Everest a Year Later: False Summit (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 1997

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True Everest
Everest a Year Later: False Summit (Cont.)

By Mark Bryant

MB: Rob Hall was an enormously likable, talented person. He also made some tremendous mistakes, which you certainly haven't shied away from investigating. The difficult questions you've raised about Hall's actions, as well as the actions of others, have managed to upset quite a number of people, haven't they? How do you deal with that?

JK: Plenty of people have said to me, "Who are you to assess someone else's role or lack of experience or skill?" But I'm a working journalist, and I was there, and I was there to do a job—to tell what happened as best I could. I certainly feel bad that some people are hurt by my assessments, but somebody needed to step up and tell what went on up there. Jesus, people died—a lot of people died.

MB: And some people are going to say here you are, not only criticizing the living and the dead but profiting off them. We at the magazine have felt twinges of guilt over the fact that your Everest article not only was the most talked-about piece we've ever published, but gave us a best-selling issue besides. We were just doing our jobs and hoping some real good might come of the effort, and I know you feel the same way. But obviously you, too, can't be entirely comfortable when the question of profit comes up.

JK: No, I'm not. But I'm a writer—it's what I do to pay the bills, it's how I've made my living for more than 15 years now. I've given away a fair bit of the Everest money to charities like the American Himalayan Foundation, an outfit that benefits Sherpas, and I intend to give away more as royalties from the book come in, but the fact is, yeah, I'm profiting from what I've written, and I won't pretend that I'm not. One thing I should have seen coming, but didn't, is that because I was actually up on the mountain last May when everything went wrong, I've drawn a lot more criticism than other journalists—the swarm of print and broadcast reporters who covered the mess from sea level for the likes of Newsweek and Life and Men's Journal and the television networks. Ironically, a few of these journalists have castigated me—rather sanctimoniously, in some cases—at the same time that they appeared to be pocketing their own paychecks without a second thought.

MB: And Linda? How's she handled things? I ask, of course, all too aware that we're the ones often sending you on these little jaunts to mountains like the Eiger, Denali, Cerro Torre. In the book you're quite frank about how difficult going off to Everest was on your marriage. But after six months back at home you were off again to climb in Antarctica for a couple of months. That must not have been easy.

JK: Before we got married 16 years ago, I said I was going to quit climbing, and I think that contributed to Linda's decision to marry me. Then I started climbing again, and things between us were not good. But Linda's come to accept that climbing is an important part of who I am. What's disturbing to her now is this sense that things might be escalating, that first there's Everest and then there's Antarctica.

MB: Are you trying to restrain yourself, slow down at all?

JK: Apparently not, though in my mind, Antarctica was much less serious than Everest, and in fact it was. It may look scarier: It was more remote, and the climbing was much more technical. But it's the kind of climbing I know how to do, and Linda appreciates that, too. I had to go there because it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to climb in Antarctica, and because I had to see whether climbing could still be satisfying or whether it had been ruined by Everest. And it wasn't. But this latest expedition wasn't easy on Linda. At Everest Base Camp the loved ones we left behind were a frequent topic of discussion. Everyone felt guilt, which generally manifested itself in feeble attempts at humor. We couldn't admit to each other how much our significant others were paying for our obsessions.

MB: Is there any advantage to the fact that Linda used to climb? Or as we discussed earlier, does she know too much?

JK: Way too much. Linda knows what it's like when things go wrong. She's torn. She understands the hold climbing has on me, and supports what I do, but at the same time she has this painfully acute awareness of what's at stake.

MB: Reading between the lines of what you've been saying, and because I've known you a long time, I'm guessing that despite everything that's happened, there's still something about mountaineering that remains life-affirming for you.

JK: If you'd said that three months ago, I think I would have said no. But now, maybe yes. There's something about it that is important to me—for some of us it's an important antidote to modern life. Pressed by, say, Ron or Mary Harris to defend this, I probably couldn't. But climbing, for me, does have this transcendental quality, this ability to transport you, to enforce humility, to cause you to lose yourself and simply live in the moment. What other people may get from attending midnight mass, I still get from climbing. These are bad clichës, I know, but they're clichës that nevertheless ring true for me.

I also think—and maybe this is my latent puritanical or Calvinist streak coming out—that there's something noble about stoicism and sacrifice and suffering for a goal. Everest turned out to be harder than I'd ever imagined. And my teammates, my fellow clients—no matter what others may say, I admire them for being that committed to something and for being able to just endure.

MB: This is the last thing: On May 13, three days after the Everest debacle—which would soon find its way onto the front page of the New York Times; onto numerous magazine covers; onto television, radio, online reports; and into books and movie deals—more than 600 people were killed and 34,000 injured when a tornado struck north-central Bangladesh, not so very far from your base camp. And yet coverage and talk of that catastrophe seemed almost nonexistent. Isn't it ironic—and sad, really—that the loss of 12 lives on Everest should resonate so much louder in this part of the world than the loss of 600? What is it about what happened on Everest that still apparently means so much, that keeps people glued to it? There have certainly been plenty of other mountaineering disasters over the years that were quickly forgotten, if they were ever noticed at all.

JK: I don't know why this tragedy has grabbed people with such force and won't let go. Part of it's the Everest mystique and part of it's the absurdity and even perversity of people spending this kind of money chasing this kind of goal, throwing prudence and common sense to the wind. But in the final analysis I really don't get it. I'm a victim and a beneficiary of it all at the same time. Everest has turned my life upside down. Nothing will ever be the same. Why did I end up climbing the mountain on that particular day, with those particular people? Why did I survive while others died? Why has this story become a source of fascination to so many people who ordinarily would have no interest in mountain climbing whatsoever?

I recently got a letter from Alexander Theroux, the writer, contrasting the act of climbing Everest with other climbing. He pointed out—correctly, I believe—that Everest seems to attract a different sort of person, someone not necessarily interested in climbing per se, but simply in climbing the highest mountain in the world. There's something about Everest that causes it to lodge especially hard in the public imagination. In Theroux's opinion, the compulsion to climb it is every bit as powerful and deeply felt as the age-old human compulsion to fly.

I guess maybe we should think of Everest not as a mountain, but as the geologic embodiment of myth. And when you try to climb a chunk of myth—as I discovered to my lasting regret—you shouldn't be too surprised when you wind up with a lot more than you bargained for.

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