extreme than high latitudes, but how many mountains are three hundred miles from the nearest village?
6. Lure of the unknown. A powerful motive during the first few trips, when the Arctic looms as strange and compelling as Mars.
7. Escape. Those who are ill-at-ease in their own culture look for home in distant places. Most travelers eventually find their personal Ellesmere.
8. Fame, fortune. “Most nonfamous people,” writes essayist Cintra Wilson, “are frequently in a state of dull torture from the lack of boundless international adoration in their lives.” Because adventure seems so dashing and difficult and arouses our Walter Mitty longings, it is one of the roads to celebrity in which no outstanding talent is required.
9. Conquest and competition (nationalism). A little out-of-date now, but the first Brazilians to the North Pole would still create a stir in their own country.
10. Knowledge (science). Often simply a ruse by adventurers to clothe, as Bill Tilman puts it, “their more or less frivolous aims with a thin mantle of science.” Self-knowledge, on the other hand, is a driving force. Under extreme circumstances you quickly learn how much you’re the person you want to be, and how much you’re not.
11. Fascination with machines (especially the airplane). Around the World in Eighty Days types continue to flock to the northern skies in putt-putts of all kinds.
12. Curiosity about people, places. This refers largely to less extreme adventures. One can be curious about Morocco; it’s too weak a term for Ellesmere. People-curious adventurers usually go where there are more people, although a few grand arctic figures – Frederick Cook, Jean Malaurie, Charles Francis Hall – fell under the spell of Inuit culture.
13. Sense of purpose. For some of us, what the Inuit call a journey in pursuit of its tail – one that has no purpose other than its own completion – holds more meaning than practical goals.

Noyce’s forty-five year old list remains the closest anyone has come to encapsulating the Why. However, it does not address the basic mystery of why some people crave adventure while others avoid it. In particular, why go to extremes?
During one trek, I developed a theory which helped pass a lot of hours. It tries to explain the thirst for adventure and at the same time answer the basic question, what made Beethoven different?

                                                Theory of Genetic Energy
There is such a thing as genetic energy. Scientists may suspect that it exists but they do not yet have a yardstick to measure it. Nevertheless, we are all born with different amounts. It doesn’t make us everything we are – there’s personality too – but it determines how exaggerated these personality traits are. When our pride is stung, do we cringe slightly or conquer nations in revenge?
Genetic energy can be squandered or fully used. As with height, a good environment takes us only so far. Beyond this, we can’t make giants of ourselves through “the omnipotence of unyielding human will.” At a certain level of excellence, everyone is dedicated – but the higher the energy, the further you can push without hitting the ceiling or breaking down.
Energy is not the same as talent. Talent is the ability to do things easily. The sharpness of a lumberjack’s ax is talent; energy determines whether he swings that ax a thousand times a day, or a hundred.
We can consciously channel some of this energy, but it tends to flow according to our predispositions. There are five channels for genetic energy: spiritual, physical, intellectual, sexual and practical. Honoré de Balzac funneled great spiritual and intellectual energy through his talent for writing, but it would be hard to find someone with less physical energy. In his few moments away from the desk, all this brilliant walrus did was sit.
Great individuals all have prodigious amounts of genetic energy. This is the basic gift that sets the Beethovens of this world apart. Some seem able to focus it all in one area; with others, it “runs madly off in all directions.” Some fields of endeavor require more energy than others. Intuitively, it takes more to found a religion than to establish a business empire. A ranking of great figures by energy level would be Prophet, Leader, Poet, Writer and Intellectual. Finally, genetic energy in an individual – and in a species – decreases over time.
I inherited my genetic energy from my mother and her high-spirited family. It seems to have been just enough to glimpse, at times, how ordinary I normally was. But I had always been physically and spiritually restless, and this restlessness was enough to shape my life. It may have prompted me, for instance, to buy a huge pack when I hadn’t camped since high school.
How does this relate to adventure? Today, survival in the West requires little energy. Sometimes, the ache of unused energy drives us to tilt at windmills –vacuum activities, like the caged flycatcher that pecks at imaginary flies. Then we discover that the happiest state lies near the edge of our capabilities. Extreme journeys take us to that edge.
The more genetic energy, the farther and more often we need to go. Much of the year, I pace endlessly, barely able to sit down. The few days or weeks after a hard Ellesmere trip are the only times I feel physically at peace. Soon the restlessness begins again. I pace and plot. Without some strange project to work toward, my days feel empty. Perhaps it’s personal style, to expend energy in floods rather than in measured daily doses. Perhaps it’s discontent with adult life. Not enough wonder.
If I had to walk ten miles to work, then carry backbreaking sacks of potatoes all day, voluntarily sledding across Ellesmere would be incomprehensible. But not for everyone. I once hiked the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan with a Russian named Andrei Ilyachov. He was one of the poorest Russians I’d ever met, which is saying a lot. In a frustrating country which grinds down the strong and crushes the weak, Ilyachov spent his vacations biking hundreds of miles – without food or water. He had done this for years, in Siberia, southern Russia and Central Asia. He was not only able to adapt to the hard conditions of his everyday life, but he had so much energy left over that he devoted all his free time to making his life even harder. A holy fool.
How does this relate to adventure? Today, survival in the West requires little energy. Sometimes, the ache of unused energy drives us to tilt at windmills. Then, we discover that the happiest state lies near the edge of our capabilities, and extreme journeys take us to that edge.