Climbing Lessons from the School of Tomaz Humar (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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Climbing Lessons from the School of Tomaz Humar (Cont.)


	Meditating under the Pericnik Waterfalls (Antonin Kratochvil)

THE ANSWER STARTS IN KAMNIK. One day Tomaz and I drive into the countryside in his Golf, a gift from a local car dealership. The car's sides are plastered with his name and likeness, which would be like Madonna tooling around Beverly Hills with her naked body painted on a Porsche. People stare in shock as we pass.

We pull up to a house under construction. An old couple, dressed in neat, well-worn clothes, are puttering around the site—Tomaz's mother and father, Rozalija and Max.

His father shakes my hand with an unusually strong grip for a short, wiry man in his seventies. I already know the feeling: When Tomaz shakes your hand, your knuckles crack.

The house is being built for one of Tomaz's younger brothers (he has two, Marjan and Mataj), and the construction crew stands before us: their parents. Trained as a shoemaker, Max Humar has worked construction his entire life, and though he is retired, you wouldn't know it. I ask him if he has trouble hoisting the 60-pound cinder blocks that the house is being built with.

"No, why would I?" the old man replies. "I get more pleasure from working than lying on a beach. I never sit around the house. That's for people who are sick."

"Before army, I was an unusual guy." Tomaz says about his stint in Kosovo. "I was not normal before. But the army made me more unusual."

Max Humar knew hunger and misery during World War II. In 1967, before he was married, he escaped the Iron Curtain by fleeing over the rugged Kamnik Alps to Austria, but changed his mind once he arrived, turned himself in to the Austrian police, and was sent home. Humar has always expected his children to work hard. When houses were built for family or friends, the boys pitched in, lugging 100-pound sacks of cement.

I'm shown photos of a boy on a scaffold.

"I was seven years old," Tomaz says.

"You were six," his father replies, sternly.

"Was he a good worker?" I ask.

"He never complained," his father says.

I ask if it was odd for six-year-olds to work construction.

"It was normal," Max says. "We didn't have much money. We couldn't pay for workers. That's what children are for."

He turns to Tomaz. "What kind of question was that?"

Tomaz shrugs.

Tomaz and his brothers slept in an unheated attic room, sharing a pull-out sofa. Their mother tells me that her sons could sleep in the living room only if the outside temperature fell below 14 degrees. "So what if they were cold?" his dad says.

These days Tomaz admires his father, but they used to be at war. "He wanted me to be a normal guy, and I wanted to be free," Tomaz tells me later. "We didn't talk. He would work, and when he wasn't working we would fight. So better not to talk."



	Plunging into springs along the Kamniska Bistrica River (Antonin Kratochvil)

Fury has its uses. Tomaz blew off steam in the Kamnik Alps. The angry young man joined the Kamnik Alpine Club in 1987, climbing under Bojan Pollak, a legendary instructor and a stickler for detail. In his first year, Tomaz was not permitted to wear climbing shoes; he graduated from sneakers to clunky boots weighing several pounds apiece. Pollak sent him on overnight climbs without a sleeping bag, without enough water or food, and insisted he bivouac on the most exposed ledge.

In 1989, when Tomaz was 20, his apprenticeship was interrupted by the Yugoslav National Army, which sent him to Kosovo. At the time, the province was under Serb control, though 90 percent of its inhabitants were ethnic Albanians who despised Serb rule. Tomaz served a brutal and rotten enterprise that he knew was brutal and rotten, and he tried to desert many times.

His description of those thwarted escapes is convoluted, because Tomaz is not a linear individual; he jumps back and forth from one idea to another, one time to another. He spoke of hiding in a ditch and being found out, of hiding in a latrine, of being stuck in a trench with a chronic masturbator, of threatening an officer, of his commander telling him, "You're never going home, coward, you're mine for the rest of your life."

But after a year, Tomaz was given permission to go. He walked to a Kosovo train station in moldy, maggot-ridden combat gear and begged a ticket out. "When I came home I was a real animal," he told me. "OK, I was not normal before, but after Kosovo I was a total fool."

"What do you mean?"

"Before army, I was an unusual guy," he said. "The army made me more unusual."

This time, when Tomaz escaped to the hills, he climbed alone, at a blistering pace, opening new routes, stealing his father's hammer to pound pitons. He climbed beyond the supervising gaze of wiser alpinists like Pollak.

"I did some crazy things in those times," Tomaz says. "Crazier than Dhaulagiri."

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