Above the Clouds

by Kilian, Jornet

  I climbed a few more meters of easy terrain until the next vertical section, about 20 meters of ice, only a few centimeters thick and covering smooth rock. I drove in an ice axe and saw that the pick went in easily. Too easily. The hard, solid ice I had found until then had become a slush of frozen snow that stuck to the rock. I put my weight on the ice axe and slipped, dragging the slush down. God damn it!

  I HAD FALLEN IN LOVE WITH THIS WALL A FEW DAYS AFTER EMELIE and I arrived in Romsdal. It wasn’t as high as the neighboring Trollveggen, or as beautiful as Romsdalshorn. I saw it every time I went to town, distant and close at the same time. I hadn’t found a single book that talked about it, or any map or route, and this made it all the more attractive. It was a 600-meter stone wall facing north, eternally in shadow. From the town, you could see its shape, vertical black granite, with thin waterfalls of ice that appeared and disappeared in the middle of the wall, and an ice goulotte, or chute, that went down diagonally from one of the sides but was abruptly left hanging about 100 meters from the ground, which meant that to reach it you had to climb those 100 meters of smooth rock. It was extremely vertical, impossible to climb without gear. However, luck had sent a wind from the north, bringing snow that fell not vertically but sideways, and with the humidity from the sea, the snow and ice had stayed literally stuck to the wall. This was a gift, and now I had a chance to reach the goulotte I saw every day.

  When I reached that point, I realized the ice was thick enough to support my weight on vertical terrain. Doubt took hold of my entire being; that day my brain told me I was going to climb the wall, but once I was there . . . I still had the option of carefully climbing down the 80 meters I’d climbed up and skiing back home, or climbing another nearby mountain to let off steam. But no. I tried the assault again, looking for a weak spot in the waterfall. First I approached it from the right, but the ice didn’t get any thicker. I went down a few meters until I found solid ice and took the opportunity to stretch my arms. The goulotte was only about 20 meters away, and before going down I tried one last time to the left. I’d wanted to avoid that side of the waterfall because it was at the edge of the rock, which was made up of completely smooth, vertical sheets, and I could see that the ice was no thicker than 10 centimeters. Here we go—fantastic! As I drove the first ice axe in, I felt some ice a little more solid than what was in the middle of the waterfall. Here at least it supported weight, but since it was so thin, I couldn’t plunge the ice axe in hard; that could crack the thick part of the ice. I drove it in gently, until one or two teeth sunk in, then I lifted my foot, barely touching the ice, and used an opening of rock to rest the tip of my crampon. Holding my breath, I climbed the 20 vertical meters quickly until the ice thickened again. A couple of meters slightly collapsed from ice accumulation forced me to drive the ice axes in hard and not look down into the 100-meter void there must have been between my legs. I clung so hard to the ice axes that if one of my hands or feet gave way, I was sure I’d still be able to hold on.

  When I reached the beginning of the goulotte, I took a deep breath and let out all my fear and adrenaline. The difficulties seemed less pronounced, or at least weren’t as constant, but from then on, the only way out was up. If I came upon some insurmountable difficulty, I wouldn’t be able to climb back down. I kept climbing, finding obstacles at every step and deciding where to keep going, trusting blindly in my intuition.

  I know perfectly well that many people think the line between total commitment and thoughtlessness is very thin, if indeed they think there is a line at all. The most plausible result of a fall from a great height is death, and any exception would come down to extraordinary luck. But what lies behind an accepted commitment, even in unfamiliar terrain, is the result of a careful study of conditions and painstaking planning, after scrutinizing the difficulties over and over, from the foot of a wall or from other peaks.

  You must have the risks implied by a technical climb ingrained in your mind, and know that you’re good enough to overcome them. A climb can be easy, moderate, comfortable, or extremely difficult, and based on this, you accept or reject the challenge. If you fall, it will be because you overestimated your technical skill or made a mistake, including in choosing your equipment.

  You also have to be careful about the dangers the mountain itself presents: the risk of avalanches, the ice quality or loose rock, the weather—many factors can intervene. But no matter how committed you are, you always have to accept that there’s an element of chance, and that you can’t always be in control. You have to muster a thousand resources to be able to make a quick decision, and the right one if it happens to be necessary.

  The perception of risk is a personal matter. While it’s true that it depends on an equation involving individual ability and experience, and the conditions and difficulties of the mountain in question, committing to a climb is always a personal choice.

  I CAME TO THE LAST STRETCH OF ROCK AND GLIMPSED THE LEDGE that had formed on the ridge, climbed those meters calmly, reached the top of the wall and the summit, then went down the other side.

  Since it was still early and I had the whole day ahead of me, I climbed up to another peak, and another, and then another, until the horizon began to slice through the sun. Finally, I decided to go home, satisfied to have conquered my fears that day.

  Experiences That Changed Me Forever

  We were searching for shade under large tropical trees. The heat had turned the mighty riverbed into an oven. We had reached a wide beach, at a point where the deep canyon widened a little, allowing the sun to filter in through the thick jungle. The sun burned our skin, but a gentle breeze lifted the stifling, sultry air. We were covered in dust and mud.

  We’d been waiting all day for the helicopter that would take us back to Kathmandu. We’d taken the heaviest stones from the beach and used them to mark a flat area where the helicopter could land. The silence of the sky, though, was absolute. We had to move the heavy body a couple of times. Though we had wrapped it in plastic bags, when the sun bore down on it, the smell was unbearable.

  The day before, we had carried the remains of that anonymous man down paths buried by rockslides, until we found the beach. You wouldn’t believe how heavy a corpse can be. On the most technical stretches, we’d needed five or six people. And without really knowing how, we were sharing what little food we had left with half a dozen guys from Tzahal, the Israel Defense Forces. We didn’t talk much since obviously the atmosphere was kind of weird.

  They had come to search for their friend, hoping he’d survived the earthquake that shook Nepal that spring in 2015, and we had just spent a week getting our backpacks ready to try to climb Everest as part of the Summits of My Life project. It was an odd mixture: three committed pacifists and six soldiers from the Gaza border. The exhaustion was starting to show. They hadn’t been able to find their friend alive, but they were determined to bury him in his home country. For our part, we weren’t sure why we’d agreed to help with this expensive and pointless enterprise, to recover a body from a valley where three hundred more were buried beneath the rubble.

  In the last few days as we climbed through the valley, we had found dozens of dead bodies, which we reported via satellite to the Kathmandu embassies and the military units of different countries that had dared to deploy to the area. The earthquake had been a true catastrophe for Nepal, where houses are little more than dry stone shelters that collapse with the slightest shake.

  What destiny awaited the rest of the bodies scattered throughout the valley? It was horrifying to witness the abyss between the resources invested in recovering a rich foreign tourist’s body and the oblivion to which Nepalese children and elderly people who shared his misfortune beneath the tons of rock were condemned.

  International aid for the earthquake’s victims was massive. Nepal is poor but each year welcomes a million tourists from wealthy countries, which explains the immense resources deployed to try to return the country to normality. Yet despite the high numb
er of groups of all kinds present on the ground, the coordination was appalling, and on top of that, the government pocketed as many of the donations it received as it could. And a great deal of energy was spent on bureaucracy.

  The help we offered was negligible, but for Séb Montaz, Jordi Tosas, and me, the experience was branded into our memories. We worked for a month, helping first with the military to search for and identify the dead in the Langtang Valley, and then helping various NGOs take food to survivors and assess the damage in the highest, least accessible villages of the Ganesh region, which we could reach only by running and after a few days’ journey. By the end, we were exhausted.

  ON MY RETURN, I MADE AN EFFORT TO GET BACK TO MY NORMAL LIFE as quickly as possible, where my concerns were barely more serious than being more or less in shape, having the logistics in place to run a race, and deciding if the news on the radio was of any interest. For a brief period, we had experienced a serious, concrete reality in which the big headaches were real: eat, sleep, survive to save the lives of others. After leaving all that behind, I decided to turn a new page and change my flight to go straight to Zegama, where I would run a marathon the next day.

  From the beginning of the race, I felt good. The fact that I’d just spent a month at high altitude gave me strength. But despite that, my head was somewhere else while I ran surrounded by thousands of spectators, and I felt dirty for taking center stage in a trivial, unproductive activity, and for being immersed in the euphoria that comes from the spectacle of runners and fans. Somewhere else, just a short plane ride away, life was very different.

  We live in a world of parallel realities that observe but choose not to understand each other. When we get up in the morning and browse the news or check Twitter, we get the false impression that we are everywhere. We see images of a terrorist attack in Baghdad, a protest in Murcia, or a migrant boat that’s just sunk off the coast of Greece . . . and since we are all parents, children, or immigrants, we identify with what’s going on. A few seconds later, we read a comment by a politician out of context, and we either applaud or get mad. Then a viral video grabs our attention, and we laugh our heads off at something dumb. And then . . . and then . . . Everything seems close. We experience everything virtually. It’s easy to get updated on everything, every day. Until the moment you find an article about something you know a lot about, and you feel a pit in your stomach as you read, because you’re suddenly amazed to realize what kind of drivel people write. And in the end, this makes you doubt the truth of any news from an area you’re unfamiliar with. Appearances end up prevailing over facts, and the issue is often reduced to finding an easy polemic to draw people into the media. Meanwhile, injustice continues, far from any debate, and those who suffer keep suffering in their world. You can wear your fingers out clicking on LIKE and sharing links: the two parallel realities will never converge.

  For a few years now in our society, our materialistic focus on personal image has become as important as our capitalist, materialistic focus on well-being. Until recently, the cultivation of a personal image was limited to politicians and pop stars, but today, nobody is immune. It all began when they started trying to put us at the center of everything, with the typical entrepreneurial slogans, like “You are your own brand!” It continued with companies choosing potential employees based on their social-networking profiles. Or with tech multinationals deciding whether we were better or worse, authentic and unique or a waste of space, according to how many comments or likes we received. Or with our loss of privacy, when it became possible for anyone who cared to find out what you ate, what music you listened to, where you bought your socks, who you admired, and where you were thinking of going on your next vacation. We’ve become obsessed, and now we’re like putty, working away at trying to fit into a mold. We have ended up turning into—they have turned us into—a tiny piece of the commercial world.

  It’s becoming harder and harder to see the line between what we call “I” and what we say is “mine.” We have come to believe that we “are” what we “have”: my body, my mental faculties, my clothes, my house, my husband or wife, my children and friends, and even my reputation, work, and bank account. We base our feelings on what we have, and lose sight of our interest in what we are. The rules of satisfaction or frustration depend on whether we can attach a possessive adjective to a noun. And this trend seems very difficult to change.

  Sports have not been immune to the shift. In fact, they’ve been subjected to it faster and more intensely than other spheres. The sports we are sold today are a spectacle, and a spectacle needs an audience. And the audiences are no longer in the stadiums. Or, to put it another way: yes, they are—they’re in the one massive stadium the world has become. Everyone has a preferred seat, in their home. An athlete is an athlete twenty-four hours a day and, on top of training, he has to live “authentically” and have a “take” on everything. And since he’s no longer just talking to four freaks who understand him—the audience is no longer a minority but global—everything he says must be straightforward and simplified, to quickly catch the attention of a public that consumes information at the speed of a machine gun firing a round of bullets. I know I have five or six seconds to produce a spectacular image that will leave you, the spectator, breathless, and grab your attention because it’s interesting and not just entertaining. There’s no need for complicated explanations and “insignificant” details, since those can get a little too interesting. You have to go straight for an easy headline, for a number that’s easy to understand and compare, for competition between news items, athletes, people.

  We do it to “reach” people, but then we realize that by trying to reach everyone else, there’s one detail we’ve neglected: we can no longer reach ourselves. And we have changed our perspective without fully realizing it, because we act, think, and write with the knowledge that we’re being watched and analyzed by an audience. As a result, we are changing what we do, and especially how we do it.

  I WASN’T COMPLETELY IMMUNE TO THIS. PEOPLE WANTED ME TO WIN more races, and since it was pretty easy for me, I did, but then they expected me to break records by conquering such-and-such peak or climbing such-and-such mountain, or to say something appropriate, or to defend what I should supposedly be defending. While for a long time what I wanted and what people asked of me were one and the same, now, without my knowing very well how, the bond was broken and I was a prisoner of other people’s projects.

  When I came back from Nepal in 2015, from that devastated inferno where Western opulence contrasts with local poverty, I felt the hypocrisy of parallel worlds in an intense and personal way, and I was convinced that, without my wanting it, everything could come crashing to an end in the blink of an eye. And I didn’t want the fateful day to come when I had to face what I hadn’t done while waiting for a future that might not exist. I didn’t want my career to change course even a bit, just so I could win more races, fame, or money. And even if this decision forced me to destroy the image I’d created of myself, I wanted to kill Kilian Jornet, to kill the “personality.”

  SEMANTICS ARE IMPORTANT. OUR NAME ACCUMULATES CONNOTATIONS, and as the years go by, it stops being simply what people call us and becomes a backpack loaded with things we can no longer shed. If we can’t understand and dominate our surroundings, we get anxious, so we name everything to create the illusion that we understand it, and that it belongs to us. If a place has no name, it doesn’t exist. Language is the vehicle for our thoughts, and if we don’t find the exact word to describe what we think, see, or feel, everything is lost to oblivion and disappears, has never “existed.”

  We know philosophical movements by what they’re called; people have names, and mountains, too. The people of Grindelwald didn’t call the mountain in whose shadow they lived Eiger (“ogre”) just for the sake of it; the same goes for the Italians, who named the Aosta Valley pyramid Cervino (which alludes to the Italian word for red deer, cervo, abundant in the area), and the Swiss on the other
side, who called it Matterhorn (the “peak in the meadows”). Names can be logical and descriptive, like Mont Blanc—the “white mountain”—or Pedraforca, named for the forked shape of its rocky peak. We also have Puro, the Pic du Midi . . . Sometimes, the imagination runs wild and sees human attributes in nature: Grand Teton in Wyoming—for the breast-like shape of the peaks—or the Cavall Bernat in Montserrat, where the cavall is an adaptation of the Catalan word carall, meaning “penis.” Or Shivling in the Himalayas—the penis again, with its connection to the Sanskrit lingum. Other names come from beliefs that mountains have almost supernatural characteristics, like Mont Maudit—haunted—the Aiguilles du Diable, the Pic de l’Infern, or Monte Disgrazia. In some cases it’s not exactly the imagination that’s in charge, and a series of letters and numbers refer to a mountain in a country the topographer doesn’t know, as is the case of K1 and K2. There are also mountains named for their “discoverer,” not taking into account that the inhabitants of the place in question must have already had a name for it: Mount McKinley, Mont Cook, Monte Fitz Roy, Pico Russell. Everest, the highest of all, belongs to this category. During the years of the British Empire, the colonizers made maps of India and called it Peak XV, but when they realized it was the highest peak of all, they baptized it in honor of George Everest, the chief surveyor. It didn’t matter that the Tibetans had been calling it Qomolangma for over three hundred years. The Nepalese, when they saw it attracted tourists, contributed to its abundance of names, calling it Sagarmatha.

  The strength of the word inspires fear, since its meaning can change according to how it’s pronounced. It can calm or terrorize, trivialize or glorify. But it’s important to understand that the mountains’ existence precedes the names people have given them. Whatever they’re called, they will keep being themselves, just as people will still exist if we have no first or last name; we still have feelings, even if we cannot find words to describe them.