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Outside Magazine September 2003

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The Survivors (Cont.)


	(Gail Albert-Halaban)

UNTIL THE 1980S, MOST ELITE climbers were men. Since then, an increasing number of women have taken up the sport, but the arena of high-stakes mountaineering—the most difficult routes on the world's highest peaks—remains dominated by men. These days, their partners are often involved in the sport themselves and are aware of the dangers. It wasn't always so.

When I first entered the climbing tribe, few of the other wives and girlfriends of mountaineers I met were climbers. I sensed a wall of silence surrounding them, as far as "the life," and the possibility of death, was concerned. They didn't complain about it or question it. The implicit understanding: Take it or leave it.

I'd met Joe in the fall of 1979, in the kitchen of a friend's house in Wales. I'd walked in while he was recounting how he and his friend Dick Renshaw had put up a new route on the 23,184-foot Indian peak Dunagiri and then, without food or fuel to melt water, endured an epic five-day descent. Joe was slim and wiry, with blue eyes and rather pinched features. He wore jeans and a fisherman's sweater. A web of fine lines ran across his forehead, and his hair was thinning. Had I passed him on the street, I doubt I would have given him a second look.

"It's the little questions that are hard," says Chris Bonington. "Sorting out your income tax, getting the car fixed, dealing with your children—these are more difficult than climbing a mountain. Life and death are simple."

I already knew a little about the climbing world. My oldest brother, Mick, was a climber at the time, and I shared a house with a young mountaineer, Alex MacIntyre. I had watched their girlfriends suffer the stress of separation when they left on expeditions, and it wasn't the life I wanted. Nevertheless, I was drawn to Joe's mix of danger and charisma, and the glamour of his life was a welcome distraction from my job as a high school teacher. I found myself in the company of some of the world's elite climbers, people who were always on the move, making plans, zipping off to remote mountains to do audacious routes, and returning with wild stories. Nothing was static; nothing was certain.

As a newcomer, I looked up to veterans like Wendy Bonington, a woman with long and hard experience. In 1966, while Chris was on a volcano in Ecuador, their two-year-old son, Conrad, drowned in a stream. It was more than a week before Chris got the news, another week before he could get home. Even then, Wendy never asked him to stop climbing. The couple had two more sons, and year after year, while Chris went off to K2, Annapurna, and Everest, becoming one of England's most famous mountaineers, Wendy stayed home. "Love to me is the whole plant," she says. "Once we put conditions on something, that is cutting off one branch of growth. There are very often things about another person that you cannot understand, but to me that does not change whether you love them or not."

Not all of the wives were so supportive. "I don't see why mountaineers need to be protected," says Ruth Seifert. "What—they're going to have absolutely everything? Plus the dear, faithful wife who's never to say anything horrid about them? Well, that's too much to ask, frankly." For 20 years, whenever Charlie left on expeditions, Ruth became a single mother to their two daughters while practicing psychiatry full-time. "I've preferred to have a life where I've not been the little wifey, where I've had to be the man and the woman," she says. "I know what I did at home was much harder than what he did in the mountains. It took me to my extreme. I thought, Good, I know who the strong one is."

Of course, Ruth also emphasizes that she and Charlie "really like and love each other and always have. Mountaineers aren't disappointed people. They don't feel they are wasting their lives. They've gone out there and done something." Charlie came into his element in the mountains, Ruth realized. He was a different person, more lively, more confident. Like most mountaineers, he felt alive in high, wild places. It was a feeling that home life couldn't provide. "Chris left Wendy with babies. Charlie left me with babies and a full-time job," she says. "They thought, What's the big deal? I'm a brave mountaineer. I'm doing something incredibly dangerous here, and all you have to do is look after the house and family. Let's get this into proportion."

And when he did come home, Ruth says, "Charlie was a nuisance. He just wrecked the whole well-oiled machine. They come back and expect that the whole universe of their home is going to revolve around them—God, I hated him when he came back. He was so full of himself. And then, after every expedition, he became depressed. And so I wasn't adequate—none of the wives could ever supply the real love and the enormous romance that they have with the mountains."

For many climbers, the hard part starts when they get home. According to Joe Simpson, the fears they face in the mountains are primal ones, of falling, or suffocating in an avalanche. Against these he sets "uncontrolled fears," about money, children, career, success, love—the daily concerns that can never be fully resolved and that never go away.

When I mentioned these theories to Chris Bonington, he smiled knowingly. "The big questions are simple questions, aren't they?" he said. "It's the little questions that are hard. Sorting out your income tax, trying to make the fridge work, getting the car fixed, dealing with your children being expelled from school or wanting to borrow money from you so they can do something you don't really approve of—those sorts of things are much more difficult questions than trying to climb a mountain or facing life and death. Life and death are simple."

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