VERTIGO – Part 7 – The Mountaineers (cont)

The mountaineering sections became my favorite section in used bookstores.  I found several used hardcovers including two more books about that fascinating story of the tragedy on Everest, the spring of 96’. (The Climb, Anatoli Boukreev and The Other Side of Everest, Matt Dickinson). I even found an old hardcover of Thomas Hornbein’s West Ridge Everest Expedition, written in 1963. 

One afternoon, while perusing Half Price Books, I found David Breashear’s High Exposure.  He’s the guy who made the IMAX movie, Everest, (which of course I had rented, along with several other movies of mountaineers’ derring do).  How exciting!  I grabbed the book and tripped across the street to one of my favorite cafes in Berkeley.  PIQ is a very Euro type place where I can sit at an outside table and pretend that I’m at Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots in Paris.  I ordered a latte and a baked good, opened High Exposure and started reading. 

About a half hour passed and I was completely engrossed.  I looked up and a guy was standing there, apologizing for bothering me, but just “couldn’t help but notice that I was reading his friend, David Breashear’s book.”  Yes, he knew him quite well, and was surprised I was reading this memoir, written several years ago.  We excitedly got into a discussion of mountaineering books, and he gave me several authors; including H.W. Tilman’s, the Seven Mountain Travel Books, (which I immediately ordered from Amazon.)  He introduced me to the old timey climbers; Tilman wrote in the 30’s before Everest had even been successfully summited.  One of the guys on his expedition was on George Mallory’s expedition in the 20’s! How cool is that?!?

It lifted my confidence that this guy actually wanted to talk to me.  And it was fun to talk about all these mountaineers with someone else who was interested. He even took my picture holding the book and said he was going to send it to Breashears.  It was a sweet encounter that lifted my spirits.  Yet another angel on the journey. . .

I wondered if God was the actual dynamic of climbing the mountain - God as a verb, not a noun.  Maybe God in me was the reaching for courage, for balance.  And these mountaineers reminded me of something that was already in me – it just took the loss of balance to find it.

I love knowing that the Himalaya Mountains are out there.  They are out there, as I type, standing tall and majestic, soaring into the sky into the thin air.  I am still standing, too.  Despite the storms and the battering, the root of my essence can never be destroyed; it is eternal.

At the summit what I felt was a massive, peaceful contentment. And a very exact feeling of everything falling into place: this woman, this young girl, fighting for her space in the world and having a lot of strength and a lot of talents and a lot of ambition and a lot of desire for challenges, and then having set out to climb this mountain because I had the opportunity and took it.

-- Lene Gammelgaard (first Danish woman to summit Everest.)