Blind To Failure
Mountaineers scoffed at the
notion that Erik Weihenmayer, sightless since he was 13, could
climb Everest. But a killer peak is no obstacle for a man
who can conquer adversity
By
KARL TARO GREENFELD Kathmandu
When he
saw Erik Weihenmayer arrive that afternoon, Pasquale Scaturro
began to have misgivings about the expedition he was leading.
Here they were on the first floor of Mount Everest, and Erik-the
reason for the whole trip-was stumbling into Camp 1 bloody,
sick and dehydrated. "He was literally green," says fellow
climber and teammate Michael O'Donnell. "He looked like George
Foreman had beat the crap out of him for two hours." The beating
had actually been administered by Erik's climbing partner,
Luis Benitez. Erik had slipped into a crevasse, and as Benitez
reached down to catch him, his climbing pole raked Erik across
the nose and chin. Wounds heal slowly at that altitude because
of the thin air.
As Erik
passed out in his tent, the rest of the team gathered in a
worried huddle. "I was thinking maybe this is not a good idea,"
says Scaturro. "Two years of planning, a documentary movie,
and this blind guy barely makes it to Camp 1?"
This blind
guy. Erik Weihenmayer, 33, wasn't just another yuppie trekker
who'd lost a few rounds to the mountain. Blind since he was
13, the victim of a rare hereditary disease of the retina,
he began attacking mountains in his early 20s.
But he had
been having the same doubts as the rest of the team. On that
arduous climb to camp through the Khumbu Icefall, Erik wondered
for the first time if his attempt to become the first sightless
person to summit Mount Everest was a colossal mistake, an
act of Daedalian hubris for which he would be punished. There
are so many ways to die on that mountain, spanning the spectacular
(fall through an ice shelf into a crevasse, get waylaid by
an avalanche, develop cerebral edema from lack of oxygen and
have your brain literally swell out of your skull) and the
banal (become disoriented because of oxygen deprivation and
decide you'll take a little nap, right here, in the snow,
which becomes a forever nap).
Erik, as
he stumbled through the icefall, was so far out of his comfort
zone that he began to speculate on which of those fates might
await him. For a moment he flashed on all those clichés about
what blind people are supposed to do-become piano tuners or
pencil salesmen-and thought maybe they were stereotypes for
good reason. Blind people certainly shouldn't be out here,
wandering through an ever changing ice field, measuring the
distance over a 1,000-ft.-deep crevasse with climbing poles
and then leaping, literally, over and into the unknown.
The blind
thrive on patterns: stairs are all the same height, city blocks
roughly the same length, curbs approximately the same depth.
They learn to identify the patterns in their environment much
more than the sighted population do, and to rely on them to
plot their way through the world.
But in the
Khumbu Icefall, the trail through the Himalayan glacier is
patternless, a diabolically cruel obstacle course for a blind
person. It changes every year as the river of ice shifts,
but it's always made up of treacherously crumbly stretches
of ice, ladders roped together over wide crevasses, slightly
narrower crevasses that must be jumped, huge seracs, avalanches
and-most frustrating for a blind person, who naturally seeks
to identify patterns in his terrain-a totally random icescape.
In the icefall
there is no system, no repetition, no rhyme or reason to the
lay of the frozen land. On the other hand, "it is so specific
in terms of where you can step," Erik recalls. "Sometimes
you're walking along and then boom, a crevasse is right there,
and three more steps and another one, and then a snow bridge.
And vertical up, then a ladder and then a jumbly section."
It took Erik 13 hrs. to make it from Base Camp through the
icefall to Camp 1, at 20,000 ft. Scaturro had allotted seven.
A typical
assault on Everest requires each climber to do as many as
10 traverses through the icefall, both for acclimatization
purposes and to help carry the immense amount of equipment
required for an ascent. After Erik's accident, the rest of
the National Federation of the Blind (N.F.B.) team discussed
letting him stay up in Camp 1, equipped with videotapes and
food, while the rest of the team and the Sherpas did his carries
for him. No way, said Erik. No way was he going to do this
climb without being a fully integrated and useful member of
the team. "I wasn't going to be carried to the top and spiked
like a football," he says. The next day he forced himself
to head back down through the icefall. He would eventually
make 10 passes through the Khumbu, cutting his time to five
hours.
Sometimes,
when Erik is giving a motivational speech for one of his corporate
clients, such as Glaxo Wellcome or AT&T, a fat, balding middle-aged
middle manager will approach him and say, "Even I wouldn't
do that stuff." Erik calls it the Even I Syndrome. And he
has to resist an impulse to say, "You're fat, out of shape
and you smoke. Why would you even think of doing any of this
stuff? Just because you can see?" Erik is not impatient or
smug, but he tires of people assuming that sight will trump
all other attributes and senses combined.
By all accounts,
Erik is gifted with strong lungs, a refined sense of balance,
a disproportionately powerful upper body, rubbery legs and
flexible ankles. His conditioning is exemplary and his heart
rate low. He is stockier than most mountaineers, who tend
toward lanky, long muscles. But he possesses an abundance
of the one indispensable characteristic of a great mountaineer:
mental toughness, the ability to withstand tremendous amounts
of cold, discomfort, physical pain, boredom, bad food, insomnia
and tedious conversation when you're snowed into a pup tent
for a week on a 3-ft.-wide ice shelf at 20,000 ft. (That happened
to Erik on Alaska's Denali.) On Everest, toughness is perhaps
the most important trait a climber can have. "Erik is mentally
one of the strongest guys you will ever meet," says fellow
climber Chris Morris.
Everybody
gets sick on Everest. It's called the Khumbu Krud, brought
on by a combination of high altitude, dirty food, fetid water,
intestinal parasites and an utterly alien ecosystem. On Erik's
team, at any given moment, half the climbers were running
fevers, the others were nauseated, and they all suffered from
one form or another of dysentery, an awkward ailment when
there's a driving snowstorm and it's 30 degrees below outside
the tent. You relieve yourself however you can, in the vestibule
of your tent or in a plastic bag. "It can be a little bit
gross," says Erik. "But if you go outside and take your pants
down, you'll have two inches of snowpack blow into your pants
in about 10 seconds."
Scaling
Everest requires the enthusiasm and boosterism of a physical-education
teacher combined with the survival instinct of a Green Beret.
You have to want that summit. And if you whine and bitch along
the way, your teammates might discard you before you get there.
Erik, beneath his beard and quiet demeanor, was both booster
and killer. "He was the heart and soul of our team," says
Eric Alexander. "The guy's spirit won't let you quit."
MORE>>
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June 12, 2001 | No. 24
COVER
STORY
A
Hero's Ascent
For mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer, just crossing the street can be a risky
venture. The first sightless person to reach Mount Everest's summit, he
gives millions-both blind and seeing-the courage to reach for new heights
TRAVELERS
ADVISORY...
PACIFIC
BEAT: Post-Olympics blues; fractured Fiji...
THE
ARTS
MUSIC: Rock rises from the dead, again...
CINEMA: Keeping faith with Ingmar Bergman
BOOKS: A fresh look at a founding father
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