Into Thin Air
No safety net, no oxygen, just me vs nature in a battle I'm losing badly
I never liked mountaineers.
As a kid, my brother, parents and I, plus a gaggle of my cousins, went to see an Omnimax film at the Carnegie Science Center about Mt. Everest. And yes, you read that right- not the IMAX, the OMNIMAX.
The Omnimax was a thing of beauty, and I consider its destruction and replacement with a regular IMAX screen to be a crime on par with the destruction of one of our greater natural resources.
The Carnegie Science Center OMNIMAX was NOT some mere “big screen”, it was an immersive experience wherein you, stadium seated, are snuggled beneath a gigantic screen-dome, the full expanse of which you cannot possibly take in all at once. Fantastic for nature documentaries. Better than the real thing, I’d wager, for scaling Everest.
It’s like a gigantic planetarium, but even bigger, even better, even MAX-ier.
I loved the OMNIMAX Everest movie, however, I did, even at that young age, find the mountaineers annoying. They would say things like “I have a wife and young kids back at home” while sweating their chances of survival.
“OH????” I thought, “I feel like you have created these problems you are having right now.”
That’s me. Born a cynic.
Everest, to me, felt like the ultimate exercise in human hubris and disrespect for Mother Nature. If she wanted us up there, surely she’d have made the place a bit more inviting.
And as for claims of having “conquering” the mountain? All I saw was the mountain conquering men. Never broke a sweat, either.
With bodies littered near the peak, what exactly did these people mean to prove with their ascent? That they were better than the ones who perished? To me, their survival proved only that they had been luckier.
