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The Lightning Rod
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| into thin air | A PERSONAL ACCOUNT OF THE MOUNT EVEREST DISASTER
By Jon Krakauer BY CHARLES TAYLOR "I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five." That line from William S. Burroughs' introduction to "Naked Lunch" isn't one of the many epigraphs to be found throughout Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air." But in some ways it speaks to the spirit of this deeply upsetting, genuinely nightmarish book. Last year, Krakauer took an assignment from Outside magazine to write a piece on the guided expeditions up Mount Everest being offered by experienced climbers. A climber himself (albeit one with no high-altitude experience), who had long dreamed of scaling Everest, Krakauer joined a tour led by the New Zealand climber Rob Hall. He made it to the summit only minutes before an unexpected blizzard stuck the mountain. Hall's wasn't the only group on Everest, and before the storm was over, he and nine other climbers had died. "Into Thin Air," an expansion of the 17,000-word piece Krakauer wound up writing for Outside, is Krakauer's first-person account. It is also (this is where the Burroughs quote comes in) the realization of a man who has gone as far as he could in pursuit of a habit that almost killed him. Krakauer says that writer friends urged him to get some perspective on the experience before writing this book. He couldn't, he said, because it "was gnawing my guts out." Though "Into Thin Air" comes less than a year after that trip, it hasn't weakened Krakauer's reporting skills. He's scrupulously fair and honest about his co-climbers and guides. He records acts of selfishness and foolishness as well as acts of bravery, sometimes all from the same person. When the worst comes, it's from the recognizably human combination of honest mistakes, carelessness, refusal to consider the worst and sheer bad luck. And Krakauer confronts what may have been his own part in the deaths of some of those people with a tormented conscience. Krakauer writes indelibly, agonizingly, on the physical torment of existing, let alone exerting yourself, at high altitude. He's brilliant on the particular brand of masochistic asceticism that drives mountain climbers. He doesn't take the easy position that only experienced climbers should be allowed on Everest; he knows that anyone has to be slightly crazy to attempt it. Describing a hike he took to accustom himself to the higher climate, he writes, "There, at the head of the Cwm [pronounced koom] ... I came upon (a) body in the snow, or more accurately the lower half of a body. The style of the clothing and the vintage leather boots suggested that ... the corpse has lain on the mountain for at least ten or fifteen years ... the shock ... wore off almost immediately... It was as if there were an unspoken agreement ... none of us dared acknowledge what was at stake here."
It's the highest praise I can give "Into Thin Air" that Krakauer has faced without self-protection what, finally, was at stake. His story contains what must be one of the essences of hell: the unceasing potential for things to become worse than you fear. Staying up half the night to finish "Into the Air," I spent the other half trying to push it out of my mind. I don't even want to think about what Jon Krakauer sees when he closes his eyes.
Charles Taylor, who lives in Boston, is a regular contributor to Salon. |
