A Big Dreamer—and Doer, Too

Ned Gillette sits astride a camel, which suddenly lies down with a grunt. Gillette didn't intend for the camel to do this, but then Gillette is a novice at camel riding. This is only the second time he has been on one. No matter, Gillette will lead a caravan across the Sahara beginning in 1991.

Riding camels all the way from Morocco, on Africa's Atlantic coast, to the Red Sea is a formidable challenge, if not an altogether wacky idea. Which is why Gillette wants to do it. He traffics in formidable challenges and wacky ideas.

Gillette is a professional adventurer. This is how he sees himself. More telling perhaps, it's also how the Internal Revenue Service sees him. In adventuring, to an extent, a pro is a con, a man who deals in illusions. In order to do what he wants to, Gillette must establish an image so romantic, so seemingly tangible, that people will pay to embrace it. Specifically, sponsors will pay to align themselves with the image, and the public will pay to read about it and to attend lectures about it. If the pro adventurer is successful—and Gillette is—he can forestall growing up. He can proceed from mountain peak to jungle floor, piling up one enviable experience after another, while accumulating income enough for the IRS to view him as a substantial citizen.

"I don't consider myself a very mature person," says Gillette, 45, as he sits atop his balky camel. "Considering the kind of person I am, this is a good job for me."

Gillette and the camel are in Marrakech, Morocco, a city of 440,000 that lies 80 miles inland from the Atlantic. If this is not actually the desert, it appears to be through the lens of a carefully positioned camera. Video producer Gae Morris, who is putting together a tape that is intended to be for promotional purposes and to be shown to potential sponsors of the camel trek in the hope of raising cash, has found this location. It is adjacent to a theme park named The Oasis, but if the cameraman is careful to shoot around the power lines, the images will be as effective as anything shot in the open Sahara.

Gillette is bothered by the situation. Though he deals in illusions, this is perilously close to deception. But his schedule is in shambles. There is no time to travel 250 miles southeast to shoot the tape in the Sahara, so Gillette is on this camel, which has finally risen to its feet again. "I'm selling a product, really," he says as he waits for the cameraman to change cassettes. "There's the adventure itself, which is why I'm in it. But it's at least half promotion. It's a funny business I'm in."

Gillette may be a lousy camel rider, but what sets him apart from the bitter dreamers and the mall clerks in rock-climbing shoes is that he has been, for 13 years, a phenomenal adventurer. He differs in that he does what he dreams.

"A lot of this extreme stuff has driven my dad nuts," says Gillette. "Yet in a way, he started it. He had me on skis when I was three. I wasn't great, but I loved being out in the air."

In summers, Gillette's father, Bob, who was chairman of the National Life Insurance Company of Vermont, and his mother, Janet, took Ned and his sister, Debbie, to Quissett Harbor on Cape Cod, where Ned learned to sail. Ned attended the Holderness School near Manchester, N.H., from 1959 to '63. All in all, he seemed on the path of any normal rugby-shirted preppie.

"That's when I started to change," Gillette recalls. "Before Holderness, I didn't have a lot of confidence, and I didn't really excel at any one sport. Then, my sophomore year, I actually used my head. To make the varsity ski team I took up cross-country, because all the best skiers were racing downhill. The team's January time trial remains my proudest moment in skiing—it was a boyhood dream come true when I won. It was just great!"