< PREVIOUS ] [ 1999 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
When it comes to hustling publicity, the people behind
this year's Everest expedition could teach William
Shakespeare how to create Much Ado About
Nothing.
Their hustle is that perhaps our history books are wrong, that the summit of 29,028-foot Mt. Everest might have been reached before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary got there on May 29, 1953.
Nearly three decades before that, in 1924, two British mountaineers -- Andrew Irvine and George Leigh Mallory -- were part of a Himalayan expedition.
Mallory is famous for responding Because it is
there
when asked why he wanted to climb Everest. He
and Irvine were last seen by Noel Odell, a member of their
climbing team. Odell estimated they were only 900 feet
below the summit and said they were climbing with
considerable alacrity.
After that, who knows? They might have fallen off a cornice well before reaching the summit. Perhaps they reached it, and were caught by an avalanche on the way down. Before or after the summit, they could have lost their way and froze to death.
Now an expedition plans to wander around the Everest Death Zone this spring, seeking a camera that Mallory carried. If Mallory and Irvine reached the summit, they would have taken pictures, and if the film can be recovered and developed, then we'd know.
And what difference would it make? Ed Viesturs, who
reached the summit four times, has observed that Even if
Mallory and Irvine touched the summit, they didn't make it
-- that's like swimming to the middle of the ocean.
Sir Edmund Hillary, who got there first, said that
The point of climbing Everest should not be just to
reach the summit. I'm rather inclined to think that maybe
it's quite important, the getting down.
I'm rather inclined to agree with him, even if his
prosaic report upon returning to camp in 1953 -- We
knocked the bastard off
-- lacks the charm of Mallory's
Because it is there.
So why the modern interest in determining whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit? Even if they got there, they didn't get back, and so they failed in the major justification for expensive and dangerous expeditions -- adding to the sum of human knowledge.
Perhaps the explanation lies in America's charitable attitude toward losers. Robert E. Lee glows in our history books, while Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated him, gets portrayed as a stolid drunkard. George Custer was killed along with his immediate command, and he's an American icon, while successful Indian fighters like George Crook are footnotes.
This is understandable, since we profess democratic values, and the vast majority of us are losers -- if 32 people enter a race, 31 of them will lose.
Winners are part of an elite, and a frequent technique
of modern discourse is to position your opponent as an
elitist,
as in those tree-hugging elitists want
to close off our public lands to everyone who can't afford
$25 for a pair of shoes, whereas I am on the side of us
plain, common folk who can afford $35,000 sport-utility
vehicles.
Another possible reason for this fascination with Mallory and Irvine is narcissism. What seems important now is the personal (getting there yourself) as opposed to any social value (returning to tell others what you saw).
For evidence of this trend, note that the word
summit
has become a verb in recent years, as in
My daughters summitted Elbert last summer.
The
three dictionaries I checked, all published in the 80s, do
not list this usage.
In those days, you climbed
a mountain, which
implies some humility and acceptance that the journey might
be as important as the hoped-for destination, since not all
climbs reach the top.
Now you summit
a peak, which implies that
reaching the top, as your ego demands, is all that matters,
and that things like returning alive
aren't
important.
For more evidence along this line, I recently read that
Himalayan outfitters are besieged with potential clients
who want to join Into Thin Air
expeditions.
I read Jon Krakauer's book as a Greek tragedy -- greed and arrogance and hubris leading to a horrible outcome in the Death Zone when the weather turned.
Some other people, though, apparently read it as
Anybody with enough money can hire a crew to haul him to
the top of the world's highest mountain, and I'm certainly
the kind of person who deserves that distinction.
Perhaps these wealthy experience-collectors are hoping that they'll become as famous as Mallory and Irvine. This is not entirely a bad thing, since Everest will certainly continue to perform its important job of removing certain arrogant traits from the human gene pool.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1999 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >