Revisiting Books Long Since Read 9 - Joe Simpson

Of Mountains and of Men (mostly) 

By their very size mountains of necessity loom large in the human psyche. In the summer, those who live in hot climes like to travel into their bosom to escape the heat of the plains and, of course, to flee from the noise and frustration of the cities. In winter many people like to travel thither to enjoy such pursuits as skiing, tobogganing or snowboarding. Even when the traveller has no such end in view merely to be in the mountains is exhilarating.

Some mountaineer was once asked why he climbed mountains and his reply was simply “because they are there!” It appears to this writer that we all have “an inner landscape” which we have to travel as well as the more obvious outer one, be it mountainous or otherwise. We have to use the concrete images of the things before us to describe the things of the mind – hence this basic metaphorical thrust of all language and of my language here. This post is dealing with minds and mountains. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, used the metaphors of mountain and cliff to describe how treacherous the mind may be to its owner. The poet indubitably was a depressive himself and wrote many poems from a deep, lonely, dejected and melancholic place. I’ll let the poet speak for himself:

Oh, the mind, mind has mountains,
Cliffs of fall, frightful sheer, 
No man fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.

The Mountaineer, Joe Simpson

These lines are from the Sonnet 41, “No worst, there is none." The depressed person could feel, like Hopkins, that they are “hanging there” over those “cliffs of fall, frightful sheer.” Hopkins cautions us not to “hold cheap” or undervalue or even dismiss the mental state of others. Salutary words indeed.

Joe Simpson was born in 1960 and is still a relatively young man. He is a mountaineer, but in more recent years has become a motivational speaker and a writer. He has admitted that he drifted into writing quite simply because he had wanted to explain to the world what had actually happened when Simon Yates and he climbed Siula Grande in the Peruvian Alps in 1985. In an interview with Jon Doran for Climber magazine, Simpson told him that he had written Touching The Void to get the story straight and to defend the actions of his great friend Simon Yates who had to cut the rope linking the two when Simpson had fallen over a precipice. By 1995 the book had snowballed into a rampant success that had sold over 300,000 copies and been translated into more than 14 languages. Needless to say, most of the purchasers or readers were not climbers – rather, they were stay-at-home Joes or armchair climbers like the present reviewer.

It is noteworthy that Simpson mentions “passion” and “obsession” when he talks about mountaineering and mountains. Undoubtedly, it is these two qualities that he carries over into his writing. Honesty is Simpson’s hallmark as a writer, as it is of all good writers. At base, if the writing in a book is honest then it is good writing. That’s the general consensus anyway of the experts.

For survivors of a disaster, the telling and re-telling of the story is undoubtedly therapeutic. Indeed, the telling of stories, whether tragic or not, is a particularly important way of giving meaning to our lives. Simpson himself admits that he fears re-reading his own book in case he may relive the most harrowing experience of his whole life, the experience of dangling over the edge of a crevasse, over a dark abyss of nothingness and probable extinction.

Here’s a little from Jon Doran’s interview in Climber which I think is interesting:

My memories of falling and the avalanche are absolutely vivid. The problem comes when you are trying to articulate them beyond just the emotions ... when I tried to write that piece in Ghosts, I just tried to be back in the avalanche ... I can remember the terror, I can actually remember the physical sensation of what it was like and I can remember hanging by that fucking rope on the Dru. The best way I can describe that feeling is by standing on top of a skyscraper and a mate goes woooo ... pushes you off, then grabs hold of you." "That," he continues. "Is why Peru really fucked me up: writing Touching The Void wasn't cathartic in any way, it just scared the shit out of me. I had to recall all these things. I used to wake up in a cold sweat every night ... John [Stephenson] used to say there were these nightmarish screams and howls coming from my room. To go through all the blocks you've put there in your mind to stop yourself remembering was actually quite painful, quite disturbing and maybe that's why I don't particularly want to read Touching The Void. See the following link for the full article: http://www.nozzer.demon.co.uk/simpson.html  

Like all good books Touching The Void opens simply and beautifully with an experience any of us who has ever done the least amount of camping can associate with: “I was lying in my sleeping bag, staring at the light filtering through the red and green fabric of the dome tent. Simon was snoring loudly, occasionally twitching in his dream world. We could have been anywhere. There is a particular anonymity about being in tents.” (p. 15) What a marvellously clear and powerful opening this is - bringing us right into his experience. Then his later description of breaking his leg and falling is simple and startling:

I hit the slope at the base of the cliff before I saw it coming. I was facing into the slope and both knees locked as I struck it. I felt a shattering blow in my knee, felt bones splitting, and screamed. The impact catapulted me over backwards and down the slope of the East face. I slid, head-first, on my back. The rushing speed of it confused me. I thought of the drop below and felt nothing. Simon would be ripped off the mountain. He couldn’t hold this. I screamed again as I jerked to a sudden stop. (p. 72)

Yates manages to get to Simpson and help him. They know they have to go on or they’ll die out there on the mountainside. Even with a broken leg, Joe kept on. He was to fall a few more times after this, and then finally and almost fatally over the edge of the crevasse. The descriptions of these falls are frighteningly vivid. The reader’s heart is in his/her mouth. Then the simple stark description of Yates cutting the rope that connected them because he was in danger of being pulled off the mountain is brilliantly succinct and is told in Yates' own words:  “I reached down again and this time I touched the blade to the rope. It needed no pressure. The taut rope exploded at the touch of the blade, and I flew backwards into the seat as the pulling strain vanished. I was shaking.” (p. 103) There are too many good descriptive passages to quote here, but this little piece is a terrifying beauty as he dangles over the crevasse:

I turned the torch off to save the batteries. The darkness seemed more oppressive than ever. Discovering what I had fallen into hadn’t cleared my mind. I was alone. The silent emptiness, and the dark, and the star-filled hole above, mocked my thoughts of escape. I could only think of Simon. He was the only chance of escape, but somehow I was convinced if he was not dead, then he would think that I was.” (p. 113)

To cut a long story short, Simpson miraculously climbed out or down the crevasse and literally crawled his way back (with a broken leg) to camp where he was reunited with Simon Yates and their friend Richard. In an epilogue written ten years later, I can only marvel at Simpson’s final words: “I can only add that however painful readers may think our experiences were, for me this book still falls short of articulating just how dreadful were some of those lonely days. I simply could not find the words to express the utter desolation of the experience.” (p. 206).

In another interview, Simpson stresses that his drive to live during those terrible days was motivated by sheer loneliness and the desire to be hugged and at least die in some human embrace. This thought moves me deeply inside. A good teacher friend of mine, Pat Fanning, goes to Zambia each summer holidays to work with children stricken by various diseases as well as the AIDS virus and he often describes emotionally how one little boy tugged at his sleeve to lift him up and cuddle him. He died in Pat’s arms. I will always marvel at that deep desire within us for human intimacy. When Magnus Magnusson was presenting Joe Simpson with the 1989 NCR Award he said, and his words are worth pondering, “It is not just a book about mountaineering. Ultimately it is about the spirit of man and the life force that drives us all.” Let these few words honour the awesome and terrible beauty that is our human spirit when we look into the abyss.

Of Mountains and of Morality

The second book by Joe Simpson is Dark Shadows Falling (Vintage 1998). If anything, Joe Simpson is a romantic at heart, obsessed with mountains in their dangerous splendour and in their treacherous beauty. Climbing mountains for him is not merely a matter of some ego trip but rather an encounter with both the depths of his own psyche and the rich, if dangerous, beauty of their rocky fastness. Only secondarily has it anything to do with the ego per se.

The Tibetans, and indeed the Nepalese, look upon Everest, which is located on their borders, as a sacred mountain that looms large with craggy splendour over their beautiful countries. Tibetans, like the Nepalese, are a very spiritual people – practically all Buddhists. We only have to call to mind that wonderful world figure of peace the Dalai Lama to remind us of this simple fact. I loved the small quotation on the frontispiece of the book. This quotation runs: “…what is Everest without the eye that sees it? It is the hearts of men that make it big or small.” It is from Tenzing Norgay (May 1914 – 9 May 1986), often referred to as Sherpa Tenzing, a Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer. He and Edmund Hillary were the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest on 29 May 1953. His statement is a typically Buddhist sentiment - the perceiver brings so much to the phenomena he or she perceives. Buddhism was always aware of this fact and has long been practising meditation techniques to lessen and ultimately, if possible, obliterate the ego which would see Everest as a prize to be won.

All climbers would agree with these humble sentiments. This book Dark Shadows Falling deals with the morality of modern-day climbers who are more ego-centred thrill-seekers with little respect for themselves, others or indeed the sacred mountain which is, as it were, a physical symbol of their very own deeper selves if they had thought long enough about it. These last are my sentiments as I write from a meditator’s and a Buddhist’s point of view and are not necessarily those of the author, though they seem to be easily implied from what he writes.

In 1992, an Indian climber was left to die alone high on the South Col of Mount Everest by other climbers who watched his feebly waving hand from the security of their tent thirty yards away. Why did these onlookers not hold the dying man’s hand and comfort him? In short, Joe Simpson feels that the noble caring instincts that once characterised mountaineering have been lost and lost for good. Why? Well, Everest has become in our modern world, which keeps on looking for further thrills, a playground for the rich, where commercial operators now offer guided tours and these have the cheek to camp amidst the detritus and unburied corpses of previous less fortunate climbers. Worse still, they are seemingly immune to dying climbers on their way up the tallest and noblest mountain in the world. At the end of the Introduction, Simpson describes the lonely death of one climber succinctly in these words: “They let him die alone for reasons best known to themselves. Perhaps they did not want to face his dying; maybe the finality of it was too intimidating for them to face.” (p. 14)

Further on, Simpson presents the reader with a beautifully poetic and moving prose passage on dying alone in the open:

I can only guess at how close I came to dying in Peru in 1985 when Simon Yates cut the rope and I plunged into the crevasse on Siula Grande. I have spoken to a number of doctors since, all of whom have suggested that, given the circumstances, I should have died. Although there was a lot of pain and anguish and hardship during the four days in which I struggled to survive, it was the dreadful loneliness that still deeply unsettles me. Much of what I did at that time was instinctive; or due to experience, but what kept me going for so long when all seemed lost was the desperate desire for company. I went beyond caring whether I lived or died so long as I did not have to die alone. I wanted a hand to hold, a voice to hear. I craved for some human contact that might alleviate the terrifying emptiness of those days spent slowly dying. (p. 23)

This verbal record of Simpson’s conscience serves as a clarion call to a morality or an ethical code for mountaineering and is a priceless piece of writing in comparison with the Dutch mountaineer Ronald Naar’s unsympathetic, dispassionate and cruelly egotistical comments in his equally egotistically-named book Only The Summit Counts.  Simpson continues: “Because I felt myself balanced on the edge of nothingness, I have already partly died, and I don’t look forward to the day when I have to do it again. Because of that, I think I have some sense of what the Indian climber on the South Col may have experienced. A little imagination and a degree of compassion are all any of us needs to understand his plight.” (p. 23)

Simpson recounts how some Japanese mountaineers climbed past three dying Indian climbers and not once went to offer any aid (the mid-1990s). In Simpson’s words: “The Japanese did not speak to the Indians or examine them in any way. They carried on for another 50 metres before stopping for a brief rest and to change their oxygen bottles. They even took in a little food and liquid nourishment within the sight of the dying Indians…. By 2:30 p.m., after a further three and a half hours of climbing, Hiroshi Hanada and Eisuki Shigekawa had fulfilled their dream – one that they were prepared to stop at nothing to achieve. Helping others had no part in that dream into which they had bought.” (p. 47) Undoubtedly, one has to agree with Simpson and with the best legal advice that no one is ever obligated to go to the aid of another human being, but surely it is a basic value of our society to desire to do so? What has happened that the prizes of the ego outweigh the ethical values we as a society hold dear?  Simpson quotes Shigekawa as saying: “Above 8000 metres is not a place where people can afford morality.” (p. 48)

I loved these few lines a little later in this book as they appeal to the Buddhist in me: “After reaching the summit of Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953, Sherpa Tensing said that as he climbed he craved forgiveness for every step he cut into her side. To the Sherpas, the mountain is the abode of the gods, a place for reverence, not something to be conquered for the sake of personal glory and the embellishment of the ego.” (p. 61-62) Unfortunately, today this holy mountain is littered with the detritus of years of climbing by Westerners mostly. As of the end of the 2006 climbing season, there have been 3,050 ascents to the summit, by 2,062 individuals, and 203 people have died on the mountain. The conditions are so difficult that most of the corpses have been left where they fell; some of them are easily visible from the standard climbing routes. Apart from this, there is a horrible picture at the centre of the book of a terrible insult to nature which shows loads of rubbish abandoned at the South Coll – hundreds of empty oxygen cylinders, old tents, various poles, old sleeping bags as well as the body of a dead Sherpa.

Without a doubt, death and high drama have always been synonymous with high-altitude climbing.  Humans desire to push their mortality to the brink and desire to come back safe therefrom. Eleven climbers perished on Everest in the spring season of 1996 while 87 reached the summit. These are cold statistics worth meditating upon because they show us the very nature of humankind. Simpson muses: “Some climbers have risked their lives, others have died, selflessly attempting to rescue fellow mountaineers, regardless of fault and criticism. Others have sat by and zipped the door shut on a man’s final lonely end.” (p. 197) I think I know which of the two kinds of climbers I’d like to count myself a member of. Who can say as I’ve never been in that situation? I only hope and believe that I should belong to the former group. Joe Simpson asked the simple question – since when did means ever justify the ends in mountaineering? The same question can surely be asked of all human beings no matter in what situation they find themselves.