Resistance - True Summit - page 22

One day in 1959, in a local bookstore, I held in my hands Starlight and Storm. I
knew Rébuffat from Annapurna, but had no sense of his individual voice or character.
The nine climbers in that heroic saga remained in Herzog's telling little differentiated
one from the other; they were all idealized “knights of the sky.” Now, as I browsed
through the small book, Rébuffat began to assume his own personality. Of the six great
north faces of the Alps, I knew nothing, but the photos in Starlight and Storm made it
clear that these savage, dark walls were far more daunting than any mountain in Col-
orado.
In the topic, I could see, Rébuffat had somewhat chimerically adjoined his accounts
of the six north faces to a pragmatic manual titled “The Beginning Climber”; perhaps
the French publisher had thereby beefed up an otherwise dangerously slender volume.
It may have been that how-to treatise that made me dig deep into my pockets and buy
Starlight and Storm, for I was still too green to know that you couldn't learn to climb
from a book.
Yet it was not the Chamonix guide's succinct advice about sunglasses and shoulder
stands that captivated me, but the lyrical prose in which he recounted the harrowing
bivouacs, the gutsy leads up frozen pitches, that had won him his great faces. The au-
thor himself had evidently wearied of the pedestrian job of explaining how to climb,
for time and again in “The Beginning Climber” he burst into philosophy: “Of course,
technique is a poor thing, even a wretched thing, when separated from the heart which
has guided it: this is true in rock climbing, or playing a piano, or building a cathedral.”
In these deftly romantic pages I found a view of climbing utterly different from
what I had discerned in the pages of Annapurna. Yet at sixteen I was still too naive to
comprehend that those two views were fundamentally incompatible. Nor did I enter-
tain even a glimmer of a suspicion that Rébuffat's Annapurna might have made for a
different story from Herzog's. No one in America, as I was to find in subsequent years,
doubted the veracity of Herzog's perfect saga of the world's first 8,000-meter ascent.
Starlight and Storm became for me a sacred text. The topic closed with an afirm-
ation every bit as revelatory as Herzog's famous final words, “There are other An-
napurnas in the lives of men.” “Life, the luxury of being!” Rébuffat pealed, then laid
down his pen.
Still without any inkling that I might ever climb a big wall myself, I thrilled
through each rereading of the author's struggles on the Walker Spur and the Eiger-
wand. A few years later, at the age of twenty, by then a junior instructor at Colorado
Outward Bound School, I was asked to give a dawn inspirational reading to the ninety-
six students it was our job to toughen up in the Elk Range. With trembling voice but