SUSO

What drives the human urge to explore: humility or arrogance? Climber Erik Weihenmayer understands the tension between the two. He’s also living proof that seeing is not believing.

W / MATT BOCHENSKI

On May 29, 1953, exhausted and running low on oxygen, a New Zealand beekeeper, Edmund Hillary, and his guide, Tensing Rhutia, reached the summit of Mount Everest. Four days later, word spread across the globe: the world’s highest mountain had been conquered. “Today,” reported The Times, “high above the Nuptse ridge, Everest looks as surly, as muscular, as scornfully unattainable as ever; but after 30 years of endeavour the greatest of mountains is defeated.”

Defeated. That’s how we remember it. As if what? Hillary had somehow ‘beaten’ a mountain that even then had claimed 16 lives? As if every time he sunk an iron crampon into snow and ice he drew blood? As if, in proving himself in the crucible of nature’s greatest challenge, man had somehow transcended his place in the world?

It is a paradox of exploration that the same frontiers which inspire our greatest achievements do so because they somehow diminish and taunt. The urge to explore is also an expression of existential defiance; of refusing to accept the limitations of the human body. When asked why he climbed mountains, Hillary replied, “Because they are there.” It appealed to his primal instincts; Darwinism stripped to its bones. Nature, in its majesty and grandeur of scale, is a psychic threat to be bested, and we attack it with the language of war. We ‘defeat’ and ‘conquer’ and ‘assault’ the world around us. A climber will tell you that he exists in harmony with the mountain, but it’s by standing on the roof of the world that we put nature beneath our heel.

Few climbers understand the tension of exploration like the American Erik Weihenmayer. At a time when Everest is covered in the debris of those who followed in Hillary’s footsteps, when French helicopters can land parties on the summit and the Chinese are talking about a gondola on the North face, Erik represents something else. In the age of the adventure tourist, he’s a throwback to another era. “I always give the utmost respect to a mountain like Everest. It can kill you anytime it wants; it can crush you. In a head-to-head battle between a mountain and a human, a mountain will win every time,” he says. “You sneak to the top of the mountain when it blinks. You sneak up there and you stand for a moment, then you get down to where humans are supposed to be.”

"The visual record is a very powerful piece of a sighted person's experience but when you lose that piece you start to notice other things."

There’s something fitting about the fact that Erik was born in 1968, with the spirit of revolution in the air. At 27 he reached the summit of Mount McKinley, North America’s highest peak; two years later he did the same on Kilimanjaro; in 2001 he etched his name onto the summit of Everest; and the following year, a climb up Australia’s Mount Kosciuszko saw him complete the fabled Seven Summits – reaching the top of the highest mountain on every continent.

Where Hillary climbed mountains ‘because they are there’, for Erik, the urge to explore is more inward-looking: he climbs to prove that he’s here. Born with a rare condition called retinoschisis, as a child, pieces of his retina began to detach from his eye. By 13, he was blind. Look again at his biography, and all of a sudden Erik’s life starts to read like some sort of lecture on the human spirit.

Try closing your eyes and walking five paces without fear grinding you to a halt. Now try and imagine what it feels like to face that fear on a frozen waterfall at 3000 feet. Or a rocky outcrop littered with ankle-breaking boulders. Or Everest, in the thin air of the troposphere, with the blood pounding in your brain.

For Erik, the mountain isn’t another tick-box holiday stop, and he doesn’t believe in ‘conquering’ nature. “We’re going to have to change if we want to sustain ourselves as people over the long term because we’re going to mow down nature like a bulldozer,” he says. “Then when we’ve conquered that we’ll move on to the next challenge. It’s a very destructive relationship.” Instead, he says, “I definitely see myself as an explorer. I’m experiencing things that no one has ever experienced in the same way as me.”

There’s something subversive about the idea of Erik the explorer. It’s hard to separate exploration from vision – the visceral thrill of discovering new sights. The visual record of a place is both the proof and the privilege of the pioneer. Without it, what sustains the impetus for Erik to continually put himself in harm’s way? “The visual record is a very powerful piece of a sighted person’s experience,” he agrees, “but when you lose that piece you start to notice other things. You have beauty in your life through your other senses. I get an image of what the mountain is like; it’s just not a visual image. It’s the crunch of the snow under my feet, the different kinds of terrain, the wind in my face, the sun and the sound of space – when you get high on a mountain you can actually here sound vibrations moving around you. Every place has a distinct image, but not necessarily visual.”

But for all that Erik has a unique relationship with the mountain, he is also, by his own admission, “a traditional climber”, and he isn’t immune to the friction between pure experience and the achievement of the summit. Fifty years after his historic ascent, Hillary criticised the spirit that had taken hold on Everest after a British climber died. Though clearly in distress just below the summit, the climber was ignored by another expedition focussed on their own effort to reach the top. “In our day,” Hillary told the New Zealand press, “there's no doubt at all that the responsibility of looking after people who were in danger was far more important than getting to the summit.”

Erik understands how powerful the need to reach the summit can be. “I’ve always had a drive to get as high as I can on a mountain so that when you come down you know that you’ve done everything you can in your human will,” he admits. “There’s plenty of things that can turn you back along the way – the human body has its limitations – but don’t let one of those things that turns you back be your own squeamishness or your own disorganisation.”

That tension was thrown into sharp relief when Erik was invited back to Everest in 2002 by Sabriye Tenberken. Also blind and something of an adventurer herself, Sabriye had ridden on her own across Tibet recruiting blind children for her school, Braille Without Borders. In Tibet, the blind are said to be possessed, or suffering karmic payback for past sins, and suffer open discrimination. Inspired by Erik’s ascent of Everest, Sabriye asked him to come and speak to her students. Instead, Erik and his team selected six of the healthiest pupils and took them on their own journey up Everest’s northern slope of Lhakpa Ri. Accompanied by director Lucy Walker, the extraordinary undertaking became an equally extraordinary documentary, Blindsight.

“I definitely see myself as an explorer. I’m experiencing things that no one has ever experienced in the same way as me.”

It sounds like one of those films: take one disability, six cute kids, stick them on a mountain and hey presto – not a dry eye in the house. But what actually unfolds is a surprisingly real human drama. Erik and his team are there to reach the summit of Lhakpa Ri; but for Sabriye – teacher first and climber second – the summit represents something else entirely. It’s not a physical place at the top of the mountain; it’s the worth of the experience no matter the end result. When the kids start to falter, those two world views are suddenly pitched against each other, and it’s Erik who leaves the mountain with new lessons learnt.

“We got half way up the mountain and I realised Sabriye had different ideas of what we were there to do. It was a shock to me,” he admits. “But you learn from things like the Blindsight expedition. What it taught me is that a ‘summit’ can mean different things to different people, and it was okay for me to expand my perception of what a summit is. For those kids, it was an experiential thing, and that took me a little bit of time to comprehend. But it broadened my horizons, it expanded my notions, which is a good thing.”

Away from the mountain, Erik is no less energetic. He completed the Primal Quest, a 10-day, 457-mile adventure race involving kayaking, rock climbing, mountain biking, caving, trekking and white water paddling. He competed in the Arctic Team Challenge in Greenland; and the Real Deal, a mixed-ability race through the Rockies. He’s written two books, led treks to Machu Picchu, and even addressed the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, sharing the bill (and presumably wiping the floor) with George Bush.

“There’s always a new frontier,” he says. “The only limit is in your mind.” Right now that new frontier is his own body. He’s working with a company developing technology that can manipulate the brain’s sensory input. It takes information that sighted people process with their eyes, and finds different ways to send it to the brain – through currents in the skin, or ‘flavours’ in the mouth. It’s called ‘electrotactile stimulation’ and if successful, it will allow the blind to ‘see’.

Whether science or mountain climbing, it’s all part of the same philosophy. “It’s not about your intentions or who you are, it’s just going out and doing it,” says Erik. “You move incrementally a lot of the time, but sometimes you have to take a big leap.”

www.blindsightthemovie.com

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