Adventure Divas

by Holly Morris

  The next morning after Tourette’s-a-go-go, I invest in earplugs, one of very few items (another being grappa) that can be readily bought in the huts.

  We head out to the trail and I catch myself counting the plaques that dot the landscape, marking spots where climbers have fallen to their deaths. “That’s twenty-four,” I say to Ben. An hour later we stop and film a stone shelter adorned by simple crosses that houses pictures of smiling, once-vital, now-dead men in their twenties and thirties. Daniele. Valerio. Franco.

  There seems to be a calm acceptance that life in the Alps exacts its sacrifices. Pierre Giorgio is a consummate professional; safety-minded yet relaxed, hardworking but not neurotic, and completely blasé about the cameras. He hits his stride at altitude but is clearly grounded; I notice the faraway look endemic to mountaineers in his eyes. At the risk of imposing a chin-jutting Marlboro-man stereotype onto our Italian host, I venture that Pierre Giorgio is full of respect for these mountains, and for the community that stoically weathers a certain number of humans lost every year. That said, climbing’s accident rate is low compared to the sport’s public perception. But as with airline disasters, accidents that do happen resonate deeply in subconscious chambers.

  At the top of Cengia Alta, Pierre Giorgio introduces us to the old man of the mountains, ninety-three-year-old Bruno Detassis, who has beaten the odds time and again and lived a long life as a famously aggressive, first-ascent climber. Detassis dreamed up the Via Ferrata decades ago. Pierre Giorgio’s father helped make that dream a reality by camping on ledges, summer after summer, installing permanent protection in the form of iron cables to make these routes safe and accessible for “wannabes” like us. Droopy-eyed, but with ass-pinching spirit intact, Detassis is a revered mountaineer. He chats with us about glory days and then makes a memorable departure in a wire trolley basket (usually reserved for food) wearing a traditional Alpen climbing hat and trailing pipe smoke down the mountain. “That’s the best image in the show so far,” says K2-Keith with a grin.

  One might expect three-thousand-foot drops and fourteen-hour climbing days to be the main source of clenched jaws, but instead our strange and still stilted group dynamic seems to be the real source of a palpable tension, and the biggest obstacle to the task at hand: making a decent show and having pleasurable—nonfatal—experiences.

  Jeez, Ben and Digger really need to pull it together, I think. The two of them have been engaged in a power struggle since day one. Director Ben is in charge of the filming, Digger is in charge of the safety and climbing. Who trumps whom when the demands of their respective departments dictate different action? Strap on a bit of competitive spirit and ego, and a sunny walk amid the Alps can turn dark indeed. Boys can be so catty, I think.

  The lesson that communal quarters can be devoid of privacy, yet full of loneliness, crystallizes the next night when I overhear a conversation between K2 and Ben on my way back from brushing my teeth.

  “No, no, Keith, the shooting is not the problem, our presenter is,” says Ben. A hunk of crow goes down, ripping the soft pink flesh of my throat along the way. Me? I’m the problem? I don’t want to hear any more. I turn and go outside. I sit, knees to chest, huddling in my down parka, against the hut’s wooden planks, feeling like a failure. I watch my breath until a star pings off to the right in my peripheral vision.

  I get fetal in my bunk and stew, using my headlamp to scribble in my journal: “Am I just lonely, sore and in over my head—or do these guys just thrash out, rather than pull together, under pressure?” I shove in my ear plugs and resolve to talk to Director Ben in the morning; to be a professional—detached, unemotional, anything but personal, despite the fact that we as a climbing team hold one another’s lives in our hands on a daily basis and are intimately familiar with one another’s bodily functions.

  “Ben, can we talk? Things aren’t going well,” I say the next day, standing up straight, emboldened by the potential inherent to mornings. Ben and I walk off about a hundred yards, out of earshot of the others.

  “Working with you is like beating a dead horse” is his pull-no-punches opener. “Clearly you’d rather not be here.” (And clearly, Ben has been stewing too.) Ben feels, it seems, that my on-camera performance is lacking vitality.

  Oh where oh where are my nurturing feminist publishing colleagues of yore? Never again will I complain about potluck professional events, having to “check in” at the beginning of meetings, or even Judy Chicago posters. Give me estrogen over testosterone any day.

  I may be a bit low-energy, but it is hard to toss off witty one-liners to camera when every last electrolyte is going to the climbing task at hand. And, well, as an American, with a slight insecurity about the superiority of the British intellect, I may be overcompensating with excessive irony . . . crossing dangerously over the line into cheap sarcasm. I concede all this in my head, but of course, don’t give an inch. Instead, I lash back, “Well you, you, you just roll your eyes when you don’t like pieces to camera.” Ben has not overcoddled me as directors are wont to do, but his disdain for my work has been fairly obvious, which has sent more than one painful pulse to my vulnerable bladder. “How about a little constructive criticism?” I ask.

  While we are scrapping I steal a glance over at the crew. Pierre Giorgio is picking up his messages on his fuchsia cell phone; K2 is tinkering with his camera; TBQM is looking wistfully into the distance, thinking of far-off summits . . . or gouda. I turn back to Ben and lob more euphemisms about his insecurity under pressure; he kicks up scree about my lackluster performance. And after about ten minutes we are done. Basta. Finito. We both moved a bit, with me conceding that the physical challenge has dampened my host-perkiness quotient, and him alluding to fears about getting all of us working in concert, and up that mountain. We agree that our union is crucial to the team’s success. As the “creatives” on this project, the two of us have to work together to pull off this show.

  We continue to scramble up and along rocks, and the magnificent landscape begins to buff the edge off the human tension. On our last night, having completed the Dolomites, we have a few grappas, loosen up, and discuss the sub that still gurgles in the depths of the Barents Sea. Will they survive? Can they cope with the dark and cold? We can relate to the sailors and to the Cold War atmosphere that is affecting decisions. What’s more important, saving the sailors or protecting whatever mission they were on? “I can’t believe the Russians haven’t asked for submersible aid from other countries,” says Ben. We all agree, shake our heads, and bond in our disapproval.

  The bright red Glacier Express train carries us from Italy and away we slip, like an oyster down the gullet, into Switzerland—a bastion of neutrality that can surely offer the level playing field our group will need in order to pull together and tackle the Matterhorn.

  My youth was alive with the girl characters of these Alps. Sassy, how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like Maria . . . Maria . . . ? What was her name before Von Trapp? Anyway, Julie Andrews was so much fun until she married the captain. After the nuptials, gone were the days of puppeteering and playclothes-made-from-curtains! And Heidi, she kicked some alpine ass and had a very progressive thing going with Hans Peter before she got shipped off to the city. I can’t remember what happened to her after that.

  We start to unpack Swiss stereotypes by interviewing a champ yodeler in front of the gargantuan Aletsch Glacier and learn that the art is not simply background music for “hoist another stein” moments in the Alps. It is an ancient tradition, first recorded in the fourth century and born from the cowherd’s incantatory call across valleys to his charges, to his cowherd colleagues, and to the gods. Some even say the origin of the yodel is the cowherd’s reaction to stunning scenery and a reflection of the human soul. “A real yodel is a wordless communication,” the champ explains before she belts out an amazing string of sounds.

  “You try it, Holly,” Ben says.

  “No,” I clip.

  “I’m sensitive to you not wanting to mak
e a fool of yourself on telly, but give ’er a belt,” urges Ben.

  “Absolutely not,” I say firmly, skirting the edge of our delicate truce.

  Fondue is everywhere, and this is one cheesy cliché we can all agree on and participate in. Long, tough Swiss winters used to mean there was only old, unpalatable cheese to eat. Out of necessity fondue was born: Toss in a little wine, heat it up, and presto, cheesy fondue that made even stale bread tasty. Eating from one pot was symbolic of communal dining, and the Swiss to this day still show manners and kinship by keeping to their corner of the pot.

  The five of us sit in the bar of our hotel in swish Zermatt, chasing kinship through the gurgling mass of Gruyère before us. Our pokers clank against one another unceremoniously, creating a significant attrition rate. But after we discuss the flavor, the best way to twirl, and the consequences of losing one’s chunk of bread in the pot, the inevitable lull ensues.

  We once again take up . . . the Tragedy. The sailors in the submarine are all dead. They had survived for a while, as a note in a dead seaman’s pocket reveals: “All of the crew from the sixth, seventh, and eighth compartments went over to the ninth. We made the decision as a result of the accident. None of us can get to the surface.” Did they combust? Freeze? Suffocate? Most importantly, who made the fatal mistake? We are talking about death in the depths, but secretly our minds are on altitude. Adventure tragedies are due purely to human failure is the comforting lie that silently passes among us and goes down with the next glob of fondue. I look around at our quiet, chomping group. Like the sailors sealed together a hundred meters below, film crews and climbers also share a forced intimacy and interdependence. I am by turns excited and scared about climbing the Matterhorn; feeling both strong and weak; clinging to the thought that guts and Kodak courage can overcome a serious lack of skill and experience. I climbed Rainier last year, but that’s a cakewalk compared to this. I try not to think about the sailors whose adventure turned to tragedy—how they awaited their deaths, the world pitying them.

  The Matterhorn hangs in a funny balance between icon and cliché, a situation exacerbated by the town nestled near its base: the touristy, car-less town of Zermatt, which is like a postcard of itself. Zermatt is a spendy stop on the global tourist route and makes big bucks off those who will pay to experience risk. The town crawls with cell phones, top-flight mountain gear, an endless hawking of all things Matterhorn, and Internet cafés that serve triple chocolate cake.

  TO: JEANNIE

  FROM: HOLLY

  SUBJECT: BASE CAMP

  Jeannie—Dolomites were tough but am stronger now. Was pressured to yodel (I know, I know: tone-deaf). We’re in Zermatt awaiting the Assault. (That’s what the books call it—an Assault.) Did those football players you used to interview ever talk? These climbers don’t. What’s happening at hq?

  TO: HOLLY

  FROM: JEANNIE

  SUBJECT: CASH POOR

  Hol—No venture capitalists have come on board, unfortunately. The economy is really beginning to slump and the dot-com bust still has everyone feeling burned. You didn’t yodel, did you? As for the talking, well, that generation of jocks mostly expressed intimacy through butt slapping. I’m sure your guys are all just worried. A lot of pressure to get up a mountain and make TV.—Jeannie

  We take a clean, modern tram up to a viewing area in order to get some long shots of the mountain. The tram-train is filled with tourists and a few climbers. Who falls into which category is easy to distinguish by what comes tumbling out of their mouths upon seeing the Matterhorn for the first time up close: Is my exposure set right, honey? or Shit, have you ever seen such massive exposure, honey?

  A middle-aged American tourist in blue fleece hears that we are to climb. “I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars. No danke. Six people died last week up there. But honey, I feel you’ll be all right,” she says, patting me on the thigh, “and I’m a bit of a psychic.”

  “Six fatalities in one week?” I say to the psychic. She nods solemnly, as if to reiterate her no-danke stance. Digger does not look up from his magazine.

  “Lots of people have climbed it”—my dad’s parting words collide with the psychic’s—and lots of people have died on it. The indifferent stone citadel that fills the train window has claimed more lives than any mountain in the Alps, which may be why it remains a siren to climbers worldwide.

  I tire of my own melodrama and spend the rest of the tram ride playing travel Scrabble with an Australian teen. “A-N-C-H-O-R. Anchor,” she says, eleven points.

  The next day, we walk through Zermatt’s climber’s cemetery before setting off for Hörnli Hut, our starting point. Ice axes drape tombstones that bear the dates of birth and death of those who have died on the Matterhorn.

  DAVID ROBINSON OF WAKEFIELD AND BANGOR NORTH WALES WHOSE UNTIMELY DEATH AT THE AGE OF 24 YEARS OCCURRED WHILE DESCENDING THE HöRNLI RIDE HAVING CLIMBED THE NORTH FACE OF THE MATTERHORN, says one. Another reads simply: TAUGWALDER FRONZISCUS “I CHOSE TO CLIMB.”

  Edward Whymper was the first to summit the Matterhorn in 1865, along with six others in his team—four of whom died on the descent and are buried here. Whymper and his contemporaries were an understated lot who took to the mountains in the name of the Queen and good air; this was long before the commodification of “adventure.” No Gore-Tex, no helmets, no crampons; they roped to one another and learned through experience, some of it tough. Their hazards will be ours—falling rock, avalanche, the fatal misstep—but because they could not rely on modern equipment and cell phones, they must have been far superior mountaineers to those of us who try it today. They also had time—to watch the mountain, to make many attempts, to talk to one another. They did not have to dash back to the office on Monday morning. Whymper, who was a lithographic artist and illustrator by profession, had been hired by a London publisher to make sketches of Alpine peaks, a job that gave him time to conjure and do reconnaissance missions that would inform his eighth, and successful, attempt on this mountain long considered unsummitable. “Toil he must who goes mountaineering, but out of toil comes strength (not merely muscular energy—more than that), an awakening of all the faculties; and from the strength arises pleasure,” wrote Whymper in his golden years. There was a good deal of competition regarding who would first summit the Matterhorn. Those early attempts seem, through the lens of history, so pure compared to ours. A relatively few men blazing unknown trails. In a funny way, we compete against ourselves, but they . . . well . . . they looked right down the barrel of the unknown. They thought: Can it be done? We think: Can I do it?

  Why climb if you can die doing it? What is it that makes us intentionally tango with the Maker? The draw seems more than just getting to a beautiful place to commune with the secular power of nature. The yearn to climb has to do with mortality and vitality being inextricably wed. The delicate glacier, the narrow ledge, the capriciousness of the elements all require us to Pay Attention—to our moves and our lives. Thus, fear gets transformed, through action, into vitality. To live in that complete present is the goal, the moment of the take. To feel, for an extended period of time, that any moment may be your last (which I did every time my leg slipped off a ledge or ladder in the Via Feratta) makes you realize that you like—and want to keep—your life, and switches vita from black-and-white to color. Bachendri Pal calls it “the difference between being fully alive and just living” (N-U-T-G-R-A-B, sixty points).

  So is it merely competitive machismo that drives mountaineers to high places with little oxygen and plenty of hazards? Or is the act—for the viscerally inclined—one of leaving entropy behind and chasing a perfect bit of prose poem, a rhapsodic bolero, the last answer in the Sunday New York Times crossword?

  Whatever the answer, I’m sure it didn’t apply to the guys in the sub.

  We hike several hours up to the Hörnli Hut, launching point for the Assault. A few relieved and giddy climbers who have already summitted sit at nearby tables, basking in their success and the su
n. To the right and straight up looms the Matterhorn, in all its 14,690-feet-above-sea-level glory.

  When my aunt Donna heard about my going on this trek, she banged the mountain up on the Internet and wailed from the other room, “Haaahleee, good God, don’t do it—have you seen how pointy it is?” Her words come to me now as I crane my neck and take in the sheer, pointy, unfathomably vertical rock before us.

  Already-high tension peaks to a sour pitch. The mountain seems different to me after hearing that it claimed those six lives. We all make ourselves feel better by saying it must have been those “crazy Czechs” who never rope up, since they were so recently unleashed politically (a superficial analysis that bounces among climbers, and that we readily accept). Digger says the plan is to conquer the mountain in one day. Light packs. Stealth filming.

  “Vee vill have good veather,” says sixty-four-year-old Ricky Andematten, who has met us at the Hörnli. Ricky has a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and a matching thick bunch of hair on his head. He will be my personal guide as well as the team’s lead guide. Like Pierre Giorgio, Ricky has climbing in his blood. He is a fourth-generation Swiss Matterhorn guide.

  We do not all bunk in the same room in the Hörnli Hut, which is a blessing as I have lost my earplugs. Ben and I, the tension between us now at a very low simmer, are roommates for a couple of days. Aside from our potentially lethal-smelling socks, our room is a sanctuary from the stories of mountain fatalities zinging around the hut. There is no escape, however, from the periodic buzz of helicopters on rescue missions (“Those damn Czechs!”). We look out our small window and see orange sarcophagi chained below the choppers as they zoom by. One time the limbs that hang out of the sling have the limpness of death. Two times they do not.