Why do climbers do what they do?

By Carl Heintze

The other day, just for the heck of it, I looked up Eileen M. and sent her an email message. Eileen is alive and well and living in Santa Clara County. I won't tell you where and Eileen M. isn't her real name. I'm protecting, I hope, her privacy.

Eileen M. is or was a mountain climber. More than that, she is one of the first women ever to scale Annapurna, among the highest mountains in the Himalayas, one seldom successfully climbed by men or women.

Eileen's story and the story of the rest of the all-female expedition is chronicled in Annapurna, A Woman's Place if you want the details. I became acquainted with Eileen because I'd written a novel about a woman mountain climber which, like most of my fictional efforts, was never published. She was kind enough to read it for technical mistakes.

When we met I thought I had the wrong person since Eileen looks as unlike a mountain climber as you're likely to find. She's now retired, but when she was working she was a physicist for a Silicon Valley computer company. She seemed to me at least more like the stereotypical picture of a librarian; small, quiet and pleasant without being talkative.

I've heard her talk about Annapurna and she talks about it in public in the same way, quietly, as if she is not telling all she knows about herself or the mountain. She values her privacy and I've tried to respect it.

I also once tried to get her to write her autobiography, but she demurred and I respect that, too, although almost all climbers seem to have written something about their climbs. The story of the all-women's Annapurna expedition is not by Eileen but by Arlene Blum, another member of the team.

I knew why I wanted to know more about Eileen; indeed, why all of us lowlanders want to know more about those who go to the mountains and that is: why? Why do you do it? Climbing the world's highest peaks is neither easy nor safe. On an average, one in every eight climbers who go to the Himalayas or other mountains over 20,000 feet in altitude don't come back, be they men or women. And two members of the all-women's expedition to Annapurna didn't return. They died on the mountain.

They are among several handfuls of women who have died on high peaks. Two of the better-known Americans are the late Marty Hoye who fell to her death on Mt. Everest because her climbing harness either wasn't properly buckled or because it failed; and the late Devi Unsoeld, who died of an undiagnosed illness on the mountain for which she was named, Nanda Devi.

She'd been taken to it by her father, Willi, who previously had climbed Everest. She was "buried at sea," as it were, on the mountain by having her body pushed off a cliff. Her father died later, not in the Himalayas but in an avalanche on Mt. Rainier while guiding a party of young people.

This grim chronicle of climbers is why so many ask why they do what they do. But I suspect that's the wrong question. And I suspect Eileen M. knows this, too. I've never really asked her why directly and I'm sure if I did, she either wouldn't answer or would come up with something like the much-quoted British climber Mallory, who disappeared on Mt. Everest "because it is there."

That answer really doesn't tell us lowlanders anything and it is not supposed to. I think the reason most high climbers climb is because they have to, because it is a kind of fatal attraction. Once they have experienced the highest mountains, they are inevitably drawn back to them.

Since I've never climbed more than 20,000 feet, I, of course, can't really tell either, but I have a vague sort of hint. I once got as far as 11,000 in the Sierra Nevada and looked down on much of the range. It's an indescribable experience, somewhat like reaching out to touch the face of God.

Climbers might not like that but I think it is at least partly true. For them it is as close to the ultimate as any of us are likely to get before we pass from this earth. There's nothing between you and the rest of the universe except sky, thin sky at that. It's a kind of religious experience and whether high climbers think of it in precisely that way or not, some kind of mystic union with nature and what's beyond the world makes it worthwhile, makes them want to risk life and limb against altitude sickness, frostbite and falling to one's death.

It is, in truth, unexplainable.

I don't know, of course, for sure, if that's the way it was for Eileen M., but when we talked around the subject her eyes made me think it possible. Eileen's retired now and she's no longer doing the big ones, partly because of health reasons and partly in deference to her two daughters.

But I'm sure her heart is still in the highlands and that now and then she must think of that supreme moment on Annapurna when there was nothing between her and everything else that exists except the air, to paraphrase the poet Stephen Spender, "signed with her honor."

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.

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