When the limits push back

Risk is often relative to the person taking it. Ask any mountain climber, Wall Street investor or newly arrived immigrant. But what about a self-styled friend of grizzly bears?

"There is no other place in the world that is more dangerous, more exciting, than the grizzly maze," Timothy Treadwell said of the remote area of the Alaska Peninsula where he spent summers living among the bears. "Come here and camp here. Come here and try to do what I do. You will die. You will die here. You will freaking die here. They will get you. I found a way. I found a way to survive with them."

Soon after Mr. Treadwell's comments were captured on videotape in 2003, he was eaten alive by a bear. There are risks, it seems, and then there are very, very bad ideas.

Mr. Treadwell was not the first or last risk taker to stir controversy and fascination for pushing the limits, sometimes fatally, and to prompt the inevitable question, "What were they thinking?"

The public appetite for the psychological intricacies of risk is being served by the release of two new movies about people who sought out extreme environments, then died in them.

"Into the Wild," based on a best-selling book by Jon Krakauer and directed by Sean Penn, tells the story of Christopher McCandless, a young man who hiked alone into the Alaska interior in spring 1992 while on a mission to shed the world.

And "Deep Water," a documentary, explores the unraveling of a British engineer-turned-adventurer, Donald Crowhurst, who set out alone to circumnavigate the world, without stopping, as part of a sailing race in 1968 for which he was wholly unprepared.

Some might see all three men the way a helicopter pilot who helped collect Mr. Treadwell's remains saw him.

"He got what he deserved," Sam Egli said in the documentary about Mr. Treadwell, "Grizzly Man."

Perhaps that may be a bit callous.

C. Robert Cloninger, a professor of psychiatry and genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, said ambitious adventures often reflected a desire for inner exploration, for renewal.

"The need for heroic transformation is very deep in the human psyche," said Mr. Cloninger, author of "Feeling Good: The Science of Well-Being." "They're in a struggle with themselves and their life that they're rejecting," he said. "When they go into the wilderness or the ocean it's in the hope of purification, when really the lesson that is needed is self-acceptance."

•	When the Limits Push Back Ideas & Trends The New York Times, Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007 Byline: William Yardley