Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
The As It Happens Files (6 page)
Simon and Joe have just completed a first ascent of the west side of Suila Grande in the Peruvian Andes, they’re heading back down and Joe falls and breaks his leg in several places. At first, they proceed downward, with Simon and Joe roped together, Simon lowering Joe ahead of him a few hundred feet at a time. This is agonizing enough, but then Joe goes over a cliff and is caught hanging in mid-air. Simon realizes that either they will plunge to their deaths together or he can cut the rope, let Joe go and hope to save himself. He cuts the rope. He hears a yell, then nothing. Simon continues his descent and returns to base camp, feeling devastated because he has had to leave his friend for dead.
Joe, meanwhile, lies at the bottom of a crevasse, not dead but without much hope of getting out. Miraculously, he does get out and then gets himself, broken leg and all, back down the mountain alone. It takes him three days. At the end of it, he is dehydrated and starving and half-frozen, but he is alive.
Touching the Void
is a thrilling tale of adventure and extreme peril, of human ingenuity, grit and determination. The title describes the feeling you get whenever you take a leap into the unknown, which is what we all do every time we embark on something we haven’t done before and aren’t sure we can do—starting a new job, getting married. But some people aren’t satisfied with the ordinary challenges life offers; they crave extreme challenges, and I crave the vicarious pleasure of hearing about them.
They must be a bit crazy, though, don’t you think? These climbers and sailors and the people who get themselves perched atop a million tons of rocket fuel and blasted into space? How else to explain why a young woman would wager her future against a race into the Southern Ocean, alone aboard a 60-foot yacht in high seas and biting, gale-force winds, knowing that if you have the good fortune to come out the other end alive and in one piece, you’re still not likely to have won the race?
That’s the race called the Vendée Globe, about which Canadian sailor Derek Lundy wrote a mesmerizing account in his book
Godforsaken Sea.
He was motivated to write it, he said, by the death in 1997 of fellow yachtsman Gerry Roufs, a former Olympic sailor from Hudson, Quebec, who was ploughing through a fierce South Atlantic storm in the Vendée Globe race when he lost radio contact. Roufs was never heard from again. Pieces of his boat were being collected by the Chilean navy at the very time that Derek Lundy came into the
As It Happens
studio to tell us about the book and the race.
The Vendée Globe is always exciting, but the ’96/’97 race was particularly intense. There were three sailors apart from Gerry Roufs who might have been lost had it not been for some remarkable rescue operations. The most daring involved
British racer Peter Goss’s rescue of Raphaël Dinelli, a French sailor whose boat capsized 1,200 nautical miles south of Australia in the same storm that killed Gerry Roufs—a “survival storm” Derek Lundy called it.
DL: A survival storm is essentially a storm in which wind and wave have reached the point where the sailor can’t make any choices. He or she is really just hanging on, adopting storm tactics—that is, probably running off before the wind and waves. You’re really at the mercy of whatever happens. I mean, if you get through a survival storm, there’s a little bit of skill involved—well, a lot of skill involved—but there’s a heck of a lot more luck involved.
ML: So you’re bobbing along on the ocean, just praying to God that you’ll survive it.
DL: You’re surfing and screaming along on the ocean, praying that you’ll survive, yeah.
ML: So they’re in this condition and Pete Goss has to turn his boat around and beat
up
into these gale-force winds?
DL: He had to beat into winds that were blowing in excess of hurricane force, probably around
70
knots or so. The seas were described as anywhere from
50
to
65
feet. The Vendée Globe boats are strong, but they’re not designed to do that; they’re designed to run ahead of weather like that, not go back into it. So he really put himself into a position where he wasn’t sure whether his boat would hold together.
Peter Goss was about 160 miles past Dinelli when he heard his distress call, and he did turn around into the howling wind. It took him two days, but he got there in time. Goss
finished the race in fifth place, but he was rewarded with a hero’s welcome in France and the knowledge that he had acted nobly. Raphaël Dinelli, for his part, showing the steely determination that characterizes so many of these adventurers, entered the next two Vendée Globe competitions and, on his third try, finally made it all the way to the end. He finished the race in 12th place, 37 days after the 11th-place finisher, Anne Liardet.
In 1997 someone also tried to save Gerry Roufs. Like Peter Goss, Isabelle Autissier reversed course and beat back toward Roufs’ last known position, but without any radio signal from Roufs’ boat, she couldn’t find him in the raging storm, nor could any of their fellow sailors in the area.
I asked Derek Lundy why people signed on for the Vendée Globe.
ML: Given how awful it is out there, you ask yourself,
Why do they do it?
Why would anybody put himself through such pain and terror and take such a beating?
DL: That really is a good question. I think they do it for a number of reasons. First of all, they are professional sailors, and this is sort of the apogee of the profession. You know, you sail the Vendée Globe, you’ve reached the top. But there are also people who just like adrenalin; they like the thrill of coming close to death or appearing to. It must seem to them quite often that they are.
ML: But are they crazy?
DL: No, they’re not. I thought they might be, or I thought they were before I started talking to them and reading more about this sort of racing, but in fact, I found myself talking to people who were extraordinarily sane, calm, centred, modest people. There was nothing
pretentious about them. One of them said to me once, “When you’ve been out there on the edge of the world, you know you’re insignificant; you know you’re just the ordinary human being you are; it’s impossible to think otherwise of yourself or of humans in general.”
And I think there’s another element, too. You know, the Southern Ocean itself can be a terrible place, but it is a beautiful place in a way as well, in the sense that it probably is the last true, great more-or-less untouched wilderness on earth. So people who are out there are in a place on earth where hardly any human being living today has been. It must be a unique sensation.
All right, but still. Forget the Vendée Globe. I have always wondered, who but a madman would willingly—
willingly—
expose himself to the brutal cold of Mount Everest, where if you don’t die of exposure or a fall, the altitude alone could kill you? In May 1996, several people paid a small fortune for the privilege of dying an agonizing death on the roof of the world. That season on Everest was notorious for the loss of life—8 in one day, 15 by the end of the climbing season—and people were wondering how much commercial exploitation should be permitted on the world’s highest peak.
The traffic doesn’t seem to have diminished. In 2005 Canadian climber Pierre Bourdeau was one of three hundred would-be Everest summiters. We spoke to him just after he’d narrowly escaped being wiped out by an avalanche that had come down on his camp on the Kumbu Glacier.
It was 5:30 in the morning when Bourdeau was awakened by something that sounded like thunder. Two or three seconds later, his tent was being pelted by rocks and debris. He knew what was happening, and he was sure he was going to die; if the rocks didn’t kill him, he’d be buried alive in the
snow. The next thing he remembers is being about a hundred metres away from where the tents had been, and alive. The tents were all destroyed, but by some miracle, he and his fellow climbers had escaped with only a few bruises.
“We don’t know why we’re alive,” Pierre Bourdeau told us.
“So are you done with climbing for a while?”
“For a short time, yes.”
Another very cold place to visit is the North Pole, which is where British adventurer David Hempleman-Adams got himself in April 1998, making him the first person to climb the highest peaks on seven continents
and
reach the magnetic and geographic North and South poles. He spoke to us from Resolute Bay after being air-lifted off the ice, together with his Norwegian travelling companion, Rune Gjeldnes.
ML: How did you know you were there [at the North Pole]?
DH: We had two systems: we had a Global Positioning System and an Argos system. So we were within three metres, actually, of the Pole. And what happens, it’s drifting all the time, and by the time the airplane the next day came in, we’d drifted off seven miles, so we had to walk through the night to get back to the North Pole again, so we went there a couple of times.
ML: Let’s make it clear to everybody exactly what kind of an ordeal this is. Some four hundred miles on skis? … How heavy was the sled?
DH: Mine was about
150
pounds; Rune’s was probably nearer
200.
ML: And the weather’s not nice.
DH: Well, when we started, it was dark and it went down to—we recorded minus
55.
Well, we think it was minus
55,
because we could only record minus
55;
it was right on the backstop, so it might have been lower. You got open water and wind, so the actual winds will take the windchill factor much lower. But it warmed up. We were picked up on a beautiful day; it was minus
20,
no wind.…
ML: You probably had your shirt off at minus
20.
DH: You could certainly feel the difference, because by that time, we’d got acclimatized, of course, and we used to have two sleeping bags [each] and we threw away the inner sleeping bags, so, yeah, it was much warmer.
ML: What did you eat?
DH: Well, we had to get in six thousand calories, because we were burning twelve thousand up.
ML: Every day?
DH: Yeah. Good place to go for a diet. I lost about
24
pounds. But in any event, we had dehydrated food and what you do is you mix a lot of oil with it to try and get the caloristic value up, and it was the same food every day, so it got pretty hard to eat in the end.
ML: You fell in the water at one point.
DH: Yeah, that was probably the lowest point of the whole trip.
ML: No kidding!
DH: I thought,
Boy,
you know,
this is it.
It wasn’t a problem falling in the water, but I had my skis on as well, and I didn’t want to lose my skis, so I was lucky Rune was
there to fish me out. And we had to start walking pretty quickly, and what happened was, the water freezes and then you just crack the water off, but you just have to get going quickly to get the heat back into your body.
ML: You must like the cold.
DH: Uh, I don’t—I’m just not smart enough to realize that I don’t like it. I seem to keep coming back here, but it’s a beautiful area, I have to say, and this thing that you just can’t describe to people—it really is a wonderful place.
ML: Try.
DH: Well, you’ve got this raw beauty. You’re on the limit, basically. You’ve got the mountains—so beautiful—and very few people visit them. The nicest thing about Canada, it’s so big; up in these national parks, you see these mountains that have never been climbed before, that are just stunningly beautiful. And then you’ve got the different colours of when the sun starts to come back in the North here—these oranges, and mauve and purple skies … it’s beautiful. And then you’ve got the sheer beauty of the sea ice itself that’s always moving and changing shape and consistency, and every day is different, completely different.
And then you can get the raw savagery of it with the wind blowing
30
miles an hour. So it goes from one extreme to the other, and we’ve always said it can be hell and heaven in one hour, the weather changes so quickly. And the conditions as well. If you’ve got a lot of rubble and you try to pull your sleds through, it can be hell, and then you get a pad of ice which you could land the Concorde on, which is heaven, of course.
ML: I don’t need to ask you why you do it—you’ve already said you’re crazy—but have you done it all now? What challenges are left for you?
DH: Well, there’s always a challenge for man. I think Browning said, “A man’s reach should be beyond his grasp,” and I think he meant it doesn’t matter what you do, be it trying to get to the top of the stairs for the first time or walking down to the end of the street for the first time. Man has to have a challenge. I think maybe now I’m
41
and I’ve got young children, I have to start slowing down. Hopefully, there’ll always be some challenge, even if it’s going down to the local pub. I owe Rune a few pints, so I suppose that’ll be the next expedition.
The next time we talked, in March 2004, David had just set a new world record, flying a balloon 13 kilometres into the atmosphere above Colorado, so I guess he did find another challenge after leaving the pub. It was cold up there, too, he said—minus 70 degrees.
David’s countryman, or rather-woman, Fiona Thornewild, also walked into the history books in 2004 when she became the first British woman to walk solo to the South Pole. She walked a thousand kilometres in 42 days, dragging a 130-pound sled behind her. She had a radio phone for company for the first 10 days; then it conked out and she had only herself to talk to for the rest of the journey. The lowest point for her, she told us, was when her GPS directional device broke down and she couldn’t immediately lay her hands on the spare.
Why go through it? She said it was because it was the biggest challenge she could set herself; because of the sense of personal satisfaction it gave her; and because after her first
husband had been killed in a car accident at the age of 26, she’d promised herself to live life to the limit.
We talked to people who’d made their way across the great Arabian desert known as the Empty Quarter—the name tells you all you need to know about
that
particular piece of real estate—and people who have kayaked and rowed and paddled their way across oceans, or tried to, and people who prefer to travel by balloon, and whenever I talked to these men and women, I reflected on how nice it was to be warm and dry and cozy in the studio. But if I had to choose from among these torturous adventures, I’d probably opt for being baked in the sand or frozen on a mountaintop over being smashed around in a cold, dark sea at the bottom of the world or sinking to a watery grave. Maybe that’s why the sailing stories thrill me most. When Adam Killick joined the programme, I had a new ally in my quest to get more sailors on the air. An enthusiastic sailor himself, Adam was keen to have us follow the progress of Derek Hatfield aboard
Spirit of Canada
in the 2003 Around Alone race, which is like the Vendée Globe, only you’re allowed the occasional landfall. The low point of Hatfield’s passage came when he lost his mast while rounding Cape Horn. We heard all about it when we reached him a few days later in Ushuaia, Argentina.