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Mortlock,
C. (2001) Beyond
Adventure. Reflections from the wilderness: an inner journey,
Milnthorpe: Cicerone
Press.
Mortlock is the founder and first Head of the
National
Association of Outdoor Adventure Education. He likes outdoor adventures
and
seems to gain personal benefits from it, like peace, quiet and a sense
of fulfilment.
This book has his personal recollections from a series of adventures
while
climbing, camping or kayaking and boating. Some of them are interesting
but the 'spiritual' tone gets up your nose after a while. Like some
Puritan, or keen young priest, he just has to draw important lessons
from everything and lecture us about them.
He uses some recognisable terms
from Leisure Studies such as ‘flow’ and ‘oceanic feeling’ ,and a
common-sense
version of ‘the edge’. He is credited with also developing a 4-stage
model of
adventure experience, that was later developed into the more useful
Adventure Experience Experience Paradigm, (AEP) (see an example of its
use here). According to the Wilderdom
site, the model runs like this:
Stage 1: Play:
Characterized by little emotion through relatively easy participation
in
activities which are below the person's skill level
Stage
2:
Adventure: Characterized
by enjoyment and excitement, where a person's (sic) is using his her
capabilities more fully, but the person maintains control over the
situation
and his/her self
Stage
3:
Frontier Adventure:
Characterized by peak experience, which emerges from a person
experiencing
adventurous challenges very close to his/her limits. If the
person
succeeds, then generally a peak experience is had, but there is real
risk of
pushing too far and falling/failing, leading to Stage 4.
Stage
4:
Misadventure:
Characterized by a person choosing or being forced to participate in
challenges
beyond his/her capabilities, resulting in negative emotions (fear,
hurt, etc.),
possibly injury and even ultimately death.
Anyway, this
book carries
on with the themes – how ‘inner journeys’ lead to wisdom about the self
and others
and ultimately one-ness with Nature. Inner journeys are more important
but only arise after outer journeys, conveniently. It is all rather
wishy-washy, pious and
amateur. As an example:
Early one morning
I had gone into the garden...I was instantly aware of a powerful
presence hitting
me in the back - -not physically but psychologically [for those deaf to
metaphor]. If that does not make sense , then in a way it doesn’t
matter, because
I now intuitively know that at least some of the most profound
experiences are
beyond rational description...The impulse had come from a group of
garden
pansies...Somehow I knew they were rebuking me for not acknowledging
their
presence as I had walked past them. I silently expressed my apologies
as I
admired them...never...had there been such a moment of
synchronicity...there
was a message coming from deep within [not to only do manly OA things]
(76)
Or try
this, on his core beliefs
(129—30):
As far as
possible the natural environment and everything in it should be
regarded as
sacred [some ‘deep green’ commitment that says famine and disease is
Nature’s
way? Or is all that covered by the weasel about ‘as far as possible?’
which lets us plough and cultivate, and defeat the 'natual environment'
of contagious diseases]
Each of us
is a member of society. So we have obligations to that society and that
society
has obligations to us [GCSE Sociology would have got you further
forward than
that, without all that rock climbing]
No human
being is more or less important than any other human being [ludicrous
abstract egalitarianism
–easy to say but impossible to operate. Is he lobbying for equal wages?
Equal access to Oxford [where he went]. There is of course an implicit
qualifying clause after 'important' --'important in a deep spiritual
sense but no other']
No human
being is more or less important than anything else in Nature [let’s
hear it for
Cockroach Rights!]
Fair
enough...I am not really a
spiritual person myself and would offer much more normal and rational
explanations for such feelings. after physically exhausting effort, and
'flow' and 'edgework' seem to be perfectly adequate. But this
kind of permanently switched-on
spirituality has some obvious problems:
1.
Where
is it
located – in him or in Nature?
2.
If it
is located
somehow in mundane encounters like the one with the pansies in the
garden, then
‘outdoor adventure’ need not mean expeditions in the wilderness, but a
walk
round the garden – what does the ‘adventure’ bit do exactly?
3.
What
does he
mean by Nature anyway – everything related to the planet is one way he
defines
it here, so presumably bacteria, malarial mosquitoes, cockroaches etc
as well –
do they make you feel spiritual as you watch poor kids die? Is it
effluent as
well as mountains? Did the victims of tsunamis communicate with Nature
as the
wave rolled in?
4.
Is it
as
naive as it looks? This man is an historian so he must know the
methodological
problems involved in appeals to Nature (that we have always been
engaged with
the world via culture, at east within human memory, so there is no
independent
access to ‘Nature’ except via those experiences he charts), and the
social
context (‘Nature’ is used simply as a term to contrast with [bad, risk
averse,
unmanly] ‘society’ or ‘culture’).
So – I
read it, I smiled, I moved
on, thinking – why are there so many hippies?
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sociology of leisure page
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