Of Kincaid | The Adventures

THE ADVENTURES OF KINCAID: Charting the Unknown in a World That’s Forgotten How

We live in an age of simulated adventure. We scroll through photos of Everest summits taken by guides who carry our oxygen. We watch survival shows where the crew is never more than 200 yards from a craft services table. We have traded the unknown for the algorithm.

Kincaid wiped ice from his beard and said: “Terror is just excitement without a sense of humor.”

When they asked if he needed a helicopter, Kincaid asked if they had any coffee. The Adventures Of Kincaid

Kincaid’s most recent adventure almost ended him. He was mapping a newly formed ice cave beneath Vatnajökull glacier. The ice is electric blue, creaking like a dying whale. He went in alone (against every rule in the book) when a calving event shifted the entrance.

For six hours, Kincaid clung to the upturned hull, losing his food supply, his spare boots, and his journal. He was hypothermic, alone, and forty miles from the nearest trail.

Kincaid refuses.

— A chronicler of the Kincaid Expeditions.

Two years later, Kincaid vanished again. This time, he was chasing the ghost of a lost library in the Kyzylkum Desert. Local historians told him the desert would kill him. The temperatures swing from 120°F during the day to near freezing at night. The sand vipers are aggressive. The water is poison.

But here is where the adventure begins. Instead of panicking, he laughed. He tore a strip of fabric from his shirt, tied his broken compass around his neck, and started walking east. He ate grubs and fiddlehead ferns. He slept in the hollow of a cottonwood tree. On day five, a family of rafters found him singing an old sea shanty to a squirrel. THE ADVENTURES OF KINCAID: Charting the Unknown in

On the third day, he remembered the broken compass. He followed its stubborn, "wrong" direction into a ventilation shaft no one had seen. He emerged at midnight, covered in frost, grinning like a madman.

He sold his house, bought a 40-liter backpack, and walked out the door with a broken compass—a vintage brass piece that points three degrees west of true north. “It’s not broken,” he told his bewildered neighbor. “It just has a different opinion of where we’re going.”

A single, dried-out apricot seed, wrapped in a silk scrap with a poem written in Chagatai. We have traded the unknown for the algorithm