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Apart from salamis and tubes of Desitin, we’re going to need further diversions to pass the slow afternoon hours as we camp along the trail. For one thing I’ve been gorging my iPod on music CDs to load it with every imaginable musical craving I may have over the next month. But that only covers 6 days of continuous listening (trust me, I can do it), and at best the iPod will fill out to 10 days. What will I do with the other 20? Richard is packing a good stack of books, and it wouldn’t hurt for me to bring along a few of my own (but I can still read and listen to music at the same time, as well as walking and talking at the same time, but not driving and talking). A few titles I have in mind are: The last 3 months of Wired magazine (I’ve lapsed a bit), Harry Potter (I promised I would read them within my lifetime, but you can trust I’ll cheat and watch the movies where I can), “The 7 Habits…” by Covey, Jon Stewart’s “America (The Book) “, and oh, I should include something to feed my paranoia about having my own Himalayan tragedy, “Into Thin Air ” by Krakauer.
However, this calls to memory a haunting scene from the 1986 movie “Platoon” about the Vietnam War. An infantry squad (my old unit the 25th ID) is gearing up for an overnight jungle patrol, and the squad leader looks through the gear belonging to the new recruits. One of them has his pack half-full of books and other junk to keep him sane, but the sergeant dumps it all out for the practicality that he’s going to be doing a lot of hiking and his pack has to be as light as possible. Now I know that I won’t have to carry the weight of the entire Harry Potter series in hard-cover on my own back, but how much gnawing can my conscience take for a Sherpa porter to bear the burden for me? I can compromise and take only paperbacks, or load them on disk and read them on my computer. Peshaw! That scene about packing light in the Army is thoroughly bogus anyway. The real policy is that they’re not happy with you unless you’ve packed an absurd amount of junkyard waste (a.k.a. government issue radios, lithium batteries, rocks, field manuals, lead fortified iron casing for the above, Jerry cans) in your rucksacks so that you yet again regret volunteering. Maybe I can apply that latent, repressed resentment and delude myself into thinking that our porters have a “more is less” philosophy. Maybe I’ll just wait it out and watch ALL the Harry Potter movies when they eventually come out and save everyone a little grief.
I don’t recommend reading “Into Thin Air” while on the trip. Possibly too discouraging. It appears to be good pre-trip reading, though. Here’s a take=-away lesson from that disastrous expedition:
As for Krakauer’s own sense of why things went so horribly wrong? “We had never climbed
together, there was a disparity in strengths among us, so, wisely, we were taught
to rely on the guide if things went wrong. Not only that, we were never ever roped
together. Everyone climbed independently, at their own pace, which was good. But
when you’re roped to someone you develop this weird intimacy; every time you take
a step, they have to take a step. You develop a bond that was just lacking on Everest.
We weren’t encouraged to look after our fellow clients and certainly not after the
guides.
“And that’s inexcusable to me. It’s the thing that eats at me most. If I’d been up
there with a bunch of friends, instead of guides and fellow clients, I can’t imagine
that I would have left [guide] Andy Harris up there in a storm when I clearly should
have seen that he wasn’t feeling well. And having gotten down to the South Col, I
just wouldn’t have crawled into my tent and into my sleeping bag without accounting
for each of my partners. Climbing is a subculture that prides itself on the purity
of its ideals. It has these weird rituals and rules that most people wouldn’t understand.
Some of it is kind of sick, because it idealizes boldness and risk-taking to such
a degree. But its ideals about respecting your partner and about ‘how you climb being
more important than what you climb’ are really good. I betrayed those ideals. For
that I really beat myself up,” Krakauer says sadly near the end of our conversation.
“I can’t think of a single good thing that came out of this climb.”
No single thing, perhaps, except this extraordinary book.
Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.