LIVING AT THE HEIGHTS

LIVING AT THE HEIGHTS

One of my boyhood heroes died this winter, and in death, he became a hero for the rest of my life.
The best-known feat of Sir Edmund Hillary, famous for being the first man to stand on top of Mt. Everest, captured my imagination because my younger brother Walter was named for a climber. Walt Bailey had conquered Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, but had died trying to scale one of the peaks of the Andes. And my name was Edward, if not exactly Edmund. So in June of 1953 (the ascent of the world’s highest mountain having come on May 29, 1953, far away in the Himalayas over which my father had navigated his B-24 in World War II), the news of this feat impressed me as Neil Armstrong stepping onto Earth’s moon would impress youngsters more than 40 years later.
As time went on, I gained a greater appreciation of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa guide who had helped Sir Edmund and who became the second man to reach the top, though probably he could have outsprinted the Englishman. (To Hillary’s credit, he was the one who made the trail though the treacherous Khumbu Icefall, and figured out how to get past the final obstacle to the summit, a 40-foot rock face, by squeezing into a crack between the wall and the ice buildup.) Like the barrel-chested inhabitants of the Andes foothills I had learned about in graded school, these Sherpas had a special strength, and probably could have gone up Everest long before, if they hadn’t been doing other things.
Little did I know that Buddhism was among those strengths, and that some day I would become a Buddhist. Why do we choose the heroes we do? Why, in first grade, did I attach to a young New York Giants player named Willie Mays, among all the players whose names and faces were on the bubble gum cards I bought with my carefully saved allowance money?
There was a lot I didn’t know about Hillary, which I have now gleaned from obituaries and research:
--As for the “Sir” part, he wasn’t some English aristocrat hiring the locals as if on safari, as I had assumed. He was Ed Hillary, New Zealand beekeeper and talented amateur climber (beekeeping was seasonal, so he could make ascents in the winter).
The 9th British expedition to Everest—over 400 people, including 362 porters and 20 Sherpa guides--were surprised to learn, when they returned to Kathmandu, that young Queen Elizabeth II had knighted Sir Edmund and expedition leader John Hunt, and had awarded a top medal to Norgay.
The Kiwis and the Australians had their own, independent-minded way of doing things, as the British officers found during World Wars I & II. The Brits were appalled at the lack of discipline in the Anzac ranks—but were impressed when the fighting started. Hillary’s first words coming down from the summit, to lifelong friend and fellow climber George Lowe, who was coming up to meet him and Norgay with hot soup, were characteristic: “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.”
--Everest wasn’t the end. Hillary climbed 10 other Himalayan peaks, plus some serious mountains in New Zealand. He reached the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, for which he led the New Zealand section, in January of 1958 (his party was the first to reach the Pole overland since Amundsen in 1911 and Scott in 1912, and the first ever to do so with motorized vehicles). In 1977, he led a jetboat expedition from the mouth of the Ganges River to its Himalayan source. And in 1985, he went in a twin-engined ski plane to the North Pole, thus becoming the first person to surmount the world’s highest peak and reach both its poles. (His companion on that trip: Neil Armstrong.)
--The Sherpas who helped so many outsiders with the Himalayas needed help themselves, and Hillary became one of their helpers. Much of his work after Everest was spent founding and leading the Himalayan Trust, which built schools and hospitals in remote regions. America’s Himalayan Foundation made him their Honorary President. In the late 1980s, he spent four and a half years as New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India, a post which combined that role with being High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ambassador to Nepal. On the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, he became the first foreign national ever to receive honorary Nepalese citizenship.
At a time when scandals and corruption have tarnished the image of professional athletes in this country, it’s worth remembering that on a global scale, citizen-athletes like Edmund Hillary will probably, as the years turn into centuries, count for more. It is possible that he was not the first to stand atop
Everest. A case can be made that George Leigh Mallory, more famous these days for having replied “Because it’s there” to an American questioner who in 1923 wanted to know why he wanted to go up Everest, got there before disappearing in the swirling mists (his body was found at 8,100 meters in 1991; Everest is 8,848 meters or 29,035 feet high, but there is a fast route down that he may have taken—long story, few certainties). But Hillary stands at the heights in so many other ways that his place is secure.
At the edge of a cliff in the Himalayas, facing Everest, the people who regard Sagarmartha/Chomolungma (Nepal/Tibet) as sacred have put up a row of stone stupas in memory of the many who have lost their lives trying to climb that highest mountain, Sherpas and foreigners alike. The melancholy row of person-size stone towers seems to be watching for eternity what they could not quite attain.
But Hillary lived to see his son Peter reach the top of Everest in 1990. And in 2003, as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of Edmund Hillary’s feat, Peter Hillary once again ascended Everest—together with Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the son of Edmund Hillary’s Sherpa teammate.

The Lost Little League Field

THE LOST LITTLE LEAGUE FIELD

Once upon a village, there was the most beautiful Little League field in the world. I know, because I played on it. Not long ago, I went looking for it, to see if anything was left, and found more than I had hoped.
I had stopped at Brandon’s downtown grocery store to pick up the local papers and check on what was happening in the town where I grew up. Coming out of the store, in the early evening, I realized two things: this was the time when we played baseball at the downtown field, and this time in town I had enough slack in my schedule to go on a long-awaited journey. Instead of driving away in my car, I drove out back of the store, looking for what might be left of that idyllic field.
The store now occupies most of the area that been the infield and outfield. By chance or coincidence, the ledges in the hill formed a curve that perfectly fitted a Little League outfield, as if nature intended for us to play baseball. But the store’s developers had blasted away the front slopes of the ledges, to have room for the building.
Home plate was toward the Congregational Church, which played hymns in its carillon during the early evening, adding to the beauty of the site. On this classic of small town life, in the glow of the near-sunset hours, my team won the pennant, and got to go to Fenway Park and see the Red Sox, which meant seeing the great Ted Williams.
Not that I had anything to do with that victory. In those days, there were no T-ball and Mighty Mites leagues, where boys and girls together find support and encouragement and build self-esteem along with their skills. In 1956, you started as a shrimp. The only way you ever got on that first year was by getting walked, which happened with some frequency because your strike zone was such a small target—but then you got thrown out trying to complete the marathon run to second base. The second year, you got a few legitimate hits, when you knocked your grounders between infielders. By the final year, you were one of the players the coaches made sure to distribute equally among the teams so the games would be good contests. School could be very frustrating, but seeing your growth on the baseball diamond, you learned something important about not giving up, and you had proof of accomplishment that no one could take away from you.
In my case, I batted the way my father taught me, choking up on the bat and swinging level to meet the ball and hitting line drives. In my last year, I was deadly: I didn’t wait for the ball to be in the strike zone, if I could reach it I could hit it, usually aiming it to the position where they had put the shrimp. When there were two outs by the time I got up, I shifted my hands down to the end of the bat and swung for distance, and hit more home runs than anyone else. Later, I looked on television to see if there were any players who batted as my father had recommended. I found two: one named Ty, and the other named Pete.
I wasn’t a very popular kid—both my parents were teachers, The Enemy, and I liked books, which many thought unutterably strange—but in baseball, I found an equalizer. By then, though, we were playing on the former high school field, which is now the site of the Nexus electronics plant.
But that field behind the American Legion house (torn down to create the Marketplace, which is now Brooks/Rite-Aid) meant a lot to me—though that first year, it was mostly a place to admire the prowess of Phil Marks and Eddie Bird, who traded the positions of pitcher and catcher and led us to the league championship. Later, on the Otter Valley basketball court, they led a team that beat Rutland by surprising them with slow-down play; Marks, who shot endless baskets at a home hoop, was a superb center, and Bird was one of the school’s all-time great guards. Ted Williams? Even as a shrimp, I could tell he was an immortal. He did not swing at the ball, he stood still and waited while the unknowing ball came wandering along and murdered it.
For the kids who weren’t playing, the field offered another diversion: swinging on the grapevines. Brandon, though you wouldn’t guess it just driving through, has a very, very peculiar geography. After the big falls in the Neshobe, the one just downstream from the Route 7 bridge, the river over eons carved a big ravine; as a result, Pearl Street and Conant Square and the area that was once the Little League Field all have steep banks, and sometimes require precipitous descents to reach the riverine bottomland. On those immense grapevines, you could swing out over the edge, bellowing like Tarzan.
Getting out of my car in the grocery store’s back lot, I could see that the scrub brush bordering the old field had, in the short 50 years it took me to become an oldster, grown up to a forest. Much of the smaller growth had died, shaded out and deprived of moisture by the larger root systems of the trees. I could see dead trunks on the ground that could have been vines.
As in the past, Brandonites of whatever ages had worn paths, for which I was grateful. Some had left beer cans and someone had dumped a bag of garbage, now strewn about; for these, I was saddened. But I kept going, closer and closer to the edge of the ravine and the edge of the graveyard.
And there they were: not swinging free, but paired with trees. “Paired” is the word: in each case, the stronger vine had won out over others. These twisted wooden cables were not only large, they were HUGE, ascending to where their leaves were invisible behind those of the trees. One was about four inches in diameter. Like the kids whose characters I admired in graded school and met later, they had changed, but were still admirable.
Coming out of the patch at its eastern end, on another path, I was delighted to find that a new generation of grapevines had conquered the chain link fence that the behavior of today's kids had demanded to protect the historic tombstones. This year, with abundant rain early on, this wild vineyard had produced the biggest fox grapes I’ve ever seen. Fox grapes? That one goes back to the time when Aesop’s fables were part of everyone’s education. In the story of the fox and the grapes, a fox sees a cluster of grapes in a tree and decides to leap up and grab them. He tries again and again, but can’t leap high enough. “Oh well,” he says as he walks off, “those grapes probably would have been sour anyway.” The same story accounts for the phrase “sour grapes.”
Earlier in my life, when I was doing more foraging, I discovered that you can make good grape juice from fox grapes, even though they do have a mouth-puckering effect when eaten whole. Gather them, wash them (look at the water that results and ask if you would ever drink water that looked like that, if you doubt the wisdom of adding an extra step here), then crush them and bring them to a boil, adding water or sweetener as necessary to get good juice. Then pour the results through a piece of cloth—an old bedsheet will do—and the mouthpuckering part will remain on the other side of the filter. Canned, this juice was the best thing I’ve ever had to drink to cope with a cold, full of antioxidants and easily available glucose that helps to warm the body, which aids the immune process.
Grapevines—the first settlers in Ohio found a giant grapevine when they arrived, according to artist-history writer Eric Sloane. It was 12 feet across at the base, and its ramblers extended a hundred feet away. After the farmers cleared the vines and cut the monster at its root, they held a dance on the stump.
Wouldn’t it have been amazing if they had put a wall around that vine and left it for future generations?
They didn’t, but Brandon still has some magnificent vines, where the magnificent Little League field used to be.

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