Saturday, June 27, 1998

Going to great heights to get there

By Rheta Grimsley Johnson

I went to see the popular IMAX movie "Everest" the other day -- because it is there -- and came away astounded at the lengths, and heights, humans will go to for a thrill.

Maybe I'm a coward. Quite possibly I'm a coward. But I like to think in case of emergency you could count on me to buck up, lend a hand, lift a two-ton car off of an infant the way loving grandmothers have been known to do in a panic.

I take my share of risks. I eat pork barbecue and drive in Atlanta traffic on a regular basis.

But I don't crave danger. I don't have the kind of guts -- if that's what you call it -- to negotiate a stepladder over a bottomless pit of ice on my way to the top a hill so high you need oxygen for your summit picnic.

Some do. Many people pay dearly for a guide to take them up where the air is thin and the weather unforgiving and where you throw up until your ribs break -- all for an exultant few minutes of high-fiving and photo-op. (So many have made the climb, in fact, that Mount Everest is literally littered with spent oxygen bottles discarded by the tired adventurers on the way down. A concerted environmental effort removed more than 800 oxygen canisters from 1994 to 1996.)

I might consider operating a base camp from Katmandu, but only if nobody else was available. Heck, I'm not even sure I have the guts to see another IMAX movie. That big picture and the tricks the camera plays with dimension make me dizzy and tired. I think you could shoot an IMAX movie about mowing the lawn and make it deadly exciting, but mountain-climbing is tailor-made for the medium.

The movie "Everest" deals marginally with the ill-fated Rob Hall expedition of 1996, the deadliest year ever on the mountain. So after the movie, I bought the book Into Thin Air, climber Jon Krakauer's account of the five deaths in the Hall party.

Krakauer takes what IMAX made pretty, if sometimes sad, and reveals it as the pure hell it was. I didn't want to climb Mount Everest after the movie; after the book I wanted to stay forever at sea level.

In a burst of poetic understatement, Krakauer explains mountain-climbing is not for timid souls.

"This is an activity that idealizes risk-taking; the sport's most celebrated figures have always been those who stick their necks out the farthest and manage to get away with it. Climbers, as a species, are simply not distinguished by an excess of prudence."

No kidding. Ed Viesturs, star of the movie, doesn't even use supplemental oxygen for his ascent. (That's like trapeze artists who work with no net, or a sailor casting off without his compass.) Ed and the IMAX team literally climb past the frozen bodies of the Rob Hall team to reach the summit. Because it is there.

Near the end of the movie there's a brief mention of the scientific gizmo the party placed on the mountain, how it might someday, somehow, contribute to our knowledge of earthquakes.

But everyone with any sense knows the climbers weren't climbing for science, exquisite photographs, or even for glory. The ones who don't make it get all the headlines. I sure can't explain why they were risking good lives and deep breaths for such a trip because, as previously reported, I lack that component that drives certain humans to seek expensive thrills.

Maybe the real value of watching that movie is in learning, for certain, that you are the kind of person content to watch movies in black and white, experience high adventure in books and keep both feet on the ground. Because it is there.

King Features Syndicate