On Grand Ambition

by Lisa Michaels

I first read the story of Glen and Bessie Hyde in a history book: in November 1928, a year after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, they had set out to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon in a homemade boat. Swept up by America's obsession with feats of daring, they hoped to set a record--she would be the first woman to run that treacherous stretch of the Colorado River. A month later, they vanished without a trace, and Glen's father set out on a trip to find them. Their photograph, reproduced within the brief chapter, stopped me short: they were young and striking, wearing wool fedoras, bomber jackets with fur collars. The known facts of their story were scant and unsatisfying, but from a writer's perspective, this seemed like a blessing. William Styron once said that historical novelists do best with "thin rations." And so where history left off, I decided to begin.

I was also drawn to the Hydes' story because certain things about it chimed with my own experience. In my early twenties, I had gotten myself into a few hair-raising situations in the outdoors, brought about by a mixture of bad judgment and bad weather. At twenty-one, I spent six months traveling alone in India and Nepal and got lost in the Himalaya. My guide had turned back to help a friend with hypothermia, and I was foolish enough to press on alone. After a half day of exhilarating solitude, I took a wrong turn on an ice-covered trail at 15,000 feet, wearing cotton pants and carrying nothing but a bag of garbanzo beans and a jug of water. I knew I wouldn't survive a night without shelter. The day wore on, the temperature dropped, and I could hardly believe what a stupid, lonely way I had managed to end my life. But when I finally scrambled my way over a pass and down to a few shepherds' huts, twenty hours later, I felt an elation and sense of self-sufficiency that I have scarcely felt since.

Some years later, I married a man who enjoys pushing his physical limits, and he and I made two trips together in the Grand Canyon. First, we went on a river trip in the winter, serving as volunteers on a U.S. Geological Survey study. It rained nearly every day for two weeks, and-to the hydrologists' great delight-the river rose to flood stage. There was hardly a place to camp against the sheer cliffs, and even the grizzled river guides were quietly appreciative of the house-sized waves in the big rapids.

We should have seen enough by then of the Grand Canyon's changeable nature, but we were thick-headed enough to make a second trip, this time hiking down to the bottom of the gorge in December. While we trekked along the river, the worst snowstorm in twenty years gathered overhead. The temperature up at the rim was below zero, and it snowed down at the water level-a rarity, since the bottom of the canyon has the same climate as the deserts of southern Arizona. When we tried to hike back up to the rim, a vertical mile above, the trail was covered in waist deep snow. We got lost and made excruciatingly slow progress, post-holing up to our hips. By the time we reached the trailhead, my husband had frostbite on his feet, and I had hypothermia. I started to wonder if this was the way I wanted to spend my vacations.

Looking back, I see that these misadventures were attempts to draw the line between fruitful risk-taking and recklessness. I'm not sorry I took any of those trips, but I am glad to have passed the age when I thought that I ought to do the things that frightened me. Still, the old questions were echoing in my mind when I came across the story of the Hydes' river journey. It seemed to give me the chance to examine both sides of the equation: the thrill of holding one's life into the wind, and the torturous worry of those left at home. When I set out for India, my mother had offered me nothing but encouragement. She was a former hippie, who had spit out the silver spoon of her childhood to live in communes and teach school in the slums. When I was three, she and my stepfather and I traveled around the United States for a year in a converted mail truck. Now her snarl-haired toddler, raised like a baby goat, had grown into a stubborn young woman with her own wanderlust. How could she raise a protesting hand? Only much later, when I had returned home safely, did she tell me how she sickened with apprehension when my letters tapered off. (I was in the Himalaya, with no post box for miles.) I felt terrible then, and I thought I understood. But only now that I have twin sons of my own do I fully understand the things I put her through. And only now do I have an inkling of the anguish Reith Hyde must have suffered, watching his son and daughter-in-law set off on such a perilous trip.

The push and pull between caution and risk, parents and children, is universal. But doing research for Grand Ambition, I also came to believe that the craving for adventure waxes in certain times. Reading newspapers from the 1920s, I was struck by the parallels between that era and the late 1990s, when I wrote the book: both boom times, with enormous fortunes being made in the stock market. Both times of relative peace. Peace and prosperity: what we all claim to want. But there's a kind of person who can't stand this dulling of the fight or flight reflexes. And to keep these instincts sharp, they dream up feats of daring. In the 1920s we had Lindbergh flying solo across the Atlantic, and Trudy Ederle, an eighteen-year-old girl, swimming the English Channel. The newspapers of the Jazz Age were full of breathless accounts of this society woman's "adventure honeymoon" barnstorming with her new husband, or that Arctic expedition. And today we have bungee jumping, "Survivor," middle-aged accountants scaling peaks. It seems that when life is easy, people will make a hobby out of making it hard.

Had Glen and Bessie Hyde been alive today, I imagine they might have tried to climb Everest or race a hot-air balloon around the world. For myself, I have decided that I would rather read about adventure, or imagine it from the safety of a book-lined room.