Another middle-aged entrepreneur wno has spent a large amount of money in brutal physical activity is Dick Bass of Dallas, founder of Snowbird Ski & Summer Resort, in Utah. Bass, who is 56, claims to be the first man to have climbed the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents -- McKinley in North America, Aconcagua in South America, Kilimanjaro in Africa, Elbrus in Europe, Vinson Massif in Antarctica, Everest in Asia, and Kosciusko in Australia. He also believes he is the oldest man to have conquered Everest. He was 55 years old when he flew out to fill a last-minute opening on the Norwegian team that made the ascent.
Bass is a freak of nature, according to his doctor: his pulse at rest, with no training, is 41, and his various expeditions have scarcely left him sore. But he doesn't climb mountains because he can; not even, in the famous phrase, because they're there. He does it because for him, it's a form of freedom -- from, among other things, business. "I am so active down here in the plains and valleys," he says, "that I'm constantly suffering from the tyranny of the urgent. But on the mountain it is like a vacation. Man can take physical discomfort better than psychological discomfort." He himself copes with fatigue and cold by repeating little poems he makes up -- mantras, he calls them, or chants -- that can put him in a reverie lasting as long as half an hour. "On the mountain," he continues, "I'm free from psychic pressure. I really love my fellowman, but some of them are hair shirts that scratch like crazy. So when I'm up on the mountain, for once in my life I'm free to go for it."
Bob Lee might understand that. What the co-founder and president of Hotwatt Inc., an $8-million electric-heating-elements manufacturer in Danvers, Mass., looks for in a vacation is a sense of common struggle -- such as that provided by Outward Bound, the nationwide organization that runs "survival" programs for people who may not be as bold (or as rich) as Morgan and Bass. He values Outward Bound not because of the physical hardship it puts its clients through, but because the ordeal leads to a momentary suspension of the self.
"Outward Bound is great for entrepreneurs," Lee explains. "I think it's because we often get tired of being in charge. People are always saying yes to you. But when you are on Outward Bound -- at least the one I went on, the Hurricane Island program in Maine -- you are under the control of the group, or else completely on your own. You lose your identity. You become one of a group. You learn to depend on one another for mutual support. And to me that's very refreshing."
Paradise regained. "It was a self-imposed guilt thing," says 46-year-old Michael Berolzheimer, a venture capitalist and former president of Duroflame Inc., in San Francisco. He was explaining why, until he was 38, he could hardly take a vacation at all. "If I left the office, I felt I wasn't providing good leadership.There's also the fear of delegating responsibility when you're the key person, or think you are."
Berolzheimer now thinks that all you need to take a vacation is "some money and a good executive secretary." But many business owners don't seem able to evade the pain of a punishing conscience. William Newman, a clinical psychologist and stress-management expert from Gloucester, Mass., believes that entrepreneurs tend to think of relaxation as a threat to their integrity. "Their whole self-esteem," he says, "depends on constant achievement, which means constantly doing something, which means that a vacation -- by definition a time of not doing something -- can be a very bad time for them."
The travel industry has always had an answer for such people: The Great Escape, a Return to Paradise. The truly guilt-ridden, of course, only laugh at the idea: there's no going back, they say, to the forest primeval or the Garden of Eden. Travel agents naturally put it differently, emphasizing the adventure of finding places that are remote and unspoiled. There are even packages assembled by therapists like Newman, which claim that the relief of stress, anxiety, and guilt is a major benefit of the idyll. "Unless I can get them away from work," says Newman, "down in the Caribbean, for example, among beautiful surroundings, they're blind to what they are choosing to do to themselves. They think it's the job, not them, that's causing all the stress."
Whatever the analysis, many hard-line work ethicists do find it restful and restorative to get as far away as they can from the trappings of civilization -- specifically, as Berolzheimer remarks, that clamorous instrument of the workaday world known as the telephone. His own favorite way of getting away from it is to travel with his wife, Janet, in Japan, moving at a leisurely, premodern pace from one country inn to another. He learned about Japanese inns from friends, he explains, and what he loves about them is their artful contrivance of "serenity and quiet."
Like Berolzheimer, Gerard O'Connell has completely recovered from whatever guilt he may have once felt about vacating his business for a holiday. The CEO of Structured Computer Systems Inc., in Farmington, Conn., now spends four or five weeks a year, and considerable amounts of money, in a race to get to the earth's last untouched beauty spots before they're "ruined" by people very much like himself. "The Yukon is already a sort of far-out exurbia," he says. "Only a few more years and all the world will be like that." Last year, O'Connell and his wife, Ann, spent three weeks in the bush of New Zealand.
