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Quote of the Day: “Because it is There”
I can’t improve upon the many posts for Memorial Day, so I won’t try. This is more of a personal reflection on a small blurp I heard on a news report earlier today–that it’s the seventieth anniversary of Edmund Hillary’s and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’s successful ascent of Mt. Everest. It is a time so long ago (barely sixteen months before I was born) that it took the news three days to arrive in London, just in time to celebrate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, on June 2 of that year. What a different–not necessarily worse–world it was.
As a matter of fact, though, it’s not even Hillary’s and Norgay’s ascent that captures my attention today. (Although I’ll always remember Hillary Clinton’s idiotic assertion that she (who was born in 1947) was named after the man who ascended Everest six years later. Talk about cultural appropriation–from the New Zealanders, no less.)
No, today I think about an abortive attempt to ascend the world’s highest peak, almost exactly ninety years ago when, on May 30, 1933 (just like “5 o’clock,” it’s May 30 somewhere–maybe even in the Himalayas, right?), Percy Wyn-Harris–a member of the British climbing team and, at that time a Colonial Officer in Kenya–discovered an ax buried in the Everest ice. The ax was at first thought to have belonged to Thomas Mallory who had disappeared nine years earlier during another failed ascent. Subsequently, the ax was identified as actually belonging to Andrew Irvine, Mallory’s climbing buddy who disappeared on the same historic expedition as his fellow.
Thomas Mallory is the man generally credited with the response to a reporter’s question of, “Why do you want to climb Everest?” with “Because it is there.”
It’s perhaps the greatest quote ever, when it comes to the power of overcoming the unknown.
Wyn-Harris’s act of recovering the ax remains, as it always has, a signal moment in mountaineering history. And he is famous because of it.
Wyn-Harris’s subsequent career in the British Colonial service culminated in his administration of the Northern Cameroons during a UN-sponsored plebiscite that was held to determine its future. His immediate subordinate in that matter was my father.
Dad didn’t have much time for Percy Wyn-Harris, thinking him to be too much of a politician, and as a result, perhaps a lesser man. I was a child, though, and I remember him fondly.
I think Dad and I would have agreed that the Percy Wyn-Harris who attempted an ascent of Everest in 1933, and whose altitude record–without supplemental oxygen–stood until the summitting by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler in 1978, was a mensch, at least in that matter.
I know that the late Mr. She would have thought the same. Because when I mentioned that I’d a personal acquaintance with the man, he knew exactly of whom I spoke. He knew the story, and had nothing but respect.
Full disclosure: I’ve slept in Percy Wyn-Harris’s bed. He wasn’t in it at the time, of course. But when I was a child, and my parents were on the cocktail party circuit, they’d simply lug me along. In the early hours, I’d play with the children of the Nigerian servants, and have a whale of a time. And when it came bedtime, they’d put me in the host’s bed so I could sleep until the party ended, at which point, they’d pick me up and take me home in the car. As I said: It was a different–not necessarily worse perhaps better–world.
“Because it is there.”
Not a bad reason to strive for more, IMHO.
Dad (middle). Percy Wyn-Harris (right). I believe the gentleman on the left is Derek Mountain, and that the photo must have been taken on the occasion of the UN referendum and the subsequent Northern Cameroon’s vote to join Nigeria. Which, according to the British, was the outcome devoutly to be wished.
Published in General
I thought I “Liked” this post two days ago, but it apparently didn’t stick properly. My goodness, what a wonderful post!
It is not a problem. As a climber, it is essentially gospel to me to know the history of climbers and climbing. I have been involved in it since my late teens, and men like Mallory and Edward Whimper who made the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865 are almost like biblical heroes. BTW, there is an absolutely beautiful novel, Above All Things by Tanis Rideout, which describes Mallory’s life from the viewpoint of his wife. It is, as far as I can tell, very accurate, historically, and also extremely touching, such that one doesn’t have to be a climber or even particularly interested in mountaineering to enjoy it. I have read several biographies of Mallory, but none give his humanity and the tragedy of his death as clearly as this book. I highly recommend it. It is available on Kindle as well as paper.
Why climb a tree?
It is the love of danger.
“I’ve been trying to account to myself for the essence of that attraction which resides for us in the blade of a sword. It’s an irresistible pull which keeps us in army service in spite of ourselves, and makes us be for ever waiting for a crisis or a war. I don’t know if it isn’t true to say, or write, that there inheres in armies a passion which is peculiar to them and gives them their life; a passion that partakes neither of the love of glory nor of ambition, but is a sort of hand-to-hand combat against Destiny, a struggle which is the source of a thousand delights unknown to the rest of mankind, and whose secret victories are replete with magnificence: in brief — the love of danger!
“What is it that sustains the sailor on the sea, pray? — that consoles him for the tedium of being a man who sees only other men? He sails, and says goodbye to the land; goodbye to women’s smiles, goodbye to their love; goodbye to his chosen friends and to the gentle customs of his life; goodbye to his cherished old parents; goodbye to the natural beauties of the earth, to the trees, to the greensward, to the sweet-smelling flowers, to the shady cliffs and the melancholy woods thronged with wild and silent creatures; goodbye to the great cities, to the endless activity of the arts, to the sublime eruption of thought into the idleness of life, to the elegant, mysterious and passionate relationships of the great world: to all these he says goodbye — and sails. He sails to encounter three enemies: water, air, and man; and every moment of his life he will have to do battle with one of them. This magnificent tension frees him from tedium. He lives amidst continual victories; it’s a victory in itself to sail across the ocean and not be swallowed up in shipwreck; a victory to go where one chooses, and to plunge through in the teeth of contrary winds; a victory to run before the tempest, and to make it follow like a servant; a victory to sleep in the midst of it and establish there a working place. The sailor reclines on the ocean’s back with a regal feeling, like St Jerome on his lion, and rejoices in solitude, to which he is wedded. And it’s the love of danger which sustains him, which means he is never idle for a moment, that he’s conscious of a struggle and has a goal.”
Alfred de Vigney
Servitude and Grandeur of Arms (1835)
Hat’s off to you, and I’ll look up that book. As the widow of a man who loved the mountains himself (he was proudest of his ascent of Mt. Ranier), I just used to close my eyes and grit my teeth and hope he came back with his skeleton intact. (Mountaineering was bad enough; ice-climbing is, I think, a pastime for the truly insane….). In my youth, I climbed Seneca Rocks in WV (one of the easier routes), and the two of us made it within a couple hundred feet of the top of Mt. Washington (which he’d climbed several times) before the sky suddenly closed in and a blizzard forced us down) but somewhere along the way a disorienting inner-ear condition put paid to such aerial activities, and I have stayed pretty much earthbound ever since.