Travel writer Mike McRae’s long-awaited article on our month-long river-rafting adventure down Ethiopia’s Omo River in the autumn of 2006 has just been published in this month’s issue of Outside Magazine. The article is really a feature story on Pasquale Scaturro, aka “PV,” our intrepid adventure-travel friend who led us on this exhibition, as well as several others in Africa. Mike was one of our crew of 19, and all his note-taking and writing on the trip was certainly worth it: he has captured PV’s larger-than-life personality to a T.

But before I introduce you to the article, which also appears on-line, here’s an aside I’m dying to share. (We all want our 15 nano-seconds of fame, right?) By email today Mike said, “Outside held the piece over to run in its annual adventure travel issue, after a difficult birthing that required amputating several thousand words. But it’s a better read at a svelte 5,200 words than in its earlier, bloated incarnations.” Much of that “bloat” included descriptions of all our crew’s members. For Kevin’s and my enjoyment, though, Mike sent along the following bit of fat that ended up on the cutting room floor:

“The rest of us looked like boomers on an adventure holiday, as if we’d walked out of an Ex-Officio catalog. But Scaturro had chosen deliberately. Ruth, a defense lawyer with strawberry blonde hair and porcelain skin, looked as prim and delicate as Katherine Hepburn’s character in “The African Queen,” but Scaturro told me that she was as tough as Lady Florence Baker and a tireless worker in camp. Ruth’s English husband, Kevin, a brainy computer scientist, didn’t look the part of an intrepid explorer either, but he had been a communications and satellite-uplink specialist on expeditions around the world, including a difficult first descent of Ethiopia’s Tekeze River with Scaturro in 1996. The couple, who live in Provence, had summited Kilimanjaro with Scaturro as well. ‘When he phoned us at home to ask if we’d like to come on the Omo, we said yes immediately,’ said Ruth. ‘Every trip with Pasquale is an adventure of a lifetime.'” Wow! Ok, I admit “porcelain skin” is stretching it, but I accept the rest as supreme compliments. Thank you, Mike, and pah! to you, Outside Magazine.

Here’s the start to the story. It’s entitled, “The Decider.”

“PASQUALE SCATURRO LEADS TWO LIVES. A big, rough-edged, passionate guy with a salty mouth and a Sicilian surname, Scaturro is an exploration geophysicist who travels the world prospecting for oil reserves. This is Scaturro’s soldier-of-fortune persona, a role that has taken him to such dicey locales as the Ogaden, the lawless wasteland between Ethiopia and Somalia, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, which he calls ‘the kidnapping capital of the world.’ The work can be dangerous – he needed military protection on both those jobs – and he’s well-compensated for it. He recently earned his pilot’s license and has his eye on a Cessna 206. His house in suburban Denver is paid off. He owns a 35, 000-acre ranch in Namibia and keeps a Land Rover there, tricked out for safaris. He’s in peak physical condition, is happily married, and has three grown children from a previous marriage, five grandchildren, and a wide circle of friends and contacts around the globe. Life is good.

But it’s also short, as he likes to observe, and at 54, having reached a point at which others might be tempted to ease up, Scaturro has an internal doomsday clock that’s racing like there’s no tomorrow.

‘He has this time thing going,” says his wife, Kim. “It’s not like a midlife crisis, but he knows his body is going to give out at some point.’ Before that happens, his apparent goal is to cram in as many experiences as possible – in the mold of his 19th-century heroes, Nile explorers Samuel Baker and Richard Francis Burton.”

To read more of the story (and to see PV in the nude!), click here. And check out our photos of the expedition.

Ruth

Categories: Environment, Travel
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