North Pole Tenderfoot. Doug Hall

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      Admiral Robert Peary, the North Pole iron man.

      If there were a travel brochure for the trip, it would read like this:

      On This Trip You’ll Enjoy: Minus 60 Degree Cold,

      Blinding Whiteouts, Bouts of Diarrhea.

      Frostbite Is a Certainty,

      Loss of Fingers and Toes a Real Possibility.

      Sounds grim. But at least it’s more optimistic than the ad Ernest Shackleton supposedly ran in London to find crew members for his South Pole expedition:

      Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages.

      Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness.

      Constant danger. Safe return doubtful.

      Honour and recognition in case of success.

      The question of why are you going to the North Pole can be asked in two ways:

      Why are you going

      to the NORTH POLE?

      In this case the emphasis was placed on why the North Pole. The place itself. However, it was most often asked with emphasis placed on the front of the question, with the emphasis on me:

      Why are YOU going

      to the North Pole?

      For some reason, my family and friends didn’t see me as a great explorer.

      Maybe it was my robust profile.

      Maybe it was my passion for gourmet cooking.

      Maybe it was my habit of exercising my mouth more than my body.

      When asked why, my first answer was that I was going to use the expedition to raise money and awareness for my Great Aspirations! charity. Great Aspirations! provides ideas to help parents inspire their children. I’d created the charity based on the work of Dr. Russ Quaglia, director of the National Center for Student Aspirations, located at my alma mater, the University of Maine.

      My idea was to use the trip as a publicity tool for raising money from corporate sponsors and to provide a media event to connect parents and children to the Web site, where they could get free educational materials. The www.Aspirations.com Web site provides a free one-hour audio workshop as well as eighty newspaper columns filled with ideas for helping parents inspire their children’s aspirations.

      Helping the charity was not a very effective answer to the question. Friends would respond, “Aren’t there less extreme ways to raise money and awareness for the charity?”

      For a month or so I brushed off the question with the common answer “Because it’s there.”

      Then I did a little research and found the source of that statement. It was first said by British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory in a March 1923 interview in the New York Times when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. I stopped saying it when I learned that the primary reason the quote is so famous is because Mallory was lost on Everest the following year. He died! Not the sort of inspiration I needed.

      In 1999, the same year I went to the pole, Mallory’s body was found on Everest with his fellow climber, Andrew Irvine. The media debated if Mallory was “going down” or “up” at the time of his death. If he were “going down” then that would mean that he achieved the summit twenty-nine years before Edmund Hillary. Mallory’s son John didn’t see it as a debate. As he said, “To me the only way you achieve a summit is to come back alive. The job is half done if you don’t get down again.”

      I’m with John Mallory—coming back alive is key to a truly successful adventure.

      When pushed deeper on “why,” I had plenty of flip responses but few honest answers.

      If the discussion was taking place over a nip or two of the only alcohol to be named after a country (Scotch whisky), I would wax philosophically about the neglected spirit of adventure in today’s high-tech souls. I would invoke the cosmic karmic nature of the pole—the place where all time zones and all people blend into one. I might even blab eloquently about the spiritual symbolism of standing on top of the world.

      These responses rarely worked to answer the question.

      Sometimes I would talk of how this trip would allow me to recapture my neglected physical nature. As a youth I earned the rank of Eagle Scout, participated in winter survival training, and spent summers leading canoe trips at Camp Carpenter Boy Scout Camp.

      Then, as a teenager, I broke my hip in a pickup football game. It was a freak accident. The doctors at Boston Children’s Medical Hospital gave me a 5 percent chance of walking again.

      The skill of my physician, Dr. Trott, some prayers, and some luck, had me walking and running again two years later. In the process my focus moved from the great outdoors to entrepreneurship.

      I developed a passion for magic and juggling and created my own show. The excitement of creating, selling, and performing set off a chain reaction of entrepreneurial adventures. I soon had a line of learn-to-juggle kits and magic tricks.