He is the man who was left for dead.
Beck weathers, an american pathologist from texas. He is best known for his role in the 1996 EVEREST DISASTER that has been the subject of many books and films, most notably Into Thin Air and Everest.
MountainZone.com: Almost everybody involved in the tragedy on Everest in 1996 has written a book, a magazine article, or something. How come it took you four years?
Weathers: Well, you can imagine, when we got back from Everest, everybody and their cousin is going to get contacted to write something about this and pretty much all before the bodies get cold. But, the problem I had with that is: one, I had no idea how the story ended, because, for me at least, the stuff on the mountain, while it was interesting, is just sort of the beginning of what was going to happen; and, and I didn't know whether this was going to turn out, ultimately, to be a tragedy or whether it was going to turn out to be a story with a happy ending. And frankly, I just had a few things in my life that needed to be addressed. And if a story is worth telling, it's going to be worth telling four years or 10 years after the fact. If you got to do it right then, probably you can go ahead and skip it. I really had not decided. I decided I probably would not write a book because I thought that the story of what occurred on the mountain had pretty much been gone through ad nauseum. And there had been a couple of very good books written, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and David Breashears' High Exposure, that documented the who, what, when, where, how, 'slowly I turn step by step' events up there, and thrashing through that one more time really wasn't going to serve any purpose. But what I ultimately wound up being interested in was really the story of those individuals who wind up remaining. That's the part that rarely gets told, although it's certainly is on the minds of individuals who go up there.
In essence, what is it that drives people to put themselves at high risk? What price is paid by themselves and by their family? And then when you get back and your body is destroyed and your relationships are destroyed, and you don't know that you'll ever work again, or if you'll be in custodial care for the rest of your life. How do you manage to put yourself back together? How do you get through that and ultimately get to be a functioning person again?
MountainZone.com: That's interesting because you've been through so much and sort of proverbially "come out on the other side" with a fairly different perspective on life, wouldn't you say?
Weathers: Well, I think always you sort of know what you ought to be doing, you know what your priorities ought to be, but the problem is it's the difference being in a theoretical world and being in the one you act upon. And I always sort of thought I could go ahead and pursue these things and maybe get that monkey off my back, and at that point you could come back and sort of go 'Ta-da, I'm home.'
But, the fact is that if you're not there for individuals, then you force them to make a life for themselves. And it's certainly an issue that occurs in climbing pretty commonly. A lot of guys' relationships and marriages wind up being destroyed by their passion for climbing but its also true in life in general. So much of our society is driven to succeed and to have that kind of single-minded focus that brings success. You think, from the business side, I'm doing it for my family, it's a great rationalization, I've used it myself many times, but the fact is that's how you live life, that's your pattern of behavior and it's very difficult to slow down long enough to examine that. A two by four across the face is helpful and that sort of got my attention.
MountainZone.com: And you actually do a fair amount of public speaking now?
Weathers: At some level, I was always a storyteller, and I didn't really have a story. And then, one of the good byproducts of an experience like this is that I wind up with a really good story, and I enjoy doing it. And it also satisfies what I would call probably 'survivor's obligation.'
I never had any grand sense of survival's guilt, because frankly I was so beat up that the likelihood that I could do a whole heck of a lot for somebody was not real. But when you come back, both in my personal case and I've seen it in a bunch of folks that have gone through experiences like this, you really have a strong sense that you want to do something that somehow mitigates or makes better what otherwise is just a horrible experience. And so by speaking to folks, and trying to maybe a good example of a bad example, if nothing else, then you can provide people an opportunity to maybe do a little better. They always tell you that you're supposed to learn from your mistakes? No, you're supposed to learn from somebody else's mistakes. It's a whole lot less painful.
MountainZone.com: Now Everest has sort of become a phenomenon in popular culture, especially from 1996. What do you think about that, good or bad, the way it has become such a recognized media event?.
Weathers: Obviously to me, it was surprising because anybody that's been around climbing, even for a little bit of time, with some perspective would know that people get their fannies kicked in mountains all the time and usually it's buried on page 26, and a small paragraph at the end that just sort of does a body count.
And for whatever reason, and some of it was the Internet, frankly, because they could take people to a place like this for the first time and actually have them there sort of in real time so they could participate and go into a place like Everest. And then, after that, it was such an odd congruence of things. You have the IMAX film crew there during this time. And of course millions of people have seen the rather extraordinary work that David Breashears and that group did on the mountain. And Jon Krakauer wrote a book that really brought people into that world for the first time. Most climbers can't write and most writers can't climb, and so that trying to meld those two together and come up with something that can be read by somebody who's not a climber actually took a lot of skill.
And so that really exposed this world and dusted off, if you will, an old gal whose maybe lost a little bit of her luster and because this was such a dramatic event and there were so many good stories in it; people making real choices with real consequences, a few cases of bad behavior and cowardice, but an awful lot of cases of people showing an enormous amount of courage and character. That's appealing. It is a fascinating moment and I can understand why people who will not have a chance to go to a place like that enjoy being taken there either in the visual sense or the IMAX, or in words as Jon has done.
MountainZone.com: Everyone has been asking you a lot questions in the past four weeks. Is there a question that no one has asked that you wished they would ask?
Weathers: There was one that I got asked early on and it is still one that I found intriguing then and it's only with the passage of time that I now know the answer. When I first got back, one of the questions was always, 'If you knew what was going to happen to you, would you do it again?' I thought initially, 'What a dumb question!' I mean, take a look at me, I'm a train wreck!
But with the passage of some time, I actually came to know the answer to that, which was that if I knew exactly what was going to happen to me on that mountain, every horrific moment and the aftermath of trying to claw your way back out of that hole once you get back, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Because I gained so much more than I lost. I mean it really wound up, ultimately, because having to come through some horrible moments, it managed to salvage relationships that were pretty much destroyed. And really for the first time in my entire life, I'm at peace. I don't have to climb, I don't have to have that monkey on my back anymore. That's a very nice thing. I like that question.
MountainZone.com: You are probably familiar with your fellow Texan Lance Armstrong. I just got done reading his biography and he says the exact same thing as you. Not so much from the perspective of that having cancer enabled him to win the Tour de France or something like that, but that given that choice, he would have had it just because of the way it got him to stand back and re-evaluate and look at the priorities in his life.
Weathers: Well you don't learn anything from success. If you want to learn something about yourself, you undergo hard times or you fail because that teaches you something. And maybe you don't want to find out what you're going to discover. You hope that if you're placed in a moment that is very difficult like that, that what you're going to find is that you will be an honorable person, and you'll do the right thing and you'll have some measure of grace and courage, but you don't know the answer to that.
I can understand why someone like Lance Armstrong, who is obviously a superb athlete, the success just keeps rolling. But understanding how to balance that success and have a more real experience in life, not just as a persona, requires some work. And it's not easy. And you have to be able to step back and reevaluate and change your priorities. And that's hard to do, but it can be done.
Beck weathers, an american pathologist from texas. He is best known for his role in the 1996 EVEREST DISASTER that has been the subject of many books and films, most notably Into Thin Air and Everest.
MountainZone.com: Almost everybody involved in the tragedy on Everest in 1996 has written a book, a magazine article, or something. How come it took you four years?
Weathers: Well, you can imagine, when we got back from Everest, everybody and their cousin is going to get contacted to write something about this and pretty much all before the bodies get cold. But, the problem I had with that is: one, I had no idea how the story ended, because, for me at least, the stuff on the mountain, while it was interesting, is just sort of the beginning of what was going to happen; and, and I didn't know whether this was going to turn out, ultimately, to be a tragedy or whether it was going to turn out to be a story with a happy ending. And frankly, I just had a few things in my life that needed to be addressed. And if a story is worth telling, it's going to be worth telling four years or 10 years after the fact. If you got to do it right then, probably you can go ahead and skip it. I really had not decided. I decided I probably would not write a book because I thought that the story of what occurred on the mountain had pretty much been gone through ad nauseum. And there had been a couple of very good books written, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and David Breashears' High Exposure, that documented the who, what, when, where, how, 'slowly I turn step by step' events up there, and thrashing through that one more time really wasn't going to serve any purpose. But what I ultimately wound up being interested in was really the story of those individuals who wind up remaining. That's the part that rarely gets told, although it's certainly is on the minds of individuals who go up there.
In essence, what is it that drives people to put themselves at high risk? What price is paid by themselves and by their family? And then when you get back and your body is destroyed and your relationships are destroyed, and you don't know that you'll ever work again, or if you'll be in custodial care for the rest of your life. How do you manage to put yourself back together? How do you get through that and ultimately get to be a functioning person again?
MountainZone.com: That's interesting because you've been through so much and sort of proverbially "come out on the other side" with a fairly different perspective on life, wouldn't you say?
Weathers: Well, I think always you sort of know what you ought to be doing, you know what your priorities ought to be, but the problem is it's the difference being in a theoretical world and being in the one you act upon. And I always sort of thought I could go ahead and pursue these things and maybe get that monkey off my back, and at that point you could come back and sort of go 'Ta-da, I'm home.'
But, the fact is that if you're not there for individuals, then you force them to make a life for themselves. And it's certainly an issue that occurs in climbing pretty commonly. A lot of guys' relationships and marriages wind up being destroyed by their passion for climbing but its also true in life in general. So much of our society is driven to succeed and to have that kind of single-minded focus that brings success. You think, from the business side, I'm doing it for my family, it's a great rationalization, I've used it myself many times, but the fact is that's how you live life, that's your pattern of behavior and it's very difficult to slow down long enough to examine that. A two by four across the face is helpful and that sort of got my attention.
MountainZone.com: And you actually do a fair amount of public speaking now?
Weathers: At some level, I was always a storyteller, and I didn't really have a story. And then, one of the good byproducts of an experience like this is that I wind up with a really good story, and I enjoy doing it. And it also satisfies what I would call probably 'survivor's obligation.'
I never had any grand sense of survival's guilt, because frankly I was so beat up that the likelihood that I could do a whole heck of a lot for somebody was not real. But when you come back, both in my personal case and I've seen it in a bunch of folks that have gone through experiences like this, you really have a strong sense that you want to do something that somehow mitigates or makes better what otherwise is just a horrible experience. And so by speaking to folks, and trying to maybe a good example of a bad example, if nothing else, then you can provide people an opportunity to maybe do a little better. They always tell you that you're supposed to learn from your mistakes? No, you're supposed to learn from somebody else's mistakes. It's a whole lot less painful.
MountainZone.com: Now Everest has sort of become a phenomenon in popular culture, especially from 1996. What do you think about that, good or bad, the way it has become such a recognized media event?.
Weathers: Obviously to me, it was surprising because anybody that's been around climbing, even for a little bit of time, with some perspective would know that people get their fannies kicked in mountains all the time and usually it's buried on page 26, and a small paragraph at the end that just sort of does a body count.
And for whatever reason, and some of it was the Internet, frankly, because they could take people to a place like this for the first time and actually have them there sort of in real time so they could participate and go into a place like Everest. And then, after that, it was such an odd congruence of things. You have the IMAX film crew there during this time. And of course millions of people have seen the rather extraordinary work that David Breashears and that group did on the mountain. And Jon Krakauer wrote a book that really brought people into that world for the first time. Most climbers can't write and most writers can't climb, and so that trying to meld those two together and come up with something that can be read by somebody who's not a climber actually took a lot of skill.
And so that really exposed this world and dusted off, if you will, an old gal whose maybe lost a little bit of her luster and because this was such a dramatic event and there were so many good stories in it; people making real choices with real consequences, a few cases of bad behavior and cowardice, but an awful lot of cases of people showing an enormous amount of courage and character. That's appealing. It is a fascinating moment and I can understand why people who will not have a chance to go to a place like that enjoy being taken there either in the visual sense or the IMAX, or in words as Jon has done.
Weathers: There was one that I got asked early on and it is still one that I found intriguing then and it's only with the passage of time that I now know the answer. When I first got back, one of the questions was always, 'If you knew what was going to happen to you, would you do it again?' I thought initially, 'What a dumb question!' I mean, take a look at me, I'm a train wreck!
But with the passage of some time, I actually came to know the answer to that, which was that if I knew exactly what was going to happen to me on that mountain, every horrific moment and the aftermath of trying to claw your way back out of that hole once you get back, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Because I gained so much more than I lost. I mean it really wound up, ultimately, because having to come through some horrible moments, it managed to salvage relationships that were pretty much destroyed. And really for the first time in my entire life, I'm at peace. I don't have to climb, I don't have to have that monkey on my back anymore. That's a very nice thing. I like that question.
MountainZone.com: You are probably familiar with your fellow Texan Lance Armstrong. I just got done reading his biography and he says the exact same thing as you. Not so much from the perspective of that having cancer enabled him to win the Tour de France or something like that, but that given that choice, he would have had it just because of the way it got him to stand back and re-evaluate and look at the priorities in his life.
Weathers: Well you don't learn anything from success. If you want to learn something about yourself, you undergo hard times or you fail because that teaches you something. And maybe you don't want to find out what you're going to discover. You hope that if you're placed in a moment that is very difficult like that, that what you're going to find is that you will be an honorable person, and you'll do the right thing and you'll have some measure of grace and courage, but you don't know the answer to that.
I can understand why someone like Lance Armstrong, who is obviously a superb athlete, the success just keeps rolling. But understanding how to balance that success and have a more real experience in life, not just as a persona, requires some work. And it's not easy. And you have to be able to step back and reevaluate and change your priorities. And that's hard to do, but it can be done.
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