一個3年時間徒步10000英里的女人
A hundred years ago, when Robert Falcon Scott set out for Antarctica on his Terra Nova expedition, his two primary goals were scientific discovery and reaching the geographic South Pole. Arguably, though, Scott was really chasing what contemporary observers call a sufferfest. He set himself up for trouble: Scott brought Manchurian and Siberian ponies that quickly fell through the snow and ice; he planned, in part, for his crew to “man-haul,” meaning that the men would pull sleds full of gear, instead of relying on dogs. Even when Scott’s men faltered, they continued collecting specimens, including rocks. The expedition ended terribly; everybody who made the push to the pole died. Miserable, starving and frostbitten, one of Scott’s last four men killed himself by walking into a blizzard without even bothering to put on his boots.
一百年前，羅伯特·法爾康·司各特(Robert Falcon Scott)開始特拉諾瓦之旅，啓程前往南極洲的時候，目標有兩個：一是科學發現，二是達到地理意義上的南極點。然而我們可以說，司各特真的在追尋當代觀察家所謂的“苦難迷戀”。他總是自找苦吃：出行時帶了滿族小馬和西伯利亞小馬，沒多久它們就墮入了冰雪；安排了“人拉雪橇”，也就是讓同行者全力拉動雪橇，而不是依賴於狗。甚至當司各特的隨從人員掙扎前行時，依然要收集各種標本，包括岩石。這場探險的結果非常慘烈，這羣拼命前往南極的人全都死了。司各特的最後四個同行者之一，因不堪悲慘、飢餓和凍傷，走進暴風雪自殺，連靴子都沒穿。
In the taxonomy of travelers, the word “explorer” suggests a morally superior pioneer, a man or woman who braves the battle against nature to discover new terrain, expanding our species’ understanding of the world. “Adventurer,” by contrast, implies a self-indulgent adrenaline junkie, who scares loved ones by courting puerile risk. The former, obviously, is the far better title, but it’s tough to claim these days. The world is Google-mapped. Reaching the actual virgin territory of space or the deep ocean requires resources that few possess. In short, the noble fig leaf of terra incognita has fallen away and laid bare the peripatetic, outsize bravado of Scott’s kindred spirits. The resulting itineraries are pretty strange. We now have guys like Felix Baumgartner sky-diving from a balloon-borne capsule at 128,100 feet.
在旅行者的分類學中，“探索者”一詞意味着道德高尚的先鋒，是某個男人抑或女人，勇敢地與大自然搏鬥，發現新的領地，拓展人類對世界的瞭解。與之相比，“冒險家”一詞則暗指一個自我放縱的爲腎上腺素驅使的癮君子，總在追求幼稚的驚險，讓親人擔驚受怕。顯然，前者是個明顯褒義的頭銜，但近幾年來，我們卻很難這樣區分。全世界都可以使用谷歌地圖了。達到太空中真正的處女地，或者潛入深海，所需的資源太多，不是某個個體所能擁有的。簡言之，未知領域尊貴的無花果葉已經隨風飄逝，更凸顯出浪跡天涯的司各特精神是何等的可貴。從那以後，人類的探險路線已經相當不同。現在，我們有了菲利克斯·鮑加特納(Felix Baumgartner)這樣的勇敢者，能在128100英尺的高空，從熱氣球的小艙裏跳下去。Baumgartner falls squarely — and for more than four minutes, breaking the speed of sound — into the adventurer camp. But then there’s Sarah Marquis, who perhaps should be seen as an explorer like Scott, born in the wrong age. She is 42 and Swiss, and has spent three of the past four years walking about 10,000 miles by herself, from Siberia through the Gobi Desert, China, Laos and Thailand, then taking a cargo boat to Brisbane, Australia, and walking across that continent. Along the way, like Scott, she has starved, she has frozen, she has (wo)man-hauled. She has pushed herself at great physical cost to places she wanted to love but ended up feeling, as Scott wrote of the South Pole in his journal: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Despite planning a ludicrous trip, and dying on it, Scott became beloved and, somewhat improbably, hugely respected. Marquis, meanwhile, can be confounding. “You tell people what you’re doing, and they say, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” Marquis told me. “It’s never: ‘Cool project, Sarah! Go for it.’ ” Perhaps this is because the territory Marquis explores is really internal — the nature of fear, the limits of stamina and self-reliance and the meaning of traveling in nature as a female human animal, alone.
鮑加特納直接跳了下去，經歷了超音速的4分多鐘，跳入了冒險家的陣營。然而，我們又有了莎拉·馬奎斯(Sarah Marquis)，她或許應該被視作一個司各特那樣的探索者，卻生不逢時。她42歲，瑞士人，在過去的四年中，用了三年時間，孤身徒步旅行了大約一萬英里，從西伯利亞出發，穿越戈壁沙漠、中國、老撾和泰國，然後乘坐貨船到了澳大利亞布里斯班，又徒步橫跨了澳洲。一路上，她像司各特一樣，捱過了飢餓和嚴寒，也曾經試過人拉雪橇。她強迫自己耗費極大的體力到達了她本想熱愛卻最終只能略一感受的地方，正如司各特在日記中對南極點的描述：“偉大的上帝啊！這真是個糟糕的地方。”儘管司各特籌劃了那場荒謬的旅行並死在途中，但他卻因此深受熱愛，有時候難以置信地獲得了極高的尊崇。同樣，馬奎斯也令人不解。“我跟人們說起我的所作所爲，他們會說，‘你瘋了。’”馬奎斯告訴我，“從來沒人說：‘真是個超酷的計劃，莎拉！去做吧！’”也許這是因爲馬奎斯探索的領域本質上是內在的——她探究的是恐懼的本質、耐力和自我依賴的極限以及一個女性人類個體孤身一人在荒野中旅行的意義。
Meeting Marquis is strange if you’ve only seen her trip photos. In those, she is filthy, her hair is a rat’s nest and her eyes are introspective, beseeching and very alert. In person, she’s beautiful and charming; she always has a smile for waiters and cabdrivers, and her bangs are so well cut that they make her seem French. (Marquis’s hairdresser squashed her idea of shaving her head for her recent trek, saying, “After all the work we’ve done?!”)
如果你只見過馬奎斯的旅行照片，那麼，與她見面會是一件奇怪的事。照片中她很骯髒，蓬頭垢面，頭髮像個老鼠窩，目光內省而警覺，充滿渴求。當你與她面對面坐下，會發覺她美麗動人：對待服務員和出租車司機她始終含着微笑，劉海修剪得如此精緻，像個法國人。（馬奎斯的髮型師粉碎了她最近一趟徒步旅行之前剃光頭髮的主意。他說：“什麼？我們好不容易做好的髮型你要剃掉？”）Marquis grew up in Montsevelier, a village of 500 people in the Jura Mountains, in what Marquis describes as “the northern part of Switzerland — it’s not the nice part.” Her father, who worked as an engineer, paid Marquis one franc for every 100 slugs she picked out of the family garden. She befriended the family ewe, Moumou, and trained the pet rabbit to come when called. She liked people less. “My mom had nine sisters, and my dad had eight sisters and brothers, and those aunts and uncles all had three or four kids, so it was a big, screaming family, and for me it was a nightmare,” Marquis told me when I met her last winter in Washington. At age 8 she ran into the woods with her dog and spent the night in a cave. Marquis’s mother called the police, but when Marquis returned, her mother didn’t scold. Fighting Marquis’s wanderlust was hopeless.
馬奎斯在芒特塞維利耶長大，那是侏羅山區一個五百人的村莊，馬奎斯說那一帶位於“瑞士的北部，不算很好”。父親是個工程師，小時候，她在家中花園裏每捉到一百隻鼻涕蟲，父親就會給她一瑞士法郎。家中的母羊茉茉是她的好朋友，她訓練過的小兔子召之即來。她喜歡清淨。“媽媽有九個姐妹，爸爸有八個兄弟姐妹，七大姑八大姨們每人又有三四個孩子，這是個充滿刺耳尖叫的巨大家庭，在我看來無異於噩夢。”去年冬天在華盛頓見面時，馬奎斯這樣告訴我。八歲那年她帶着狗跑進森林，在山洞裏住了一夜。馬奎斯的媽媽報了警，但馬奎斯回家後，媽媽卻沒有罵她。因爲她明白，與馬奎斯的漫遊癖作對，是一場必敗的戰爭。When she was 16, Marquis answered a classified ad for a train company that promised free travel. She loved the idea of seeing Paris and Milan, but once Marquis started work, her colleagues, almost all of whom were older men, harassed her relentlessly. On the first day one man claimed he could smell that Marquis had her period. The experience was a boot camp — punishing but character-strengthening. “I learned how to build myself,” she said. “I built the tough skin I needed for later on. I learned how men worked.”
馬奎斯十六歲那年，按照分類廣告的指引，來到一家火車公司工作，因爲它承諾可免費旅行。能見到巴黎和米蘭，這個念頭讓她迷戀，但一開始工作，她就發現同事幾乎都是老男人，而且她遭到了他們肆意的騷擾。上班的第一天，一個男人就宣稱他可以聞出馬奎斯的例假來了。這種經歷就像新兵訓練營，充滿懲罰，但卻錘鍊性格。“我學會了如何鍛造自己，”她說。“我練出了一身後來所需的堅韌皮膚，也學會了男性的工作方式。”Marquis’s desire to travel began to coalesce around the question of whether she could survive by herself in nature. First, she decided to ride a horse across Turkey. On that trip, she ate apricots off trees and slept with her head on her saddle. Muslim women bathed her in warm goat’s milk. But after that, Marquis’s itineraries veered away from romance and pleasure into solitude and suffering. In her early 20s she flew to New Zealand and set out on a four-day backpacking trip with some noodles, a huge radio and three or four books — “everything except what I needed.” The outing, by typical standards, was a fiasco. Day 1 it poured; Marquis didn’t know how to set up her tent, and she was freezing and bored because, she now said wryly, “at night there was nothing to do.” But near the end of the trip she had a sort-of epiphany. “Something happened,” she said. (Articulating her reasons for pursuing her travels is not one of Marquis’s strengths.) “Over the years I’ve had this feeling again and again.” Chasing that inexplicable sensation is why she walks.
馬奎斯對旅行的渴望越發深濃，最後歸結於一個疑問：她能否孤身一人在荒野中逃出生天。一開始，她決定騎馬穿越土耳其。在那次旅行中，她從杏樹上採果子吃，頭枕着馬鞍睡覺。穆斯林女人們讓她在溫暖的羊奶中洗澡。但從那以後，馬奎斯的路線就轉變了方向，從浪漫與歡愉轉向孤獨與苦難。二十出頭的時候，她飛到了新西蘭，帶了些麪條、一臺巨大的無線電和三四本書，開始了爲期四天的揹包徒步遊。“除了我需要的東西，其他什麼都帶了。”她那場遠足用典型的標準來看，是一場慘敗。第一天，大雨傾盆；馬奎斯不知道如何扎帳篷，凍得要死，百無聊賴，原因正如她現在含着苦笑所說的那樣：“到了晚上，什麼事都做不了。”但在苦旅即將結束時，她有了某種靈光一閃的領悟。“某件事發生了。”她說。（把無休止旅行的原因說得清清楚楚，並不是她的長項。）“在過去的幾年中，我一次又一次地領略到這種感覺。”追尋這種難以言說的感觸，就是她遠足的原因。Marquis spent the winter after that trip earning money by bartending in Verbier, a fancy off-piste ski resort in the Alps. The next summer she returned to New Zealand. This time she walked into the South Island’s Kahurangi National Park without food to see if she could survive for 30 days. That trip, too, was a trial. Marquis failed at spearfishing, consumed only mussels and lost 20 pounds. But she not only recaptured that inchoate feeling she craved; she also glimpsed the savageness of her desire. “That was the first time I actually got in touch with the wild,” Marquis said. “You know when you’re really, really hungry? You have to teach yourself that food is not a big issue. You just need sleep and sweet water.”
那次旅行回來之後，馬奎斯在威爾比爾當酒吧招待，度過了一個冬天。威爾比爾是阿爾卑斯山脈一個極地滑雪勝地。次年夏天，她回到了新西蘭。這次，她走進南島的卡胡朗吉國家公園，沒帶食物，想看看自己能不能荒野求生三十天。同樣，那趟旅行也是一場實驗。馬奎斯用魚叉扎魚的計劃宣告失敗，她只有牡蠣可吃，瘦了二十磅。但她不僅重新得到了自己渴望的那種莫可名狀的體驗，而且瞥見了自己慾望中的野性。“那是我第一次真正與大自然親密接觸，”馬奎斯說。“你知道非常、非常飢餓是什麼樣的感覺嗎？你必須告訴自己，食物不是什麼大問題。你所需的只是睡眠和淡水。”Marquis returned to Switzerland and embraced the cycle — work for money, then leave on some extreme challenge she devised for herself. She canoed through Canada’s Algonquin park without knowing how to portage; she was attacked by beavers camping near water in Patagonia; she hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail. She remained captivated by what she describes as “this wild call from inside me” and decided to walk 8,700 miles around Australia.
馬奎斯回到瑞士，回到了生活的循環中——打工，賺夠錢之後就離開，奔向下一項極限挑戰。她曾經在不知道路線的情況下划着獨木舟穿越了加拿大阿岡昆公園；在巴塔哥尼亞的河邊露營時，她遭到了海狸的攻擊；她徒步走過了2650英里（約等於4265公里）長的太平洋山脊步道。那種“來自內心的野性呼喚”讓她一直心醉神迷，於是，她決定在澳大利亞徒步8700英里。For that trip, Marquis lined up her first sponsor, the North Face. She doesn’t think she impressed the company by her pitch. She believes it gave her a few backpacks, a couple of tents and some clothes because, she said, “when I told them what I was going to do, they thought, We can’t let that little thing go out without gear.” To supplement the inadequate supply of noodles she could carry, Marquis brought a slingshot, a blow gun, some wire to make snares and a net for catching insects. In the warm months, Marquis ate goannas, geckos and bearded dragons. In the cold months, when the reptiles hid, she subsisted on an Aboriginal standby, witchetty grubs — white, caterpillar-size moth larvae that live in the roots of Mulga trees. (Raw, Marquis said, they taste like unsweetened condensed milk; seared in hot sand, they crisp up nicely.) Throughout, Marquis tried to minimize human contact. She hid her femininity with loose clothes, big sunglasses, hair piled up in a hat. When water was scarce, she collected condensation, either by digging a deep hole and lining the cool bottom with plastic or by tying a tarp around a bush. If those techniques didn’t yield enough liquid — and they rarely did — she drank snake blood. At night Marquis slept close to the trunks of trees, touching the bark in a way that she describes as “almost carnal.” She fell in love with a particular twisted and wind-bent Western myall tree on Australia’s Nullarbor Plain.
爲了那趟旅行，馬奎斯聯繫了自己的第一個贊助商，北面公司。她感覺自己的旅行經歷並沒有讓這個公司刮目相看。她想北面給了她幾隻揹包、兩頂帳篷和一些衣服，因爲她說：“我告訴他們我的打算，他們想，我們可不能眼睜睜地看着這個小東西不帶裝備就出發。”馬奎斯隨身可以攜帶的麪條不多，爲了彌補食物的不足，她帶了彈弓、吹槍、製作繩套及結網的繩子用來捕食蟲子。在溫暖的季節裏，馬奎斯吃巨蜥、壁虎和鬃獅蜥。在寒冷的季節，爬行動物都藏了起來，她就靠本土常見的巫蠐螬爲食。那是一種白色的毛毛蟲大小的蛾子幼蟲，生活在金合歡樹根周圍的土裏。（馬奎斯說，這種蟲子如果生吃，口味像是沒加糖的煉乳。在熾熱的沙地裏烤過之後，變得酥脆可口。）自始至終，馬奎斯都儘量不與人類社會接觸。她用寬鬆的衣服和大太陽鏡遮住了自己的女性氣質，把頭髮挽起藏在帽子裏。缺水時，她收集冷凝水，挖一個深坑，在陰涼的底部鋪上塑料袋，或者在灌木周圍捆上防水布，收集露水。如果這些技巧仍然不能帶來足夠的水——這種情況很少發生——她就喝蛇血。到了夜裏，馬奎斯挨着樹幹睡覺，用一種她所謂的“幾近肉慾”的方式貼着樹皮。她愛上了澳大利亞納拉伯平原上一棵被風吹彎的格外扭曲的西部垂枝相思樹。On June 20, 2010, Marquis’s 38th birthday, she set out to walk from Siberia through Asia and, once back in Australia, trek to her beloved tree. The video of Marquis walking away from her starting point in Irkutsk feels like the setup for a horror film. “Hello, O.K., so here we are,” she said just before turning away from the camera. “Time to go now!” On her back is a 75-pound pack, and trailing behind her, overflowing with gear secured by bungee cords, is a custom-made cart that looks like a cross between a wheelbarrow and a giant roller bag — her dry-land sled. After Australia, Marquis couldn’t handle slaughtering more animals; she says it felt “like killing a friend.” So she decided to carry rice and hard biscuits (the latter inedible without “a nice, hot cup of tea”), which meant she would need to pull a cart. It now weighed 120 pounds.
2010年6月20日，馬奎斯38歲生日那天，她開始了那趟旅行，從西伯利亞出發，穿過亞洲，回到澳大利亞，徒步走到到她摯愛的那棵樹下。馬奎斯從伊爾庫茨克起點出發時錄製的那段視頻感覺就像一部恐怖片的背景。“你好！嗯，我們在這裏了。”她說着就轉身離開了鏡頭。“出發了！”她的背上是75磅重的揹包，跟在她身後的是一輛滿載着戶外裝備的定製的小車，用蹦極繩子捆緊，模樣像個十字架，功能則兼具獨輪手推車和大拖輪行李箱的特點，也就是一輛旱地上的雪橇。離開澳大利亞之後，馬奎斯無法接受殺戮更多的動物，她說感覺“就像殺害朋友”，於是決定攜帶米飯和硬餅乾（後者哪怕沒有“可口的熱茶”也可以吃下去），這意味着她需要拉着一輛車旅行。現在，這輛車重達120磅。To prepare for the expedition, Marquis spent two years walking or snowshoeing 20 miles a day, wearing 75 pounds. On the trip itself, she carried, among other things, five pairs of underwear, a large pocketknife, wide-spectrum antibiotics, tea-tree oil for massaging her feet, a solar-powered charger, a beacon, a BlackBerry, a satellite phone, Crocs, a compass, a tiny emergency stash of amphetamines (“that’s the backup backup backup of the backup; in case you lose a foot and you need to get out and not feel a thing”) and pink merino-wool pajamas (“you put them on and you feel good, you feel gorgeous”).
爲了準備這場遠足，馬奎斯花費了兩年時間，每天負重75磅，徒步或穿着雪地靴步行二十英里。在旅途中，除了其他物品，她還要攜帶五套內衣褲、一把隨身大摺疊刀、廣譜抗生素、用於腳部按摩的茶樹油、太陽能充電器、信標、黑莓手機、衛星電話、洞洞鞋、指南針、僅爲緊急情況準備的一點點安非他命（她說：“這是最最最最無奈的備選方案。萬一失去了一隻腳，你需要毫無痛覺地走出困境。”）和一套粉色美利奴羊毛睡衣（“穿上以後感覺很好，覺得自己漂亮極了。”）。The afternoon she departed from Irktusk, Marquis walked just a few miles and set down her load. “That first day I don’t even eat or do anything,” Marquis explains. “By that point, I’m so exhausted, it’s unbelievable.”
那天下午，馬奎斯離開了伊爾庫茨克，才徒步了幾英里就卸下了重負。“那只是第一天，我什麼都沒吃，什麼都沒幹。”馬奎斯解釋道。“那時我已經筋疲力盡，太難以置信了。”In truth, the first six months on Marquis’s trips are always harrowing. She describes it as “the washing machine”: endless agitation, physical pain, emotional pain, nonstop bargaining among opposing internal voices — the inner demons that whisper, Remember the delicious foam on the cafe latte? and the inner angels that reprimand, Coffee isn’t accessible now, so why talk about it? “You can’t move your hands, you can’t move your feet, you just want to die,” Marquis said. “You think about sleep all the time, because maybe sleep will set things straight.”
事實上，馬奎斯那趟旅行的最初六個月始終如此痛苦。她說就像“洗衣機”：無窮無盡的焦灼、身體上的痛苦、情緒上的煎熬、內心兩種相反意見無休止的爭吵——內在的惡魔悄聲說：還記得拿鐵咖啡上那層香濃的泡沫麼？內在的天使斥責道：現在又沒有咖啡，說這個幹什麼！“你的手動不了，腳也動不了，只想死掉。”馬奎斯說。“你隨時想躺下睡一覺，滿心希望一覺醒來後，一切恢復正常。”A few months into her journey, Marquis shot a video of herself in her sleeping bag. Like a hostage clutching a newspaper, she holds a thermometer that reads minus 20 Celsius. “I don’t sleep much these days. I do not know what time it is. Maybe midnight, or something like that?” In the next day’s video, she looks wrecked. The previous night a wind- and sandstorm ripped across the Mongolian plains. To keep the nylon of her tent from tearing, Marquis removed the metal poles holding it up. But she still feared the gales would blow away her gear, so she unzipped herself from her collapsed shelter and lay atop her pack, tent and cart.
旅程開始幾個月之後，馬奎斯錄製了一段自己在睡袋中的視頻。就像一個抓着報紙的人質，她手裏拿着溫度計，上面顯示零下20攝氏度。“這些天我睡得很少，不知道現在是什麼時間，也許是午夜，或者午夜前後？”在第二天的視頻中，她看上去很憔悴。之前的夜晚，一場大風夾雜沙塵暴席捲了蒙古平原。爲了防止尼龍帳篷被撕裂，馬奎斯把支撐帳篷的金屬桿拆了下來。但還是害怕裝備被大風颳跑，於是她拉開坍塌的帳篷的拉鍊，躺下去，用身體壓住揹包、帳篷和小車。Another night during those first months, while Marquis camped on a vast, overgrazed steppe that she describes as looking like an ugly golf course, she heard horses galloping toward her. The visitors turned out to be Mongol horsemen, all in traditional overcoat-like deels, making a vodka-fueled raid on her camp. After trying to steal her tent, they rode off. But for weeks, in the evenings, the men returned, treating Marquis, she said, as “the little entertainment.” To protect herself, she began waking before dawn, walking until midafternoon, then looking for a place to hide for the night — if possible, in a cement sewage pipe. “Everything is going on under those roads,” she said. “There is waste. There are dead sheep. But for me it was not a problem. I was safe.”
在最初的幾個月裏還有一個夜晚，馬奎斯在一片遭到過度放牧的遼闊乾草原上露營，她說，那片地方看上去像個醜陋的高爾夫球場。她聽見馬羣朝她飛奔而來，結果來訪者是一羣蒙古牧馬人，全都穿着傳統的蒙古長袍，醉飲伏特加之後向她的宿營地發起了攻擊。他們試圖偷走帳篷，結果未遂就便策馬而去。但之後的幾個星期，每到夜裏，這羣牧民就會回來，招惹馬奎斯，把這當成“一項小小的娛樂”。爲了保護自己，馬奎斯在黎明前就醒來，徒步一直走到半下午，然後尋找一個夜裏的藏身之地，如果可能，就藏在水泥排污管裏。“道路下面，什麼髒東西都有。”她說。“有垃圾。有羊的屍體。但對我來說這都不是問題。我很安全。”Eventually, however, Marquis passed out of Mongol territory. The washing-machine cycle ended. Her body changed, and her mind changed, too. Her senses sharpened to the point that she could smell shampoo on a tourist’s hair from a mile away. “One day you walk 12 hours, and you don’t feel pain,” Marquis said. The past and present telescope down to an all-consuming now. “There is no before or after. The intellect doesn’t drive you anymore. It doesn’t exist anymore. You become what nature needs you to be: this wild thing.”
然而，馬奎斯終於走出了蒙古的國土。洗衣機般的折磨結束了。她的身體變了，想法也變了。她的感覺靈敏極了，甚至能嗅到一英里之外遊客頭髮上洗髮水的氣味。“有一天，你走了12個小時，連痛覺都感受不到了。”馬奎斯說。往日和今天，都濃縮爲一個銷蝕一切的此刻。“沒有過去，也沒有將來。智力不能幫你向前再走任何一步。它一點都不存在了。你變成了大自然需要你成爲的樣子：就現在這個原始的模樣。”As Francis Spufford writes in his history of British polar exploration, “I May Be Some Time,” for ages, men have wandered intentionally into extreme hardship, and they “are notoriously bad at saying why.” Marquis and her female peers — women who, say, walk across the Sahara alone with a camel or pull a 200-pound sled to the South Pole — don’t explain it much better. “People always ask, ‘Was it something in your childhood?’ ” says Felicity Aston, the first woman to ski solo across Antarctica. “I’ve thought about it endlessly: no.”
千秋萬世以來，人類漫遊的腳步總在有意踏入極限的艱險，而弗朗西斯·斯巴福德(Francis Spufford)在他的英倫極地探險史一書中說，“可能在某些時候，我特別不擅長說清楚爲什麼”。馬奎斯和她的女性同好們——女人，孤身一人騎着駱駝穿過沙漠或拉着200磅的雪橇走到南極，也無法更好地解釋爲何要這樣做。“人們總是問：‘你是不是有什麼特殊的童年經歷？’”第一位孤身滑雪穿過南極的女性菲麗西提·阿什頓(Felicity Aston)說。“對這個問題，我深思熟慮之後的回答是：沒有。”The rest of Marquis’s trip was not all Zen bliss. Seven months into the walk, she lost a molar. Her gum abscessed, and the attendant infection, which couldn’t be controlled with the antibiotics, started moving down her neck, and she had to be evacuated from Mongolia. Marquis returned to the precise G.P.S. coordinates she left and made it to China, where, one day, some children followed her. She sang with them and taught them how to set up her tent — and then they stole her BlackBerry. In Laos, drug dealers descended on Marquis’s camp one night, firing their automatic weapons into the air. Soon after that, Marquis contracted dengue fever. She tied her left leg to a tree so she wouldn’t wander off in her delirium and drown herself in a river.
馬奎斯苦旅的剩下部分並不全是禪意的福祉。啓程七個月之後，她掉了一顆臼齒。她的牙牀潰瘍了，伴隨的感染連抗生素都無法控制，開始下行到頸部，她只好從蒙古返回到她根據GPS座標精確定位的起點，又進入中國。在那裏，某一天幾個小孩一直跟着她，她帶他們一起唱歌，教他們搭帳篷——後來他們偷走了她的黑莓手機。在老撾，一天夜裏，毒販突襲了她的宿營地，拿着自動武器對空鳴響。之後沒多久，馬奎斯又感染了登革熱。她把自己的左腿綁到一棵樹上，以免自己在譫妄中亂走，掉進河裏淹死。The trip smoothed out during the last year. Thailand was uneventful. Australia was lovely, despite the heat and the last couple of hundred miles, when Marquis’s legs cramped so badly that it was difficult to walk. She wrote a book about the experience, “Wild by Nature” (available only in French). The last page is profoundly anticlimactic. “I have arrived,” Marquis writes. “I touch the back of the tree with my right hand. ‘I’m back, darling.’ I sit down.”
這場旅行的最後一年漸漸順利起來。泰國之行波瀾不驚。澳大利亞十分可愛，儘管酷熱難當，最後兩百英里時，馬奎斯的雙腿嚴重抽筋，幾乎無法行走。她把這段經歷寫成了一本書——《生來狂野》（Wild by Nature，只有法語版）。最後一頁如此淡然。“我到達了，”馬奎斯寫道。“我用右手的手背觸摸着樹幹。‘親愛的，我回來了。’我坐了下來。”In Washington last winter, Marquis met with people from the National Geographic Speakers Bureau, because that’s what explorers do (and pretty much have always done): come home and sell their stories. It was nine months after re-entry into mainstream life, and she was happy to return to some physical comforts: sleeping in a bed, taking two baths a day. But she found being among people overwhelming, and her senses remained so acute that even just sitting in a cafeteria was grating. “You hear the dishwasher?” Marquis asked me, pointing toward an unseen kitchen. I shook my head. Marquis said, resigned, “There’s a radio playing back there, too.”
去年冬天，馬奎斯在華盛頓與國家地理演講局(National Geographic Speakers Bureau)的工作人員見面，因爲探險家就是這樣（他們基本都試過）：回家，把自己的故事寫成書賣掉。當時，她再次進入主流生活已經9個月了，很開心身體能重新體驗舒適的感覺：睡在牀上，每天洗兩次澡。但她發現，身處人羣讓她感覺壓抑，因爲她的感官仍是如此敏銳，僅僅是坐在餐廳裏，都感覺是種折磨。“你聽見洗碗機的聲音了嗎？”馬奎斯問我，指着視野之外的廚房。我搖搖頭。馬奎斯無奈放棄了，說：“那裏面還有廣播的聲音。”Marquis plans to return to northwest Australia in 2016. She said it’s her “dream to go with just a sarong and a knife” — the ultimate test of survival. It’s hard not to wonder where these urges come from. Geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists and religious scholars have all taken stabs at answering, with unsatisfying results. But perhaps the real reason to court a sufferfest — to explore or adventure, or whatever you want to call it — is that it makes a person feel alive. The literature of survival is weirdly upbeat. A few days before dying, in 1912, Robert Falcon Scott wrote a letter telling a friend that he wished that friend were with him “to hear our songs and the cheery conversation.” The day of his death, Scott said of his trip, “How much better has it been than lounging in too great comfort at home.”
馬奎斯打算2016年回到澳大利亞西北部。她說她的夢想是隻穿一件紗籠、帶一把旅行刀去澳洲，那將是生存實驗的終極挑戰。人們很難不好奇，這種衝動究竟從何而來。這個問題遺傳學家、生理學家、心理學家和宗教學者都曾試圖回答，結果卻都不令人滿意。但是，一個受虐狂去探索或冒險，真正的原因或許是——那會讓他們感到自己活着。歷險主題的文學作品總是奇特而積極向上的。1912年，羅伯特·法爾康·司各特去世之前的幾天，寫了一封信，告訴朋友他希望對方和自己在一起，“聆聽我們的歡聲笑語”。去世那天，司各特說起這場旅行，“這種感覺，比呆在家裏要美好得太多太多了啊！”Of course, if you don’t die — well, then the experience of extreme travel is fantastic. After swimming across a river infested with crocodiles, Marquis wrote that every time she finds herself in the bush, “my happiness increases tenfold.” Perhaps among the purest expressions of joy ever recorded is of the Norwegian explorer Aleksander Gamme on the 86th day of his unsupported 1,410-mile expedition from Hercules Inlet to the South Pole and back in 2012. Desperately hungry and dreadlocked, he comes upon a cache that he buried in the snow for himself a few months earlier. From the frozen duffel he pulls matches, Vaseline and zinc ointment. Then he starts screaming: “YEAAAAA! AAAAHHH! HAHA! YEAA! WHOOOWHOOO.” His elation at seeing a double pack of Cheez Doodles might be greater than any most of us will feel in our entire lives.
當然，如果你沒死——那麼，這場極限旅行的經歷是極其精彩的。遊過鱷魚肆虐的河流之後，馬奎斯寫道，每當她發現自己置身叢林，“我的歡愉就會十倍地增長。”也許，在有記錄的對純粹喜悅的描述中，最鮮明的是挪威探險家亞歷山大·嘉莫(Aleksander Gamme)的版本。2012年，他從大力灣出發前往南極，開始了一場無人支持的長達1410英里的旅行，在第86天，他極度飢餓，蓬頭垢面，來到了一個藏身之處，是他幾個月前孤身一人埋藏在雪下的。他從冰冷的粗呢旅行袋中掏出火柴、凡士林油和氧化鋅藥膏，然後開始歡呼：“耶~~~！啊~~！哈哈！耶！烏呼！”他因發現兩盒芝士麪條而產生的極大狂喜，或許要比我們之中任何人整整一生所感受到的歡愉都要強烈。
