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Erik walks
through these Kathmandu streets with remarkable ease, his
red-tipped cane searching out ahead of him, measuring distance,
pitch and angle. You give him little hints as he goes-"There's
a doorway. O.K., now a right-no, left, sorry"-and he follows,
his stride confident but easily arrested when he bumps into
an old lady selling shawls, and then into the wheel of a scooter.
The physical confidence that he projects has to do with having
an athlete's awareness of how his body moves through space.
Plenty of sighted people walk through life with less poise
and grace than Erik, unsure of their steps, second-guessing
every move. And certainly most of the blind don't maneuver
with Erik's aplomb. As he takes a seat in a crowded restaurant,
ordering pizza, spaghetti, ice cream, beer-you work up an
appetite climbing Everest-he smiles and nods as other diners
ask, "Hey, aren't you the blind guy...?"
With his
Germanic, sculpted features and light brown hair, Erik looks
a bit like a shaggy, youthful Kirk Douglas. He is a celebrity
now: strangers ask for his autograph, reporters call constantly,
restaurants give him free meals. But is his celebrity the
circus-freak variety-of a type with the Dogboy and the two-headed
snake?
At its worst,
Erik fears, it is. Casual observers don't understand what
an achievement his Everest climb was, or they assume that
if a blind guy can do it, anyone can. And indeed, improved
gear has made Everest, at least in some people's minds, a
bit smaller. In the climbing season there's a conga line to
the top, or so it seems, and the trail is a junkyard of discarded
oxygen tanks and other debris. But Everest eats the unready
and the unlucky. Almost 90% of Everest climbers fail to reach
the summit. Many-at least 165 since 1953-never come home at
all, their bodies lying uncollected where they fell. Four
died in May. "People think because I'm blind, I don't have
as much to be afraid of, like if I can't see a 2,000-ft. drop-off
I won't be scared," Erik says. "That's insane. Look, death
is death, if I can see or not."
Everest
expeditions break down into two types: those like Erik's,
which are sponsored and united by a common goal, and those
like the one described by Jon Krakauer in Into Thin Air, in
which gangs of climbers pay $65,000 each for the opportunity
to stand on top of the world. But as conditions become more
arduous, these commercial teams start squabbling, blaming
weaker members for slowing them down and sometimes even refusing
to help teammates in distress.
Many pros
wouldn't go near Erik's team, fearing they might have to haul
the blind guy down. "Everyone was saying Erik was gonna have
an epic," says Charley Mace, a member of the film crew. (Epic
is Everest slang for disaster.) Another climber planned to
stay close, boasting that he would "get the first picture
of the dead blind guy."
For Erik,
who knew almost as soon as he could speak that he would lose
his vision in his early teens, excelling as an athlete was
the result of accepting his disability rather than denying
it. Growing up with two brothers in Hong Kong and then Weston,
Conn., he was always an athletic kid, a tough gamer who developed
a bump-and-grind one-on-one basketball game that allowed him
to work his way close to the hoop. He was, his father Ed says,
"a pretty normal kid. While bike riding, he might have run
into a few more parked cars than other kids, but we didn't
dwell on his going blind."
His blindness
was a medical inevitability, like a court date with a hanging
judge. "I saw blindness like this disease," he explains. "Like
AIDs or something that was going to consume me." Think about
that-being a kid, 10, 11 years old, and knowing that at some
point in the near future your world is going to go dark. Certainly
it builds character-that mental toughness his fellow climbers
marvel at-but in a child, the natural psychological defense
would be denial.
When he
lost his vision, Erik at first refused to use a cane or learn
Braille, insisting he could somehow muddle on as normal. "I
was so afraid I would seem like a freak," he recalls. But
after a few embarrassing stumbles-he couldn't even find the
school rest rooms anymore-he admitted he needed help. For
Erik, the key was acceptance-not to fight his disability but
to learn to work within it; not to transcend it but to understand
fully what he was capable of achieving within it; not to pretend
he had sight but to build systems that allowed him to excel
without it. "It's tragic-I know blind people who like to pass
themselves off as being able to see," Erik says. "What's the
point of that?"
He would
never play basketball or catch a football again. But then
he discovered wrestling. "I realized I could take sighted
people and slam them into the mat," he says. Grappling was
a sport where feel and touch mattered more than sight: if
he could sense where his opponent had his weight or how to
shift his own body to gain better leverage, he could excel
using his natural upper-body strength. As a high school senior
he went all the way to the National Junior Freestyle Wrestling
Championship in Iowa.
Wrestling
gave him the confidence to re-enter the teenage social fray.
He began dating when he was 17; his first girlfriend was a
sighted woman three years older than he. Erik jokes that he
is not shy about using his blindness to pick up women. "They
really go for the guide dog," he explains. "You go into a
bar, put the guide dog out there, and the girls just come
up to you." He and his friends devised a secret handshake
to let Erik know if the girl he was talking to was attractive.
"Just because you're blind doesn't make you any more selfless
or deep or anything. You're just like most guys, but you look
for different things," Erik says. "Smooth skin, nice body,
muscles-that stuff becomes more important." And the voice
becomes paramount. "My wife has the most beautiful voice in
the world," Erik says. Married in 1997, he and his wife Ellie
have a one-year-old daughter, Emma.
Erik first
went hiking with his father when he was 13, trying to tap
his way into the wild with a white cane and quickly becoming
frustrated stubbing his toes on rocks and roots and bumping
into branches and trunks. But when he tried rock climbing,
at 16 while at a camp for the disabled in New Hampshire, he
was hooked. Like wrestling, it was a sport in which being
blind didn't have to work against him. He took to it quickly,
and through climbing gradually found his way to formal mountaineering.
Watching
Erik scramble up a rock face is a little like watching a spider
make its way up a wall. His hands are like antennae, gathering
information as they flick outward, surveying the rock for
cracks, grooves, bowls, nubbins, knobs, edges and ledges,
converting all of it into a road map etched into his mind.
"It's like instead of wrestling with a person, I am moving
and working with a rock," he explains. "It's a beautiful process
of solving a puzzle." He is an accomplished rock climber,
rated 5.10 (5.14 being the highest), and has led teams up
sections of Yosemite's notorious El Capitan. On ice, where
one wrong strike with an ice ax can bring down an avalanche,
Erik has learned to listen to the ice as he pings it gently
with his ax. If it clinks, he avoids it. If it makes a thunk
like a spoon hitting butter, he knows it's solid ice.
Despite
being an accomplished mountaineer-summiting Denali, Kilimanjaro
in Africa and Aconcagua in Argentina, among other peaks, and,
in the words of his friends, "running up 14ers" (14,000-ft.
peaks)-Erik viewed Everest as insurmountable until he ran
into Scaturro at a sportswear trade show in Salt Lake City,
Utah. Scaturro, who had already summited Everest, had heard
of the blind climber, and when they met the two struck an
easy rapport. A geophysicist who often put together energy-company
expeditions to remote areas in search of petroleum, Scaturro
began wondering if he could put together a team that could
help Erik get to the summit of Everest.
"Dude,"
Scaturro asked, "have you ever climbed Everest?"
"No."
"Dude, you
wanna?"
Climbing
with Erik isn't that different from climbing with a sighted
mountaineer. You wear a bell on your pack, and he follows
the sound, scuttling along using his custom-made climbing
poles to feel his way along the trail. His climbing partners
shout out helpful descriptions: "Death fall 2 ft. to your
right!" "Emergency helicopter-evacuation pad to your left!"
He is fast, often running up the back of less experienced
climbers. His partners all have scars from being jabbed by
Erik's climbing poles when they slowed down.
For the
Everest climb, Scaturro and Erik assembled a team that combined
veteran Everest climbers and trusted friends of Erik's. Scaturro
wrote up a Braille proposal for the Everest attempt and submitted
it to Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of
the Blind. Maurer immediately pledged $250,000 to sponsor
the climb. (Aventis Pharmaceuticals agreed to sponsor a documentary
on the climb to promote Allegra, its allergy medication; Erik
suffers from seasonal allergies.) For Erik, who already had
numerous gear and clothing sponsors, this was the greatest
challenge of his life. If he failed, he would be letting down
not just himself but all the blind, confirming that certain
activities remained the preserve of the sighted.
He argued
to anyone who would listen that he was an experienced mountaineer
and that if he failed, it would be because of his heart or
lungs or brain rather than his eyes. He wasn't afraid of physical
danger-he had made dozens of skydives and scaled some of the
most dangerous cliff faces in the world-but he was frightened
of how the world would perceive him. "But I knew that if I
went and failed, that would feel better than if I didn't go
at all," Erik says. "It could be like [the wrestling] Junior
Nationals all over again. I went out to Iowa, and I got killed.
But I needed to go to understand what my limits were."
Oxygen deprivation
does strange things to the human body. Heart rates go haywire,
brain function decreases, blood thickens, intestines shut
down. Bad ideas inexplicably pop into your head, especially
above 25,000 ft., where, as Krakauer famously wrote in Into
Thin Air, climbers have the "mind of a reptile."
At that
altitude, Erik could rely on no one but himself. His teammates
would have to guide him, to keep ringing the bell and making
sure Erik stayed on the trail, but they would be primarily
concerned about their own survival in some of the worst conditions
on earth. Ironically, Erik had some advantages as they closed
in on the peak. For one thing, at that altitude all the climbers
wore goggles and oxygen masks, restricting their vision so
severely that they could not see their own feet-a condition
Erik was used to. Also, the final push for the summit began
in the early evening, so most of the climb was in pitch darkness;
the only illumination was from miner's lamps.
When Erik
and the team began the final ascent from Camp 4-the camp he
describes as Dante's Inferno with ice and wind-they had been
on the mountain for two months, climbing up and down and then
up from Base Camp to Camps 1, 2 and 3, getting used to the
altitude and socking away enough equipment-especially oxygen
canisters-to make a summit push. They had tried for the summit
once but had turned back because of weather. At 29,000 ft.,
the Everest peak is in the jet stream, which means that winds
can exceed 100 m.p.h. and that what looks from sea level like
a cottony wisp of cloud is actually a killer storm at the
summit. Bad weather played a fatal role in the 1996 climbing
season documented in Into Thin Air.
On May 24,
with only seven days left in the climbing season, most of
the N.F.B. expedition members knew this was their last shot
at the peak. That's why when Erik and Chris Morris reached
the Balcony, the beginning of the Southeast Ridge, at 27,500
ft., after a hard slog up the South Face, they were terribly
disappointed when the sky lit up with lightning, driving snow
and fierce winds. "We thought we were done," Erik says. "We
would have been spanked if we made a push in those conditions."
A few teammates gambled and went for it, and Jeff Evans and
Brad Bull heroically pulled out fixed guidelines that had
been frozen in the ice. By the time Base Camp radioed that
the storm was passing, Erik and the entire team were coated
in 2 in. of snow. Inspired by the possibility of a break in
the weather, the team pushed on up the exposed Southeast Ridge,
an additional 1,200 vertical feet to the South Summit. At
that point the climbers looked like astronauts walking on
some kind of Arctic moon. They moved slowly because of fatigue
from their huge, puffy down suits, backpacks with oxygen canisters
and regulators and goggles.
With a 10,000-ft.
vertical fall into Tibet on one side and a 7,000-ft. fall
into Nepal on the other, the South Summit, at 28,750 ft.,
is where many climbers finally turn back. The 656-ft.-long
knife-edge ridge leading to the Hillary Step consists of ice,
snow and fragmented shale, and the only way to cross it is
to take baby steps and anchor your way with an ice ax. "You
can feel the rock chip off," says Erik. "And you can hear
it falling down into the void."
The weather
was finally clearing as they reached the Hillary Step, the
39-ft. rock face that is the last major obstacle before the
true summit. Erik clambered up the cliff, belly flopping over
the top. "I celebrated with the dry heaves," he jokes. And
then it was 45 minutes of walking up a sharply angled snow
slope to the summit.
"Look around,
dude," Evans told the blind man when they were standing on
top of the world. "Just take a second and look around."
It could
be called the most successful Everest expedition ever, and
not just because of Erik's participation. A record 19 climbers
from the N.F.B. team summited, including the oldest man ever
to climb Everest-64-year-old Sherman Bull-and the second father-and-son
team ever to do so-Bull and his son Brad.
What Erik
achieved is hard for a sighted person to comprehend. What
do we compare it with? How do we relate to it? Do we put on
a blindfold and go hiking? That's silly, Erik maintains, because
when a sighted person loses his vision, he is terrified and
disoriented. And Erik is clearly neither of those things.
Perhaps the point is really that there is no way to put what
Erik has done in perspective because no one has ever done
anything like it. It is a unique achievement, one that in
the truest sense pushes the limits of what man is capable
of. Maurer of the N.F.B. compares Erik to Helen Keller. "Erik
can be a contemporary symbol for blindness," he explains.
"Helen Keller lived 100 years ago. She should not be our most
potent symbol for blindness today."
Erik, sitting
in the Kathmandu international airport, waiting for the flight
out of Nepal that will eventually return him to Golden, Colo.,
is surrounded by his teammates and the expedition's 75 pieces
of luggage. Success has made the group jubilant. This airport
lounge has become the mountaineering equivalent of a winning
Super Bowl locker room. As they sit amid their luggage, holding
Carlsberg beers, they frequently raise a toast. "Shez! Shez!"
shouts a climber. That's Nepali for drink! drink! "No epics,"
a climber chimes in, citing what really matters: no one died.
In between
posing for photos and signing other passengers' boarding passes,
Erik talks about how eager he is to get back home. He says
summiting Everest was great, probably the greatest experience
of his life. But then he thinks about a moment a few months
ago, before Everest, when he was walking down the street in
Colorado with daughter Emma in a front pack. They were on
their way to buy some banana bread for his wife, and Emma
was pulling on his hand, her little fingers curled around
his index finger. That was a summit too, he says. There are
summits everywhere. You just have to know where to look.
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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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