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THE EVEREST CHRONICLES #2

"YEAH, BUT YOU USED OXYGEN"

"I've been to the top of Everest and you haven't." There aren't that many people walking around who can say that here in 1999, but the number's growing all the time, much to the chagrin of those who have been clear to the top. Maybe you noticed in the May 26 issue of Newsweek that even after the 1996 tragedy, with the multiple deaths on Everest, one year later 330 climbers and Sherpas were perched at Base Camp, waiting for the weather to clear so they could try for the summit.

And so what does human pride do? As a man's accomplishment is diminished by the equal feats of others, he has to knock them down. On May 8, 1978, a Reinhold Messner and partner Peter Habeler were the first to climb Everest without oxygen. Even back in the early days, pioneer climber George Leigh Mallory had said that to go to the top with bottled oxygen, "British air," the Sherpas disdainfully described it, was "(quote) unsporting and therefore un-British." But he soon realized that above 25,000 feet in what was now being called the Death Zone, it was a choice of using oxygen or not making it. So when Messner and Habeler made it to the top without gas, many proudly called it "the first true ascent of Everest." And the distinction of not using oxygen became a dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, an extra source of human pride. "I made it to the top!" "Yeah, but did you have to resort to oxygen?"

As we read through Jon Krakauer's incredible book, Into Thin Air, about the 1996 tragedy at the roof of the world, it comes pounding home to us how susceptible the human spirit is to this thing called pride. It's only worth climbing our Everest if those around us haven't climbed it, or didn't have the money to try it, or didn't get to the top without resorting to bottled oxygen . . . which we didn't stoop to doing.

Early in his book, Krakauer writes about his prior mountaineering experiences before Everest.
"The culture of ascent," he writes, "was characterized by intense competition and undiluted machismo, but for the most part its constituents were concerned with impressing only one another." Now notice this: "Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable. No one was admired more than so-called free soloists: visionaries who ascended alone, without rope or hardware."

And as mountain guides like Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, back in their freelance days, looked for corporate sponsors so that they could go up the mountain of their choice, pride would drive the stakes up every time.

"To continue receiving sponsorship from companies a climber has to keep upping the ante," he writes. "The next climb has to be harder and more spectacular than the last. It becomes an ever-tightening spiral: eventually you're not up to the challenge anymore."

I'm sure you've noticed — if we can come down from the mountain for just a moment — how pride and upping the ante have infected all the other sports as well. After a good season, a baseball player's agent will enter negotiations with ownership over next year's contract. And you know, many times it really isn't a case of wanting or needing or deserving X number of dollars. No, the agent puts just one concept on the table. "My client wants to get more money than any other player at his position." If he's a great pitcher and someone else out there is getting nine million a year from Steinbrenner, then my guy has to get 9.5 He doesn't need it; he can't ever spend it. But for at least one issue of Sports Illustrated, he wants to be known as the highest-paid pitcher in the game of baseball. Friend, it's a little thing called pride.

Maybe you remember this Bible line: "Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." That's Proverbs 16:18. And let me take you also to C. S. Lewis' classic chapter on this subject from the book Mere Christianity. It's entitled, appropriately enough, "The Great Sin." And he doesn't mince words:

"According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind."

That sounds very harsh, doesn't it? But there's more, and it takes on a decidedly Everest tone. Notice:

"Each person's pride is in competition with everyone else's pride. It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise. . . . Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man."

The aura and mystique surrounding Everest really came to an end in 1985, when a rich Texan named Dick Bass — a weekend climber with limited experience — was pushed and pulled and cajoled to the top by veteran guide David Breashears. "That wrecks it," complained the elite who had previously made it to the peak. Michael Kennedy, editor of Climbing magazine, wrote unhappily:

"To be invited on an Everest expedition was an honor earned only after you served a long apprenticeship on lower peaks, and to actually reach the summit elevated a climber to the upper firmament of mountaineering stardom."

Bass hurt people's feelings even more by being the first person to climb the so-called Seven Summits, the highest peaks on all seven continents. Well, what did pride dictate should happen next? Okay, said Rob Hall and his friend Gary Ball. "We'll go up the Seven Summits too . . . but we'll do it all in seven months. Seven peaks in seven months." With just hours to spare, they got to the top of the seventh mountain, the Vinson Massif in Antarctica, and enjoyed the fanfare of being the first climbers to do THAT. As C. S. Lewis observed: "Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man." Gary Ball is another climber, by the way, to die on a mountain, the victim of cerebral edema — swelling of the brain brought on by high altitude. All alone with his thoughts, his partner and friend, Rob Hall, lowered Ball's body into a crevasse on Dhaulagiri, the world's sixth-highest peak. Pride sometimes drives us humans to fatal moments.

Now friend, let me say again: we're not here to kick at those who climb mountains. Brave people have gone up to the top for some very noble reasons, and we all have our hobbies, our sports, our passions, the things that drive us. But when our identity is all wrapped up in the competition of it all, going where no man has gone, climbing higher than the next guy, breaking through some final frontier that until you did it was considered impossible . . . we're going to find ourselves in trouble, whether we're standing at 29,028 feet or down at sea level just keeping up with our neighbors the Joneses.

Maybe there's some kind of Everest driving you right now; I know I've got my own demons to wrestle with. Something out there I've just got to do, that you've just got to accomplish. It's a hard thing instead to fall into the arms of Jesus, to simply be God's child and let that be our identity, the source of our strength. The apostle John gratefully wrote in his first epistle:

"How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!"

Now, I know you don't normally write bestselling books by saying "I'm a child of the King." But what sweet relief it is when we can finally stop fighting our way up those glaciers, stop trying to pass our fellow climbers up the Khumbu Icefall.

A bit later in his chapter on pride, C. S. Lewis writes about how God wants to relieve us of this terrible competition, this race up the hill.

"He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And . . . if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble — delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life."

There was a man in the Bible who climbed a few mountains in his day. At one point, Moses had the option of being Pharaoh — talk about a temptation to indulge in pride. Then he was given authority over the Children of Israel, a group numbering maybe two million. More opportunities for pride. He climbed up Sinai and received the Ten Commandments from God's own hand.

But in the end, where was Moses' identity? How did he choose to be known? Simply as a servant of the Lord. At the end of his long and incredible career, as he gathered his people around him for a farewell speech, he didn't give them his credentials or talk about all the peaks he had scaled. Notice instead what he says here in Deuteronomy 32:

"I will proclaim the name of the Lord. Oh, praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, His works are perfect, and all His ways are just."

It's hard to look up, seeking for God instead of for that mountain peak with our name on it, isn't it? It's pride that pushes us along, makes us fight for a paycheck. The two Everest guides, Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, were competitors on the mountain. Their two rival companies, while sharing the same May 10 date for their final push, were vying for customers, for that elite "We're #1" reputation. And when it looked like one team would get more clients to the summit than the other, they competed. They ignored safety rules and previously established turn-around times. They compromised; they kept going forward instead of turning around. And today as you're hearing this sober message, the bodies of both men are up there in the Death Zone of the world's tallest mountain.

Pride. There but for God's grace . . . it would be you . . . and me.