THE HARD WAY

Rough and far-flung (with a few close to home) adventure pieces, from Outside columnist Jenkins (To Timbuktu, 1997, etc.).

There’s no denying Jenkins’s relish at being outdoors, preferably beyond the beyond with a soupçon of danger thrown in. Here, he organizes his tales into sections on general experiences; curious folk who also pushed the adventure envelope; activities in the mountains; and exploits with kith and kin. “That night we camped in the bleak medieval village of Tseqgu” is a typical opening, followed not long after by an equally typical shift of gears: “Strange people are supposed to be interesting, but usually they’re just messed up, and if you happen to get caught up even for fifteen minutes in their messed-up lives, you can get killed.” It could equally be in a remote part of Ethiopia or on the Adriatic Coast that “we were attacked on an ordinary night.” But Jenkins is level-headed enough to realize that it’s his traveling companions who are as likely to be on the weird side as it is those in the country he is traveling through, as when he encounters a confirmed believer in reincarnation who tells his traveling companions that they choose their own afterlives. There are cruel climbs up an ice-covered Ben Nevis and a jolly competition between brothers over skydiving. One of the most perceptive pieces is about the life and climbing of George Mallory, which Jenkins takes well beyond the “because it’s there” level, explaining that “like any artist who gradually moves toward greater and greater challenges, and through this process defines himself and interprets the world around him, Mallory had reached Everest.”

Adventure that’s always first-rate, and, if the writing is less distinctive, it has the tang of a man urgent to get on with it.