Somber Tales

In Into Thin Air, there are many passages which tell the somber, tragic, story of each of the some 12 climbers who died on May 10, or the days after. Using sensory details Jon Krakauer is able to describe the ferocious storm, as well as the extreme conditions of simply climbing Everest in general. Simply saying that the wind was strong, and the wind chill was below zero is weak, it provides no feeling of what that would be like. To understand what those climbers were going through that night is essentially impossible, however the writing of Into Thin Air does the best at it. During the night, Neal Beidleman and Klev Schoening, described the tramp down the mountain with several clients in tow, some of whom they didn’t expect to survive the night, to find they couldn’t locate Camp IV and would have to spend the night in a notorious storm on Everest. “Biedleman and Schoening searched for a protected place to escape the wind, but there was nowhere to hide. Everyone’s oxygen had long since run out, making the group more vulnerable to the windchill, which exceeded a hundred below zero. In the lee of a boulder no larger than a dishwasher, the climbers hunkered in a pathetic row on a patch of gale-scoured ice. ‘By then the cold had about finished me off,’ says Charlotte Fox [a client on Scott Fischer’s team]. ‘My eyes were frozen. I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive. The cold was so painful, I didn’t think I could endure it anymore. I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.’” p.216 The sensory details, which to me is amazing that these survivors had the mental capacity to remember such vivid details, provide the ability to understand the extremities of not only climbing Everest, but being blindsided by a storm tens of thousands of feet above sea level. For reference, at a windchill of a hundred degrees below zero, it would take a mere 5 minutes for any body part to be frostbitten if exposed. Not only that but as Fox says, “My eyes were frozen,” this means that it was so cold that the water in the cornea of the eye froze, which can eventually result in the loss of the eye. Krakauer also writes, “the climbers hunkered in a pathetic row on gale-scoured ice,” this line provides even more to understand the grave situation, the fact that not only is it already freezing, as one would expect at the cruising altitude of a commercial airplane, but the wind is so strong it ripped the snow from the mountain, leaving only ice in its place. All of this combines to create conditions so painful that you would wish that, “death would come quickly.” So extreme that you would lose all hope, and simply give in.

Jon Krakauer’s first hand experience of this disaster gives him a unique and special understanding of the events of the book. His first hand accounts offer the most accurate and neutral description. This experience also gives him an edge while writing, because he can remember exactly how each moment felt, or as many moments as he can remember, and translate them into writing, using extreme details, similes, or metaphors in order to most accurately describe that climb. “At 6:30, as the last of daylight seeped from the sky, I’d descended to within 200 vertical feet of Camp Four. Only one obstacle now stood between me and safety: a bulging incline of hard, glassy ice that I would have to descend without a rope. Snow pellets borne by 70-knot gusts stung my face; any exposed flesh was instantly frozen. The tents, no more than 650 horizontal feet away, were only intermittently visible through the white out. There was no margin for error. Worried about making a critical blunder, I sat down to marshal my energy before descending further.” p.201 The fact that what he is writing is entirely authentic and isn’t a simple statement of facts, as if it were a Wikipedia article makes the book more compelling, because he really participated in the climb completes the book as a story. There wouldn’t be a protagonist, or plot, or setting had it been written by an outsider with no real idea of what happened. The book becomes more of a high-energy story, rather than the monotone article you would expect had it come from a third party who interviewed the survivors. All of this amounts to the ability to have empathy, and compassion for these characters, rather than studying the facts of an event with no real purpose.

As the reader, I feel drawn into the text through the vivid details, creating suspenseful moments which create the total immersion into the text. To be quite frank, anybody can tell a mediocre story about their climb on Everest and have it be interesting. However, to get someone engaged and immersed into what you’re writing, it takes someone with the skills of Jon Krakauer. Not only do the events of that fateful day create anxiety, and tension within the reader, but the extreme detail and eloquent writing makes the reader want to get to the next page that much more. We become attached to every single one of the people that Krakauer meets along the way and he himself as well. “A moment earlier I’d noticed that wispy clouds now filled the valleys to the south, obscuring all but the highest peaks…But unlike Adams, I was unaccustomed to peering down at cumulonimbus cells from 29,000 feet, and I therefore remained ignorant of the storm that was even then bearing down.” A great example of suspense being created here, this is a prime example of foreshadowing and one that creates that gut feeling where you just know something bad is about to happen. The reader wants to yell at Krakauer to get off that mountain as fast as possible. The moment of relief from summiting the mountain is short-lived, because even though Krakauer subtly points out those “wispy clouds” the reader can infer what will happen and is on the edge of their seat, waiting for what’s going to happen. My favorite part of the passage is the fact that he says, “that wispy clouds now filled the valleys to the south, obscuring all but the highest peaks,” because you can really imagine how ominous that would seem when viewing it from the top of Everest. Everyone knows when the clouds come rolling in, something bad is about to happen, and Krakauer utilizes that perfectly to create suspense, leaving the reader hungry for more.