osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2017-10-24 05:50 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2017-10-24 05:50 pm
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Book Review: Into Thin Air
I just read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, which - okay, Julie arrived home while I was about two-thirds of the way through the book, and we had planned to watch Frankenstein, and I told her, “I’m sorry, but I’m in a blizzard on Everest right now.”
Fortunately she had read Into Thin Air, so she understood.
It’s just fascinating in a “for want of a nail…” sort of way to watch all these little, little mistakes add up to a disaster that killed eight climbers in one night. The ropes for the final ascent weren’t fixed beforehand - so that slows the climbers down. There’s an extra team on the mountain that day, which adds a bottleneck, and that slows things down. They ought to turn back, but Rob Hall, the most experienced & responsible guide, didn’t set a solid turnaround time, because - this is conjecture, but I think it’s pretty solidly supported - he’s dead set on getting his client Doug Hansen up the mountain, because Doug had nearly summitted the year before and Rob convinced him to give it another go-round (at a steep discount) because he felt bad for making him turn last that time.
This seemed especially tragic to me: he’s destroyed not by carelessness or greed but by one of his good qualities, his loyalty to a friend. (One of the last times anyone saw him, he had an arm around Doug’s shoulder to help him the last little bit up to the summit. That made me tear up. It’s like something out a war movie.) And yet, in conjunction with all the other little mistakes that kept them on the mountain too late, when a blizzard blows up Rob and Doug and two other members of his expedition all die.
This is all extra-fascinating because, in a horrible coincidence, Krakauer was part of that expedition from the start - so he’s writing about people that he knew, not people that he’s piecing together after the fact by the evidence they left behind. This gives it all a tremendous immediacy: he doesn’t have to deconstruct the way that it unfolded, the confusion and “fog of war” (as it were), he was there.
And I think that actually makes it easier to understand how such a disaster could happen. Krakauer understands from the inside the intense desire to reach the summit that propelled all three teams on the mountain that day to keep climbing, and even more importantly, the disorienting physical effects of the thin air and the extreme cold. If people seemed to be acting irrationally - of course they were acting irrationally! Their brains cells were literally dying from oxygen depletion! Their irrationality is not a moral failing but a physical side effect of climbing Everest. I don’t think that someone who hadn’t experienced that for themselves could have evoked it so intensely.
(One thing I like about Krakauer's books is that he's very sympathetic to people even if they made mistakes. He realizes that even the most competent of us sometimes fuck up - and in an environment as hostile as the summit of Mount Everest, even small mistakes can kill you - and there's a sort of self-protective cruelty to the way people will sneer at these little mistakes, as if making a mistake means that the dead deserved their fates.)
The book both clarifies why people climb Everest (because it’s there, basically; because a certain kind of person wants to climb everything that’s there), and makes it look crazier than ever, because it’s so deadly. I’ve used war metaphors a couple of times in this review, because it does strike me that there’s a resonance there, both in the camaraderie that develops among climbers and the confusion when disaster strikes - but it’s a war against a foe that is unconquerable, that won’t even notice you’re there in the moment when you’re standing on the summit proudly proclaiming that you’ve won.
Plus it just sounds miserable. Krakauer says he lost twenty pounds on the climb, because he was putting forth so much physical effort but the thin air made him nauseous and unable to sleep well. And apparently this is pretty common. I could see the appeal of climbing shorter mountains, but once the air’s so thin that it makes you sick - God, it just sounds like hell.
Fortunately she had read Into Thin Air, so she understood.
It’s just fascinating in a “for want of a nail…” sort of way to watch all these little, little mistakes add up to a disaster that killed eight climbers in one night. The ropes for the final ascent weren’t fixed beforehand - so that slows the climbers down. There’s an extra team on the mountain that day, which adds a bottleneck, and that slows things down. They ought to turn back, but Rob Hall, the most experienced & responsible guide, didn’t set a solid turnaround time, because - this is conjecture, but I think it’s pretty solidly supported - he’s dead set on getting his client Doug Hansen up the mountain, because Doug had nearly summitted the year before and Rob convinced him to give it another go-round (at a steep discount) because he felt bad for making him turn last that time.
This seemed especially tragic to me: he’s destroyed not by carelessness or greed but by one of his good qualities, his loyalty to a friend. (One of the last times anyone saw him, he had an arm around Doug’s shoulder to help him the last little bit up to the summit. That made me tear up. It’s like something out a war movie.) And yet, in conjunction with all the other little mistakes that kept them on the mountain too late, when a blizzard blows up Rob and Doug and two other members of his expedition all die.
This is all extra-fascinating because, in a horrible coincidence, Krakauer was part of that expedition from the start - so he’s writing about people that he knew, not people that he’s piecing together after the fact by the evidence they left behind. This gives it all a tremendous immediacy: he doesn’t have to deconstruct the way that it unfolded, the confusion and “fog of war” (as it were), he was there.
And I think that actually makes it easier to understand how such a disaster could happen. Krakauer understands from the inside the intense desire to reach the summit that propelled all three teams on the mountain that day to keep climbing, and even more importantly, the disorienting physical effects of the thin air and the extreme cold. If people seemed to be acting irrationally - of course they were acting irrationally! Their brains cells were literally dying from oxygen depletion! Their irrationality is not a moral failing but a physical side effect of climbing Everest. I don’t think that someone who hadn’t experienced that for themselves could have evoked it so intensely.
(One thing I like about Krakauer's books is that he's very sympathetic to people even if they made mistakes. He realizes that even the most competent of us sometimes fuck up - and in an environment as hostile as the summit of Mount Everest, even small mistakes can kill you - and there's a sort of self-protective cruelty to the way people will sneer at these little mistakes, as if making a mistake means that the dead deserved their fates.)
The book both clarifies why people climb Everest (because it’s there, basically; because a certain kind of person wants to climb everything that’s there), and makes it look crazier than ever, because it’s so deadly. I’ve used war metaphors a couple of times in this review, because it does strike me that there’s a resonance there, both in the camaraderie that develops among climbers and the confusion when disaster strikes - but it’s a war against a foe that is unconquerable, that won’t even notice you’re there in the moment when you’re standing on the summit proudly proclaiming that you’ve won.
Plus it just sounds miserable. Krakauer says he lost twenty pounds on the climb, because he was putting forth so much physical effort but the thin air made him nauseous and unable to sleep well. And apparently this is pretty common. I could see the appeal of climbing shorter mountains, but once the air’s so thin that it makes you sick - God, it just sounds like hell.
no subject
That thing about pinning blame on people for making mistakes--yeah, like somehow tiny failings make you worthy of death! But I think you're right that it's a self-protective thing. I think it's linked to the instinct that makes you yell at the screen in a horror movie, "Don't split up!" or "Take off those high-heeled shoes" or whatever.
no subject
People seem to find it very hard to separate "someone made mistakes that contributed to their death" (and when someone dies while climbing Everest, well, if nothing else their decision to climb Everest in the first place definitely contributed!) from "and therefore they DESERVED TO DIE." Krakauer quotes a few letters in the book from people who believed that he implied the second because he said the first, even though he actually portrays pretty much everyone in the most sympathetic light possible. Anyone who reads Into Thin Air and decides Rob Hall deserved it because he made a few bad choices is reading furiously against the text.
no subject
I don't know what to say about Everest, to be honest.
no subject
I may put off Under the Banner of Heaven for a few months just so space out the delight of reading Jon Krakauer, but it's definitely on my list.