Manaslu Part 1

Introduction

Approximately ten kilometers south of the mountain chain that forms the Nepal/Tibet border, in the Gorkha Himal, stands the world’s eighth highest mountain: Manaslu. Weighing in at 8163 meters, Manaslu is one of fourteen mountains that rise more than eight thousand meters above sea level. To mountaineers the number eight thousand is important in the same way that twenty six point two has special significance among runners.

I went to Manaslu in the spring of 2002 with five American and three Nepali climbers. The Nepalese climbers were on the clock, in other words we paid them to help us reach the summit; these three men were invaluable to our success and I will have much more to say about them in the pages to come. Among the American climbers was my very good friend Brian Sato. Brian and I have climbed together for over twenty years and the friendship that we shared – one in which two men completely trust one another – is a theme woven into the fabric of this story.

All writing, even non-fiction, is conjecture. I am not a journalist and have no particular affinity towards books that simply tell how, when and where such and such an event occurred. I personally have always been more interested in the why. This is a story based entirely on recall, which is not to say that I’m making things up, but memory is fickle, and what I remember as a seminal event may have passed by my companions unnoticed and vice versa.

As our society becomes increasingly immunized the adventurer becomes more of an anomaly. What one hundred years ago was the danger of everyday life has, today, morphed into an unacceptable risk. The price of an unexplored life is mediocrity; you don’t know your capabilities until you’re forced to find them.

So that’s the upshot, this is a story about friendship, challenge and discovery: the three ingredients of a wonderful life.

Subprime Intelligence

I’m reading this book The Monster by Michael Hudson, it’s all about the subprime mortgage debacle and it got me wondering: why don’t they teach personal finance in high school? It seems that a class on basic household finance – what is APR, what’s wrong with credit card debt – should be required in order to graduate high school.

The purpose of public education is to create a responsible citizenry, but when you have so many people who are so gullible you actually begin to create a failing state. The financial meltdown spawned by subprime lending is a case in point. I mean how can you explain to the public the problems of deficit spending or global warming when so many members of that public will willingly sign an adjustable rate mortgage that begins at fourteen percent and climbs to twenty two percent.

Keep It To Yourself

One of my favorite editorial writers is New York Times columnist David Brooks. Unlike most blow with the wind conservative columnists who are adamantly for something until they become adamantly against it, Mr. Brooks remains true to a very well-defined ideology, and even though I usually don’t agree with him, I do respect him for his intelligence and his consistency. In today’s editorial - The Joys of Social Science - Mr. Brooks accumulates the findings of several social scientists, my favorite of which was a study performed by David Gal and Derek Rucker.
Here's the abstract of the study:

A seminal case study by Festinger found, paradoxically, that evidence that disconfirmed religious beliefs increased individuals' tendency to proselytize to others. Although this finding is renowned, surprisingly, it has never been subjected to experimental scrutiny and is open to multiple interpretations. We examined a general form of the question first posed by Festinger, namely, how does shaken confidence influence advocacy? Across three experiments, people whose confidence in closely held beliefs was undermined engaged in more advocacy of their beliefs (as measured by both advocacy effort and intention to advocate) than did people whose confidence was not undermined. The effect was attenuated when individuals affirmed their beliefs, and was moderated by both importance of the belief and open-mindedness of a message recipient. These findings not only have implications for the results of Festinger's seminal study, but also offer new insights into people's motives for advocating their beliefs.

Funny the timing of this bit of info as I yesterday I was emailing a couple of buddies my hypothesis that the more someone doubts their religious beliefs the more likely they are to go around trying to convert others. I think David Puddy from the good old Seinfeld days had the right approach.

First Turns

Finally it's the time for ice cream for breakfast. Nothing fuels that big ski day at Alpental like a big Belgian waffle topped with ice cream and berries. I was up at five thirty beating egg whites to soft peaks so that we could be in line at opening bell.

The coverage was spotty but the snow was cold and soft, so all in all it was a good day. Here in the Northwest any skiing before Christmas is gravy so I can't complain. As a general rule you can't ski Alpental if you're a complainer: I am continually amazed by just how challenging Alpental really is. There just aren't that many people willing to put up with that place.

A Balancing Act

I like to balance my rants with something positive. Not everything manufactured in the twenty first century is complete crap, all you have to do to prove this point is look to the small town of Red Wing Minnesota. There is a factory in that town, a factory known as "The Shoe" where craftspeople still make a product that is built with pride and built to last.



My Red Wing Iron Rangers are the most comfortable and most well-made shoes that I've ever owned. They are my go-to winter shoe and I predict that ten years from now I'll still be wearing these same shoes.

The Land of Broke S**t

My father-in-law used to have a ranch in rural east Texas, a place he accurately referred to as “the land of broke shit.” The roads leading to the ranch were lined with trash and nearly every home we passed was surrounded by a garden of broken lawn mowers, motorcycle frames, rusted farm equipment, disused playsets and no-wheel cars on cinder blocks. It was as if owner used something until it broke down and then simply got off and walked away, leaving a metal hulk to rust in the knee high grass. Now it seems that the WalMartization of America has made, not just East Texas, but our entire country a land of broke shit.

Last week I bought one hundred and fifty pounds of grass fed beef from a rancher in Eastern Washington and wouldn’t you know it my six year old chest freezer decided that this was the time to take a crap. We go to Home Depot, but all they have is the same piece of junk I already had so off we went to Sears. Sears had two options: the same piece of junk with a Kenmore instead of a GE sticker and a $250 stand-up freezer. I didn’t want the same ole same ole so I inquired about the stand-up. They wanted $70 to have it delivered; seventy bucks to deliver a two hundred and fifty dollar unit, no thank you I’ll take the POS chest freezer and borrow Jane’s Jeep Cherokee to get it home.

So here I am with POS 2.0 in my garage and next to it sits a worthless piece of scrap metal. The old freezer didn’t completely fall apart, what happened was some tiny plastic part had finally had enough and gave out thereby rendering the entire unit worthless. What irks me is the waste.

As Americans demand cheaper and cheaper products manufactures’ respond by examining each individual part of their product and systematically replacing relatively expensive durable parts with inexpensive failure prone parts. Eventually the unit becomes so cheap that it’s more economical to purchase a new unit than it is to have it repaired. This would be no problem if the product were made out of say corn, but they are not, they are made of and packed in non-renewable resources. My old freezer is a complete waste of finite resources. Whether it’s pots and pans, televisions or freezers we have become a throw away society.

Throwing everything away just isn’t a sustainable model. Perhaps we should task prison inmates with the job of repairing all the broken down freezers, water heaters, dishwashers, ranges, washers and dryers. You should just be able to make a call, have someone pick it up, have it transported to some lock-up where it would be fixed and put back out for sale. Seems like a win, win, win.

Community

A few weeks ago I listened to a story on NPR about the family of severely disabled girl who was turning eighteen and facing severe reductions in her Medicare. The girl required full time medical care, which came from either the parents or an in-home nurse. There was a lot of pressure on the parents to put their daughter into a home for disabled adults, an idea they were against because of the poor care she would receive. The parents brought up the subject of whether or not the public ought to care for a person who, at least in the traditional sense of the word, has nothing to “contribute” to society. The parents tried, in vain in my opinion, to make the case that their daughter did have value to society, a topic some emailer seized on the next day stating that he had no responsibility for someone who can’t contribute. In my humble opinion both the parents and the emailer completely missed the boat.

This girl doesn’t contribute to society, but she does define us as a society. Imagine a scenario wherein one hundred pregnant women were put into a room where a doctor walks in and states “I’ve studied each of you and I can tell you that ninety eight of you will have healthy babies, one of you will have a mildly disabled child and one of you will have a severely disabled child. My combined fee for providing care for the two children is one hundred thousand dollars. These are the facts you decided how to best handle it.” I think that the room would be split about eighty/twenty with the eighty being a community oriented group and the twenty being a screw you group.

The community group would propose that everyone kick in a thousand dollars for a total of one hundred grand, thus ensuring that the two disabled children will get the care they need. The other twenty percent will say screw you, I’ll go ahead and take my chances. In my humble opinion the community group has the more worthwhile solution: everybody kicks in a little in order to care for the community as a whole. The screw yous would argue that they are forced to pay for something that their family doesn’t need, while the community people would counter that they are paying for something that that their society needs. Do we stand alone or do we stand together.

The disabled child has value outside of her immediate family not because she can go out and handle a shovel or enter data into a computer, but because she defines who we are as a society. Are we a community or are we a collection of screw you individuals. The screw you mentality falls apart when one of that group ends up with the disabled child; suddenly they want to change their vote. Kind of like when Limbaugh found himself addicted to hillbilly heroin or when Wall Street bankers stuffed money in their pockets just before coming to the American people – the very same people they’d been screwing for a decade – hat in hand.

When you look at American history you see an attitude shift right around nineteen forty. I believe that WWII changed the American psyche from one of “grab all you can get” to “we’re all in this together.” It was this shift in world view that fueled something that America had never before seen: a prosperous middle class. Today The United States of America faces a very difficult challenge wherein a minority of screw yous are presenting themselves as a majority. The community group, led my President Obama, has done a very poor job of making their case, it’s time he/we step up and show the voters just what kind of crappy world these Ayn Rand reading screw yous are trying to create.