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.

Comments

[Harper Cosper]

Sir Edmund Hillary is a hero among those who have grown to love mountain climbing. Ever since he set foot on the top of the highest peak of the planet, a lot of people from other countries have tried to climb it as well.