Like Chauncey Gardner in Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There,” I like to watch. Far be it from me to actually “engage” with this illusory existence, when I can get up to speed by simply hauling out the books and maps and spend the day going from one to the other sprawled out on the floor in front of the fireplace.
Not that I don’t find the company of others rewarding, it’s just that I seldom find myself in the company of others and when I do, I’m often paying more attention to whatever agenda I rode in on than actually participating in any communal sense. I mean, if you’re going to be neurotic, be deeply neurotic.
One thing generally leads to another when moseying down these undesignated paths. You start out in the microcosm — targeting the particular — but, then, dots that desperately wish to be connected begin appearing and, before you know it, retracing your steps back to the original trailhead becomes akin to descending Everest in the dark.
Don’t you just love it when an analogy becomes a segue. Late last week, the world once again changed. The news from Auckland that Sir Edmund Hillary had passed arrived as if driven into the door with an ice axe.
It had been Big Ed, of course, who along with his sidekick, the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, first summited Everest back in 1953. “We knocked the bastard off,” he announced with a huge grin upon returning to base camp.
It would be how the humble New Zealand beekeeper spent the rest of his days, however, that would forge him into the larger-than-life planetary icon he became. As hands-on head of the “Himalayan Trust,” he saw to the construction of a couple of dozen “classrooms in the clouds and hilltop hospitals” for the people of Nepal.
There was also the matter of 12 bridges and assorted landing strips put in place not for the outside world but for those indigenous to the high narrow valleys those whom he had grown to love and, in turn, had grown to love him.
It was never about imposing an outside sensibility, he would remind critics. “These are all things that the local people wanted, and we just responded.” The work would give him “more satisfaction than any footprint on a mountain,” he would say.
But all this is just to explain why the huge National Geographic map of Mount Everest and its environs currently takes up such a large portion of the living room floor. It’s not part of a grieving process, by any stretch much more of a celebration of a life lived to the fullest and the singular accomplishment that first brought it attention.
I mean it’s a given that any guy who likes to watch has got to retrace the initial route taken by the 1953 British-led expedition all the way from the liquor store in Kathmandu to the summit of what Tibetans refer to as “Qomolangma.”
The last time the map spent any quality time laid out on the carpet was probably during the “1999 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition” when Conrad Anker located George Mallory’s partially exposed body at 27,000 feet on the North Face. In the photo, George looked pretty good considering he’d been there for 75 years.
And since we’re on this part of the peak, may as well check out Reinhold Messner’s 1980 oxygen-free solo romp up the North Col, across the North Face, and straight up the Great Couloir (thereby bypassing the infamous Second Step on the North-East Ridge). If I didn’t know better, I’d think there might be some dot-connecting digressions going on here.
So where were we? Oh yeah, over on the South Side in 1953 trekking with Hillary and the Brits through the Khumbu Icefall, up the Western Cwm, and on a route previously established by Norgay and a Swiss climber, across Lhotse Face and on to the South Col. I love it when I talk like that!
Nine camps had been established as Sherpas transported tons of gear on their backs ever upward into ever-thinning air. Big Ed and Tenzing were the designated “end links” along this chain to “conquer” Everest and, once the first assault party returned without success, they did just that.
After climbing what came to be known as Hillary Step, “I continued hacking steps along the ridge and then up a few more to the right. To my great delight, I realized we were on top of Mount Everest and that the whole world spread out below us” Hillary recalled. It was 11.30 a.m. on May 29, 1953, and their lives would never be the same.
News reached the rest of the world the same day as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Big Ed would have Knighthood thrust upon him and be forced to purchase a new, second pair of beekeeper overalls “for occasions of state.” I wonder what he thought about the “colony collapse disorder” currently plaguing the beekeper industry worldwide.
For Tenzing, it would be “a long road from a mountain coolie, a bearer of loads, to a wearer of a coat with rows of medals who is carried about in planes and worries about income tax.”
As far as how these two humble climbers spent time together through the years, Hillary noted that “we talked about our families; talked about the world and its problems; talked about just about everything. But we never ever once talked about Everest.” They had been there and done that.
With the spirit of Tenzing Norgay having begun its afterlife journey over twenty years ago, perhaps the beekeeper and the Sherpa once again share a summit. Maybe now, after all these years, they too like to watch.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.