Four years ago a special friend gave me a copy of The Best American Travel Writing, then a brand new series published by Houghton Mifflin. I gobbled up this collection of adventure and travel stories from around the globe in just a couple of days. And ever since, I’ve hungrily looked forward to each year’s new edition.

I’m about half way through the 2004 edition now, and last evening read a wild story by veteran Himalayan mountaineer Mark Jenkins entitled “The Ghost Road” (which originally appeared in Outside).

Jenkins is obsessed with the idea of finding and following the old Stilwell Road, a rough passage built by U.S. and British soldiers during World War II to connect India with China through Burma (now Myanmar) as a way to supply the Chinese against the Japanese. But, as with many similar construction projects in history, the road was obsolete by the time it was completed in 1945, and subsequently abandoned right after the war.

Myanmar is one of the world’s most brutal totalitarian regimes and a decidedly dangerous place when Jenkins visits during the period 1996-99 in his quest to document the old road, the people and the landscape along it. Jenkins is repeatedly stymied by third world bureaucracy, and worse, brutally beaten, threatened with death, arrested dozens of times, and deported nearly as many times.

This is not your average adventure travel story. Your skin will crawl and fear will well up inside you. And, as I have a good friend from Maine currently traveling alone in that part of the world, I took serious notice. And said a prayer for his safety.

But for my friend Bill, as with Jenkins, staying home was not an option. I understand that sentiment full well, having done my share of traveling abroad, although to nowhere near as hostile (yet, anyway) the places that these two adventurers have experienced.

You can’t see the world, and understand it, from your living room couch. Life is short, time flies, health wanes. You’ve got to weigh the risks, be as smart as you can, and leave the rest to Providence. But go you must. To see and feel beyond yourself. Get a view from the edge. Or over it.

Jenkins sums it up like no other:

Adventure is a path. Real adventure—self-determined, self-motivated, often risky—forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth, and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind—and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black and white.