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Outside Magazine September 2003

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The Survivors (Cont.)


	(Gail Albert-Halaban)

NOTHING CAN PREPARE YOU, of course, for the phone call or the person at the door telling you there's been a storm, an avalanche, a falling rock, and that your husband, wife, father, or daughter isn't coming home. You can't allow your mind to expect that sort of anguish.

When Erin and Eric Simonson met, on a climb up Kilimanjaro in 1997, she asked him if he would climb Everest again if he had a family. If children were involved, he told her, he would think twice. "What his answer told me," says Erin, "was that he felt he wouldn't have the same sense of responsibility to a wife that he would have to children." In 2000, the couple had a daughter, Audrey; Eric went to Everest the next spring. "I used to feel like I came home from trips with my little bag of experience fuller than when I had left," he told me that fall. "That whatever I brought back with me overcompensated for something I might have missed. But you can't rewind the tape on a kid—you're either there or you're not." Eric continues to climb, but he has made a conscious effort to reduce the time he spends at high altitude. Still, says Erin, "he's willing to take that risk, even as a father."

In 1995, 33-year-old British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves, the first woman to climb Everest alone without oxygen, and the mother of two small children, wrote from K2 base camp, "It eats away at me—wanting the children and wanting K2. I feel like I'm being pulled in two."

Like many climbers, she didn't stop. As she neared the summit of K2, on August 13, it was late in the day and threatening clouds were forming to the north, but she kept on. At 6:30 p.m., she stood on top of the world's second-highest mountain. The sky was clear, the air still. But thousands of feet below her, the clouds were generating storm-force winds. On her descent, Hargreaves, along with two of her climbing partners and three Spanish alpinists, was plucked off the mountain by the wind and slammed down so brutally that her jacket, her harness, and one of her boots were ripped off. After the storm, another climber found these items, along with a trail of blood leading down the mountain to where her body lay, unreachable. How do families—children especially—make sense of something like that?

It doesn't matter to 45-year-old Andréa Cilento that her father, American mountaineer John Harlin II, never finished his dream climb, a direct route on the north face of the Eiger. Or that the route he took now bears his name: the John Harlin Direct. What matters to her is that he's been gone since she was eight.

The Harlins moved to Leysin, Switzerland, in 1963, when Andréa was five and her brother, John, was seven. Harlin and his wife, Marilyn, had jobs at two American schools there, and in the Alps he could pursue his passion for mountaineering. By the time Andréa was eight, he had given up his regular job to establish the International School of Mountaineering and to focus on his plans for the Eiger.

Harlin made his attempt in the winter of 1966. On both sides of the Atlantic, the Eiger expedition was big news. On March 22, a British reporter, Peter Gillman, was on a hotel balcony at the bottom of the mountain, scanning the north face through a telescope. He was searching for Harlin and his climbing partner, Dougal Haston. Suddenly he saw a figure in red, falling. A human figure. "It was stretched out," he wrote in his book Eiger Direct, "and was turning over slowly, gently, with awful finality."

A fixed rope Harlin was jumaring up had broken, and he fell 4,000 feet down the face. Haston later admitted to Marilyn Harlin that he'd noticed the rope was frayed but thought it would hold. She couldn't bring herself to look at the body.

Andréa built up a fantasy around her father's absence. He hadn't died; he'd faked his death. It was perfectly plausible. He'd run away to start a new life. Eventually he would come back. He would let Andréa know where he was. It would be their secret, and she could go and visit him. Back in America, she held on to that fantasy until she was a junior in high school. When she started dating, she went for "skinny city boys." Eventually she married a nonclimber. Now they have a family, and in their house in Olympia, Washington, among the framed photographs of their children, are shots of her father and of his near double, her brother, John. He, too, is a climber. And the father of a seven-year-old girl. Andréa shakes her head at the thought.

"When climbers die," she says, "I hear lots of people saying, 'Oh, well, it's OK—they died doing what they love best.' I don't think that at all. You should make sacrifices when you have children, because they need you. People say, 'If climbers didn't do what they love to do, they would die inside.' Well, excuse me, but there are other people involved in life, and you're not an island, especially when you have a family. I can only go by how I felt growing up in that situation. I felt abandoned. I felt like I was less important to my father than that mountain. I still feel that way."

Was she less important? Certainly Harlin loved his children, but he resented the demands of fatherhood. In a 1960 letter to his wife, when Andréa was two and John was four, he wrote, "With [the kids] I have a trapped feeling, and I lose interest in myself, you, even life....Away, I become a romantic...just a different person. This person is more me, and it's the way I want to be."

"He had us too early," says John Harlin III, now 47 years old. "I wasn't planned. My father was 19 when he conceived me. He had great, driving ambitions. I was twice my father's age when I had a child. But I was still frustrated by not having climbed what I felt I should have by then."

When John was six, his father took him on his first multipitch climb, in the Calanques, on the southern coast of France. Harlin's competitiveness was legendary, and as hard as he was on himself, he made impossible demands on his son. When he died, John was ten. "Everyone else was crying," he says. "But I thought, How could he do that? How could he fall off? I wanted to know the details right away. I wanted to hear that he hadn't made a mistake."

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