Shishapangma, Gasherbaum, Rupal Face, Wickersham Wall, Kangshung Face, Khumbu Icefall, Lhotse, Siula Grande, Kanchenjunga. Breathe in each name and you breathe in adventure, drama, heroism. Mountaineers seem to be the among the last breed of adventurers left in this century. Continents have been reached, oceans crossed and cultures bridged (or destroyed). The depths of the ocean, the heights of the mountains and the vast icy landscape of the poles are among the last places on the continent to have seen the face of humans. Weighed down by work, too tired to read my usual non-fiction and too old to read juvenile thrillers about secret societies, I turned to reading a couple of books on mountaineering, which combined drama, adventure and death in sufficient quantity to be engrossing. The two books that I picked were “Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow” by Maria Coffey and “Mountains of the Mind” by Robert McFarlane. I just finished reading the former and this is a review of that book.
The book deals with the effects of living with mountaineers. Of being their mother, their daughter, their sibling, their friend and in the case of the author, their lover. Why do people become mountaineers, why do people get attracted to them, to stand in the wings while they bask in the adulation of the world, what it is like when they are away, when they come back, and when they don’t come back. Maria was in love with Joe Tasker, a premier mountaineer, when he vanished on the North East ridge of Everest. She is/was an insider of the close-knit mountaineering community and she uses this effectively in the number of people she meets and interviews for this book. Her quest to understand them seems as much a quest for her to make peace her love for Joe and with his disappearance.
She writes beautifully. Reading the book was much like reading a thriller. Tales of people crawling on their hands for eight days down a 7000m mountain after breaking both legs in a fall, of ascents made in a “Niagara Falls of snow” and of descending the Rupal Face in a blizzard make for a riveting read. Inevitably, in many of the episodes people die in many ways: heroically, trying to rescue a fallen partner; desperately, running from an avalanche; horrifyingly, freezing to death stuck in a crevasse; unluckily, being hit by a falling rock smack in the head or clumsily, by getting entangled in fixed ropes and falling down.
The most extraordinary episode for me was that of Carlos Carsolio, the youngest mountaineer to have climbed all fourteen of the world’s 8000m mountains. Descending K2 in a blizzard that restricted descent by only 300m after several hours with visibility so poor that he could not see beyond his own hand, Carlos lost his way and headed down a slope that grew increasingly steep. Instinct stopped him from proceeding any further at one point. He sensed the edge of a precipice. He is quoted: “I had not the energy to go up again. I was completely drained. I sat down in the snow. In such a storm, I could not see anything, but I could feel something. I sensed there was a void below me, an empty space, but I was sure there was something beyond this void. I concentrated a lot; I took many deep breaths. I reached a moment that was clear, a moment without worries. And when I reached this point – I jumped.”
What makes them do it ? Maybe because some people miss risk and challenges of life and death in the modern day and seek it; maybe because they’re “addicted to danger” as Jim Wickwire put it; maybe because climbing mountains provides “narrow moments of perfection”; or because they suffer from the Peter Pan syndrome, of perpetual adolescence. For some women mountaineers, the mountains seem safer than the human predators in urban settings. The climber-poet Michael Roberts is quoted as saying that mountaineering “is a demonstration that man is not wholly tied to grubbing for his food, not wholly tied by family and social loyalties; that there are states of mind and spirit that he values more highly than life itself on any lower level”. Mark Twight, another climber-writer is quoted as saying that when he is climbing certain routes, he achieves that mystical state of mind where he loses himself and “becomes the mountain”. Reading the book you realize, it is not that they’re not afraid, but they do it despite being scared to death. Being a long distance runner, I get asked what makes me want to endure the pain of running a marathon, where at least for me, the last mile was pure agony, of willing the body to go beyond what it was capable of. Someone on a running mailing list said that people run the marathon because “they were dropped on their heads when they were babies”. Maybe the mountaineers were dropped on their heads as well. But as a runner, I don’t court death every step of the way.
“Climbers are very single-minded and unspeakably selfish” says Ruth Seifert, a consultant psychiatrist married to a climber. When they’re around, they’re not much help to their spouses, craving attention, longing for the next climb and being of scant help around the house. Many spouses have to live with the fact that the mountaineering associates know them far better than they ever will or with the infidelities that seem as compulsive as the climbing. When they leave, they leave behind the agony of silence, of waiting to hear that their loved ones are OK and coming back alive. Spouses speak of building emotional walls to protect themselves from going batty waiting for a phone call and then find it hard to tear down the walls when they return. Many times, the phone call brings their nightmares to life.
In their death, the spouses, parents and silblings are denied even the basic human need of “conclusive proof of death”. So they piligrimage to the mountains seeking some form of closure and/or spend years driving back to their old house expecting to see their loved one’s van parked in the driveway. The children inevitably suffer as they spend their lives wondering why their dad (or mom) loved the mountains more than they loved them. Elsewhere, I had read about a father mourning for his daughter killed in a bombing. He said “Having one’s children die is not in the natural order of things”. The toll on the parents is no less.
And even those who do return, return physically and psychologically ravaged having seen a close associate die. Yet despite all this, after promises upon promises, they inevitably return. All this and more is poignantly captured in the book.
In a world, increasingly conflict-ridden, people being added continually to the impoverished masses, children dying of malnutrition, species after species being wiped out, with glaciers melting at an unprecedented rate, it seems to me that people getting caught up in their own selfish pleasures, offers little hope of a better world. Nay, it may even put an end to the world they love. Maurice Herzog, the man who first climbed Annapurna and lost his hands and feet to frostbite in the process, dictated a book about that adventure in a genre-defining book called Annapurna. The book ends with a line that haunts me and offers a possibility of mankind redeeming itself: “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men”.
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