A box of old photographs, a file of crumpled papers and a sense of time running out sometimes converge in a man's life. Then there is no option. An advertising executive gives up golf to study history; a retired mechanic goes to inspect gravestones; a graying car dealer disappears into a library.

It happened to Silas Ayer about 15 years ago. Sometime on the passage through middle age, Silas realized he had no one left -- no father, no mother, no sibling -- to remind him of his family's past. No one remained to speak reassuringly of the loam from which he had come.

"All of my immediate family's dead," says Silas, a 71-year-old retired insurance man who lives with his wife in Howard County. "My father's dead. My mother's dead. It's just me."

One day, about 10 years ago, a distant relative suggested he visit an old woman in Ithaca, N.Y., named Betty Balderston, the daughter of a man Silas knew to have been one of his grandfather's closest friends. "She has this whole trunkful of stuff," he was told. Perhaps he would find something there.

Silas owned his own equivalent of a trunkful of stuff -- hundreds of aged photographs and two wrinkled, leatherbound diaries, neither of which he had read, left after his father died in 1958. He had stashed them away for more than 30 years, suspecting the pieces should be placed in a library some day, but never finding time to do it. Until he heard about Betty, he had mostly forgotten about his collection.

Of course, Silas had always suspected the documents might be important to someone. They traced a seafaring adventure of his grandfather, Louis Bement, and Betty's father, Clarence Wyckoff, two of a group of men who had sailed to the Arctic in the summer of 1901 to rescue the famous explorer Robert Peary -- the man most often credited as the first to reach the North Pole.

"You could say it was family lore," Silas recalls. "But the story was also pretty well known around Cornell [University], where my grandfather owned a clothing store. When I was a boy, anybody in Ithaca who knew Bement in the same breath knew he was the man who went up to find Peary. It was synonymous."

When Silas drove to Ithaca and met Betty, then in her 80s, he found out she not only knew his father and his mother, she also remembered his grandfather. She opened her old trunk and showed him her treasure: hundreds of pictures from the Arctic adventure and a diary, Clarence Wyckoff's own jottings of the journey.

"Meeting this person who knew so much about my family was wonderful," Silas says.

But Betty did not know everything they both might have wished for.

"Silas," she confessed. "I was told everything but I didn't pay attention. Now we've got all these pictures and things and I don't have it together. What are we going to do, Silas? What are we going to do?"

The retired insurance man never would have guessed the trip back to his parent's hometown would become a story within a story, an intimate exploration of something more common than heroism, more valuable to him than a trunkful of old treasures.

It was Tuesday, July 9, 1901, the hottest day in memory. On the train to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Louis "Louie" Bement stopped in New York City for a farewell dinner with members of the Peary Arctic Club. They ate at Shanley's, one of the finest restaurants in the city, then spent the evening at the theater. He and his young friend, Clarence Wyckoff, had wandered the streets that day buying snowshoes, felt boots and supplies for their journey north.

Just 260 miles from Ithaca, and already Louie was having the time of his life. "We are traveling like kings," he wrote in his diary. "Everything going fine."

Unlike Clarence, who had inherited $1 million from his father's investment in Remington Typewriter and, at 25, had eagerly plowed his fortune into patent medicines and real estate, Louie lived a more tranquil, domestic existence. He made his living selling hats.

At 35, Louie was balding, civic-minded, married with three children. He was a family man of modest stature given to high band celluloid collars, percale pattern shirts and classy hosiery. He was not an adventurer. He was an ordinary man of ordinary means. Hobnobbing with the likes of Clarence's high-rolling business associates at the Arctic Club -- financial supporters of the vaunted Peary expeditions to the North Pole -- must have been exciting. But lighting off for a few weeks in Greenland was almost beyond imagining.

There was a certain amount of intrigue to this business -- Clarence had confidential information that Peary's latest expedition to the Arctic had stalled. The explorer had reportedly fallen ill and a doctor was forced to amputate all but three of his toes. His wife and daughter, who had set sail the previous summer to rescue him, also had disappeared.

To fund a relief expedition, the Arctic Club was offering berths aboard a chartered steamer for $500 a person. The steamer, called Erik, would sail to northern Greenland and rescue the Pearys. Along the way, though, Clarence and his friends would be "guests," the world's first Arctic tourists partaking in a great eco-adventure. Louie had been told they could expect up-close views of icebergs, walrus and exotic Eskimo natives, then do some hunting and return within a few weeks.

The trip to Halifax, where they would board the Erik, was first class. By Saturday, July 13, Louie stood at the Halifax harbor waiting to breakfast with the ship's owner, James Farquhar, a "jolly old salt," Louie said, who kept everyone laughing. Clarence's other friends showed up -- Alfred Church, a Chi Psi fraternity brother and grandson of the founder of Borden Milk Co.; Herbert Berri, son of a New York newspaper publisher; and Dr. Limond Stone, Berri's professor at the New York Polytechnic Institute -- and they prepared to launch.

Everything was set, except the ship had no crew. Clarence and the other passengers offered to pay more to entice local sailors, but when word spread about where they were bound, no one would even consider the offers. Finally, the captain of the ship, J.U. Blakeney, explained he couldn't sail unless he signed up the passengers as crewmen. Innocently, Clarence's friends agreed, and on Sunday, July 14, around noon, the Erik slipped out of harbor with Louie and Clarence at the wheel and Herbert Berri and Limond Stone doing what Louie called "ordinary sailor work."

That night they stopped in Cape North. They hoped to hire sailors there, then tried a little cod fishing. "No success" on either count, Louie noted in his diary.

A storm came up just as the boat set sail for Newfoundland. They saw lots of lightning that night and floated slowly north on a phosphorescent sea.

Silas never spoke to his grandfather about his great adventure. His last memory of the man is of a day in 1933, when Silas was just a toddler standing outside Louie's bedroom. The old man died of pneumonia the next day.

"So the conversation never happened," Silas says, wistfully.

Even after he met Clarence's daughter, Betty, the conversation stalled until Betty introduced him to her great-niece, Kim Gillis, then an art student at Michigan State University.

Kim had her own obsession with her family's Arctic tale. Fifteen years younger than Silas, she had helped Betty transcribe her father's Arctic diary, and was making huge copies of the Arctic photographs to build collages for a graduate school art project. She collected books about the Arctic and shared Betty's enthusiasm for unraveling the story's deepest mysteries. Betty had convinced her that something happened -- she didn't know what -- that might reveal an important clue about Robert Peary's controversial claim to being the first person to reach the North Pole.

"Betty always said, 'There is something in there,' " Kim remembers. "She was positive there was some key fact that was recorded that would solve some Arctic mystery. She didn't have the energy by that time to do it herself, but I was fascinated."

About five years ago, after Betty died, Kim inherited the collection and she and Silas decided to meet. He arranged to join her at the university library in College Park when she came to do research. Silas opened a suitcase full of Louie's photographs for her to see, and Kim gasped. "Silas, you have more than I do." Together they counted more than 700 images.

Kim mumbled something about making a book together, and then Silas gasped.

"What?" he exclaimed. A book project was born.

It took Silas a year to transcribe Louie's diaries. Some entries contained code words, which his grandfather had used to disguise telegraph messages home. The script was tiny, some parts edited. As he got into it, the story also turned out to be not quite what either he or his new friend had expected.

The coast of Newfoundland was rocky and bold, rising majestically, at times more than 1,500 feet above the water. The Erik's passengers wrote letters and took pictures, ate cod and brook trout they had caught ashore in a pond near the town of Basque. Although they managed to hire three sailors at St. John's, they were still short of hands. Louie assisted the captain making nautical observations and Clarence climbed into the crow's nest for lookout duty.

For a while, the venture seemed to meet expectations. "Everybody having the finest of times," Clarence wrote, "and glad we came."

There were, however, a few problems. The first mate turned out to be a drunkard. The "cook," merely a 19-year-old tailor's apprentice who had run away to sea, had never seen a stove before. The cabin boy stole their cigars.

Even then, all should have been well, except that on the evening of July 19, after entering Belle Isle Strait, the Erik showed signs of weakness. Louie, who had gone to bed around 10 p.m., was awakened at 11 by a jolt. It sounded as if the boat had scraped across a gravel heap. The boat, which passed the first large icebergs that afternoon, was slipping into no man's land and found itself hemmed in by enormous pans of ice ranging from a few feet across to a full square mile. Stymied by fog, the Erik rammed its way, bashing keel, then rudder, being violently tossed, slinging men at the wheel across the deck.

As they worked through the night, Clarence noticed something unsettling.

"Every minute the ship gets a jar, [sic] the captain who is opposite me, jumps up," he wrote. "He is absolutely unfamiliar with the ice conditions and is nervous and scared."

The boat battled fog, rain, ice and wind. By Sunday the 21st, the Erik had been driven hundreds of miles into the Atlantic and had lost position. The expedition's commander; the entourage's physician, Dr. Frederick Cook; the professor; and his student took to their beds, seasick. Clarence sat up the entire night with hives.

Battered by stormy seas, the ship rolled side to side 30 degrees off perpendicular, so the men could barely hang on in their beds. Louie and Clarence finally pulled themselves together Tuesday to join a few crewmen and sat down to a pot of rice soup, which they had eaten for nearly a week. Clarence found himself toying with the rice until he noticed a bit that looked corrugated, then saw "little black dots at one end of each kernel of rice "

"My curiosity aroused," he wrote that day, "I examined closer and found that it really was not rice soup at all. The kernels were maggots."

When Clarence complained, the captain appointed him to take over for the chief steward. He went immediately to rummage through their supplies and discovered that worms had eaten the barley. Unable to sleep because of hives, Louie and Clarence walked the deck at night in frigid cold hoping to soothe the masses of sores on their legs and cool their fever.

"I suffer the torments of hell," Louie wrote.

As the ship crossed the Arctic Circle, Dr. Cook, a longtime Peary associate who later would challenge the explorer's claim of being first to the North Pole, prepared the traditional initiation of the passengers. Everyone pelted Louie with rotten bananas and some of the others were forced to march around the deck with the ship's livestock. While the lighthearted antics went on, Clarence discovered, to his horror, that the Erik had spent the previous three years "on the rocks" after a wreck, and this was its first trip since the repair. Much of their food, he realized, had been aboard, rotting the entire time.

Sifting through photos of that demanding journey, Silas had to confront misconceptions about the great adventurer in his family. Louie Bement hadn't joined a crackerjack expedition of brave explorers. Instead, he seems to have fallen in naively among a group of wealthy sycophants who were using their $1,000 dues in the Peary Arctic Club to get first dibs on Inuit artifacts and earn a chance to have a freshly mapped feature of icy landscape named in their behalf. The motivation for Louie and Clarence and the Erik's other passengers was probably less the grand mission to save Robert Peary than a few weeks of engaging tourism.

"Did they know what they were getting into?" Silas asks. "I don't think so. They were just going along as guests, looking for a little adventure. I don't think it was even particularly that important to Clarence because he had plenty of money. But for my grandfather, it was probably a career-building move -- to use the trip as a way to make business contacts for his store and to raise his profile with community leaders around Ithaca."

Initially, both Silas and Kim rejected the term "tourists" to describe their courageous kin, particularly when the evidence -- photographs that showed the men dressed in sealskins, digging the Erik out of ice, skinning seal and scrambling over ice with Eskimo hunters -- indicated otherwise. But, as the diaries suggest, the men did join with pedestrian expectations, believing they would be reasonably cared for, enjoy some grand sights and use their summer weeks escaping the everyday stresses of American life. Instead, the challenges of the trip grew exponentially and the dangers became increasingly life-threatening.

But discovering what happened when the friends finally arrived at Greenland and came face-to-face with Robert Peary, his wife, his Eskimo mistress and the dismal shadow of the explorer's true intentions was genuinely shocking.

Were Louie and Clarence courageous heroes? Did they salvage the expedition that would later go on to claim the North Pole? Did they discover secrets that might resolve the later controversies that would emerge between Peary and Dr. Cook?

"It wasn't the climactic thing that went on in my mind," Silas says, simply. "It's a different story. It was very quiet. Things became very quiet."

History has shown that Robert Peary's race to the North Pole was an enormous display of one man's power, an egocentric quest for immortality. His claim to the pole was, Peary once said, "a prize that ranks with the prize which Columbus won, the last geographical prize that the Earth has to offer," and he would do whatever was necessary to have it.

Far from being grateful when the Erik arrived on Aug. 4, Peary greeted his weary rescuers with restrained cordiality.

When the Erik's crew delivered news that his mother had died the previous year, he showed no sign of emotion. Louie noted that the great explorer was a "very ordinary looking man and very much stuck on himself." Clarence was furious that after pledging $5,000 to be a member of the Arctic Club and putting his own life at risk for the rescue, Peary had nothing to say to him when they arrived. "We got no news," he wrote. "All is very secret. The only information we have gotten is what we have seen: they are all here and alive."

After three years in northern Greenland, the 49-year-old explorer was anemic, he had lost eight toes, the membranes of his throat and nose had begun to atrophy and he looked, his doctor reported, like "one affected with some morbid disease." Eskimos in his entourage said he showed signs of "piblockto" -- insanity. Mrs. Peary and their daughter, Marie, who had made a rescue mission the previous year, were all right. Their boat, the Windward, was stuck in the ice, and she and her husband and been reunited. But shortly after her arrival, Mrs. Peary discovered that her husband had been living with a young Eskimo woman and had even had a child by her.

As it turned out, Peary never had any intention of being "rescued." He merely needed a fresh crew to begin a sustained hunting campaign that would supply provisions for the next stage of his quest.

For more than two weeks, Louie and Clarence walked up to 20 miles a day, hunting birds, rabbits, walrus, seal and deer, turning the deck of their ship into a slaughterhouse -- "the bloodiest and most stinking mess I ever saw or want for," wrote Louie -- to prepare Peary for the winter. During that time, Louie, Clarence and their friends were almost killed three separate times when Captain Blakeney rammed the boat full speed through the ice floes on the way to pick up their hunting crew and game. It was then that Louie discovered the captain had only once been a pilot before, "a good many years ago" with the Canadian government, but had been fired after wrecking his ship and had since worked only as a house painter.

Finally, on Aug. 24, as they transferred 30 tons of rock ballast, 50 dogs, 30 Eskimos and the cut-up parts of 53 walrus onto the explorer's boat, they entered Peary's Arctic heart of darkness. While at dinner that night, a note from Peary's physician, Dr. Thomas Detrick, came to Clarence; Peary had cut Detrick from the mission. The doctor, however, had refused to leave because he feared for Peary's health. Instead, he had abandoned the ship and announced he intended to live with Eskimos until he could reach Peary's camp in Cape Sabine, where he would continue to provide medical services, if necessary. He only asked Clarence for a rifle and ammunition so he could fend for himself.

The man who had saved Peary's feet from frostbite and cared for the Inuit tribe that supported Peary's explorations was now an outcast. Although Clarence and Louie spent hours trying to persuade the man to come back with them, Peary sent word that they should leave him on the ice, without gun, ammunition or food. Clarence slipped a rifle into the physician's bag with seven boxes of matches, two Bowie knives, soap and chocolate. Then they left him, as Peary commanded. When Peary later discovered that Clarence had given him a gun, he shrugged it off, saying it was no more than "throwing a crust of bread to a starving dog."

It would be many years before the public came to truly know the celebrated explorer with whom Louie and Clarence had this startling encounter. Robert Peary's mania for fame, his tyrannical power and his disregard for those who aided his quest were astonishing, sad, even despicable.

But Louie and Clarence had nothing to say about that, neither in the diaries nor on their return to Ithaca nor in the many years that followed, when Peary's reputation as the first man to reach the North Pole came under scrutiny.

On Sept. 15, as he made the last leg of the trip home, Louie penned his final entry in the diary: "Thus endeth the finest and grandest trip any Ithacan ever took: no sickness, no accidents, no cross words. Everything pleasant and the expedition accomplished everything it set out to do."

Silas initially felt let down when he finally learned the truth about his grandfather's great Arctic journey. He had not rescued Robert Peary. He had not uncovered an important mystery. He had been deceived, his life needlessly put at risk, and he was used to advance an megalomaniac's blind ambition.

"Yeah, I was disappointed," Silas says. "As Americans, I think we come from a place where we build up things like this to be like what we see in the movies. This just didn't have that same kind of drama. And it took a while before I understood why."

Louie Bement was a changed man when he came home to Ithaca, Silas says. He took over the hat business where he worked and opened a second store, Toggery Shops, on the Cornell campus. He served in the Rotary Club and became a solid community man. Although he and Clarence remained friends and gave lectures and slide shows about their Arctic travels, they refused to speak poorly of anyone connected with the expedition.

Among his papers, Silas found a warm note from Dr. Detrick, who had survived his own ordeal and returned home to be a family physician. "Your letter comes to me like the cool music of ocean's roll lapping an iceberg," the doctor wrote. "You (and Mr. Wyckoff especially) entered my life at the time when, though, if we never met again, you two could never go out of my life again."

And when Louie died, Silas discovered, Clarence had written a eulogy that explained it all:

"When you are beyond limits of police control, you learn to know a man as nowhere else. Everybody is apt to get lawless in such a situation. But Louie was just the same there as on the streets of Ithaca. We encountered a lot of difficulties and dangers, but Louie smiled through it all. He took everything as it came. He was always volunteering as a sailor or a hunter, for anything that needed to be done, just the same as he always has in Ithaca. He was joyous in everything he touched or did. He was the best friend I ever had."

It was not what Silas expected. But, all in all, a pretty fine legacy for an ordinary man, and one in which his family can be proud.

"It's a different kind of story," says Silas who, with Kim Gillis, has fashioned the two men's diaries and photos into a picture book, Boreal Ties (University of New Mexico Press), which has just been published. "A story of everyday life. And probably a pretty wonderful experience."