five big mountains
Reviewed by Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
23 February 2011 archive
My mountain climbing credentials are minimal: I pull on my hiking boots perhaps twice a month and six years ago I went up Mount Triglav for the first and last time. At a respectable-sounding 9,396 feet, Triglav is Slovenia's highest peak, the subject of a musical march by the composer who wrote "Entrance of the Gladiators" (of circus music fame), and a molehill compared to the Five Big Mountains in David Schaeffer's new memoir. Still, my Julian Alpine experience was more than enough to scare me witless and remind me that other weekend-warrior activities pale against the genuine perils of mountain climbing. For the final hour of my little climb the fear-juices were flowing; if I were venison, my adrenalin-soaked meat would be ruined and too tough for the goulash. "Never again," I vowed.
Early in Five Big Mountains, Schaeffer recalls two climbers descending to a base camp near Orizaba, "swearing that they would never do this again" (16). Like me, Schaeffer admits to similar thoughts. Unlike me, he has gone on to conquer some of the highest peaks outside of Asia. And lived to tell the tale. The sub-title, A Regular Guy's Guide to Climbing Orizaba, Elbrus, Kilimajaro, Aconcagua, and Vinson, clarifies his middle-age goal: to climb the third-highest peak in North America (Orizaba), and the highest in Europe, Africa, South America and Antarctica respectively.
Schaeffer's book is an extended journal of sorts, with each of the five chapters dedicated to one summit. There is also a summarizing "Postlogue" (a new word for me), in which the ever-modest author/lawyer/husband/father renews his vows to "'Whoppers' malted milk balls, M&Ms, cashews, potato chips, ice cream, Cokes, cookies, cheesecake" (297), expresses gratitude to his family for indulging his habit, and reiterates that he's "merely a regular guy who likes to do extraordinary climbs" (296). Schaeffer may fuel himself with Snickers bars at 17,000 feet, and he may have a soft spot for Coke, but he's obviously a fine climber and not just a sweet-tooth with a strange hobby. Consider this: when Schaeffer falls into a crevasse on Russia's Mount Elbrus, he steels himself with an eerily stoic admonishment "Just climb out idiot. Use your crampons" and calmly does exactly that. Just another day in the life of a serious climber.
This family man does not brag about his achievements, and is honest throughout whether he is secretly gauging his climbing partners' fitness level, complaining about "an overweight English policeman" (30) who slows down the group, or having a rare meltdown on Mount Vinson in Antarctica ("THIS IS NOT A ****IN' RACE!!" he tells a cohort when the going gets particularly tough). This sort of climbing is seriously serious, and unprepared or unreliable partners are a genuine hazard.
Climbers of Schaeffer's stamp are necessarily jet-setters and much of their time and money is spent getting to the mountain. Schaeffer capably transmits the dull flavor of this travel limbo and the inevitable waiting it entails. Five Big Mountains is not just about danger and adventure, about suffering frostbite and staring death in the face; Schaeffer plunges us into the quotidian torpor of bad elevators in Moscow, airport lounges anywhere, visa applications, and plane journeys ("The flight from Atlanta to New York was uneventful" [35]; "The three or four hour flight to Dar Es Salaam was quite uneventful" [93]).
Indeed, Schaeffer takes us to the front lines of the waiting line in many an airport, a place I've been too often and would like to avoid in my reading time. "Getting through the approval process to get to the departure gate [in Johannesburg] took forever," notes Schaeffer, making me wonder why I had to join in this forever-ness. He continues: "[a climbing partner's] bags were overweight and an excise tax had to be paid in cash. Rather than pay the cash, we rearranged some of her clothes into our bags, and finally managed to slide through with no penalty" (93). Would that he had trimmed a pound of this book, since fewer descriptions like this would make for a tighter, more gripping read. This and the many other descriptions of modern bureaucratic life at airports ooze dullness, especially when juxtaposed against Schaeffer's descriptions of nasty alpine storms and the possibility of literally slipping away for good on a descent.
On another low note, Five Big Mountains was in desperate need of a copyeditor. In the first few pages, we learn about "a beefed up stud with an European accent" (9) and "a perfectly day" (11), and are we warned "'Be careful and if it gets to hairy" (15). There are so many mistakes that reading soon becomes a game. Find the missing element(s) in these sentences: "Even a mild headache and the scratching of rats below, I quickly fell asleep" (17); "Once inside, I retired the tiny room looked like a ship cabin" (37). Definite and indefinite articles are occasionally dropped ("in sort of Bolshevik way" [41]), such that Schaeffer's own writing doesn't always differ much from his imitation of his late Russian guide's English ("who tragiccally [sic] diedin 2005"). Sometimes nouns are supposed to double as adjectives, such as when Schaeffer writes of a "young Russia woman" (35) and "Southern Russia cattle farms" (43). Some verb forms and tenses are plain wrong and unidiomatic ("By 6:00 A.M., we climbed over a crest" [21]. "By seven o'clock," things are back in grammatical order, as "he had climbed" [22]) and some are more creative "than I will ever to be" (33). Even a decent ESL could find dozens of typos and gaffes here. Editors are expensive, and we're all used to seeing a few misspellings now and then, but here the mountains of errors block the path to reading pleasure.
But not always. Schaeffer tells us that Mount Ixta in Mexico is "over 17,000 feet and resembles a woman laying on her back" Must be some sight.
Five Big Mountains is probably a must for the select few who have scaled the five big peaks Schaeffer describes, and it also offers some bright spots to counterbalance all the mundane descriptions of getting to Russia or Tanzania, and the less mundane descriptions of flying to Antarctica. Schaeffer's juggling act with family, career and passion for climbing is warmly presented throughout. "Tell me again why I voluntarily paid $30,000 to put myself through this?" (263) asks Schaeffer as he battles Mount Vinson with a bunch of strangers. The answer is given in the chapter on Kilimanjaro. "I felt the mountain drawing me to it. Climb me!"
Schaeffer, David. Five Big Mountains: A Regular Guy's Guide to Climbing Orizaba, Elbrus, Kilimajaro, Aconcagua, and Vinson. Mercer University Press: Macon, Georgia. 300 pgs. 6 chapters, index. $29.00.
Copyright © 2011 by Jason Blake.