Finding Myself on Mt. Everest

I've been watching season two of a years-old Discovery Channel documentary series about people who climb Mt. Everest. Some of the climbers are mountaineers, people who have spent years honing their skills, ever with an eye on Everest--the highest of the eight-thousanders--as the ultimate test of their abilities and, should they reach the summit, the ultimate accomplishment. Others are essentially tourists who have paid $50,000 to be ushered up the mountain. The latter type is a problem on Everest, as reported by Jon Krakauer after the disastrous 1996 climbing season and by others more recently. Through its coverage of these mountain tourists, the Discovery show highlights the indecency of the commercialization of Everest. (You can read about the related experiences, tragedies, and injustices of and against Sherpas and Nepalese guides here, here, and elsewhere.)

Tim from L.A. failed to summit the year before and is back again in 2007, determined to meet his goal. As portrayed on the show, he is a foolish man, a blowhard, a kind of white American male that gives white American males a bad name. Tim often faces the camera, pretends to throw something at it, and yells, "Bam!"

Not Tim.

When you climb Everest, you have to do it in stages to adjust to the altitude: up a couple-thousand feet and then down, and then up a few-thousand feet higher and then down, and so on. It takes about two weeks to reach the top. On his final ascent during the 2007 season--in the high climes of the mountain known as the "Death Zone"--Tim slips and breaks his right hand in two places. Scaling a mountain without the use of a hand (and in great pain) is a tall order, but Tim is a self-described "tough guy" and, when his guides, in rather a sneering way, remind him of this fact, he rallies. He's scared, though, and rightly so: as he ascends, the ropes are to his left, so he can hold on; but as he descends, they will be to his right. What will he do?  The expedition guides in charge of Tim work out those details for him and, through some complicated rope work, risk their own lives getting the client up and then getting the client down again. As they do this, the disgust of Russell, the British expedition leader patched in by radio, is palpable. It's impossible to tell if Russell is more disgusted with Tim or with himself for enabling someone like Tim to reach the summit and come back again alive.

Also from L.A. is Becky, a journalist in her mid- to late-40s who caught the Everest bug from Tim when she interviewed him after his first attempt. She's pretty woo-woo but is also a black belt in karate--so, you know, no slouch. Even so, she showed up at Everest without ever having fastened crampons to a pair of boots. This should not be.

It took me about 3 seconds to find this image on petzl.com.

Come on, Becky.

As they plod up the mountain, both Tim and Becky attribute their success to personal strength. Remember, Tim is "tough"--in fact, the toughest guy he knows--and as for Becky, well, she sets the bar high and never backs away from a challenge. Pushed to her physical and emotional limits, she considers quitting but does not because "I don't know how."

These two people are driven by vanity, but, as people will do, they avoid confronting this fact, at least on camera. For example, when Russell kicks Becky off the expedition because her level of inexperience puts the other climbers at risk, she laments how "cold" it is on Everest. "And I'm not talking about the weather," she adds. When Tim reaches the summit, he waves an American flag (with his good hand) and yells, "Yeah! Old Glory, baby!" never pausing to consider that it was a Tibetan and an Australian who hauled his ass to the top, in this way rendering his achievement particularly American but not in the way Tim means.

More haunting than the combined effect of Tim and Becky's stories are those of legitimate climbers David and Fred. These men climb Everest to exorcise demons, David's acquired through no fault of his own, and Fred's apparently called to roost through his own misjudgment.

David was abused as a child, and the first time he summited Everest he did so in the name of abused children everywhere. He meant for his ascent to the top of the world to show these kids that they are not doomed always to be victims of circumstance, that they can, quite literally, rise above. He confesses  that he thought his first summit would "be enough" to release him from the hold of his past. "But it wasn't," he says.

At this point, I imagine David's wife. Does she see? Before his second attempt did she plead with him not to return to the mountain? Did she say, Think of our children? I wonder, too, if David sees, if he realizes that no amount of summits will ever be enough, and I will him off the mountain and onto a therapist's couch. But this is my way.

In the 2007 season David intends not only to summit Everest again but also to do what has never been done: to descend the opposite (the South) side, and then to climb the South side and descend the North, basically, to perform a double-ascent/descent. If he accomplishes this, David believes, he will really show the children that they can overcome.

Initially, he wants to go it alone--of course he does!--but Russell convinces him to bring Phurba Tashi, a highly accomplished Nepalese guide who has summited Everest many times, once even three times in a season. It is a good thing David complies: they find that no one has yet laid fixed lines at the top of the South side, and so Phurba must do so. Ironically, it is Phurba Tashi who guarantees David's survival of the South side Death Zone, and it is Phurba Tashi who drives David forever from the mountain. Upon reaching camp on the South side, David decides to abandon his goal and, further, to retire from mountaineering. By way of explanation he says, Phurba Tashi "is in every way my superior." David knows that had the two of them reached the top of Everest for a second time, Phurba would have had to step aside to allow David the honor of being the first, and solely because David had paid him to do so. David refuses to continue to play a role in the farce.

David is a man of great integrity: he is exceptional and admirable. And in another way, he is like the rest of us, pitiable, deserving of pity. Here is a man for whom, perhaps, nothing will ever be enough, a man who climbed and descended Everest two times because it took two times to prove an abusive parent right: "David, you are in every way my inferior."

Fred is a doctor who, during two separate (failed) summit bids, nearly died on Everest. A photo that the Discovery editing team delights in flashing to viewers shows Fred's nose blackened by frostbite. It has taken two years for Fred to recover sufficiently to try again. The last time around, he diagnosed himself with pneumonia, so in 2007 he must also understand the nature of his suffering. Repeatedly, Fred refers to the summit as "the albatross," an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In that poem, an ancient mariner incurs a Sisyphean punishment for killing an albatross and dooming his ship: he must wear the albatross around his neck and forever tell the story of his folly. And here is Fred, revisiting his own past, certain that if he reaches the top, he will shed the albatross and transcend or relinquish his story. He makes it to the summit. Later, when he tells the cameras about it, he references the albatross again, and he cries.

I am an armchair enthusiast. Never in my life will I climb a mountain, and gladly so. But in the stories of those who do, I find myself. I'll bet you do, too. Most of us, thank god, tend not to yell "Bam!" or to say we don't know how to quit--and if you do either of these things, you should probably stop--but we have been every bit the imbecile and the outcast. We have been victims and victors, too, even if not on the grand scale of David and Fred. We are all of us haunted by stories, our own and those of others.