Air Where Dreams Die --

¶ … Air

Where dreams die -- Into Thin Air dreamed of ascending to Everest myself one day; for more than a decade it remained a burning ambition" (Krakauer 23). The idea of realizing a goal is often compared as climbing a mountain. Meeting a great goal or challenge is often described with the metaphor of climbing Mt. Everest. The metaphorical ideal of mountain climbing suggests that the climber is exhilarated upon putting forth great effort and standing upon the summit. However, for Jan Krakauer, standing atop the snowy peak of Everest was hardly uplifting. In his book Into Thin Air, Krakauer uses his own experiences on Mt. Everest as a metaphor for human folly, and the limits of ambition.

The subtitle of the Krakauer book is "an inside account of the Mount Everest disaster," preparing the reader for the story of heartache that will come, of climbers ill-equipped and trained to meet with the awesome physical and psychological challenges posed by nature. Krakauer suggests that the climbers had no idea what they were getting into and that the businessmen who wanted to make money off of their dreams had no motivation to truly make the amateurs aware of what awaited them in the thin air of the highest peaks of Everest.

Standing upon the peak of Everest, Krakauer recalls his own deflating experience, a flood of emotions of everything but triumph: "It was the afternoon of May 10. I hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours. The only food I'd been able to force down over the preceding three days was a bowl of ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&M's. Weeks of violent coughing had left me with two separated ribs, making it excruciatingly painful to breathe. 29, 028 feet up in the troposphere, there was so little oxygen reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired" Krakauer cannot even enjoy his victory and the victory of his fellow sufferers (Krakauer 4). He took some obligatory photographs and began to descend, barely aware of his surroundings. Multiple bodies would be left on the sides of the mountain in the wake of the climb, including the Krakauer's friends and one of the climbers lost his hand to gangrene. Dealing with the lack of oxygen and the climate was a constant challenge, even more so the inexperience of the team, and the entire climb was an exercise in misery and disillusionment of how cruel and selfish people could become when their lives were at stake.

Despite all weather indications to the contrary, and the infighting they experienced, the team continued, undaunted -- why and for what? Because of the allure of meeting the challenge was too seductive, perhaps. Perhaps because turning back, even if logic might counsel this as advisable, seemed even more daunting than death. After all, what sounds more impressive -- I risked death to climb Everest, or I turned back to save my own life and the lives of my fellow climbers? How could Krakauer counsel others to turn back, when he himself admits he was ill-equipped to deal with the thin air although compared to his fellow climbers he was far more technically skilled? Yet what is deeply ironic about the single-minded quest delineated in Into Thin Air is that 'climbing Everest' amongst professional climbers was no longer regarded as a very impressive feat at the time of the expedition because so many amateurs had done so successfully and because Everest had become a big business for businessmen in the travel and sports industry.

The victory felt hollow to Krakauer, and even had he succeeded without any loss of life, he admitted: "Over the past half-decade, the traffic on all of the Seven Summits, and especially Everest, has multiplied at an astonishing rate. And to meet demand, the number of commercial enterprises peddling guided ascents of these mountains has multiplied correspondingly. In the spring of 1996, 30 separate expeditions were on the flanks of Everest, at least ten of them organized as moneymaking ventures" (Krakauer 26). Everest was no longer just a motivational cliche, it was also a commercial venture, and those running such ventures had little incentive to turn climbers away, even overly idealistic and incompetent amateurs.

Boyhood dreams die hard, I discovered, and good sense be damned" said Krakauer when given the opportunity to make the climb (Krakauer 31). This attitude, on the surface, seems admirable. We as a society admire people who set lofty goals. But setting lofty goals can come at a great cost to others. We sacrifice time with our loved ones to study hard or work late, for example. The climbers on the team sacrificed their time and wages to train and scale the heights of the mountain. Before the expedition met with disaster, friends and loved ones praised many of the climbers for their single-minded pursuit of the peak. This fueled their ambition.

Of course, every time someone sets a goal, there are naysayers. Many friends and loved ones also scoffed that the climbers could not do it, or said that the goal was not high or difficult enough for a seasoned climber, or to merit the risk. Again, because the undaunted pursuit of a goal is idealized, this kind of attitude only motivated the climbers more to pursue their dream, to sacrifice more, and to draw others into their web of ambition. Some of the climbers even knew that their families or loved ones were pulling for them step-by-step -- one climber on the author's first expedition chronicled in the book had an elementary school sell t-shirts to finance his climb. How can you turn back in the face of that kind of support?

But when you pursue your dream, you always have to ask if it is worthy of what you sacrifice for that dream. One Taiwanese expedition that resulted in the death of one of the climbers, and the near-death of two others still had the leader proclaiming: "Victory! Victory! We made summit!'...as if the disaster hadn't even happened" (Krakauer 122). Victory of what kind? Victory of the kind of lightheaded, miserable few minutes described at the beginning of Krakauer's book? What human life is worth such a small and insignificant event?

Setting a goal, any goal, is often viewed as a positive, but Into Thin Air demonstrates that this is not always the case. You must ask what you gain through reaching the goal, externally, and internally. In this case, lives were lost and the living participants felt misery, guilt, and embittered afterward. The title of the book is apt, because it reflects the thinness of the mountain's air, the ephemeral nature of human life, as the dead seem to disappear into thin air (two of the bodies were never found), and also how Krakauer's dreams, with all of their feverish childhood intensity evaporated into the air on the summit. His book is a frightening illustration of how easy it is to set the goal of Everest for your personal challenge, provided you have enough money.