If you’ve read my earlier post
about acquiring a new-to-me copy of The
Shining Mountain, you know that I felt fated to read it again,
immediately. I don’t recall reading it
for the first time, but most likely it was in this same American edition which
was published shortly after Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker were lost on Everest
in 1982. The first British edition was
published in 1976 shortly after the climb of the west wall of Changabang with
Joe Tasker, the book’s subject.
So, as I read, I must have known
Boardman was dead, but somehow I don’t remember this fact as affecting my
reading of the book. 1982. The year we were married. Thirty-seven years
Boardman and Tasker didn’t have. It may
be that in 1982 death was more of an abstraction to me. Not so now.
The
Shining Mountain is one of the most explicitly self-conscious expedition
books, before or since. I think this is
due partly to Boardman’s acute consciousness of he and Tasker as a two-person team,
with little margin for error and wholly self-sufficient. His climb on Everest the previous year was
one of those enormous old-fashioned, well-financed, and well-publicized
expeditions.
My gloss on the passages (which
speak best for themselves) is in italics.
i
I was still diary scribbling notes
onto bits of paper. I had left my diary on the moraine at Advance Camp,
thinking that if anything happened to us on the Wall, then at least someone
might find record of what had happened to us up to that point. Also, I censored
it–I didn’t write about the occasional disagreements Joe and I had, or worries
I felt about the route. I thought, “
What if this is the last thing I write and somebody read it? I think things done in the strange world of
an expedition, once recorded, become inflated and can be easily misunderstood
by the non-mountaineer or uninformed commentator, eager for ‘the reasons behind
the tragedy’. Joe was intrigued by my assiduous writings:
“I
wondered why Pete wanted to preserved the situation, rather than use every conscious minute to savour them. He was usually full of apt literary quotations and when I told him that
Graham Greene had said that a writer’s greatest
problem was not trying to remember, but trying to forget, he thought that I had made it up to
excuse my laziness in keeping a diary” (73).
It
is often presumed that journal writing, because of its immediacy to events
described, is a kind of primary truth.
But of course, experience mediated through language is always . . .
mediated. The gap between language and
“the truth” can’t ever quite close.
Every word choice is a construct.
I love that Boardman didn’t disclose
his disagreements with Joe in his journal, yet chose to reveal them to the
public in what would become the book.
And
then there’s Joe’s “living in the present.”
He would later publish two books and one wonders if he changed his view
on this subject and kept a journal or recalled events and feeling s later “in
tranquility.
ii
The icefield had a symbolic aura
about it, and entering it was like entering other secret places–there was the
same air of privilege and mystery about it, I had the same feeling about the
Spider on the North Face of the Eiger (80–1).
This
is Peter quoting Joe. These secret places with their aura of privilege and
mystery. A big part of the allure.
iii
I noticed he [Joe] had only clipped
into two of the three angled pegs I had placed so apprehensively before.
“Why
have you only clipped two, Joe?”
“They
look all right. Two should be enough,”
he said
I hastily clipped into the third
one. Pegs always give an illusion of
safety if you have not put them in yourself (132).
Love
this last line. It’s weirdly true. Theoretically, we should trust only what we
place ourselves, right? But we tend to trust
fixed pins and bolts, foe example, whose efficacy is quite unknown to
ourselves. Pete, here is like “I placed
them, I know how sketchy they are!” My
friends Charlie at some point vowed never to rap off any anchor that ne didn’t
place himself. And, every time I’ve climbed with him, that’s been the way it is.
iv
Hurry up, there’s no time for
taking photographs.” It was the first time Joe had sounded angrily impatient.
“Don’t
worry, “I shouted back, “You’ll be glad of them when you are an old man!” (135).
Just
heartbreaking. Because they never became
old men. But then, how often do I look
back at my climbing photographs from 1982 or ’76? They are among my most valued possessions,
what I’d hate most to lose in a housefire.
And yet, I never look at them.
v
He was down it half an hour before
I was, as I descended the last dangerous section, I looked down at him collecting
our fallen belongings, envying his safe world of the glacier. At last I was stumbling over the lumpy
avalanche debris at the foot of the slope.
“Nothing can kill me now,” I thought as I walked across the glacier to
help him (168).
We
all know the “Nothing can kill me now”
feeling when we reach safe ground after an ordeal. And yet, for most of us, we don’t stay in the
“nothing can kill me now” zone. We are
slow learners.
vi
As I strode through the main street
I started to feel, for the first time, unkempt and strangely dressed. But no one was noticing me and I felt
confident. So this was the outside—were
its preoccupations off-centre or were mine? Did I need it? It was twilight, transistor radios were
blaring and naked bulbs were flickering dimly in the shops and sweet-meat
stalls. It was crowded, and I had to jostle past through the crowds of
shoppers, pilgrims, and beggars, carts and dogs. My senses were stormed by a confusion of
images, intense, momentary ‘takes’ freely flashing by the corners of my eyes.
I
walked into the rest house. Joe was
there, looking washed and rested. I was
still carrying with me the wilderness of mountain life and the aura of one of
the newly returned amongst people (178).
Re-entry
into “the real world.” There is that
zone between the vertical world and the world where we can once again, smell
the grass, taste the ice cream, and feel the pounding of a hot shower on our
wasted bodies. The mountain world and
everyday life can be separate universes.
I remember aching to be in the mountains, that I had been so far away
from them. Then I remembered it had only
been two days.
Postscript
• Peter Boardman’s body has been
seen a couple times on the windswept ridge of Everest where they were last
seen. But Tasker’s has not.
• The Boardman Tasker Prize for
Mountain Literature, established in their names, has been awarded annually
since 1984.
• The most recent winner was Kate Harris
for her Land of Lost Borders: Out of
Bounds on the Silk Road.
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