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