The End & Everest

The End
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

The Photo

A blurred cell phone photo of two spoons, a glass plate, and an empty Sweet 'N' Low packet. These are the remains of a chocolate lava cake that Dave and I shared at the end of tonight's dinner with my niece, her boyfriend, her mother, and her mother's boyfriend.

But Wait, There's Everest
I’m still on the Everest jag. This round of Everest material consists of the next couple of episodes of the Discovery Channel’s Everest series and several books about Sherpa culture and history.

I’m interested in Sherpas in part because they are the reason most Westerners are able to climb Everest. It’s interesting to read stories by and about the "successful" Western summitters, the same climbers for whom Sherpa fix camps. pitch tents, cook food, fix ropes to the summit, carry personal gear and all expedition equipment, and accompany up the mountain to look after them and carry their extra oxygen tanks.

Because of the work they do, Sherpas often climb up and down the mountain from camp to camp and back several times for each single time a Western climber summits. Of course, the Sherpas are paid to carry loads and cook and pitch tents. The pay is good by Nepali standards: Sherpas can make about $2,000 for an entire climbing season, approximately 100 days. That means they earn about $20 per day. (Contrast that with the Western guides who can earn, as did Boukreev in 1996, $25,000 per season, or $250 per day.)

As a further insult, the climbing feats of Sherpas are overwhelmingly unrecognized by the larger climbing community. Some books address this; one calls Sherpas the Mexicans of Everest.

One of the few leaders who recognizes the extraordinary contributions made by the Sherpas is Russell Brice, the expedition leader featured by the Discovery Channel series. For his respect towards Sherpas, Brice pays a price. On one major Everest-oriented web site, he garnered a lot of criticism for, among other things, telling his Western clients that the Sherpas have their own families and their own lives and it wasn’t part of their job to die on the mountain with the Western climbers. His exact words were, "It's not their [Sherpas] job to die alongside you because of your ambitions. If I see that that's going to happen, I'm going to call the Sherpas away. I will deal with that in court later - and you will die."(Brice here refers to the courts because it is becoming common for Western climbers to feel that, for the $40,000 to $65,000 fee they pay to expedition leaders, they are “owed” the summit, or, failing that, are "owed" a rescue, and, if they don’t get what they think they've paid for, they--or their families in the case of climbers who die--sue.)

The Sherpas have a long history climbing the mountain and a history regarding Everest that is quite separate from that of the West and enormously profound when compared to the Western historical view of the Everest.

From the West to the East:

The first to summit Everest were New Zealander Edmund Hillary (who died a couple of days ago) and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay (who died in 1986). Tenzing Norgay (who summited Everest on his seventh attempt, each in conjunction with different European expeditions) wrote an autobiography, long out of print, called Tiger of the Snows the name an homage to the award that the early (and unsuccessful) British expedition leaders began to award exceptional Sherpas.

I haven’t read Tenzing Norgay’s book, but I have read two books written by members of his family: Tenzing Norgay and the Sherpas of Everest by Tenzing Norgay’s grandson, Tashi Tenzing, and Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest by Tenzing Norgay’s son, Jamling Tenzing Norgay.

Tashi Tenzing’s book offers not only the story of his own attempts and success at climbing Mt. Everest, but it’s also an historical view of Sherpas, both before and after they became the premier climbers of Everest.

Jamling Tenzing Norgay’s** book is more of a personal story but heavy with Tibetan Buddhist influence. His climb is spiritually profound compared to the books I’ve read of Western climbers, who may feel spiritual as they climb, but whose spirituality lacks profundity. The Sherpa journey up the mountain is far richer and more spiritual than the Westerner’s journey up the mountain simply because the Sherpas have a history with the mountain that is richer and more spiritual than that of Westerners.

Here is a quote from Jamling Tenzing Norgay’s book:

Despite the wind, I felt the tranquil form of Miyolangsangma sitting gracefully above us, protecting us all. Lying in the tent and praying, I felt that she knew why I had come; she understood my pilgrimage. Perhaps she recognized that I and others on the mountain were capable of a transformation like her own, and like that of the other Five Long-Life Sisters who inhabit five peaks within forty miles of Everest. Guru Rimpoche subdued and converted them all into defenders of the Buddhist faith, and they are now considered to be emanations of the Five Dakinis, the consorts of the Five Buddhas.

Can you imagine a Western climber on Everest laying in his tent thinking the Miyolangsangma, the goddess who lives at the top of Everest, and how his journey to the summit of Everest was like her journey to Buddhism? From all I’ve read, at Base Camp (where Jamling Tenzing Norgay was when he was thinking about Miyolangsangma), the Western climbers are thinking about how cold they are and how they feel sick from altitude and how they need to eat more and that they’re worried about themselves. Their vision is turned inward with that worry.

Compare Jamling Tenzing Norgay’s passage with one from Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air:

Despite the many trappings of civilization at Base Camp, there was no forgetting that we were more than three miles above sea level. [. . .] If I sat up too quickly, my head reeled and vertigo set in. The deep, rasping cough I’d developed worsened day by day. Sleep became elusive [. . .] Most nights I’d wake up three or four times gasping for breath [. . .] My cuts refused to heal. My appetite vanished [. . . ] My arms and legs gradually began to wither [. . . ] I spent most of my time in Base Camp brooding about how I’d perform higher on the mountain [. . .]

Unlike Jamling Tenzing Norgay, Western climbers aren’t worried about Miyolangsangma, the goddess who lives atop Everest, and whether or not they’ve made the proper offerings to her at the right time so that she might allow them to summit.They’re not worried that at any time that they might insult her and awaken her demon nature (she was a demon before her conversion to Buddhism). The Sherpas worry about that; perhaps it is that worry and their offerings that allow the Western climbers safe passage. And why not? The vast majority of Westerners rely on Sherpas for everything else, up to and including their very survival on Everest.

Queued Up

So I’m partway through Tigers of the Snow, Jonathan Neale’s book about the Sherpas’ involvement with the early attempts by German mountaineers on Nanga Parbat, a Himalayan mountain like Everest. I’ve also queued up Sherpas: Reflections on Change in Himalayan Nepal by James F. Fisher. After the books, the last two episodes of the Discovery Channel series should arrive.

Will I be finished with Everest after that? I doubt it; There still remain Edmund Hillary’s books about Everest and Lene Gammelgaard and Goran Kropp’s books about the 1996 Everest disaster--the same disaster that caught Krakauer, Boukreev, and Jamling Tenzing Norgay.

(**Note: I use Jamling Tenzing Norgay’s full name every time because Sherpa naming doesn’t follow Western conventions--a Sherpa might have several names, and sometimes one appears to be the family name and sometimes it doesn’t, though many Sherpa’s adopt the name “Sherpa” as a kind of surname. In any case, I’m not sure exactly how to refer to Jamling Tenzing Norgay or Tashi Tenzing by the Western convention of using the author’s last name.)