His accomplishments are incredible, i think they matter a helluva lot.
Adventurers are a different breed of breeder 
But being the first to do anything is so aluring.
Did we really gain anything significant when we reached the Poles or Everest was scaled for the first time? What valuable scientific knowledge was imparted? We knew how tall Everest was and where the poles were, too. Nothing new.
But I’ll bet that most of the people reading this can name two of the three men that accomplished those things if not all of them. It’s important to reach deep and set goals for ourselves. I think it’s a need we have a species, but I have no cite.
I, too, feel bad for his family, but I have to feel that for his wife, living with him and his dream and now living without him was better than living with him would have been if she had crushed that dream.
Frankly, while the space program did advice human knowledge, the astronauts themselves were mostly dead weight. If we had spent what it took to keep them safe on unmanned exploration we would know a lot more about Mars and Venus. Having men go made the whole thing sexy and a lot easier to fund.
A friend of mine is a mountaineer. He had a close call on one of the really big peaks neighboring Everest a few years ago (an “experienced” climber who was with them, lied about his actual experience and nearly got them all killed.) When he married his wife, people asked if he was going to give up climbing, he said “No.”
Then they asked his wife, “Are you going to let him keep climbing?” and her answer was “I married a mountaineer! I knew what I was getting into when I married him!”
But I agree, when you’re a mountaineer and a dad, you got to pick your adventures a bit more conservatively. I’m pretty sure my buddy would scale back his expeditions dramatically if he had kids.
Besides, he’d have to pick ones that were easy enough for a toddler to do along with him.
To the best of my knowledge, neither Christopher Columbus, nor the Pacific Islanders were stupid or lucky. I’ve been told that Christopher Columbus based his estimate of the radius of the earth on material washed ashore along the coasts of Europe and Africa. He actually made a pretty good estimate of the distance to landfall. Educated Europeans knew the radius of the Earth, and said Columbus was wrong. It turned out that Columbus was approximately right about the distance to landfall, and wrong about the radius of the Earth. The fallacy was in assuming there were no large landmasses between the Europe and Asia.
The islanders also knew there was land in the directio nof HI. They were not steering blindly, but following the clues of birds and debris in the oceans.
There were no tangible gains associated with these particular firsts, but at least these accomplishments can be considered symbolic victories for mankind (see how you say “we”?). Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain on earth, so when “we” scaled it, the take home message wasn’t just “Look Mom! I cheated death by doing something crazy and making it out alive”. It was something larger than that. It was more like “look at what we are able to do”.
At some point there becomes a certain Guiness World Book absurdity associated with stunts that have little symbolic value. I guess I’d put kayaking thousands of kilometers in this category.
And wave patterns
Sorry, I think he was being extremely selfish.
I am sorry, I need to work on my writing skills. I was trying to say that we need our firsts, and his first was as important as other firsts. His was an adventure that had not been accomplished. It shed no more light on the human condition than landing on the moon. Nor did it add any less.
Maybe this is a YMMV situation, but I don’t get it. I’m pretty sure no one has walked up Stone Mountain with rattlesnakes wrapped around their legs. If I accomplished this feat, should I be applauded and compared to Neil Armstrong? If I die while accomplishing this feat, should I get respect for “living out my dreams”? Should my children be glad for me, proud to have such a brave mother?
I’m not saying what this guy did was stupid or not important, but I disagree that simply achieving crazy feats like his are something that humankind needs. Society needs some firsts, but there are lots of feats that are crazy and not really all that meaningful to anyone except for the people who carry them out.
Have any of you ever been the first to do something?
I was lucky enough to be such a person.
Not all that risky but more so than I originally thought.
Was I a fool, selfish, a thrill junkie, uncaring about my children? Read it and see what you think.
Is it true he actually died because his kayak caught fire after an oil lamp he was using for warmth tipped over?
If so, it only goes to show that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.
I think that adventuring is more self serving these days than in the past. There is really nothing more to surpass these days than has been done. The Poles have been conquered, the highest mountains, deepest ocean, solo ocean crossings, ballooning, aviation, most all of the big records are done.
Nowadays, anybody can pay fifty thousand to be dragged up and down Everest. That is not to say you will survive coming back down, and you will probably walk by a body of a climber that didn’t make it. There are dozens of frozen bodies up there. But if that’s your thing, and it’s cool with your wife/husband, whether you have kids or not, who are we to judge?
I mean more people die falling off ladders every year than die than climbing Everest, or kayaking across dangerous waters. Shit happens.
Saying his wife will crush his dream is complete sexist bullshit. The guy should be man enough or mature enough to say that was my dream but now my son is the reality, and I’m going to make my personal choice. Not blame his wife for crushing his dream.
I’m not sure how true it was in real life, but I remember Rowdy Roddy Pipper talking about fatherhood and how he took personal responsibility for the first time.
There are lots of tradeoffs in life. Having kids is one of them. IMHO its irresponsible to indulge in self gratifying behavior that has a high risk of your child growing up sans a parent that was off on an adventure. Or on any other higher risk than you should reasonably take as a parent activity. Your child should come first in a lot of calculations or you shouldn’t have one.
Some people are wired differently. I do not have any interest in bungee jumping, mountain climbing ,cave exploration, or hang gliding. That is me. I have no right to say you should not. It is your business . Some people would feel very unfulfilled if they did not take risks. It is not about right or wrong . It is about doing what you have to. I do not even like roller coasters. Some travel the world looking for the best one. They are not wrong . They are just being true to who and what they are.
I’m sure this makes me a monster, but everytime I hear of somebody leaving a finger or the tip of their nose up on the top of some mountain my gut reaction is “serves 'em right”. How many of these people would go “adventuring” if they couldn’t go bragging about it afterword?
But “being true to who you are” should change when you have kids and responsibilties.
When you’re young and unattached, you should be able to live free and wild. Your life is your own. No one is depending on you for anything.
But kids, by neccessity, tie you down. Creating life requires sacrifices. If people aren’t willing to sacrifice, they shouldn’t have kids.
“Being true to you are” sounds very like a selfish philosophy. A drug dealer can decide that drug-dealing is the essence of himself, that that’s what he was born to do. So can a lazy bum or an alcoholic. Being true to oneself should not be the primary focus of a parent. IMHO, it should be about what’s best for the dependents.
Adventurers with children can still have their adventures. But they should allow for trade-offs.
My fiancee and I are both rock climbers. It has nothing to do with bragging about anything later. It’s about enjoying nature and testing the limits of your body. There is a huge personal reward in competing a technically difficult maneuver (even just bouldering four feet from the ground).
I’m afraid of heights, my fiancee gets motion sick if she swings around at all. Part of it is overcoming our personal fears in the challenges.
Bragging never enters into it. No one else would care, anyway.
We don’t have kids, but another outdoorsy couple we know does. They’ve scaled back their adventures to include the kids. So last summer they had two weeks of canoe camping with the 18-month-old twins, portages included. The girls loved it!
Put me squarely in the camp with ChinaGuy. I think having kids is a responsibility and a trade-off.
I had this same discussion with a friend of mine (“R”), about another friend of mine, “E”.
At the time, E already had 2 kids, and #3 was on the way. E was in between jobs and started taking to scuba diving solo at a local dive spot. Now E is a very experienced diver, and knew this dive site inside and out. But when I learned that he was diving solo, I thought this was not only very irresponsible, but also extremely selfish. It bothered me a lot, but I could never quite come up with a good way to broach it with E.
So I decided to talk to another friend about it. R had a somewhat different take on the situation. She agreed that it was both selfish and irresponsible. But she also pointed out that E’s wife, though she may not approve, “accepts” that E will do such risky activities.
R could certainly relate since her husband also did some risky activities, and they had kids as well. R explained that she learned early on that despite how she felt she realized she could not/would not be able to get her husband to stop his activities. So the options were to leave him, or “accept” that he will continue to do these things. She decided to accept that he will continue to do these things.
So R explained that E’s wife must also (on some level) have come to such an understanding - actually probably some time ago.
I suspect that though this kayaker’s wife is obviously distraught over the loss of her husband. She had also come to accept that his attempting such a feat, and possibly dying from it, was a real possibility.
But it’s not the wife who carries responsibility for her husband’s choices. It’s the husband. Scratch that. It’s the father.
Regardless of what his wife had to say about it, this adventurer dude was not being fair to his kid.