Surviving Everest

This column first appeared in the Age on May 31, 2003

I was lucky enough once to fly over Mount Everest on a clear day and it was bigger and more beautiful than I ever could have imagined. This mountain looms large in the human psyche, as well as upon the landscape, and most days the papers have yet another story of a triumph or mishap that has occurred on its slopes. The Sherpas call it a Goddess, and respect the mountain as breathing, living thing. Certainly the Goddess has mood swings. One moment it is clear skies, sun, and relatively balmy weather. The next winds of 60 miles an hour, frostbite and death.

Even flying to the moon - an exercise in technological superiority - cannot compare to climbing Everest. Everest is about testing personal limits, rather than the limits of science. This was the case fifty years ago when a beekeeper from New Zealand called Edmund Hillary made it, with the help of another poor unknown, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

In Surviving Everest (Wednesday, 8.30pm, ABC) this week it is clear that scaling this mountain has another significance. It is a way men try and get closer to understanding their fathers, and hope to garner their respect. The documentary centres on the return to Everest of three sons of climbers. Jamling Tenzin Norgay (son of Sherpa Tenzing Norgay), Peter Hillary, and Brent Bishop (his father, Barry Bishop, was one of the first Americans to get to the top). They are led by Pete Athans, a man who has climbed Everest more than any other Westerner - 7 times in fact.

Interlaced with the story of their attempt to summit, are the stories of those who have gone before them, most particularly the Sherpas without whom any ascent would have been impossible. For the story of Everest is really the story of these people and it is they who have paid the dearest price. Of 175 lives lost on Everest expeditions, 56 have been Sherpas. Their superiority in climbing causes the West much irritation and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay himself was endlessly harassed with the question: who actually stepped foot on Everest first. Hillary and Norgay tried to off set this speculation by signing a statement that they did it as a team.

Watching the sons of such men suffer as they haul themselves slowly up the side of this mountain is dramatic. But what I found most moving of all was Brett Bishop's distress that he couldn't tell his father (who had died in a car accident) of his achievement, Jamling Tenzin Norgay talking of his father's physical collapse as well as his struggle to handle the attention his feats bought him. Saddest of all was the sight of Peter Hillary crying on the summit as he called his father to tell him of his achievement, with Sir Edmund, gruff on the other end of the line, saying, 'What, what? I can't hear you.' It spoke volumes of what efforts men will go to be loved by their fathers and how even one of the greatest physical achievements in the world cannot guarantee that love.

Posted by Sophie at 05:21 PM