Honorary Chair
Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008
President
Daniel A. Bennett
Honorary President
Don Walsh, Ph.D.
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Honorary Chair Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008 |
President Daniel A. Bennett |
Honorary President Don Walsh, Ph.D. |
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PROJECTS
INTERVIEW with James Robert "J. R." Harris MR'93
Harris joined The Explorers Club in 1993 and is a Resident Member (MR).
CLAY: Do you remember when you first heard of the Explorers Club? HARRIS: I remember it was a long time ago. And I remember that there was going to be a big banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria, and these people were going to be all dressed up in tuxedoes, and were going to be eating stuff like antelope gizzards. And I was like, What's with that? But that's got to be forty years ago, when I was in college. And so that's really the first thing I remember hearing about it. Then hearing about how the Club got started. I was interested in history and I knew Matthew Henson went to the North Pole with Peary and that Peary had been president of the Club. CLAY: Did you see about the annual dinner in the newspapers or did you meet someone from the Club who told you about it? HARRIS: No, I never met anybody from the Club, and even today I don't know a lot of people. I live in the city. I do travel a lot and I'm out of town a lot, but I really don't know a lot of people. And when I went to my first Explorers Club Annual Dinner, apart from my date, I didn't know anybody. It was kind of awkward, really, sitting at a table where everybody knows everybody, and I don't know anybody, and I'm eating this stuff that I never heard of before. But I do like to explore and so the circle came around, came back to me. CLAY: You mentioned history. What is your main focus in exploration? HARRIS: Well, by training, I'm a marketing consultant. That's what I do. So exploration is more of an avocation. And I've been doing it a long time. My thing is, I'm just a curious guy. When I read about something in National Geographic, and everybody else says, "Oh, that's really interesting, now I know something about that"—what that does is it whets my interest. So it doesn't really satisfy me; it makes me want to go there and see it for myself: see it, feel it, experience it, whatever it is. So that's what I do. I read about something, hear about something in the Arctic or in the jungle or in the mountains somewhere, and I put an expedition together. I pay for it myself, I plan it, I do the whole thing myself, and I go by myself. I'll maybe charter a plane to fly me in, but it's basically backpacking to see or experience or learn more about something. Last September I was in northern Alaska, just following the caribou migration, the fall migration to the south. Just to see what it was like. I was following behind them and the wolf packs. CLAY: Wolves follow the migration too? HARRIS: Sure. It's thousands of caribou moving down in clumps through the Brooks Range, and nobody within hundreds of square miles. I got dropped in at one place and picked up three and a half weeks later--it’s really fascinating. CLAY: So you were backpacking? HARRIS: I was backpacking. I also had an inflatable raft so I could make some time by going down the Alatna River. I set up a base camp, stay there, usually just watching. So that's what I do. I've been to Tasmania: I went there to see a platypus. CLAY: That's what drew you there? HARRIS: Yeah. And a lot of other things while I was there. But that's enough to get me to go someplace. And so my exploration is really different from most people in the Club in that I'm not part of a university or some kind of society or museum that sponsors it. I'm just like, you know, old-school independent. Much of what I learn, somebody knows it already, but I didn't know it. I like the dimension of going there and seeing it for myself. Being interested in history, before I leave, I read everything about it. I once spent some time with the Inuit people in Baffin Island. Then I got really curious, so I went to northern Greenland, and I hung out up there. And then I said, Well, what's the difference between Canadian Inuit, Greenlanders, and Laplanders? So I went to northern Sweden and Norway to find out. CLAY: So it became a great tour. HARRIS: Yeah, over three or four years. CLAY: And do you keep a journal and shoot photographs? HARRIS: Oh, yeah. CLAY: And what typically have you done with those resources that you bring back? HARRIS: I've written some magazine articles. One is published in a Swedish mountaineering magazine. It came out last summer, the summer before when I was in Lapland. And the Tasmanian Tramp—I love that name—is another magazine I’ve published in. Instead of hiking, they call it tramping. The Tasmanian Tramp is the journal of the Hobart Walking Society. And so I'm proud to say I have several articles in there. And everybody is kind of fascinated about somebody that comes to their country or their area alone, like a guy from New York. Whenever I write these articles, the editors ask me: Could you write an article about a New York guy who goes to, let’s say Tasmania to look for a platypus, or to hike in the mountains for whatever reason, and tell us what it's like? So they ask me the same questions no matter where I go: What is it like? What are you doing here? And where's the rest of your party? They see me as different. For example, I was up in Anaktuvik Pass in northern Alaska. It's a little town and everybody is jabbing each other: “Look at this guy.” They know I don't live there. When I go someplace, the first thing that happens is, I can see them looking at me from a long way like, What is this guy doing here? And then, as they approach they ask, How are you doing? And then they kind of look over your shoulder and ask, Where's the rest of your party? So I say, I'm alone. You're by yourself out here? Yeah. So then they say, Well, where are you from? I say New York. Wait a minute, you're a New Yorker and you live in New York and you're way out here ... all by yourself? What are you looking for? Why are you here? And I say, Well, somebody said there was a species of ant that only comes out every seven years, and this is the year, and I want to see if I can find it. And, of course, the issue of race comes up. You know that they don't see a lot of African-Americans there. And especially an old black dude from New York carrying a backpack who comes out to follow the caribou or whatever. So they get it, and they really, a lot of times, appreciate it that somebody is that curious—because a lot of them are equally curious, in terms of personality. They want to know, What's the impact of their place on somebody from the outside who comes here, especially somebody who comes here just because they were curious! And some people, I think, feel flattered that somebody would come out there for no other reason than just to see. CLAY: Sometimes people outside of the Club wonder what is there left to explore. And it's true that members of the Club oftentimes are going places that many people have already explored before. But your examples shed a new light on the question: Even if the place is the same, when a new person goes there, they see something new. HARRIS: A lot of the places I go, I go there because somebody has been there and written about it. So I'm not looking to go someplace that nobody has been before. I assume that that person had a certain curiosity to be there in the first place. And they stirred my curiosity. Now maybe what they wanted is not what I'm interested in, and maybe they have their own motive; it doesn't matter. I go there because I'm going to learn something—not necessarily different from what other people learned—but I'm going to learn it myself in the way I absorb things. CLAY: Did you find the ants? HARRIS: No, I didn't. You know, they said that these ants are really fierce biting ants and that sometimes the Aborigines would use them in initiation rites for guys. So it wasn't too sad that I didn't see them. CLAY: Do you find when you go out to see something you have read about, that you see that much and more? HARRIS: Well, here's an example just from my Alaska trip. I saw a program on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. And it wasn't even about caribou, but it was about northern Alaska and the Brooks Range and the whole ecosystem. And I saw this shot of herds of caribou going through the mountain passes, streaming down a river. And that one shot, that high shot, made me say, Wow, man, that would be great to see. And then I wanted to know, When do they migrate, how long have they been doing that, which routes do they follow, and how long does it take? So I said I ought to go up there and check it out. And so even though somebody had been there and put it on TV and everything, I wanted to be there: the wind blowing in my face, seeing the caribou shit on the ground that they don't show you on film, trying to cross these rivers and streams, the glacial water freezing cold, sleeping out at night, walking through the snow. That's mine, that's me. And it's not that important to me that I'm not the first one that ever did it. I did it. And I'm not doing it for a TV program. Nobody even knows, if I don't write about it. I mean, I do have a log of every trip, and I have published. But even that, I collected it for myself. And, I'll tell you, I've learned a lot just doing that over forty years. CLAY: There certainly are plenty of explorers out there who aren't members of the Explorers Club. Why join the Club? Why not just explore on your own as you've been doing? HARRIS: That's an excellent question. To be honest with you, I was content to explore on my own, I was fine. In fact, I didn't even try to get in the Club. The two people that sponsored me, two female Club members, I had never met before. They were looking to sponsor somebody else, a woman who either decided she didn't want to come in, or they decided that her background wasn't good enough. But they still wanted to sponsor somebody. And so a friend of a friend said, I know a guy named J.R., if you want to sponsor somebody, this guy goes all over the world, and he's this and he's that. So I get a call from Ann McGovern, and she says, Have you ever heard of the Explorers Club, and would you be interested in being a member? Sure. I wanted to taste some of those weird snacks at the Waldorf; I thought it would be pretty cool. And that was it. This was back in 1992 or ‘93 or something like that. CLAY: What did it feel like getting that call from out of the blue? HARRIS: Well, it was unexpected. But going back to the original point, I was content to do my own thing. I thought it would be really cool to be in the Club. I never thought about it before, though. I always had this thing about Peary and Henson. I felt that Henson got shafted, that they were both step-by-step all the way to the Pole. And yet, you know, when they come back, Peary is president of the Club and Henson is delivering mail somewhere. And then that got me thinking about Ed Hillary and Tensing Norgay. And Tensing was a famous guy already as a climber. He was one of the better Sherpas and had plenty of experience. So I was thinking to myself that if I joined, that’s a way of telling my grandkids--not that I have any, because I don't--that black people can explore, we don't just live in cities. And if you want to explore, the idea really is that you can do anything you want to do. Don't think that just 'cause you're black or Latino or whatever, that you're stuck in the city. I grew up in a housing project, right here in the city. I went to public school. But I was always curious. And I got into a situation where I own my own business, my kid brother runs it, and I can do what I want. And this is what I want to do. And so I said, Yeah, maybe I should join. I've actually gone around to schools. I used to deal with the Boy Scouts until my opinion of Boy Scouts as an organization started to change. But I was a Boy Scout. That's how I learned all these skills when I was growing up. I used to go to camp right here in Ten Mile River in the Catskills, and to Alpine, which is forty-five minutes from here on the other side of the Hudson River. CLAY: You don't have to go far to get way, way out of the city. HARRIS: But after I joined the Club, I never really met a lot of people. I'm coming around more now. I never asked to take a flag on my own. And not that I don't think it's an honor. To me, in a sense, these journeys are kind of private. I can say this: I've certainly had some interesting experiences. CLAY: What expeditions do you have planned for the future? HARRIS: I'm leaving in about two months, going to the Outback with a couple of friends of mine who live in Melbourne, Australia. They used to write for Lonely Planet, and now they publish their own trail guide books for Australia and Tasmania. There's a new route through the Outback that just opened up in the Northern Territories, and they want to include it as a potential route for their next book. So they're going to go out and try it. It's about 233 kilometers. It will take us about three weeks. So, right now, I'm reading up on the flora and the fauna and the weather patterns and anybody who may have lived there or anything that's happened in history and which way the rivers flowed--they're now dry, most of them—and all that. So when I get there, I'll actually see that and experience it myself. I've already been approached by the Tasmanian Tramp to write a third article for them, when this is all over. So that's all good, too. CLAY: What would you say has been your defining expedition? HARRIS: It was back in 1997 and it was a trek along a route called the Canol Pipeline Trail. The Explorers Club newsletter wrote an article about me back then, about my expedition, before I left. The Canol Pipeline is in northern Canada in the Northwest Territories. It was a huge engineering project that nobody ever heard of. The brief story is that at the beginning of World War II, after the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, they were afraid that the Japanese would attack America through Alaska and down western Canada. They wanted to build bases in Alaska to head off that invasion, but there was no oil. So the U.S. Army put in an oil pipeline across northern Canada, from the Mackenzie River, across the Mackenzie Mountains, into Whitehorse. It took three years to build and it was one of the largest engineering projects in the world. It was bigger than Hoover Dam; it was on the scale of the Panama Canal. They laid this pipe on the ground. They also built a road and a telephone line for the Army. After the battle of Midway, which eliminated the threat of a Japanese invasion, the Army just decided to close the thing and pretend it never happened. So they pulled everybody out but they left all the old quonset huts and the pump stations and the old maintenance road, the dirt road that accompanied it. It deteriorated within fifty or sixty years basically back to nature, almost like a hiking trail. But among the things that I found out when I read something about it was that there were, among the soldiers that made the pipeline, some black units that were sent up from Louisiana. They had never been out of the South before and were sent into northern Canada. They didn't get warm clothing or anything. My father was in World War II. And so now I'm getting curious. I said, I wonder what it was like being up there, working on that pipeline. And so I decided to do the whole route. It took me three weeks. Even though the Canadian government has made it an historic trail, they tell everybody not to travel it because all the bridges have been wiped out and there are some rugged stream crossings and river crossings and there are no towns. It's a very dangerous route. People go out and never come back. There is no search and rescue. The same year that I did it, 1997, just about a month before I went up there, the Canadian Army sent up an elite unit to do a training mission in that area, and they had to come and evacuate them. They were trained military guys. I'm just a backpacker. So when I showed up a month later, by myself, 53 years old, from New York City, the town took a pool to see exactly the day and time I would come back. CLAY: Betting on it? HARRIS: Yeah. And when I came back, the first guy I saw on the road there, he says, You're back, you made it! He was shocked. Now understand, I didn't even know this guy, I never saw this guy before. He said, When did you get back? I said, I just got back. And he asked, But what time? I said, I've been back like an hour. And I said, Why? He said, There's a pool, everybody in town put in three dollars on the day, if you would make it back, and when. So I said, Well, what was the betting like? So he said, You know, they had a separate pool like if they didn't think you were going to come back. So I said, Well, how many people were in the pool? And he says, Mostly everybody in the town is in the pool. And the weird thing was that I came back on exactly the day I said I was coming back. You know what, man? Word got around I was back, and they had a big feast, they called it a sheep feast, in my honor. We went out to this guy who had a cabin just on the outskirts of Norman Wells. Everybody brought pies and hunks of sheep meat and wine--so they were really great. I tell you, I made a lot of friends that I still keep up with. And now the few people who tried to do that hike all correspond with me because very few people have ever done it. So there's another side of my explorations. I have this friendship network all over the world now. You create a network of people that you meet, and of other people who you might see who are backpackers or climbers who relate to you. I'm still getting Christmas cards from people all over the world in really obscure places. And I send them out too. CLAY: Did you publish your experiences of traveling that dangerous trail? When I came back, I wrote an article for the Canol Trail website. Then I decided what I wanted to do is maybe try to see if I could find some of those soldiers. They're all dead except one, and he lives in New Jersey. I tracked him down, and I went out and interviewed and videotaped him. And we talked about life in the military being black, the whole thing. And about how the Canadian Indians related to him and the military. Because I'd been up there. He was fascinated that anybody would go up there. Then he told me, You know, when we were up there, we were not allowed to fraternize with the Indians, and the white officers told the Indians that we had tails and that we were crazy. But they didn't believe the officers. A lot of guys and the Indians went out together, and when the thing ended and they just pulled the soldiers out, some of these women were pregnant. And so then I said, Man, I wonder now if there are any half Indian and half black people still living there? They'd be about my age because my father was in the military then. At that point, I got contacted by a Canadian Indian playwright who writes about Indian culture and history to give Canadians a sense of the indigenous people. He grew up there, and he read my article and he knew some black/Indian people who are still there. And so then he decided to write a play about a black guy from New York who goes up because his father worked on the pipeline and he heard that his father had other kids. He combined and blended the stories. Now I'm going back in the summer to interview some of the Indian women and some of the men who were working on the pipeline as hunters and cooks and boatmen. I'm putting this whole story together. I have archival photos. I have the history of this whole project. So now I'm writing a book about it. All that from just one spark of curiosity. So I'd say the Canol Pipeline was my favorite or biggest expedition. Although, to be honest with you, they're all great.
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