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Literary Review
Why climb?
ANOTHER book on Everest, I thought, casting a jaded look at the clichéd book cover showing peak and tent. But a few pages into High Exposure, and there was no turning back. Those like me whose relationship with peaks is to admire them from a respectful distance may know nothing about Breashears. Among people interested in mountaineering, this climber and high altitude film-maker is apparently a legend.
To couch potatoes who wonder why people bother climbing peaks, he provides some answers. People don't climb Everest just because "It is there". For Breashears, as a child confused by the violence of a father he idolised, climbing provided focus and calm. He narrates how he fanatically read, trained and thought of it all his waking hours. He demonstrates how fiercely technical a craft climbing is, solitary, dangerous and exacting. There is also the sobering self-realisation later in life, "staring at the prayer flags, bent aluminium surveying tripods, and laser prisms that now adorned the top of Everest" that like other climbers, he uses the mountains "for personal gain."
David Breashears was at Everest's Camp III for a pioneering film shoot during the death-scarred expedition of 1996 that Jon Krakaeur has written about in Into Thin Air. Having put his life at risk to rescue those he could, Breashears took sometime, thought hard, then went on with his team to the summit past the stranded dead bodies of friends from that other expedition. He got his film footage as planned. He does not make it sound either heroic or rash. Just all in a day's commonsensical, hard work.
High Exposure, Penguin, Rs. 295.
ANURADHA ROY
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