 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
||
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In 1993, as I was just beginning to catch a glipse of my future taking shape, as a potential software pioneer working outside of the secure boundaries of an office cubicle, I had the good luck to find in my hands a beautiful hard bound book called “Women into the Unknown – A Sourcebook on Women Explorers and Travelers,” by Marion Tinling that was remaindered at our local book store for $4.99.
In leafing through this book in the shop, sentences and phrases jumped out at me, like “They got lost...”, “When Yongden sprained his ankle, Alexandra tried to carry him...” , and “The cook became ill, the ponies were useless, and the cow would not give milk.” I did not expect to encounter in this book, true stories of blistered feet, and women wanting to sit and wail as the rain poured down on them in foreign lands. I had expected this book to read like Indiana Jones, or perhaps like the old style of schoolbook lies where Christopher Columbus sets sail in Tuesday’s lesson and arrives back to Isabella in Wednesday’s lesson with his famous accomplishment neatly tucked away in his velveteen pocket. Somehow I had internalized a vision of exploration that involved the grand gestures of setting out, the attainment of a peak, and some general notion that while the journey was perhaps filled with danger, the explorer experienced these not as mortal peril but as marvels to be recounted later to anyone who would listen after the trip home. The lady mountaineer, climbs deftly to the top of the mountain, shades her eyes from the sun for a good view, and scrambles back down the hill for tea and biscuits. Livingston and Stanley shake hands. No, this book is all about the real deal. The very first story recalls the adventures of Harriet Chalmers Adams who travelled in South America around 1910. Harriet was the first president of the Society of Woman Geographers, and wrote for National Geographic, Harper’s, and the Ladies Home Journal. I did not expect to identify so strongly with Harriet, but I came to regard her with great fondness. For one thing, she started out her trip riding side saddle, though she quickly decided to ride astride instead. In her khaki short skirt, high boots and sombrero she was then probably an even more spectacular sight, until the mule carrying her belongings was swept down a steep trail. When Harriet herself fell in a brook, her spiffy traveling clothes were all lost or ruined. So, Harriet travelled South America wearing a Doctor’s bathrobe, a mine superintendant’s underwear and an engineer’s slippers, without so much as the comfort of her Pond’s cold cream and hair pins. One freezing cold night, high in the Andes, llamas saved her life. The image of this small woman, patiently creeping into a herd of sleeping llamas to nestle among their woolly fur for the night, became the unlikely inspiration for my software company’s name. After all, what is softer than Alpaca? And surely if the llamas had saved Harriet, they might provide comfort on a cold scary night for me too. I realized in reading Harriet’s tale, that to start my adventure was to invite hindrances, hardship and perhaps even ridicule. I could easily imagine that at some moment Harriet might have felt a little foolish in borrowed undies in the Andes. If she did, she certainly didn’t let it stop her. Harriet wrote in the New York Times in 1912: “ I’ve wondered why men have so absolutely monopolized the field of exploration. Why did women never go to the Arctic, try for one pole or the other, or invade Africa,Thibet, or unknown wildernesses? I’ve never found my sex a hinderment; never faced a difficulty which a woman, as well as a man could not surmount; never felt a fear of danger; never lacked courage to protect myself.” Indeed, as I sat in the darkened hall in San Jose in May of 1993, where the Newton MessagePad was being shown by Apple to the developer community for the first time, I was surrounded by about 1000 youthful men. There might have been five women in the audience. I felt immediately that if I could not find something within myself that was unique to offer to this brand-new industry, I might have to later paraphrase Harriet’s comments to apply scoldingly to myself. “I’ve wondered why men have so absolutely monopolized the field of computers? Why did women not participate in the building of the handheld computer industry? Why did women not insist not only on being computer literate but computer savvy? Why did we not unleash our imaginations to make software that goes beyond a virtual shooting arcade?” I just couldn’t imagine myself looking Harriet, Grace, Blanche or any of my other female relatives in the eye if I didn’t give it my best shot. Although Harriet’s story is nearly 100 years old, it mirrors the nature of our modern adventures too. What I learned from Women into the Unknown is that to succeed as a pioneer in any era of exploration, you have to expect that the mule might fall down the ravine. When the Newton was cancelled, our mule fell down a ravine, and our software business has had to wear bunny slippers for a while now. So far, we have nevertheless, managed to keep on track. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
