A life worth living is lived at the edges where it is wild
At the beginning of his memoir Life Lived Wild, Adventures at the Edge
of the Map, Rick Ridgeway tells us that if you add up all his many
expeditions, he's spent over five years of his life sleeping in tents:
"And most of that in small tents pitched in the world's most remote
regions." It's not a boast so much as an explanation. Whether at
elevation or raising a family back at sea level, those years taught him,
he writes, "to distinguish matters of consequence from matters of
inconsequence." He leaves it to his readers, though, to do the final
sort of which is which.
Some of his travels made, and remain, news: the first American ascent of
K2; the first direct coast-to-coast traverse of Borneo; the first
crossing on foot of a 300-mile corner of Tibet so remote no outsider had
ever seen it. Big as these trips were, Rick keeps an eye out for the
quiet surprises, like the butterflies he encounters at 23,000 feet on K2
or the furtive silhouettes of wild-eared pheasants in Tibet.
What really comes through best in Life Lived Wild, though, are his
fellow travelers. There's Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, and Doug
Tompkins, best known for cofounding The North Face but better remembered
for his conservation throughout South America. Some companions don't
make the return journey. Rick treats them all with candor and
straightforward tenderness. And through their commitments to protecting
the wild places they shared, he discovers his own.
A master storyteller, this long-awaited memoir is the book end to
Ridgeway's impressive list of publications, including Seven Summits
(Grand Central Publishing, 1988), The Shadow of Kilmanjaro (Holt,
1999), and The Big Open (National Geographic, 2005).
