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.
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I’ve been afraid to see An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary about Global Warming, because I know I will only get depressed. I am already well aware that the polar ice caps are melting, that changing weather patterns are adversely affecting animal migrations and causing natural disasters such as hurricanes, droughts, and floods to occur more frequently around the world. Why would I want to hear more about a subject I feel completely powerless to do anything about?
