Chilling commentary on America's get-up-and-go

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In the end, they ate their boots. They were, after all, fashioned from animal hide, and, once boiled, could be ingested, if not digested. The men aboard the USS Jeannette, bound for the North Pole in 1879, did what they had to do to stay alive, for as long as they could.

Their inspiring and horrific story is told in “In the Kingdom of Ice: the Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette,” by Hampton Sides. He is the writer who gave us “Ghost Soldiers,” an account of the rescue of survivors of the Bataan death march in World War II. His recent tale is devoted to the national push in the late 1800s to discover what mysteries lay north of the 75th parallel.

The book resonates these days because it exemplifies a spirit of adventure that seems dormant in, if not absent from, contemporary American life. Our visionary questing seems to have diminished after we landed on the moon, and that was 45 years ago. Does anyone’s child want to grow up to be an explorer?

What we need is a united, national effort to achieve something great, greater than any one individual, and something new, with a sense of we’re-all-in-this-together. As a country, we used that passion to push west across the frontier, and to push north with a group of intrepid explorers who left home and hearth to discover new lands. And it wasn’t just about claiming land for America; it was about discovery of new cultures in the native populations living in the far North, and plant life and animals that roamed the ice packs and swam beneath the glacial landscape.

I’m not doubting American know-how. For example, despite the hysteria, our best and brightest scientists and physicians will contain and ultimately squelch the Ebola outbreak that’s now in the news. We have brilliant people working in every conceivable endeavor, but we seem to lack a shared desire to push farther into space and deeper into the oceans. Those are the only geographic frontiers that still hold secrets.

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