extract anniversary book 150 years mammut
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CLIMBUNTILIDROP OswaldOelz OswaldOelz l AroundtheworldTRANSCRIPT
88
“You don’t climb a difficult and poorlyprotected route because you want todie; on the contrary, you do it becauseyou want to live life more intensely.”
Oswald Oelz
87
I still live a pretty in-
tense life and have no
intention of dying any
time soon. I plan to climb for at least another 20 years; in fact, I in-
tend to climb until I drop. I have enough potential destinations to
last me the next two hundred years. It’s going to happen some day
though; I’ve noticed that the obituaries in the papers are often about
my generation. I have never been slow to grasp an opportunity, but
at the end of the day, I’m going to have to leave a long list of unfin-
ished projects behind.
Climbing the pocketed cliffs of Oman, snow bivouacs in Lunana
in northwestern Bhutan and sheep-shearing and trekking in the
Dolpa region of Nepal have all helped provide a real contrast to my
career in medicine as the director of a hospital. For me, climbing
has always been a complementary archaic lifestyle that has served
to counterbalance the over-regulated plastic world that we live
in. Life affords us comfort, a high standard of living, a more than
doubled life expectancy, as well as allergies, cancer-inducing che-
micals and obesity. We have destroyed the natural rhythms of the
world, our nights are constantly illuminated, and we are not sup-
posed to experience rain, cold or storms. There are no bears and
no woolly mammoths left to threaten us. Food is now abundant and
no longer has to be hunted or cultivated. Diesel and aviation gaso-
line save us from walking, layers of concrete, metal and other ma-
terials seal us off from the world outside. Electrical cables and radio
networks transport billions of banalities across the globe on a daily
basis. Everybody sends text messages, but only a few people seem
to be actually able to talk.
All this is forced into an ever tighter corset of regulation; safety
regulations have become the new terrorist networks. I am no longer
supposed to consume the brains of my own lambs and in the near
future, it will be illegal to leave offal to the foxes. Virtual worlds, safe-
ty standards, regulations and heteronomy make life more comfort-
able and also serve to fill the practices and pockets of the psy-
choindustry. The primeval world in which we developed was a very
different sort of place. Like our ancestors, we were mainly occupied
with finding food, keeping warm and fighting over women. If a bear
spotted you, you had to either flee or turn and fight.
Climbing involves returning to the conditions experienced during
the millions of years of human evolution. It is essential to find a safe
place to bivouac, to build a fire to melt snow, to be able to cook
potatoes with parmesan and to have sharp weapons (crampons).
This is where the regenerative potential of wilderness experiences
lies. Climbing in unknown regions makes flashmobs, the taxman or
the size of your automobile irrelevant. Trekking in the high moun-
tains of India recharges the batteries, leaving you better prepared
for any challenge the urban jungles of New York, London, Paris or
Berlin might throw at you.
This course of therapy is not entirely free of risk. I have lost more
than 25 friends over the years. These are people with whom I have
climbed on the same rope as, in whose company I’ve been privi-
leged to appreciate that life is a beautiful gift. They have been buried
by avalanches, have disappeared, fallen or died from high altitude
cerebral edema. They have journeyed on ahead to another place.
Whether all these things were a price worth paying remains a mys-
tery to me.
The Grim Reaper has had me in his sights and only narrowly
missed me on more than one occasion. Close shaves involving
falling rocks, avalanches, and pulmonary edema or breaking bolts
have made me appreciate my life in a more conscious manner. We
climb to experience intensity, not because we have a death wish.
“The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness
and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities
on the slopes of Vesuvius!” said Friedrich Nietzsche, the German
philosopher. In my opinion, mountaineering is a wonderful alterna-
tive.
The reason why we do these things is perhaps rather different
than we would think. Take, for example, Diego Wellig’s answer when
asked why he wanted to climb 8,000 meter mountains. “Because
there are no 9,000 meter mountains.” The same applies to George
Leigh Mallory, who told a journalist in 1924 that he wanted to climb
Everest “because it’s there.” Both of these answers express how
futile and unanswerable the question is.
I continue to enjoy each day I get to climb; feeling for a hold, the
sun beating down on the back of my neck, the rising thirst and the
soaking snow. I feel that my own experiences on the Jabal Misht in
Oman, the Cholatse in Khumbu, the Heiligkreuzkofel in South Tyrol
and the Triemli Hospital in Zurich are best summed up by the Swiss
playwright and novelist Max Frisch in his own inimitable manner in
“An Answer from the Silence” (1937), where he writes: “Why don’t
we live when we know we’re here just this one time, just one single,
unrepeatable time in this unutterably magnificent world!”
CLIMB UNTIL I DROPOswald Oelz l Around the world