Indiana Jones doesn’t have time for coffee.
Wearing corduroy and khaki, Wade Davis, Canada’s famous anthropologist and ethnobotanist, sweeps into a Toronto café and launches into a conversation about his latest book, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, as though it’s a great adventure from which he has only recently returned. The only thing missing is a rakish hat atop his dark blond hair and handsome, weather-beaten face.
This adventurer is a photographer, award-winning filmmaker, author and scientist who has left few of the world’s cultural corners unexplored. And all because he grew up in Pointe Claire, an Anglo suburb of Montreal, where “the bourgeois blanket of banality” fuelled his desire to escape. His father was an investment adviser with Royal Trust. “He talked about it being the grind. He got smaller every day,” Mr. Davis says. As a teen, “I desperately needed to know what I was going to do with myself.”
It is not surprising that an anthropologist – whose curiosity about human cultural diversity earned him an explorer-in-residence position at the National Geographic Society – should take an interest in the practices of his own tribe, even though he rejected them. Understanding the difficulty in surmounting the influences of one's culture, he is quick to offer insight to young people who seek him out. The only right career choice is to “follow your heart,” he avers. “A career is not something that you put on like a coat. It is something that grows organically around you, step by step, choice by choice, experience by experience,” he wrote as part of a commencement address at Colorado College in 2010.
At Harvard University, he trusted the whim of his intuition. He had planned to study history and law. But then, on the day before he had to declare his major, he ran into a friend who was studying anthropology. He was intrigued, so he chose that. For a postgraduate degree, he followed an interest in ethnobotany.
“I have never had a job,” says the 58-year-old father of two girls, now in their 20s. “… Creativity is not the motivation for action. It’s the consequence of action … You have to put yourself in the way of opportunities and what happens is that you find yourself. Suddenly you’re doing things that were not imaginable a couple of years before.”
At 20, he walked across the Darien Gap, a swampland in Central America, in the company of celebrated English author Sebastian Snow. In 1996, his book One River documented his expedition with his mentor, Richard Schultes, into the shamanistic culture of the Amazon rain forest. He investigated Haitian folk preparations in the creation of zombies in his 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow.
Into the Silence explores the culture of British men at the turn of the 20th century, as much as it delves into the challenging environment of Mount Everest for early climbers, many of whom felt oxygen supplements were “unsporting.” Between 1921 and 1924, there were three epic attempts to scale Everest. Mystery had always surrounded the 1924 disappearance of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, last sighted a few hundred metres from the summit. Did they reach the top before they died? It was not until 1953 that New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary made history for conquering Everest.
“I was truly and sincerely not interested in whether Mallory got to the top or not [a continuing debate]. I wanted to know who these men were,” says the author, seated sideways in a chair, as though he’s ready to leap from it. “They were not cavalier about death. But their attitude about death had changed because of the First World War. That was my intuition from the start.
