in 2000, “Nobody gets out of life alive.” So obvious, yet so profound; those six words have had a huge effect on my own thinking about the end of life. I have shared intimately in the dying of two others of our team: Barry Corbet and Jim Lester, both of whom came to occupy special places in my life after Dick and Willi were no longer around to “keep Hornbein under control,” as Willi was wont to say. (I still at times feel Willi’s hand resting on my shoulder.)
Faced with incurable conditions, Gil Roberts, Barry Corbet, and Jim Lester willfully chose their times to exit. I suspect that climbers (not uniquely) cherish the illusion of being in control and carry that need to their last act of living, which is to die.
Barry had been an indispensable member of our West Ridge effort. Three years later he, Pete Schoening, John Evans, and Bill Long made the first ascent of Mount Vinson, the highest point on the Antarctica continent, and a few days later Barry and John Evans climbed Mount Tyree, which Barry described as his finest climb. Then in 1968 a helicopter from which Barry was shooting a ski film crashed. Barry never walked again, living the next thirty-six years in a wheelchair. He became the editor of New Mobility, a magazine for those with spinal cord injury or similar conditions. He was an eloquent and courageous writer, a compelling advocate for those living with disabilities. I sometimes wonder what other path he could have followed to have had such a profound impact on the lives of others had he not become paralyzed.
Barry and I loved to explore a kaleidoscope of topics of greater and lesser moment, among them physician-assisted dying. Many in the disabled community, Barry told me, feared legalized assisted death as the beginning of a slippery slope to get the burden of the disabled off the backs of society. Part of Barry shared that view, but another part needed to be calling his own shots. When he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer, he decided, as had Gil, to forgo treatment that promised but modest gain in the duration of life at an unacceptable cost to its quality. The prospect of having to leave his aerie on Lookout Mountain in the Colorado Front Range to spend his remaining days in a nursing home was unthinkable.
In early December 2004, Barry’s daughter, Jen, called to say that Barry had begun his final fast and wondered if I might wish to be there with him and his family during those last days. That time with Barry and his children and their spouses and four grandkids and another dear friend from Wyoming turned out to be a higher-than-Everest moment in my own life. We laughed and cried and cared for Barry (and each other) and tried to keep the smells from the kitchen from tempting his fast. In the evenings we watched one of the film classics he had created, read poetry and Winnie-the-Pooh, or just were there. He was our guide, taking the sharp end of the rope for this one last climb. Once more, as on Everest when the time came for deciding the summit team and he volunteered that Willi and I should climb together, he bestowed a gift of empowerment along with a responsibility. On December 18, 2004, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the day when he climbed Mount Vinson, Barry closed his eyes, his breathing stopped, and our vigil ended.
For me, Barry was friend and also hero. He didn’t much care for the “hero” bit. I pointed out that that was his problem, not mine. Barry saw death as something that came after life, but dying as still very much part of life, its final chapter. He approached it with the same style and virtuosity with which he had confronted so much else during his sixty-eight-year journey.
In 2009, Jim Lester was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and he too chose to end his life by fasting. I visited him shortly before he died, and was once again struck by how much living goes on in the act of dying. Like Barry, Jim was someone I met for the first time on the expedition. He was a psychologist, a non-mountaineer who was forced to become a mountaineer when Norman lured him onto the expedition to add more breadth to the expedition’s scientific goals. He returned from Everest untainted by the need to climb mountains, but his curiosity about how climbers related to themselves and to each other while attempting to ascend a big, sometimes hostile hill was the substance of lifelong research. Immediately after the expedition, Jim volunteered to guide Nawang Gombu and five of our Sherpas on a tour across America. For six weeks he drove them from coast to coast, seeing the sights and visiting team members along the way. Four decades later, Jim journeyed back to Nepal to find out how our Sherpas had fared in the intervening years. Some were there to greet him enthusiastically; in other cases it was their widows or children who welcomed him into their homes and their lives.
Jim’s passions transcended his life as a psychologist. One such was the young Pan Am stewardess he encountered on his flight home from Everest. It did not take long for Jim and Val to translate that initial magic into a rich lifetime together. Jim was a consummate jazz musician, playing piano and trombone. His curiosity about the origins of jazz led to learning more about the life of seminal jazz pianist Art Tatum and to writing a biography of Tatum, Too Marvelous for Words. As is apparent from the photos in this book, his and Dick Emerson’s cameras were an extension of their souls.
In 2006 Kathy and I left my home of four decades in the Pacific Northwest and moved to this alpine valley where I first met mountains when I was thirteen. My life has come full circle. For me this is a fairy-tale place. I walk out our door and scramble among the granite slabs and gullies of Lumpy Ridge. I pause on some high knoll to catch my breath and look out at the dance of light on windblown plumes of snow blurring the silhouette of Longs Peak and the other high peaks along the Continental Divide. I am back on the slate rooftop of my childhood home, in spades.
Adventures, though mellower, continue—on these solitary jaunts behind our home, on hikes and climbs and skis. I am blessed with nurturing and patient young companions who slow to my pace and bring me back alive, glowing. There’s Jim Detterline, once a Longs Peak ranger, who in 1995 introduced me to the spirituality of the vertical on Longs Peak’s Diamond. The following year we returned to fulfill a promise to Clerin “Zumie” Zumwalt, an effervescent guide on Longs in the early 1930s, to leave a bit of his ashes atop the tiny spire that bears his name. For me it was a return forty-five years after three of us made the first ascent of Zumie’s Thumb and also a lesson in how modern rock-climbing shoes counter the process of aging.
On the forty-eighth anniversary of Willi’s and my Everest summit day, I experienced the mystical grandeur of Wyoming’s Devils Tower, struggling up one of its columns while Jon Krakauer bombarded me from above with encouragement. The following year, as part of a protracted eightieth birthday celebration, Harry Kent, Chris Reveley, and Mark Donahue were my companions on a climb up the Keyhole Ridge on Longs, a scenic and joyful route that had somehow escaped my notice in younger years.
The other seasonings to this ninth decade are no less precious: struggling to learn to play the piano; baking bread; meddling in the affairs of the Altitude Research Center at the University of Colorado in Denver; and helping a dear friend, Cynthia Hunt, with her effort to make a difference in the lives of those dwelling in remote villages high in the mountains of Ladakh, India.
I ended Everest: The West Ridge on a somewhat downbeat note: “It is strange how when a dream is fulfilled there is little left but doubt.” Now, a half century later, maybe it makes some sense: dreams are the beginning, and doubt simply a catalyst to creativity, and not just in climbing a mountain. And so the dreams continue.
My life is still rich with adventure and its attendant uncertainties. Precious are those people with whom I share it: that lady with her arm in a sling, my children, and a priceless community of caring friends, both here and in my former haunts in the Pacific Northwest. What wonderful alchemy is it that has turned doubt to gold?
Tom Hornbein Estes Park, Colorado January 2013
Zinc-oxided Tom Hornbein at Camp 2 (Photo by Willi Unsoeld)
|
|
One of the misfortunes of advancing age is that you get out of touch with the sunrise. You take it for granted, and it is over and done before you settle yourself for the daily routine. That is one reason, I think, why, when we grow older, the days seem shorter. We miss the high moments of their
|