Adventure

GOLD WITHIN

Adventure! When Tim Jacob ’03 alerted us that he was participating in the expedition in search of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship, Endurance, we enthusiastically took him up on his offer to share his story with DePauw Magazine readers. His tale of adventure inspired us to ask other DePauw alumni to tell us about their exploits and explorations too. Their stories follow.

Searching for Shackleton

Alum endures violent seas, frigid cold to witness history

By Timothy Jacob ’03

On May 5, 2022, the place to be aboard the South African icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II was the closet-sized shipping container on the ship’s aft deck. Outside of the container, early winter gusts of

Antarctic air sent wisps of snow swirling in and among heavy machinery and then off into the great white emptiness of the frozen-over Weddell Sea. I watched orange fiber-optic tether pay out slowly from a nearby winch, rising up and through a pulley before plunging down into the sea below. The other end of the tether led straight to the shipping container. When its door opened, I caught the eye of one of the marine robotics specialists, who beckoned me closer with a look of frenzied excitement. Inside, all eyes were glued to a bank of glowing computer monitors projecting live images from the seabed 10,000 feet below. Live images of the most famous undiscovered shipwreck in the world – undiscovered no more.

My journey to the aft deck of an expedition ship in one of the harshest and most remote corners of the planet began in Greencastle, Indiana, when my

English professors preached the joy of writing about what you know. I didn’t know much of anything at the time, so after graduation from DePauw in 2003, I moved to the wilds of New York City and began collecting experiences. I spent my days editing articles for a travel magazine, and my favorite weekday diversions were the Monday night public lectures at The

Explorers Club on East 70th Street.

As I sat in the Jacobian headquarters, surrounded by leather-bound journals, narwhal tusks, globes, ships’ bells and oil portraits of larger-than-life explorers, I felt a connection to a bygone age of pure wonder and larger-than-life adventures. And inevitably, as soon as the lectures began, I was reminded that exploration is not a romantic relic, but rather a state of relentless curiosity. Becoming an explorer didn’t feel like an actual career path, but I finally knew what I wanted to know well enough to write about it.

My next adventure was a move to South Bend, Indiana, where I got my teaching license and saw firsthand how the life-changing benefits of travel and global exposure are not accessible to everyone. Many of my sixth-grade students were amazed to see a Google Earth photo of their neighborhood, take a field trip to Chicago or consider what life is like in another country. I wanted to share the world with them, inspire them to feel the same sense of wonder and possibility that I felt. We joined a Reach the World virtual exchange with a college student who shared her study-abroad experiences in Italy with my students through weekly written articles and Skype calls. I could see the boundaries of my students’ mental maps expanding by the week.

Fast-forward to February 2022, where after several years of classroom teaching and many more years working for Reach the World as an editor, I found myself aboard the S.A. Agulhas II in Cape Town harbor, watching the sun set over Table Mountain during my last night in port for almost two months. I joined the Endurance22 Expedition as Reach the World’s onboard educator/explorer, tasked with leading a virtual exchange program that allowed K-12 students around the world to join the search for Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary lost ship, Endurance, in real time. That night, I hosted a livestream event for 30,000 students in 26 countries from the topmost observation deck of the ship, during

which I talked about ice-breaking ships, the geography of Cape Town, the difference between sea ice and icebergs and how it felt to be on the cusp of a great adventure. I referred to myself as an explorer for the first time, and invited everyone on the call to think of themselves as explorers, too.

The story of Shackleton’s third Antarctic expedition, the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, was perhaps the best story I could have hoped to share with young people, especially in parallel with a modern international expedition to find the ship Shackleton was forced to leave behind. He hoped to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent by land via the South Pole, but Endurance became “nipped” in the Weddell Sea’s swirling gyre of sea ice and swept far away from the expedition’s intended landing place. Nine months later, Endurance’s captain, Frank Worsley, used a sextant to calculate the approximate coordinates where Endurance succumbed to the relentless sea ice, slipping below the surface and beginning its 10,000foot descent to the cold, dark depths of the seabed below. Shackleton, Worsley and the rest of the expedition team lived on the sea ice until it began to break up, and then used Endurance’s lifeboats to complete a series of stunning open-ocean journeys that ultimately led to their rescue by Norwegian whalers on South Georgia Island. Remarkably, every person under Shackleton’s direct command survived – some minus a few toes. I’m leaving out a slew of unbelievable, harrowing moments that happened along the way, and I highly recommend reading a fuller account of the expedition (Alfred Lansing’s “Endurance” is a great place to begin) so you can decide for yourself at what point you might have tapped out. I’m not sure I would have survived the first winter.

The story of the modern-day expedition is similarly compelling. After a herculean effort to bring helicopter pilots, sea ice scientists, marine robotics experts, marine archeologists, ship’s crew and other experts (plus tons of specialized equipment) to Cape Town from all over the world in the midst of a global pandemic, the Endurance22 Expedition was likely the last and best opportunity to locate Shackleton’s shipwreck for the foreseeable future. Departing Cape Town harbor felt like a now-or-never moment, laden with both great possibility and a stifling historical weight. We were, in essence, attempting to write the final chapter of Shackleton’s story.

After a 3,000-mile, 10-day journey from Cape Town to the edge of the Weddell Sea ice pack, across the “Roaring 40s” and “Furious 50s” – some of the most perilous parallels on the globe – I learned very quickly that 100 years of technological advancement weren’t necessarily enough to ensure our success. There are many good reasons why Shackleton’s Endurance is considered the most challenging shipwreck in the world, most of which have to do with the sea ice. More than 107 years after the Weddell Sea caught and claimed Endurance, the sea ice remains incredibly dynamic and powerful, often crashing into itself and creating double-thick pressure ridges that could rebuff many modern icebreaking ships. I loved to stand on the bow of the S.A. Agulhas II – Titanic-style – as the bowl-shaped hull rose up onto a massive ice floe and, using the weight of the ship to its advantage, parted the frozen landscape to reveal the water below. The

The Endurance crew

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton

ship left car-sized ice chunks bobbing in its wake and Adélie penguins scuttling to keep their distance. We had the advantage of a team of remote sensing specialists who used daily satellite images of sea ice conditions to help the bridge determine the path of least resistance. One particularly advantageous section of light ice that led directly to Worsley’s coordinates was affectionately dubbed “Neptune’s Finger.” Just arriving at the last-known location of Endurance felt like a significant accomplishment. Fewer than five ships have ever been to that particular place on the planet.

As soon as we entered the search area, the race began to survey as much of the seabed below as possible. The sub-sea team switched to around-the-clock operations, launching, monitoring, retrieving, charging/repairing and re-launching the marine robotics on repeat as the ship tried to anticipate and outmaneuver the very conditions that bested Endurance 107 years prior. The journey south had been a physical rollercoaster, and the day-to-day search for Endurance was an emotional one. Would we have enough time? Would all of the sensitive technology work in such extreme conditions? Were we looking in the right spot? As a veteran expedition member told me, when you find a shipwreck, you either find it right away, or you find it at the last possible moment. We didn’t find it right away.

Thankfully, there was no shortage of diversionary work to do both on and off the ship during my three weeks in the Weddell Sea. I joined the sea ice scientists on the ice floes around the ship every chance I got, traveling in a basket carried by the ship’s crane from the deck to the sea ice below. I enjoyed watching the scientists collect ice core samples, analyze ice crystal structure and measure the average thickness of miles-wide ice floes using sleds equipped with electro-magnetic sensors.

I spent a wonderful afternoon pulling one such sled more than a mile away from the S.A. Agulhas II with the expedition’s chief scientist, learning all about his research along the way. We walked far enough to reduce the 440-foot vessel to a spot of red on the blindingly white horizon. I didn’t even have to squint my eyes to imagine how Shackleton might have felt as his ship – his lifeline – disappeared beneath the ice. The silence was intoxicating.

I made a mental note of everything I felt and saw and hurried back to the ship so I could tell students all about it during that evening’s livestream event. Oftentimes, before I could fully process a remarkable experience myself (minke whales surfacing alongside the ship; a helicopter flight around an iceberg; a midday parhelion, with a perfect circle of light around the sun), I was on Zoom, telling the story to young students and seeing it more clearly through their eyes and questions. Together, we explored every corner of the S.A. Agulhas

Photo: Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National Geographic

II, met the crew and learned their stories, crossed paths with emperor penguins and crabeater seals and, ultimately, experienced every twist in this journey to the Weddell Sea together. I’m 99.9% sure that I made the first-ever Zoom call from atop the Weddell Sea ice, which should absolutely not go down in the annals of exploration as a life-changing achievement, but the thrill I felt being the first to do anything in this day and age gave me a taste of what kept Shackleton coming back to the Antarctic. We were all living Shackleton’s story while writing one of our own. As the days ticked by, I could feel the students leaning in from thousands of miles away, itching for the perfect ending to both stories.

The perfect ending came – as predicted – at the last possible moment. A hundred years to the day after Shackleton was buried on South Georgia Island, I was standing on a ship floating directly above his beloved Endurance, watching live as a marine robot flew slowly around the deck, reclaiming in 4K detail all the wreck’s secrets for the world to see. I felt pure joy and relief and a sense of history being made, all at the same time. I couldn’t wait to share this incredible news and these images with students. When we finally met on Zoom on the day the media embargo was lifted, the students’ questions for world-renowned marine archeologist Mensun Bound and marine robotics specialist Chad Bonin did not disappoint.

“Did you take anything from the wreck?” No, the treasure is the images, videos and survey data we have collected.

“Did you find any new marine species?” I’m not sure, but maybe… there are some funky creatures living on this ship! We’ll have to ask a marine biologist.

“How does it feel to be a part of history?” You tell me! We are living this moment together.

From the bottom of the world, I could feel the world reacting to the news of the discovery. I felt extraordinarily proud of the inclusive, engaged learning community my colleagues at Reach the World and I had built. All students had the chance to see themselves reflected in the diverse cast of expedition characters. It was one of those rare opportunities as an educator to see the impact of your work.

Before we left the Weddell Sea, the ship’s crew extended a walkway out the side of the ship into a stable ice floe so all 100+ people aboard the S.A. Agulhas II could celebrate with a slippery game of soccer, a floating dinner and one final promenade with the penguins. We then broke through nearly 50 nautical miles of sea ice to reach the open ocean, racing the cold breath of a rapidly approaching winter beneath the Antarctic Circle. I will never forget leaving the Weddell Sea ice behind, gathering with the entire expedition team on the helipad for a South African braai (barbeque), and watching the sun set in the South Atlantic while surrounded by dozens of humpback and fin whales. We stopped at the former Norwegian whaling port of Grytviken on South Georgia Island to read one of Shackleton’s favorite poems at his gravesite and reunite him in spirit with a color photo of his Endurance.

While the ink was drying on the final chapter in Shackleton’s story, I joined the Endurance22 Expedition team on the uppermost deck of the ship as we left the mist-covered peaks and glaciers of South Georgia in our wake and began the 3,000mile ocean journey back to Cape Town. Through the power of virtual exchange, these dream-like places were now more real than ever to a new generation of explorers, historians, scientists and conservationists. Forging my own personal connections with Shackleton and the Weddell Sea allowed me to write and speak about what I knew and, with luck, those words will inspire young people everywhere to pursue journeys of their own.

Jacob is the director of the traveler program at Reach the World, a New York City-based global education nonprofit that makes the benefits of travel accessible to K-12 classrooms. Reach the World’s mission is to inspire the next generation of curious, confident and compassionate global citizens through the power of virtual exchange. Since 1998, Reach the World has connected thousands of college-age travelers (including DePauw students on study-abroad adventures!) with K-12 classrooms, helping young students form positive, personal connections with the world. To learn more, visit about. reachtheworld.org.

Reach the World’s full Endurance22 virtual exchange program is supported by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and is available on demand (and at no cost) to K-12 educators around the world. Visit explore.reachtheworld.org to learn more.

Photo: Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National Geographic

Photo: Vicente Gonzalez

Alum dives into uncharted waters of Cuba for tourism business

By Mary Dieter

Early in her senior year at DePauw, Amy Houghton Warren ’98 was dismayed that “I didn’t know what to do with my life.”

She turned to her father, Bill Houghton, who “was very adventurous. He would introduce me to women who were not the norm,” she said. “… He was always trying to teach me to do things, to follow my passion. … His proposal was to take something that you’re good at and try to match it with something that you like.”

She had majored in Spanish, so she could speak the language, and she liked to scuba dive, something she and her father did together since she was 10. She was certified during a DePauw winter-term trip to Cozumel.

“Why not look into diving areas that haven’t been documented, that speak Spanish?” he suggested. Maybe she could write a diving guide. Warren quickly focused on Cuba and, while her dad was leery, “he didn’t want to burst my bubble. So he’s like, all right, if you find a legal way to do it, I will go with you.”

A career was born. During her senior year, she spent hours at the library, researching ways to travel to Cuba, a Communist country that prohibited American travelers and that had been struggling economically since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The U.S. maintained an embargo that prevented American businesses from trading with Cuba.

But Warren “was raised to just take the risk. Go for it,” she said. “What’s the worst that can happen? If you don’t succeed, you’re going to learn something from that.”

A socialist organization based at the University of Iowa planned an educational expedition, and Warren and her father signed on to travel about a month after she graduated from DePauw. “I did have some fear, but to me the fear felt like adventure,” she said. “… We definitely had trepidation that first landing because we didn’t know what to expect. Everything that I had read in my research and the news was very polarizing. It was either super repressive and awful or a great place to vacation for Canadians.”

She and her father went off exploring on their own a few times, and “it became this exciting thing because you finally get to see for yourself,” she said. “… It’s just fascinating to learn this completely different way of life and philosophical upbringing 90 miles away from us, and we tried to make sense of it from an American lens. After a couple of days, we weren’t so scared.”

Photo: Vicente Gonzalez Photo: Stan Fuhr

Houghton and her father Bill, who died in 2018.

Photo: Vicente Gonzalez

Warren brought along a letter she wrote in Spanish and English, describing her plans for the diving guide, and gave it to a host from the University of Havana. That letter proved critical, because the woman connected her with María Elena Ibarra Martín, the director of the university’s Center for Marine Research, who did not speak English but was sufficiently impressed to introduce Warren to the island and its marine protected areas.

Over the next five years, Warren traveled to Cuba about 10 times and “built this relationship with her and the marine biologists on her team. And we were able to dive from their marine research boat and basically map the island out.” Back in the states, she got the notion to sell advertising to finance the guide’s publication, so she attended a couple of conferences, including one hosted by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, where she tried to persuade a marketing honcho to buy ad space.

“He didn’t go for that, but we spent probably 45 minutes talking … About three months later, I got a call from him asking, ‘Would you be interested in a marketing job here?’” She worked for the organization for about 12 years, first in California and then remotely from Fort Wayne, where she grew up. Meanwhile, Warren found a publisher interested in launching a series of travel guides, starting with her “Cuba Scuba” in 2003.

Around 2015, when relations between the U.S. and Cuba had thawed somewhat, Warren developed Cuba Ecology, a tour business that since has taken almost 600 divers, in groups of 12 to 30, on excursions of seven to 12 days to Cuba, with the goals of exposing them to fabulous underwater experiences and indelible connections with the Cuban people. Warren reached an agreement with the Center for Marine Research that smoothed the way.

Clients, who book a year in advance, are exclusively divers, though their itineraries include many experiences on land. They are exposed to marine professionals, entrepreneurs, artists, teachers and pastors as they explore daily living, art and small businesses. Warren scrupulously avoids politics, and warns her clients early on to expect changes in their itinerary because of political or local circumstances. Most are flexible about that, she said.

She wants her company to improve the lives of individual Cubans, and thus directs business to them. Those connections pay off for both sides; her Cuban business partners nimbly adjust when circumstances require it and, when COVID-19 hit, Warren’s customers donated money to buy food and have it distributed to “our trusted circle in Havana.” She also is involved in other humanitarian projects.

Her business took a hit from COVID-19. Her primary source of income is a digital marketing job; diving tourism “is really kind of a side business for me now,” she said. However, she visited Cuba in March and secured an agreement that will allow American travelers to engage in underwater ecology trips independently, not only with groups, and she plans to schedule both group and individual tours.

“I don’t think that I’ll ever not be involved in Cuba in some form or fashion. It has just become a part of me,” she said.

Her journey from indecisive senior to adventuresome businesswoman “validates those who don’t know exactly what they want to do with their life,” she said. “I felt lost. And then I realized that is part of the adventure. Being an adventurer is not knowing your next step, but being confident enough to know that, whatever it is, I’ve got what it takes to get there. And the right people will be brought to my path.”

Voyage to the center of Earth gives caver the thrill of discovery

By Mary Dieter

It’s dark and it’s cold, just a few degrees above freezing. And it feels as if a garden hose has been turned on you. You’re alert to your body’s messages, mindful of the deadly consequences if hypothermia sets in.

Oh, and you’re caked in mud and, depending on the expedition, you may not have showered in three weeks. You’re ravenous and exhausted, having expended your food supply and your energy during your 30-mile hike just to reach the vertical cave, where you’re descending hundreds of feet into the earth, sometimes navigating narrow passages, sometimes searching for holds, sometimes rappelling, sometimes toeing your way through rubble. Sometimes people die.

The bottoms of the caves “are terrible places. They’re horrible,” said Philip Rykwalder ’01. “They’re great memories for me.”

This is nirvana for Rykwalder, whose passion for caving was ignited at age 14 when he and a friend summoned the nerve to crawl into a 55-foot horizontal cave in his suburban Nashville, Tennessee, neighborhood, carrying a BB gun, a candle and a flashlight. That led to nearly 30 years of cave exploration, first in the 80 Nashville-area caves, and then on to caves in at least 18 American states and at least 10 other countries: Canada, China, Ecuador, Greece, Guam, Guatemala (eight times), Mexico (at least 40 times), the Philippines, Russia and Ukraine.

“Caving is all about discovery. That’s the goal: Discovery, like going to the moon, something new,” said Rykwalder. “… Caving for me is not a thrill thing like skydiving or whatever. It’s the thrill of the unknown. What’s around the next corner?”

For a while, caving defined Rykwalder’s lifestyle. After graduating from DePauw with a degree in geology and earning a master’s in the same subject at the University of Texas at San Antonio, “I got a job for a hot minute,” he said.

“And I was like, I just want to go caving. And so honestly, I moved into a van and I drove around the country going caving for years.”

He would do $15-an-hour manual labor for half the year, usually sleeping in his van or on a friend’s floor, so he could afford to cave for the other half, often in faraway lands. He escorted photo and video crews for National Geographic, The Discovery Channel, the Weather Channel and the U.S. Army into caves, and worked on the film “No Place on Earth,” a documentary about 39 Jews who survived World War II by living in a Ukraine cave for 544 days.

His goal was to be internationally known as the best American caver. “My strategy was to find the deepest cave in the U.S. and I could hang my hat on that,” he said. “At the same time, I knew it is probably impossible. There are, ballpark, 100,000 caves in the U.S., and what are your chances of finding the single deepest one?”

Turns out his chances were pretty good. Among the many caves that Rykwalder and his caving partner have found is the deepest known limestone cave in America, the 1,863-foot Tears of the Turtle, which they discovered in 2006.

“Tears is terrible,” he said. “It’s well named. It’s terrible. The whole thing is just a crack, an 18-hundred-foot-deep crack.”

They also discovered the third-deepest cave in America, Virgil the Turtle’s Great House, at 1,586 feet, and the 13th deepest, Tickle Me Turtle, at 1,027 feet. All are in Flathead County, Montana.

(Three lava tubes in Hawaii are considerably deeper, but Rykwalder said that “there are snobs among us; we want limestone. That’s the classic.”)

“Literally our life plan was to spend our whole lives looking for the deepest cave in the U.S.,” Rykwalder said. “We found it when I was 27.”

That was a problem. “I was content turning old and not having accomplished that goal,” he said. “I figured it would take me into my old age in caving, just the search. So at 27 I found that, and … my drive dissolved, because I accomplished my life goal a little early. …

“Nothing worked anymore. I didn’t like living in my van. I didn’t like living on, sleeping on floors. I didn’t like not having any money. I didn’t like not going out to eat. I had no luxuries. And, you get older and I (thought) I would like a person.”

Oh, he still loves caving. In fact, he’s thinking of going to Crete in the fall and last March he spent several weeks in Mexico, exploring the Chevé Cave, which, at 5,039 feet, is the world’s 11th deepest. (An Indiana caver died there in 1991.) Last year, Rykwalder helped establish the second of five camps in Chevé on a flat spot that emanates from the vertical shaft. He lived 10 days at the camp.

“I realized I needed a new goal, so I set the goal on business,” he said. He moved in with his parents and started companies that did mobile car detailing; caving tours; roofing; and insurance adjusting. All failed. He landed on real estate wholesaling, in which he bought a house and then sold it on contract for a profit. He began flipping houses. And he bought one rental house, then more.

The Nashville market was pricey, so he moved to Chattanooga, where he has expanded his rental portfolio. When he had problems with contractors, he started a construction company. When he suspected a property management company of fraud, he started his own management company, which now manages almost 1,000 properties – his and others’. He joined the Hamilton County Cave and Cliff Rescue group, with which he has been involved in about eight rescues in two years. And he found his person; she caves too.

When the businesses get to be too much, Rykwalder goes caving; his business partners understand that. “My happiness is way more important than a little bit more money,” he said.

“If I had to give up 95% of my life, there’d be no hesitation: I’d keep caving,” he said. “I would give up my real estate, my businesses or whatever, and I would retain caving. I could build the businesses back up. The cavers and the caving are my people.”

Fascination with exploration spurs alum to visit 7 continents

By Mary Dieter

Samir “Sam” Patel ’95 has plunged into the frigid waters off Antarctica, hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and negotiated the ferocious whitewater rapids of the Zambezi River.

He backpacked across Europe for a

DePauw winter-term experience, dove into shark-infested waters off Mexico, went kayaking in search of bears in Vancouver and honeymooned in Australia. In 2020, he and his wife took off on a threemonth, 22-state road trip while much of the country was shut down because of COVID-19. They visited both sets of parents, ate at drive-through restaurants and disinfected hotel rooms as they went.

“Ever since I was a young kid, I just had a fascination with exploring the world,” said Patel, an angel and real estate investor in San Diego.

That fascination has taken him to all seven continents despite the gradual deterioration of his eyesight. Six years ago, he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare disease that affects the retina, and he is at risk of going blind.

Patel was born in Germany to Indian expatriates who departed their native country as teenagers. After his father became a physician, the family moved to the United States, and “traveling was just a part of life. … My dad always said, you learn more from traveling than you will in a book, which I think is true.”

Patel said travel enables him to learn, satisfy his curiosity, explore and witness the beauty of the world. It also has taught him that “everyone’s the same.”

He did not intentionally set out to visit all seven continents; “it just happened … as the opportunities would come up.” The opportunity to visit his third continent – after his birthplace of Europe and his adopted home of North America – came when he was 11, when he and his family visited India. He has not been back, having had a planned trip thwarted by COVID.

In the meantime, he has visited numerous countries across the globe. On one of several trips to South America, he and a friend traveled to Ushuaia in Argentina’s southern tip, from where they embarked on a trip to Antarctica aboard the Professor Malchanov, a Russian research-turned-tourist boat that was strengthened to navigate sea ice.

It was February 2007 – summer in the southern hemisphere – and those in the know told him the seas were relatively mild. Relatively. Everyone strapped themselves into their bunks at night and sometimes the ship listed at a 45-degree angle. They crossed the Antarctic Circle, going farther south than any other commercial boat had done at that time. They traveled from the boat to the mainland by Zodiac, a rigid inflatable craft, where they saw penguins and sea lions and explored abandoned whaling and research stations as well as an active station where Poles who were studying the ozone layer treated the visitors to homemade hooch. He and six other stouthearted travelers were initiated into the Antarctica Ice Tub Club after they stepped off the Professor’s gang plank into iceberg-cooled waters, Patel wearing only board shorts and sneakers.

He has gone on wildlife safaris in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Zambia, where he went whitewater rafting, for the first time ever, on the Zambezi River below Victoria Falls. He was told the rapids were Class V, and thought that, on a scale of one to 10, five didn’t seem too bad. But he soon learned that the scale is one to five, and Class V, the most intense, is generally recommended only for expert rafters. What’s more, crocodiles frequent the river.

“Sometimes not knowing is better,” Patel said. “And anyways, we did it. It was super fun.”

He also has gone “shark diving” – that is, he entered a cage that was submerged in the waters off Guadalupe Island in Mexico, a premiere spot to see great whites. Most of the sharks that circled the cage – hundreds of them – were interested only in gulping the chum the expedition organizers used to attract them, but he has footage of an especially large female called Lucy crashing into the cage.

Patel said he will continue traveling, though he has no specific plans at the moment. He acknowledged that his diagnosis has dampened some of his enthusiasm, since much of the joy of traveling is experienced by sight.

Doctors cannot say if his eyesight will freeze at some point or if the disease will progress until he cannot see at all. For now, he has lost his peripheral vision; he also experiences cloudy flashes and cannot see in the dark. “Some days you could have clearer vision,” he said. “Some days you wake up and you’re like, ah, my eyes aren’t going to work today.”

People often point to his many adventures and tell him “at least you got to do that.” But that rings hollow, he said, and he has abandoned the wanderlust refrain that guided his life for so long: “What’s the next one?” That question, he said, “is kind of gone.”

Yo Ho! Yo Ho! A sailor’s life for Stotesbery

By Mary Dieter

Dan Stotesbery ’02 was sailing his new boat a couple hundred miles off the Canary Islands, on the first leg of a 2,500-mile, trans-Atlantic crossing to Grenada, when it hit him: “You’re really alone. You’re really on your own to fix things and to make it, and there’s nobody coming to help you.”

He and his hired crew of four saw only one boat and spotted three others on radar during their 17-day trip. They previously sailed across the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey, where he had picked up the boat he had just bought, to Majorca, Spain, but “I didn’t have that feeling because you’d always have land around or there’s always a bailout option somewhere. But there’s no bailout option in the Atlantic. It was very emotional and psychologically demanding.”

Stotesbery had faith in the boat, a 50-ton, 64-by-17-foot vessel that he had spruced up in Spain, and also in his ability to use modern tools, such as digital weather forecasts and two satellite tracking systems, to make the trip as safe as possible. He texted his wife Kacey frequently. But he already had encountered five days of “big, big seas and big winds” between Gibraltar and the Canaries.

Said Stotesbery: “When you come up on deck, and you see the wind driving the water off the top of the waves, and they’re towering on top of you, and then you go up one side and you’re looking down into this huge crevasse, it’s absolutely terrifying.”

His biggest worry was that Kacey and their two sons, now 9 and 7, would always wonder what happened if he failed to arrive safely. That made him question: “Did we make the right decision to do this?”

Let’s rewind. Earlier in life, Stotesbery already had had adventures of a different sort. He traded commodities at the Chicago Board of Trade, before digital trading displaced the pit’s pandemonium. After the board shut down for the day in the early afternoon, he taught sailing on Lake Michigan. Then, when his father asked him to handle national sales for the family business, Ladera Vineyards in St. Helena, California, Stotesbery traveled the country 300 days a year.

After Kacey became pregnant, Stotesbery stepped away from the sales job, concerned that so much travel would mean “I’ll never know my kids.” In 2016 his family of four moved to Colorado, where he took over as chief executive officer of another family business that made plastic containers. And then COVID-19 hit, and everybody was frantically searching for hand sanitizer, which, of course, comes in plastic bottles.

“We suddenly got approached by a big business to buy us out because they needed more machine time and more capacity,” Stotesbery said. “We thought it was probably a good idea to sell, a good deal, and so I came to a transition point in my life, essentially firing myself.”

With the pandemic-induced lockdown, Stotesbery had time to contemplate his next step. “I thought back about everything, just about my whole life and where I was the happiest, and I was always the happiest on the water,” he said.

He and Kacey mulled the idea of moving onto a boat and sailing indefinitely. They hired consultants to help them “decide if it’s the right thing for you, help you go through the transition.” The decision made, they sold their house and all their belongings. And they bought the “Polar Bear,” which they renamed “Hindsight.”

Kacey and the boys climbed aboard early last year, shortly after Stotesbery arrived in Grenada, and the family – along with a rotating volunteer crew of friends and relatives – headed north to Portland, Maine, then south again, when Stotesbery crossed 10,000 nautical miles in a year. Since then, “it’s been a lot of sailing and a lot of moving around,” in ports on the U.S. east coast, the Bahamas and Caribbean Islands, where they recently spent the winter months. Then they headed north again, required by insurance to be north of Cape Hatteras before hurricane season started.

Though the family has had amazing experiences, “it’s a lot more work than people think it is,” Stotesbery said. “The boat needs constant maintenance and you always have to be trying to keep ahead of that. My wife put it best: Imagine taking your house and putting it through an earthquake every week and seeing what breaks.”

Though he and Kacey have discussed circumnavigating the globe, that dream poses risks, such as pirates, that they’re not willing to take. They also have postponed a planned but expensive trip to the Mediterranean, as they consider whether the nomad life is right for their children, whom they’ve been homeschooling.

They’ve become worried that the boys aren’t exposed to enough other children, so they’re considering docking near other families throughout the summer “so that they can have a little more socialization.” They’re also considering ending the adventure because, as much as he and Kacey love it, “it’s becoming more clear that (the boys’) needs are a little different from our wants.”

Stotesbery has been asked if he is crazy. “Some people would say that,” he said. “I mean, it’s definitely a different lifestyle. … You’re constantly changing. And a lot of people are change-averse. They like to have their routine and there’s no routine on a boat and moving around. But I like change, and my wife likes change. And I think it’s good to teach the kids to be able to adapt and change and see new stuff all the time.”

Alum discovers adventure during Camino pilgrimages

By Mary Dieter

J. David Cook ’66, a retired “county-seat lawyer” and avid runner, had “really never been an athlete” and was decidedly not adventurous.

But his life changed when he accepted a friend’s 2012 invitation to walk part of the French Way, one of the routes of the famed Camino de Santiago, a network of footpaths in France, Spain and Portugal that culminate at the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain.

Two years earlier, the friend had attempted the 500-mile journey that starts near St. Jean-Pied-du-Port in France, but foot problems caused him to miss the penultimate 100-mile stretch between Leon and Sarria, Spain. He asked Cook to walk that stretch and continue through the final leg into Santiago.

Cook readily agreed. He felt in good physical shape, having been a runner since 1978, when he and his Indianapolis church friends formed the Meridian Street Striders to compete in the second 13.1-mile OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini-Marathon. He subsequently competed 16 more times, through 1994; a month later, moments after he completed a 6.2-mile fitness run, he collapsed from sudden cardiac death.

Bystanders revived him; he spent 12 days in the hospital and underwent surgery to remove an arterial blockage. But he came back strong and, after laying off a year – doctor’s orders – he since has run the last 27 minis, including the virtual events in 2020 and 2021 and the back-to-normal event in May. Still, “there’s a big difference between going out and running for an hour or an hour and a half and walking for eight hours,” Cook said. He got shin splits – a first for him – and walked more slowly than his friend, so they often split up, enabling Cook to meet other pilgrims or spend time by himself.

For two weeks, he walked six or eight hours a day, covering about 15 miles, to complete the last 200 miles of the French Way. “I thought there might be time for some introspection and some deep thoughts, but I was just worried about where I was walking,” he said. “… You just keep going and going. When you’re on the camino, you have one thing to do, and that is to walk to the place that you’re going to sleep that night.”

Like many pilgrims, he slept at albergues, or hostels, where he also could eat, shower and wash his clothes. By finishing the last leg, he received a certificate that said he had completed the camino, despite not traversing the entire 500 miles.

Several years later, in 2016, another friend who had attempted the camino a decade earlier asked Cook to join her and her granddaughter on another pilgrimage. She likewise wanted to cover just part of the route, so they started in Roncevalles, Spain, just over the Pyrenees Mountains from the traditional starting point in France. He again walked for two weeks, covering the first 200 miles of the French Way.

A lot had changed in the 10 years since the friend attempted the camino, so it “was really a nice opportunity for me to experience … helping someone along the way,” he said.

The journeys have been so meaningful that Cook said he’d return to the camino

again, possibly to complete the 100mile gap midway on the route that he did not cover on either previous foray or to repeat his 2017 service in Nájera, Spain, as a “hospitalerio,” or host, who stamps pilgrims’ camino passports to prove they’ve passed designated checkpoints. He is active in the organization American Pilgrims on the Camino, whose conference he attended in March, and started a chapter in Indiana, Hoosiers on the Camino.

“Now I have friends all over the United States, all over, and in a fashion, all over the world,” he said. The camino changes “just about everybody,” including him.

“I think I learned something about myself after I got over there,” he said. “… I’d say I’m more open to having adventures now.”

Zimbabwean student lives dream, heads to Greencastle

By Mary Dieter

It wasn’t easy for 14-year-old Nokutenda “Noku” Mukukula to decide to travel almost halfway around the world to attend high school near San Francisco.

But “coming here was always my dream growing up,” said the Zimbabwe native, and “the drive and the excitement of wanting to be here” firmed her resolve. Now, at 18, she is embarking on still another adventure, moving in August to Greencastle, Indiana, some 8,400 miles from home, where – sight unseen – she will become a member of DePauw University’s Class of 2026. “It definitely was super hard on me, mentally and everything, just being away from home,” she said. “I was definitely super homesick. It was a lot to process. But I’m glad I did it because it allowed me to grow more as a person. I became more independent; I could make my own decisions. I feel like it brought a little bit of toughness, because I was always a mom-and-daddy’s little girl.” Her high school counselor suggested several colleges that might appeal to Mukukula, and she chose DePauw for its size. “I’m one of those people who is super overwhelmed by big crowds,” she said. “So I wanted a school that I could potentially grow in, but still find myself in the school and not be really overwhelmed.” She also saw “a lot of opportunities” at DePauw. One may be to play basketball, though Mukukula is unsure if she wants to make the “huge commitment” needed to play college ball. She played center for San Domenico School and was captain her senior year, when her team won the Division 5 California state championship and she was named to the D5 all-league first team and all-state second team.

Mike Fulton, director of basketball operations and the girls’ coach at San Domenico, said Mukukula has become a “mature, confident woman” with “the work ethic of a champion. … A great word to describe her now is ‘fearless.’”

Mukukula, who is considering a major in psychology, allowed that her decisions to attend high school and college so far from home may mean she is adventurous. “I like trying new things,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t work out. But I think it’s just fun to be open to new ideas and things.”

So far, things have worked out. “I definitely built resilience by coming here when I was 14,” she said. “It was something that changed my life completely, because now I am the best version that I could possibly wish for.”

‘Accidental nomad’ responds to whisper and whim

By Mary Dieter

She was a high-powered executive, having built national volunteer-management infrastructures for leading charitable organizations.

But there was that whisper.

“I always knew that there was more, and something just kept pulling at me about the idea of taking a leap and doing something bold and different,” said Nadia Mitchem ’98.

She lept into a “slomad” lifestyle – a slow-moving, nomadic existence that has taken her on nine solo U.S. road trips covering 5,000 miles and, so far, on long visits to 12 countries in Europe, Northern Africa and the

Middle East. She is careful to say she is not on vacation, packing in every conceivable experience; she is living a lifestyle with the attitude that she will return to each destination someday.

“The world has been opened up in some of the most enchanting ways,” she said. She spent an afternoon with a master violin maker, who demonstrated how he coaxed melodies from a block of wood. She departed with a sore back and reddened fingers – but also an appreciation for women’s contributions and “the painstaking labor that is put into the artistry” – after

Photo: AG Photography

Photo: Devin Kessler

learning to weave a rug from a woman in mountainous Turkey.

She was struck by the dignity Rembrandt depicted in “Two African Men,” a 1661 painting, and the irony that it hangs in The Mauritshuis, a museum that used to be the living quarters of a Dutch sugar farmer who enslaved people.

She marveled at her freedom while traveling the Harriet Tubman Byway in Maryland, and contemplated how women in the past, especially Black women, “did not have the agency to decide when and where and for how long” they could move. She toured Southern plantation homes to “claim my place in American history.”

Mitchem said she is “an accidental nomad in the sense that this wasn’t my intent. Initially, I thought I’d travel and then return and go back into a traditional environment.” Instead, “I had to give myself permission to color outside the lines because this was a bit unconventional.”

That took time. It was 2014 when the whisper was “loudest in my ear, but I didn’t take any concrete steps.” She was working for the American Red Cross, where she created the infrastructure to support 272,000 volunteers across more than 100 local chapters. She was deployed for six months to advise the international affiliate in Geneva, Switzerland, where “the pace was so palpably different” from the hectic American workplace and “the wheels started turning.”

Nadia’s travels: far lower left: Qasar Al Wantan Palace, Abu Dhabi; far lower right: Strahov Monastery, Prague; left: Weaving in Gokpinar, Turkey; below: Budapest Skyline; bottom left: Charles Bridge, Prague; bottom right: Louvre Abu Dhabi; next page left: Popic Winery, Lumbarda, Croatia; next page right: Prague Metronome.

Photo: Bulent Dogan Photo: Monica Shaw

Photo: Sandy Berman

She had just determined that she should find something new when St. Jude Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, recruited her to create its volunteer infrastructure. “That job was fine, but I still didn’t quell that whisper,” she said. “In fact, it probably got louder.”

That, and “the universe was just conspiring in my favor,” positioning ideas and people in front of her and inspiring her to set March 29, 2020, as the date she would resign. Then COVID happened. She postponed but didn’t cancel her plans and in August 2020 she stored her belongings, identified her hometown of St. Louis as a base and headed out across the U.S. for six months.

“It probably took me three months to unwind from that sense of ‘do, do, do’ and to recognize that I had complete control over my day,” Mitchem said. “I was really exploring. I was really able to subject myself to whim and give in to whim. And that was amazing and refreshing and delightful and delicious.”

The whisper, though, still nagged. “I

Photo: Robert Wesley

realized the power in asking myself ‘Why not?’” she said. “I couldn’t come up with any good reason.” And so, in June 2021, she lept still farther, this time to a monthlong program in Croatia curated for professionals who need a timeout. Though she was a veteran international traveler before this experience, “I wanted a degree of structure because of the uncertainty in the world at the time.” After that, “I’ve been solo and nomadic all around the world.”

Mitchem heeds U.S. State Department travel warnings and listens to other travelers – especially Black women also traveling alone – as she chooses each destination. Sometimes she merely mulls a map. When she spoke with DePauw Magazine, she was newly arrived in Marrakech, Morocco, where she planned to stay five weeks, then head to Milan, Italy. “I don’t know what I’m doing after that,” she said.

She has formed many friendships, often with other solo travelers whom she seeks out on Facebook and Meetup as she moves from place to place, and thus she never feels lonely. “I enjoy my own company, and I seek community when I feel like I want community,” she said.

She is recording her experiences – and encouragement to would-be solo nomads, especially Gen Xers (born 1965-80) and Xennials (a microgeneration born in the late 1970s and early 1980s) – on a website, globalchroniclesofnadia.com, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.

She has no plans to end her travels. “I don’t know that I will go back to a desk because I’ve realized you don’t have to,” she said. She has done some consulting but “90% of my time is still mine” and “I would engage only in things that bring me joy. I protect my peace in ways that I had never considered protecting my peace before. I embrace the fact that ‘no’ is a complete sentence.

“I want to be able to dream.”

She was audacious and energetic, nervy enough to launch an organic children’s clothing line at age 23, despite having zero business experience, and driven enough to do it simultaneously with starting law school.

Then Kyle Smitley ’07, inspired by service trips to Haiti in high school and El

Salvador and Belize in college, earmarked half her profits for charitable causes, and the world went crazy.

Mom bloggers raved, and celebrity mothers outfitted their children in Barley & Birch attire. Inc. magazine listed her among its 30 “coolest entrepreneurs under 30.” Forbes called her a top 10 entrepreneur to watch. Huffington Post named her its “Greatest Person of the

Day.” She lunched with President Obama and had dinner with Steve Jobs.

It wasn’t enough.

“I wanted to feel so enthusiastic to be alive every single morning,” she said. “And it wasn’t there in the strictly for-profit. …

At the time, I was like, it doesn’t feel good.

I don’t feel excited.”

Smitley said that work with a story coach – “almost more of a therapist” – caused her to realize that “my entire life is about the next adventure. … I’m not summiting Everest, right? It means, to me, more like every single day being a very exciting adventure.”

She sold the company, mindful that

“I had some dues to pay. I wanted to do my part to give back to a world that I felt had given a lot to me.” Then living in San Francisco, Smitley determined that she should move to Detroit – just 90 minutes from her hometown of Defiance, Ohio – and volunteer at a public school. Unable to identify one where she might fit in and buoyed by her public persona, she decided she’d open a charter school.

She got a rude awakening. A comeuppance, really. “Over the next three months, I proceeded to get nine rejection letters,” Smitley said. “… Give Michigan a little bit of credit because, at the time, I (said) I’ll open a school and Michigan was like, ‘you’re not qualified to teach a bunch of our kids. Good try.’”

She buckled down, researched, talked to people who had started schools, recruited veteran educators, learned “how to play the game a little bit better” and finally secured approval from the state to open nonprofit Detroit Achievement Academy, a K-8 charter school, in 2013. Detroit Prep, which serves K-6 pupils and where the older of Smitley’s two daughters attends, followed, opening in a 100-year-old renovated school building where whimsy met historic preservation sufficiently to merit a story in Architectural Digest.

The schools focus on helping students decide “what kind of a person do you want to be? And what kind of person are you? We have habits of character and they drive every single thing we do,” she said. Teaching soft skills such as self-awareness, self-reflection, compassion, cooperation and grit “can lead to more productive and successful people.”

Risk-taking entrepreneur seeks everyday adventure

By Mary Dieter

She handles external matters – budgets, partnerships, fundraising and public relations – and leaves the education to the educators. And she has found contentment.

“A couple of years ago, I would have said I’m really good at starting something but I don’t have the tenacity and attention span to really stay in the details and focus,” she said. “Now I’ve been doing the same job for nine years. So maybe I’m better at it. But I think it’s because I have a really good team that does a lot of that here. So I’m essentially still in the startup and entrepreneur mode. And I have a lot of people who clean up my mess behind me, who button things up.”

Not that contentment equates to slowing down. With time on her hands during the pandemic, when the school buildings were vacated, Smitley – in what she called “a pandemic, nervous-energy project” – designed a cookware line, started a company called Louis (pronounced LOU ee) and has begun to sell the cookware nationwide in popup stores.

“Capitalism is only exciting to me if I can be proving that it can be done in a more unique way,” she said. “It takes a deep well of confidence and a sense of adventure.”

And earlier this year, she applied to become a volunteer police officer in Detroit.

“I want to see if I’m strong enough,” she said. “I want to see what it’s like. I want to see what I can do. I want to see if I have any value to add,” she said. “I haven’t ever really fallen on my face in a big way, and I think that I’m a better person for trying new things and pushing myself.”