The Desert of The Real

I am reading Into Thin Air, an account of the ascent in 1996, of Everest. I believe during those weeks in May a record number of climbers died on a single day, or something.

Jon Krakauer's account is rivetting. But one also realises what happens when you have dreams and ideas and then you approach the reality. When the reality is a mountain, it's amazing how dreams and delusions persist. Arguably, those who awaken, live. Perhaps this is the point of doing difficult things - to come to a point of realisation. Perhaps life is so dull that we slip into boredom, and some need to be shaken along the core of our spine to find ourselves alive once more.

Books and movies pretend that life is a coherent whole, but it isn't. When people die, or things go wrong, we usually find a reason or a rationale, or just some statement (everthing happens for a reason). In truth, things happen, randomly, haphazardly. It may be sentimental, it may be useful to find reasons, to believe in a design.
I know when I climbed Kili, I simply felt miserable on the summet. Cold, tired, exhausted, and eager, desperately eager to get the hell down. This is the reality. Obviously the lower reaches of the mountain were magical, but mountains themselves, beyond about 20 000 feet, are not places for men. Maybe they are places our dreams take us, but no one, nothing, certainly, belongs there.

Krakauer talks of noticing a large plastic wrapped shape beside the path, while walking on the Khumbu Icefall. It tuened out to be a sherpa, the body of a man that had been left lying not far from basecamp for around 3 years. A few days later he found the lower half of a body, much older, also beside the path. And soon after a sherpa at Camp 2 developed an edema, a pulmonary edema (where blood amd fluid leaks out of vessels and fills the lungs). He recounts a gory tale of a doctor who spends 40 hours pumping oxygen into the sherpas lungs, sucking blood out of tubes, giving mouth to mouth despite blood and vomit. The man was later airlifted to Kathmandu and deteriorated over a period of weeks, until he died.

What makes these high mountains so tricky, are those occasions when one has to make a calculated, or strategic decision. It's the sort of decision that requires precise thinking. Imagine you are driving a car, and you're low on petrol. You carefully assess how many kilometres you've done, how mnay you can still do, and you watch out for road signs. You're alert, because if you run out of gas there's this simple reality: the car will stop and you will be stuck. On a mountain, it's not easy to be that lucid. It's very easy to go into a half asleep Determination Mode, and why not, most of the time that's necessary, to have steely resolve, to continue on. But sometimes, time checks need to be made, to resolve the mind must also bring in pragmatism, chances of success, reality must face off against positivity and dreams. One must decide, in effect, to turn back, to give in, to withdraw. This, and other matters pertaining to ego, and time, and effectiveness, are not clearcut on a mountain, and once at a certain altitude, the Void, the brain is simply not operating crisply. In fact, set patterns rule, and set patterns do not, often, make sense. A set pattern may be just a repetitious: 'ten steps then rest, ten steps then rest,' or a mantra like 'keep going, almost there'. These become nonsensical when one is able to compute a timeframe, when one is aware of prospects. Few who summit after 4pm, say, have survived. If it is 5pm, and you;re saying to yourself, "keep going, you can do it," then you have to realise this person is also saying, "You can do it, and then you can die. Doing this equals a decision to die." But you just don't know to think that at extreme altitude, and that's what makes lives so easy to lose. When death finally beckons it comes to those who can only offer lives of sleepy resignation in ferociously adverse conditions. Those who die on these mountains are often trapped in weak wintry daydreams far from the desert of the real.

It's interesting to read what is happening on the world's highest mountain these days. It can cost $65 000 per person to climb it, and $5 000 to get a helicopter for an airlift. 1 person died for every 4 who reach the summit. Death basically begins the minute you reach Base Camp. I know the day I reached the moony camp beneath the last scree slope on Kili, I developed a cold, suddenly, and headaches, and my body just wass filled with air, I was burping and farting and falling apart. At even higher altitudes, the body simply slowly starts to die, as it is starved of oxygen, and basically just slows down. What aggravates this condition is lack of sleep, and usually diarhea. Add to that the fact that it is permanently icy cold, and the lack of oxygen reduces everyone's intellectual and physical capacity - it's a very tough environment. And this is the environment where one has to balance, climb upward, on slippery ice, through blinding white blizzards or the dark.

It is interesting to read a personal account of the people who attempted Everest in 1996. The characters who come, some rich, some ardent, some in love, some in their fifties, all kooks in some way, coming to the mountain for a dose of reality. The mountain is merely there, massive, its glacier groaning, pushing 12 storey chunks of ice at about 3 metres a day. Ladders have toi be strung over crevassing. These crevassing change, growing or disappearing, over time. The climb itself, is incredibly arduous, not merely in and of itself, but given the slow drowning reality of being without sufficient oxygen. Krakauer tells a story of being faced with incredibly incompetent people, people who could not even attach crampons to their boots, assembling below the Hillary Step, each one having to inch their way up, while precious time ticked by, and a storm was drifting up from the valley.
He mentions the Taiwanese, whose leader was triumphant on Mount MacKinley, despite memebers of his team either dead or near death and having to be rescued by helicopter - the leader of this team was on Everest in 1996, and when one person needs to be rescued, everyone else has to risk their lives to help that person.
The South Africans were there too, headed by Woodall, who had apparently lied to, controlled and alienated most of his team, threatening to kill or maim if he didn't have his way. These characters all come together, with the professionals, and the natives, and face the mountain.

I won't give the book away, but the author himself describes the sleep deprived misery of the summit, of spending only 5 minutes there, and of passing those ascending, unaware of the storm brewing below, or of the lateness of the day. The desert of the real is when you pass alongside someone on an icy path, who is on the way to where you have been; like the summit of the world, a place that was just cold and hard. And while your head is busy with thoughts, and your heart knows that words are useless against a mindset, and determination, there is a sense of knowing, almost longing, because as you pass by, you know you are heading down to life, and this person beside you, up to an almost certain death.
This what the mountain does, in the dizzy heights. Words cease, and deeds bring about the extinguishing, or the manifestation of a dream.

The Ironman this year, also asked the same question: Are you a bullshitter, or are you for real?
Wouldn't it be good to answer that question while having a picnic, or going for a walk. I wonder why we have to put our bodies on line, but I suppose if we are not careful with our dreams, we take ourselves into harms way until we learn to love our lives, and see the reality of breathing, eating, sleeping, in the rich milieu that is the grand kaleidoscope of life. The lesson of the mountain is perhaps this: Life, being alive, is spectacular however simple it may seem.