Risking It All

The spirit of adventure is alive and well

There is a priggish voice inside most of us that complains, on hearing about someone like Geoffrey Tabin, "Where would we be if everyone jumped off bridges on long rubber bungee cords?" Bobbing boozily up and down, yoing, yoing, yoing, that is where we would be. Can't have that; no one ever got any aluminum siding sold or orthodontia bills paid while dangling from a bungee cord. And Tabin, a Harvard medical student, admits that an alcohol-fueled, top-hat-and-tails leap off of Colorado's 1,053-ft.-high Royal Gorge bridge in 1980 required "no skill, just a little stupidity and a fairly calculated risk."

Thus it is gratifying to learn that Tabin, 27, who carried off his stunt with several other members of something called the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club, has moved on to more mature concerns. He is in fact a member of an American mountaineering expedition in Tibet that intends to make an ascent without oxygen of Everest's forbidding and unclimbed East Face. George Leigh Mallory, the great British climber who died on Everest while making a summit attempt in 1924, had written of the East Face that "other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would, but, emphatically, it was not for us." Tabin, tracked down with his colleagues in China last week, said, "The most difficult and scary part is explaining to a Jewish grandmother that you're taking time off from medical school to do it." He also said that he would like to make love on top of Everest but had no realistic hope of doing so.

Tabin and Teammate George Lowe, 38, tried to climb the East Face in 1981 and failed. They are, of course, expert mountaineers, who know the formidable dangers they confront. But this seriousness presents a problem in comprehension for citizens who like to think of themselves as solid. Everest's weather is as foul and unpredictable as any in the world, the avalanches of its snow fields and the icefalls of its tumbled glaciers pick off climbers every expedition or so, and the deadly thin air toward its 29,028-ft. summit debilitates and stupefies the mountaineers it does not sicken or cripple. What craziness is this to be serious about?

There have always been adventurers, footloose and sometimes screwloose, and their careless "Why not?" has always stirred alarming and delicious fears in settled souls whose timid question is "Why?" But Dr. Livingstone has been found (alive on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, in 1871, by Anglo-American Journalist Henry Morton Stanley), the Atlantic has been flown in a single-engine aircraft (by Lindbergh, in 1927), the polar regions have been explored (by an assortment of frauds and heroes), the world has been circumnavigated singlehanded (first by Joshua Slocum from 1895 to 1898), and all of the 14 mountains higher than 8,000 meters (26,400 ft.) have been climbed. Space is there to be rummaged, but not, at least in this century, by lonely daredevils.