True Summit (20 page)

The following year, Couzy and Terray were the first pair to reach the summit of Makalu, on a French expedition so strong that all nine climbers eventually reached the top. None of the other thirteen 8,000-meter peaks would first succumb to such a clockwork victory.

On November 2, 1958, Couzy was attempting a new route on the Roc des Bergers in the Alps with his friend Jean Puiseux. Couzy was leading. Puiseux heard a noise he knew all too well—that of a rock falling from high above. He yelled, “Watch out!” The stone struck the wall and caromed wildly. Couzy never had time to move. The rock struck him square in the head, killing him at once.

Somehow Puiseux soloed up the rest of the wall, then accomplished an arduous descent. The recovery of Couzy's body took a crack team two days of perilous toil.

Eight men, including Schatz, carried Couzy's bier to his grave
near Montmaur, in the Hautes-Alpes. Two years later, a commemorative plaque was mounted on the forest hut where Couzy had bivouacked the night before the fatal climb. Its legend reads:

JEAN COUZY

1923–1958

Alpinist extraordinaire who opened or repeated, from the Olan to Makalu, the most beautiful routes in the world.

At the time of his death, at thirty-five, Couzy left children of seven, five, and (his twins) three years of age.

In a moving obituary, Schatz spoke of Couzy's “purity.” “That was the secret of his demeanor in the mountains in the face of danger—no physical fear ever bothered him; he acted always as though, with everything carefully weighed, he had decided to act.” In
Conquistadors,
Terray wrote, “Jean was not made for the rat-race of this world. He was a sort of saint, an idealist tormented by visions of the absolute.”

In Paris in the spring of 1999, I met Lise Couzy. A strikingly handsome, dignified woman, she had never remarried. She recounted the moment forty-one years earlier when she had received the terrible news. Puiseux had telephoned a friend in Lyon, who in turn telephoned Lise's mother, whom Lise was visiting. “When I saw my mother's face, I knew,” she told me.

At first, it was more than she could bear to tell her children. “Where's Papa?” asked her son that evening. “Maybe he'll come back later,” she prevaricated.

“Jean stayed friends with the other Annapurna climbers,” Lise Couzy recalled. “He and Terray were particularly close. And he very much liked Lachenal. He was not at all disappointed in Annapurna, even though for him it was a very hard expedition, a very tough return.

“When he was off on Makalu, I had a lot of fear. But I knew this was his passion. On Makalu, Terray lost six kilograms, but Jean put on six kilos! It was a matter of different metabolisms.

“After his death, everybody spoke so well of Jean, but they didn't really know him. I never thought of marrying again. Jean was my hero. He still is.”

G
ASTON
R
ÉBUFFAT RETURNED
from Annapurna deeply disenchanted. According to Françoise, one of the first things he said was, “I don't believe any more in friendship.” His long relationship with Terray was irrevocably damaged by the expedition. Says Françoise of the dolorous march out from Annapurna, “After that, Gaston was no longer friends with Lionel, because Lionel had seen the political advantage of taking care of Herzog. Often Lachenal was left alone lying on his stretcher, so Gaston stayed with him.”

Rébuffat would never again join an expedition to the far-flung ranges, restricting his climbing instead to the Alps. Yet for the next two years, he pushed the limits of what was humanly possible in his beloved mountains. Only eleven days after getting home from Annapurna, Rébuffat put up an important new route on the Aiguille de Blaitière near Chamonix.

On July 29, 1952, Rébuffat reached the summit of the Eiger, the last of the six great north faces of the Alps, the ensemble of which he was the first man to climb. That ascent through storm, waterfall, avalanche, and falling stones was Rébuffat's most harrowing “epic” in the Alps. Of the nine climbers who found themselves trapped on the Nordwand that July, Rébuffat and the fiercely motivated Austrian Hermann Buhl were the strongest. The ascent verged toward chaos, with ropes entangled, climbers setting loose small avalanches upon one another. Buhl's stubborn refusal to share the lead, even when his lapses of judgment threatened to maroon the whole party, drove the calm and premeditating Rébuffat into a silent fury.

In his account of the Eiger in
Starlight and Storm,
Rébuffat casts no aspersions on the Austrian. Even reading between the lines, the reader would be hard put to discern the sharp interpersonal conflict that unfurled high on the face. “Buhl and Gaston didn't like each other,” says Françoise. “Buhl knew that Gaston could outclimb him.”

After 1952, Rébuffat lowered his sights slightly, although he continued to make the occasional first ascent, as well as to guide talented clients on routes otherwise reserved for experts. With the success of
Starlight and Storm
in 1954, Rébuffat started to believe that he might pursue a second career as an author.

For almost three decades after 1955, Rébuffat published large-format picture books about his beloved Alps. Some, such as
Mont-Blanc, Jardin Féerique,
were primarily historical; others, including
Entre Terre et Ciel
and
Les Horizons Gagnés,
amounted to lyrical evocations of his “enchanted garden.”

It was these books that revolutionized the aesthetic of mountaineering. Virtually never before had a professional guide written about his craft—let alone written at such a high poetic pitch. Nor had any previous photographs captured the grace and elegance of climbing as did the dozens of pictures of Rébuffat, shot by alpine lensmen, that spangled these luxurious volumes. In a typical photo, Rébuffat was seen in profile against a vertical cliff, with a distant glacier providing a backdrop. No apparent struggle breathed in these images: instead, the lanky acrobat calmly clasped the clean granite with his fingers, while his toes adhered to minuscule holds. The rope plunged free in space out of the bottom of the picture, with not a single piton for protection. The patterned pullover sweater that Rébuffat wore in every photo became his signature. (A photo of Rébuffat on the Aiguille de Roc was chosen by NASA as a representation of human life on Earth, to ride aboard Voyager II probing the remote reaches of outer space in search of extraterrestrial intelligence.)

The most revolutionary aspect of Rébuffat's works, however, was his thoroughgoing rejection of the martial metaphors that had dominated mountaineering from Mont Blanc in 1786 on. His own emphasis on a harmonious embrace of the alpine world owed something to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one of his favorite authors. But this new philosophy was not one Rébuffat consciously created, in reaction to the militarism of the Herzogs and Devieses; it seems to have been inborn, instinctive.

With the success of
Starlight and Storm,
Rébuffat began touring on the lecture circuit, giving slide shows. He soon gravitated to
film. Collaborating with several visionary filmmakers, he produced classics of mountaineering cinema, including
Starlight and Storm
and
Entre Terre et Ciel,
that brought the enchanted garden to vast new audiences. By the late 1960s, Rébuffat was the most famous guide in Europe.

M
Y OWN ENTHRALLMENT
to the Rébuffat aesthetic lasted most of a decade, after I first read
Starlight and Storm
at age sixteen. But in the late 1960s, as climbing itself embraced the counterculture passions that swept America, I found myself drifting away from the lyrical poets of mountaineering and toward its rowdy skeptics.

A turning point for me came in a long discussion in the middle of the night with a Harvard friend, Hank Abrons, as we drove the Alaska Highway toward my first expedition, on Mount McKinley. Twenty years old, I earnestly voiced a cardinal Rébuffat tenet: that in the mountains we seek difficulty, not danger. Could climbing be divorced from danger altogether, it would reach its purest possible expression.

Nonsense, said Hank, who was two years older. Danger was precisely what made our pastime so real, so rewarding. If you could separate danger from difficulty, climbing would become just another sport. We wrangled on, but there, with the dusky tundra plodding by us as we steered north toward the ineluctably dangerous Wickersham Wall, I began to wonder whether Hank didn't have a point. (Today I believe Hank was right, and Rébuffat, seduced by his own idealism, wrong. The sterility of such latter-day developments in the climbing scene as indoor gyms, where risk has truly been divorced from difficulty, furnishes my evidence.)

Climbing in the Shawangunks in New York State, I found the first gang of live climbers (as opposed to eminences, such as Lachenal and Terray, whom I had met only in books) to become my heroes. They were the Vulgarians—a hard-drinking, drug-taking, pretension-pricking band of dropouts and misfits who also happened to be the best climbers in the East.

The Vulgarians' counterparts in the United Kingdom were the iconoclasts of the Creagh Dhu and Rock and Ice, loosely organized
clubs of working-class blokes who had replaced the Oxbridge gentlemen of the previous generation to become the finest climbers in Britain. My friends and I listened in awe to the tales of Joe Brown, a plumber from Manchester, and Don Whillans, also a plumber and a high school dropout from a grimy town in the north of England, who might at the moment be the nerviest climbers in the world. Brown was the first man to have solved the fierce and perilous short crack called Cenotaph Corner, in north Wales; but he had dismissed his own first ascent of Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain (where he was paired with those Oxbridge throwbacks), as “a long slog.”

One day in my late twenties I discovered the writing of Tom Patey, a Scottish ice climber and crony of Brown and Whillans, who had perfected a satiric take on our pastime that on first reading won me over utterly. That initial Patey essay, which I came across in 1969, was his quarrel with Rébuffat, titled “Apes or Ballerinas?” published in the splendidly counterculture British journal
Mountain.

In the piece, Patey launches boldly into an attack on what he called the “stylist” climber.

The French, as might be expected, are the supreme stylists. If you don't know what I mean, have a look at the illustrations in Rébuffat's book,
On Snow and Rock.
Every picture shows the author examining himself in some graceful and quite unbelievable posture. . . . Even the captions carry a note of smug satisfaction: “Climbing means the pleasure of communicating with the mountain as a craftsman communicates with the wood or the stone or the iron upon which he is working” (portrait of Rébuffat, standing on air, studiously regarding his left forearm, hands caressing smooth granite).

Patey then imagines the climber trying to learn from Rébuffat's injunctions to graceful, effortless movement:

Stage Two: the left boot is aligned with the right boot by stepping up smoothly and deliberately. Any effort is imperceptible. . . .

Strange! You're lying flat on the ground with a squashed nose. Another attempt; another failure. Time passes, along with your faith in Rébuffat.

Eventually, in Patey's piece, the climber gets up the cliff by ignoring the ballerina of Rébuffat's “stylist” and reverting to the primal ape.

Heave, clutch, thrutch, grunt! Up you go, defying gravity with your own impetus. So what, if it looks ungraceful? Joe Brown doesn't look much like a ballet dancer.

Patey's delicious burlesque swept away what was left of my former adulation. At the time, I was too sociologically naive to realize that there yawned between French and British climbers an unbridgeable gulf of mutual contempt, that on the crags above Chamonix they traded curses in Scots and Savoyard. Out of such animus was born a caricature of “Ghastly Rubberface,” as the British wickedly nicknamed Rébuffat.

On reexamination, all those beautiful pictures in Rébuffat's books started to smack of the inauthentic. In
On Snow and Rock
(published in 1959), Rébuffat had been one of the first to realize that to take a picture that truly captured the vertiginous glory of our pastime, you had to set it up. Today, most good climbing pictures are set up beforehand, with photographers resorting to machinations to get in positions that Rébuffat would never have dreamed of. In 1969, however, Patey could imply that the only honest climbing photo was one taken by the belayer as he whipped a Brownie out of his rucksack and snapped, one-handed, a shot of the leader scrabbling above.

All those photos of Rébuffat frozen in sublime equipoise against ethereal granite began to seem an affectation. The insistence on himself as subject, my friends and I took for arrant vanity (as opposed to what I now suspect—that no other climber was good enough to pose on the perches that Rébuffat wished to illuminate). The famous pullover sweater became a standing joke.

Swept up in the iconoclasm of the late 1960s, I could even delight
in Patey's morbid but clever ballad mocking the legend of Annapurna itself (it mattered little that Patey miscounted the frozen digits):

Twenty frozen fingers, twenty frozen toes

Two blistered faces, frostbite on the nose

One looks like Herzog, who dropped his gloves on top

And Lachenal tripped and fell, thought he'd never stop.

Bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop.

“Take me down to Oudot” was all that he would say

“He'll know what to do now,” said Lionel Terray

“Your blood is like black pudding,” said Oudot, with his knife

“It is not too late to amputate if I can save your life.”

Chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop.