Problem climber
In the wake of Ed Hillary's death, when the simple and unalloyed pleasures of mountain climbing were celebrated as the nation idealised a simple and straightforward approach to adventure, competitiveness and enjoyment of life, Paul Hersey's wide-ranging and readable book struck a very different tone.
The title, Where the Mountains Throw Their Dice, gives you some idea of the terrain covered in this book. When it arrived, I was away climbing and a friend had given my partner a copy of Maria Coffey's Where the Mountains Cast Their Shadow. Hersey mentions this book (although apparently his own title was suggested by his editor from a poem by James K Baxter), and oddly seems to have had much the same reaction to it as I did. Despite being outwardly about the effect on those "left behind", when climbers are killed, Hersey bases much of his analysis of the experience of climbing on what Coffey has to say. I, too, think that for anyone who wants to know why people go climbing, some of the best explanations around can be found in Coffey's book. Her climbing stories exist on a whole other plane of misery, horror, extremity and mythic symbolism, but the question is more or less the same. As a climber, how can you justify repeatedly putting yourself in situations of considerable risk, when the impact on those who are left behind is so awful?
I used to wonder why it was that so many older people stopped climbing mountains. Partly it's due to gaining other commitments, lack of time, families, work, the probability that you'll waste your precious time in a hut while it storms outside. But I've come to realise that many climbers do eventually ask themselves this question, and decide that the answer is the risk can no longer be ignored. Hersey notes that the death rate on the big routes in New Zealand's mountains has been estimated to be similar to that on peaks above 7000 metres.
Is it something about the time that we live in that has led to this question assuming such a position in the way we think about mountain climbing? It's commonplace now to complain that our society is becoming more risk averse, but I think this has been going on now for a long time. I've just returned from a family reunion in the Hokianga, where some of the older relations remembered an almost completely unsupervised childhood: roaming the bush, streams and farmland, and playing with guns and fire.
In 1914, when my Grandad and his siblings were aged 10, 8 and 6, and their mother was pregnant with a fourth, their father drowned while netting fish off the beach at a district picnic. A tragic and avoidable death, but perhaps not especially unusual for the time.
Today, such a death might also go unnoticed by the wider world – unless, of course, he was rescued only to die in his wife's arms. Hersey, who has worked as a journalist, has a jaundiced view of what interests the media about climbing, but it may be that climbing accidents do tend to produce these kinds of intensely dramatic tragedies more than do other pastimes. Look at the volume of climbing literature. Look at the truly incredible stories that Maria Coffey collected. These powerful tales seem to be in some way an intrinsic and essential reflection and product of the experience of climbing mountains.
Hersey's stories are not, on the whole, remarkable, but that is hardly the aim of his book. Climbing brings him some discomfort. He is far from experiencing the joyful romance of Hillary on Everest; society seems not to sanction what he does, and nor do some of those closest to him, in particular his father. And a close friend was killed climbing in the Italian Alps. He wants to examine his motives for climbing, and does this in a series of conversations with friends and climbing partners. Some are disarmingly frank, such as Derek Chinn confiding that when descending from Nanga Parbat in a storm he made sure he was last so that the others would traverse dangerously loaded slopes before him.
Yet by the end, when Hersey visits Jill White to reflect on the death of her son (and Hersey's close friend), there's no bitterness or recrimination. It's a beautifully tender and moving passage. I remembered how the parents of a close friend of my own, who died on Aoraki Mount Cook when we were both aged 20, urged all of us who attended his funeral not to stop going to the mountains. I admired them immensely for bestowing this gift on us climbers, instead of inflicting guilt or blame.
The subtitle of Hersey's book is "An Insight into the Kiwi Climbing Psyche". In fact, despite the range of climbers he's talked to, and the number of other books he quotes from, this is a very personal account. And although I found the first couple of chapters, in which he endeavours to describe the appeal of climbing mountains and set out the problems he faces by doing so, rather uneven and forced, it's the sense of one individual struggling to figure out why he continues to do it that is the book's real strength.
I've included several personal stories while writing this review, but I think that any climber who reads this book will reflect on their own climbing experiences and possibly even begin to see them in a new light. Which is to say, none of us are Paul Hersey, but by reading his book we might not only find out something about him but also something about ourselves.
Where the Mountains Throw Their Dice by Paul Hersey
https://tepuna.on.worldcat.org/oclc/174110801
This review appeared in 2008 in the Climber magazine.