The Mountain Without a Map

A new series: American history told as fables, each with a takeaway you can carry. Poor Richard preached thrift and industry to a young republic. Poor Rusty deals in the harder wisdom of a country that has already climbed a long way — how to keep going without lying to yourself about the ground ahead.

This is not a warning against ambition. It is a warning about the two ways ambition gets you killed. Two men set out across the American frontier. One priced the danger as honestly as any man alive and went anyway; he died going, and the country still runs on what he found. The other was warned to his face, chose the shortcut anyway, and led his family into the snow. The difference between them is the whole lesson.

PLATE I — THE FORK

The difference between enterprise and self-deception is invisible from here.

There is a particular kind of confidence that has nothing to do with how good your instruments are. In certain terrain, no one can see far — not the greenhorn and not the expert, not the man with the bad map and not the man who draws the best maps alive. The fog is a property of the ground, not a failure of the eyes.

But there are two ways to be wrong about a mountain, and they are not the same, and a country that wants to keep climbing had better learn to tell them apart. There is the honest fog — I could not see the danger — and there is the chosen fog — I did not want to see it. One is the price of going anywhere new. The other is a sin, and it is the oldest and cheapest one there is.

Two men from the same stretch of frontier show you the difference. One of them Poor Rusty admires, reservations and all. The other is a cautionary tale, and not the flattering kind.