TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030689/03068900.040

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 8.5 KB | 162 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN IDEAS, Page 14

Climbing Mount Everest


What It Takes To Reach the Summit An ascent involves money,
hype, sex, stamina, skill and the faint beat of great wings

By John Skow


    Last fall the mountain known in Tibet as Chomolungma, or
Goddess Mother of the World, and in the West as Everest
permitted itself to be climbed by 33 people, withheld
permission (in the form of benign weather) from a much larger
number and killed nine climbers. Are those good odds or bad? A
flatlander's question, an observer decides, after asking it of
Stacy Allison and Peggy Luce; to mountaineers, the answer is a
shrug. The odds are the odds. Allison, a contractor and house
framer from Portland, Ore., and Luce, a bicycle messenger from
Seattle, members of a U.S. expedition from the Pacific
Northwest, were among the 33 summit climbers. More important,
as these matters are reckoned, they were the first and second
U.S. women in history to reach the 29,108-ft. top of Everest
(among the 200-odd climbers who had summited before were six
other women, beginning with Japan's Junko Tabei in 1975).

    The drive to put a U.S. woman on Everest had been something
between grail and financing gimmick for at least a decade.
Everything -- gender, nationalism, internationalism, ever more
dangerous routes, climbing solo and without oxygen, and climbing
quickly with little equipment, "Alpine style" -- is a gimmick
to Himalayan climbers, whose hobby is absurdly expensive. The
most strenuous effort is not on the wind-racked ridges above
Camp 4; it is in corporate conference rooms, where idlers with
powerful legs try to persuade achievers in powerful suits to pay
for their vacations.

    At any rate, Allison, who was weathered out on Everest in
1987 after reaching 26,000 ft., then retreating and spending
five days in a snow cave, was by several days the first of
three climbers from her expedition to reach the top last fall.
(A male climber, Geoff Tabin, made it to the top just ahead of
Luce.) Thus she settled what she somewhat dismissively refers
to as "the American-woman-on-Everest thing." (Tired of hype and
of fund raising, she had put $9,000 of her own money into the
expedition pot.) No doubt she also quelled some of the grousing
from the Old Guard of male Himalayan climbers that women aren't
equipped for extreme-high-altitude climbing, complaints that
have subsided for the most part into gossip about the
undeniable problems that love affairs cause on expeditions.
(Allison herself does some grousing on this subject, and she
says that one of the reasons her 1988 expedition was successful
was that everyone understood the concept of delayed
gratification.)

    As Allison saw it, she and the mountain settled some
unfinished business. That was that. But hype has a life of its
own, and she was rewarded on her return with her country's
equivalent of a knighthood, an interview on David Letterman's
late-night TV show. She is little, blond and cute, and probably
could have carried Letterman on her back to the top of the
Statue of Liberty. His questions were gingerly and puzzled.
She, as it happened, had never seen Letterman's show, but
friends had explained its tribal rituals. No 19th century
explorer snacking on pickled sheep's eyes could have honored
bizarre local customs more graciously. She took a rock out of
her pocket, explained that it came from the top of Everest, and
asked politely whether she could heave it through the studio
window. "Of course," said Letterman. She chucked it with a good
sidearm motion, and there was the familiar sound effect of
breaking glass that Letterman fans have grown to love. Fade to
commercial.

    Some weeks ago, as the press and TV uproar began to subside,
the two women spent a couple of days sorting photos in the
Portland house Allison shares with her boyfriend, a local
doctor. Allison and Luce did not know each other before the
expedition, and though they are friendly enough, it seems
doubtful that their lives from this point will take them in
similar directions. The contrast in character is too great.
Even the extraordinary physical and mental strengths that each
possesses are of sharply divergent kinds.  Luce is a big,
powerful, easygoing soul who for several years ran her own
restaurant in Seattle. When the restaurant began to consume her
life, she quit cold and took a job as a bicycle messenger. With
nothing much in the way of climbing credentials, she volunteered
for the Everest trip. "I've always wanted to do adventures," she
says with a big grin.

    Allison doesn't like that idea at all. For her, adventures
are what happen when you make a mistake. She has been climbing,
she says precisely, "for 11 1/2 years." She is a gifted rock
climber. At extreme altitude, she is an aerobic marvel,
renowned for climbing at unusual speed. She and the rest used
bottled oxygen much of the time because of the dangers of
altitude sickness. A reporter with some experience at altitude
asks whether she felt sluggish and slow-thinking when she
wasn't using oxygen. This is what he remembers and what
virtually all climbers report. Not Allison; she said she had no
problems, with or without oxygen. And clearly this is true; at
the summit, which she reached without trouble, she spent 45
minutes waiting for her Sherpa and photographing herself with
the logos of various corporate sponsors. Then she made an
unbelievable descent all the way to Camp 1, at about 21,000 ft.

    High winds battered the mountain on the day of Luce's summit
try, and she hung back, breaking off from Tabin, her climbing
partner, and her summit group's Sherpas. Then Luce (no relation
to TIME's co-founder) decided to try for the top. At some point
her goggles fogged, so she took them off. By that time  the men
had passed her on their way down. She reached the top alone,
dulled and sluggish, and stayed about five minutes, not
bothering with photos. As she started down, she realized her
unprotected eyes were going snow blind. What she did not
realize was that she had run out of oxygen. And on a steep slope
just below the summit, she leaned over to try to see a foothold
through the blazing retinal glare. The empty oxygen tank
overbalanced her. She somersaulted downward.

    Then strength and her adventurer's enchanted luck took over.
She swung her ice ax, sunk it into the snow face and performed
a perfect self-arrest, just the way they teach it in climbing
school. She ditched the oxygen bottle and found her Sherpa. The
only thing she could see by this time was the blue of his boots,
so she followed the moving blue blobs. The next day her eyes
were swollen shut.

    Had the experience taken either woman into unexplored places
in her character? "No," says Allison, not surprisingly. But then
she adds, "Getting to the summit didn't. Winning's easy. Not
getting there the year before did. Yeah, failure teaches you
things."  Luce says, "Maybe I'm calmer. Friends say I seem more
mature. Maybe just tired." She and some partners heard the beat
of great wings when they were cuffed by the edge of a large
avalanche at the Khumbu Icefall. Being in peril, she says,
"sharpens your senses for life."

    "No, I don't think so," Allison says. She is not a
contentious person, but she can't abide what seems to be
imprecision. "That implies that people who don't climb don't
feel life sharply. Children feel life sharply . . ." "O.K.,
you're probably right," says Luce amiably. "Strike that last
answer." What next? Allison, the house framer, has gone back
into contracting. She and her boyfriend want to spend a lot of
time kayaking. And there is some $60,000 still owing (of the
$250,000 total cost) on the expedition.

    Luce has quit her messenger job. She and Carl Jones, a
Seattle filmmaker, plan to pedal mountain bikes from
Vladivostok to Leningrad, camping or sleeping in the houses of
ordinary folk along the way, in a five-month tour starting in
May. Four Americans and four Soviets will make the trip with
cameras rolling, and then they will do a similar tour in the
U.S. next year. The Soviets are enthusiastic, says Luce. Only
one element is still uncertain. Right the first time. So it is
back, with smile and mandolin, to the powerful-legs,
powerful-suits scene. Back to those cold, cold phone calls to
the vice president for sales and aggrandizement of Monstrocorp,
or at least his secretary: "Have I got a marketing opportunity
for you! . . ."