You're tired, you're dirty, you may be exhilarated, but you don't know what it means. Cahill began his talk by recalling his early days as a writer, in the 1970s, when literary-travel writing was not yet a genre unto itself. Let's not have mountain climbers write about mountain climbing. In those days, books with trees in them just weren't published. Instead, he took a three-year detour to write a book about convicted serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was then on Death Row.
Stories are mostly about obstacles.
That's why the adventure-travel stories appeal to us so much. If you put three or four stories together, you might get a glimpse of that sublimeness. Cahill recalled a recent expedition to Turkey to write about a rare species called the Caspian Tiger. They never found any Caspian Tigers but talked to people who had seen them and gathered information about how endangered the species is. Cahill compared the writing process to a trip to the optometrist's office, where you look through various combinations of lenses to achieve clearer vision.