Risking It All

(3 of 10)

What is happening is that the incandescent souls who need to be thought extraordinary are being pushed to ever greater feats. These self-assigned heroes range across a startling spectrum, and some of their wave lengths are distinctly strange. Many of them breathe publicity as if it were oxygen. Others work at self-promotion without pleasure and only because their dreams cost a lot of money to realize (a major Himalayan expedition can employ several hundred porters carrying to base camp and dozens of high-altitude porters, and can cost a quarter of a million dollars or more). A few of these fearless exotics are so shy as to be detectable only on infrared film. Hang around climbers for a while, and you hear stories like this: Mountaineers C and D make what they think is a first ascent, only to find unmistakable evidence on the same slope that someone has been there before them. They grumble about this to a group including Climbers A and B, who actually made the ascent without telling anyone. A and B agree gravely that this is rotten luck and still do not reveal themselves.

Technology is another goad, and it pushes adventurers in at least two directions. Fixed-object parachutists can succeed in their scarifying dives, most of the time, because new square-shaped, directional chutes allow them to guide their descent away from the buildings and cliff faces from which they jump. Without modern self-steering gear, singlehanded sailing would be even riskier than it is. Attempts to better the land-speed record on skis (129.3 m.p.h.) and on a bicycle (140.5 m.p.h.) could not succeed without space-age equipment. Although plenty of high-tech gear is used in rock-climbing, the trend here is away from technology and back to technique and nerve: what once were aid climbs (those in which the climber's weight sometimes hangs on artificial devices) are being done as far more difficult free climbs (all of the weight on rock at all times). Difficult routes are often done alone and, sometimes frighteningly, without safety ropes.

The ultralight aircraft that waft across the landscape look less like chicks of the Concorde than like those of the Wright brothers' rickety gliders. Ultramarathon runners, who race 50 miles or more at a stretch, return to the technology of dawn-age hunters loping across African grasslands: the repeated flex of feet and knees, the drumming rhythms of lungs and heart.

Yes, but what for? To what real end? These exasperated questions, of course, are also asked about life, but ordinary people can point out that although we are stuck with life's ironies, it is quite possible to ignore those of Everest. It may be, nevertheless, that these conquistadors of the useless, in Mountaineer Lionel Terray's phrase, are instinctively acting out their views of existence: the building jumpers' that life is short and absurd, the expedition climbers' that it should be an exalting struggle, and so on.