osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: jon krakauer

Daylight savings time has begun, or ended, or something. At any rate I had an extra hour lying around and I used it catching up on The Three Musketeers, although I think I am still a little bit behind, alas. The musketeers have just lost all the beautiful horses that they gained.

Slightly less recently, I finished Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. Apparently the Mormon Church did not like this book, and honestly I can see why. I don't think Krakauer actually intended to argue that Mormonism is inherently violent, but the book is replete with examples of Mormons doing horrible things, intercutting between examples from today and examples from the early days of Mormonism.

So you have the Mountain Meadows massacre (when the Mormons murdered a wagon train and tried to blame it entirely on the Paiute Indians they paid to help them) and the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her baby daughter by her fundamentalist brothers-in-law, or Joseph Smith informing young women that God has told him that they will be damned if they don't become his brides and modern-day fundamentalists marrying their fourteen-year-old stepdaughters - and the overall effect is to suggest an evolution from one to the other (with modern-day mainstream Mormonism as a sort of weird off-shoot, I guess).

And there's no counterweight of normal non-horrible Mormons. The general effect is to suggest that Mormonism just is a violent faith, flat out. Or at least that Mormon fundamentalism is, which may be fair, but I guess if that's your basic thesis then I want the whole book to be devoted to exploring the world of Mormon fundamentalism today, instead of intercutting with Mormon history and the murder of Brenda Lafferty (which was clearly influenced by Mormon fundamentalism - but was just as clearly outside of the Mormon fundamentalist mainstream, insofar as that exists).

As it is, it's clear that this is not a complete overview, and I did wonder if the fundamentalist sects Krakauer was writing about were representative. Did the Lafferty brothers end up getting involved with all the most unpleasant Mormon fundamentalist groups? Or do most Mormon fundamentalists think marrying your fourteen-year-old stepdaughter is A-OK?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Little’s The Lady and Sada San, a sequel to The Lady of the Decoration, in which the Lady returns to Japan for complicated plot reasons and, on the voyage, befriends young Sada - who is the product of a mixed-race marriage between an American man and his Japanese bride, who unfortunately were washed away in a tidal wave when Sada was but a babe, so she was raised in Nebraska by a missionary lady (who found baby Sada in the ruins of her washed-away village in Japan, but had to move back to Nebraska because of her own failing health).

Now Sada is returning to the beautiful land of her birth, confident that all shall be well! You have probably read enough fiction to guess that it will not be so simple.

So if anyone ever wants to write a novel with a mixed-race white & Japanese heroine in the deepest Midwest in 1911 - you can now point to this book as an unimpeachable source if anyone complains about your historical accuracy.

What I’m Reading Now

I meant to save Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven for later, on the grounds that one shouldn’t binge read a new favorite author’s entire oeuvre and then be left without anything else by that author to read (I did this with Jane Austen when I was a teenager, oops) buuuuut then I went to the library and it was in and I just couldn’t resist. It’s not grabbing me quite as much as his other books - the man-versus-nature aspect is what really got me in his other books and that’s not really present here - but Krakauer is still Krakauer and it’s still fascinating.

William Dean Howells Venetian Life, a travel book about Venice - where Howells was American consul during the Civil War - and Howells’ first book. The writing doesn’t flow as well as his later books, either because it is his first or possibly because long, ornate, multi-clausal sentences became less fashionable as the nineteenth century wore on. In any case I’m finding it rather slow going - but vivid - his description of the Venetian winters made me shiver. (And it seems the stereotype of the comfort-loving American who is baffled by the poor heating in other lands was already in place by the 1860s.)

I’m also working on Elyne Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby, but sloooowly. For whatever reason it’s just not grabbing me.

What I Plan to Read Next

Will the library ever get me Fire and Hemlock? WHO KNOWS. I had better start haunting used bookstores in quest of it, I think.

I have also discovered that American Girl has a new series out, set in Hawaii in 1941, but they have broken my heart TOO MANY TIMES and I am reluctant to read it.

I just read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, which - okay, Julie arrived home while I was about two-thirds of the way through the book, and we had planned to watch Frankenstein, and I told her, “I’m sorry, but I’m in a blizzard on Everest right now.”

Fortunately she had read Into Thin Air, so she understood.

It’s just fascinating in a “for want of a nail…” sort of way to watch all these little, little mistakes add up to a disaster that killed eight climbers in one night. The ropes for the final ascent weren’t fixed beforehand - so that slows the climbers down. There’s an extra team on the mountain that day, which adds a bottleneck, and that slows things down. They ought to turn back, but Rob Hall, the most experienced & responsible guide, didn’t set a solid turnaround time, because - this is conjecture, but I think it’s pretty solidly supported - he’s dead set on getting his client Doug Hansen up the mountain, because Doug had nearly summitted the year before and Rob convinced him to give it another go-round (at a steep discount) because he felt bad for making him turn last that time.

This seemed especially tragic to me: he’s destroyed not by carelessness or greed but by one of his good qualities, his loyalty to a friend. (One of the last times anyone saw him, he had an arm around Doug’s shoulder to help him the last little bit up to the summit. That made me tear up. It’s like something out a war movie.) And yet, in conjunction with all the other little mistakes that kept them on the mountain too late, when a blizzard blows up Rob and Doug and two other members of his expedition all die.

This is all extra-fascinating because, in a horrible coincidence, Krakauer was part of that expedition from the start - so he’s writing about people that he knew, not people that he’s piecing together after the fact by the evidence they left behind. This gives it all a tremendous immediacy: he doesn’t have to deconstruct the way that it unfolded, the confusion and “fog of war” (as it were), he was there.

And I think that actually makes it easier to understand how such a disaster could happen. Krakauer understands from the inside the intense desire to reach the summit that propelled all three teams on the mountain that day to keep climbing, and even more importantly, the disorienting physical effects of the thin air and the extreme cold. If people seemed to be acting irrationally - of course they were acting irrationally! Their brains cells were literally dying from oxygen depletion! Their irrationality is not a moral failing but a physical side effect of climbing Everest. I don’t think that someone who hadn’t experienced that for themselves could have evoked it so intensely.

(One thing I like about Krakauer's books is that he's very sympathetic to people even if they made mistakes. He realizes that even the most competent of us sometimes fuck up - and in an environment as hostile as the summit of Mount Everest, even small mistakes can kill you - and there's a sort of self-protective cruelty to the way people will sneer at these little mistakes, as if making a mistake means that the dead deserved their fates.)

The book both clarifies why people climb Everest (because it’s there, basically; because a certain kind of person wants to climb everything that’s there), and makes it look crazier than ever, because it’s so deadly. I’ve used war metaphors a couple of times in this review, because it does strike me that there’s a resonance there, both in the camaraderie that develops among climbers and the confusion when disaster strikes - but it’s a war against a foe that is unconquerable, that won’t even notice you’re there in the moment when you’re standing on the summit proudly proclaiming that you’ve won.

Plus it just sounds miserable. Krakauer says he lost twenty pounds on the climb, because he was putting forth so much physical effort but the thin air made him nauseous and unable to sleep well. And apparently this is pretty common. I could see the appeal of climbing shorter mountains, but once the air’s so thin that it makes you sick - God, it just sounds like hell.

I just finished Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, a fascinating book about Chris McCandless, a young man from an upper-middle class family who gave away his fortune, spent two years hitchhiking up and down through North America, then hiked into the Alaskan wilderness and lived off the land (and a ten-pound bag of rice) for a hundred days before dying of starvation/poisoning from eating the seeds of a wild potato plant.

The animating tension in the book lies between the two interpretations of Chris McCandless and his death: was he an admirable spiritual seeker or an arrogant young idiot? Krakauer leans toward the former - I suspect the book would be unreadable if he didn’t; who wants to read two hundred pages of “I can’t believe this guy was so stupid!”? - but he gives the latter view its due, as in this passage about McCandless’s mother:

“As she studies the pictures [of Chris’s final days], she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow.”

Coming as part of a book that is, among other things, an apologia for high-risk activities (Krakauer himself is a mountain-climber) this passage has considerable power.

I’m temperamentally inclined toward the “arrogant young idiot” view: the amount of damage he caused his family (especially his sister, whom he claimed to adore) by disappearing and dying undermine the supposedly spiritual qualities of his journey. But Krakauer makes a good case for the other side, strong enough that I’m - not converted; but left ambivalent toward McCandless; maybe there’s something in his quest, after all.

(Although if there is something in McCandless’s quest, it probably still would have been there if he had sent his family the occasional postcard rather than dropping entirely out of their lives and thereby sentencing them to two years of constant grinding anxiety as they wondered where he was and if he was well.)

It helps Krakauer’s case that so many of the people who think McCandless was a fool seem to feel a sort of relish for his death, like they enjoy seeing people suffer and die for the capital crime of being unprepared. “Maybe McCandless reminds them a little too much of their former selves,” one of Krakauer’s outdoorsy friends muses, which I think is part of it, and perhaps there’s also an element of It couldn’t happen to me. If McCandless died because he was an idiot, then wilderness trekkers who take safety precautions like bringing along a topo map needn’t worry that misadventure will take them, too.

No matter what lies behind it, there’s something creepy and off-putting about that relish. Surely it’s possible to feel that his death is sad, even tragic, even if you think his quest is foolish and he should have been more prepared. Take the topo map, Chris, come on!