Once More to the Mountain
When Chuck and I repeated a trip we had taken with our ghostly parents, we were also unavoidably confronting the edge of doom—which for our generation is also the advancing edge of the baby boom. I am sure there is some element of trying to deny your own mortality in wanting to repeat a past experience, but even stronger is the realization that denial is impossible. Any journey on this earth is a metaphor for our life’s journey in time. Journeys come to an end.
Mountains, inherently dangerous places, can hasten the end. In 1959, the day before our family took the cog railway to Kleine Scheidegg, rescuers brought down the body of an Italian climber from the North Face of the Eiger. He had been part of a party of four, only one of whom survived the attempted ascent two years before; his body had been dangling from a climbing rope ever since. In 2010 we described this grim event to one of the hotel owners. As it happened, he had recently seen (and highly recommended) the German film North Face (2008), which recounts a 1936 race to climb the then-still-unscaled wall of the mountain. The movie portrays the competition between German and Austrian teams, who struggled and for the most part died with working-class stoicism while bourgeois reporters covering the story wined and dined at the Kleine Scheidegg station not far away. (The North Face was finally scaled in 1938 by a German, who was lauded by Hitler for his feat. The coming of the war was already in the air, even mountain air.)
All the high places of the world are dangerous, because you must rely on complex technologies to take you there and get you back safely. In 1959 the first leg of our return flight from Zürich to Boston, on the AMC-chartered BOAC Boeing Stratocruiser, was uneventful. After stopping in London and refueling at Shannon Airport, we re-boarded and headed westward over the Atlantic. Twenty minutes out of Shannon, engine number four quit. The pilot executed a 180-degree turn and headed the aircraft back to London. There the engine was repaired, while we enjoyed an unexpected extra day of sightseeing and more shopping.
On July 29 we took off again. About 1,000 miles out of Shannon, as most of us were asleep or nearly so, the same engine that had caused trouble on our first attempt to fly home blew up. The explosion tore off most of the engine’s cowling, but one large piece, held on by a few rivets, stuck out at an acute angle from the wing. The cowling fluttered like a sheet on a clothesline, setting up air currents that made the whole plane shudder.
The captain again turned back. The distance was greater than if we had continued westward, but heading east we had the wind behind us. He throttled back to a minimum flying speed to reduce vibration. This in turn caused the airplane to lose altitude, so that we ended up flying about 1,000 feet above the waters of the Atlantic. The crew jettisoned bottles, trays, and anything they could think of to reduce weight. They told us that personal baggage would be next to go if necessary. We passengers were helped into “Mae West” life preservers and prepared to ditch. Ships in the area were redirected toward our flight path in case of this eventuality. An RAF Sunderland aircraft was dispatched from London to escort us, as well as a DC-7 en route from New York to London.
Chuck and I were nervous but not panicked. Everyone onboard felt vaguely reassured when the two escort aircraft appeared alongside. Our plane was still flying, although it felt like a bus traveling on a dirt road at high speed. Later, our father told us he was frightened either that the cowling would break loose and hit the tail section, or that the shuddering would cause metal fatigue, which could make the whole airplane fall apart.
After about four hours of anxiety, our airplane landed at Shannon Airport. We passengers broke into relieved applause for the skill of our captain. We were shepherded onto a bus that drove us across the Irish countryside to a rural hotel, where we were put up for the night. The flat green damp earth was a welcome sight. The next day, another aircraft, a DC-7, flew us without incident across the Atlantic to Boston. Chuck and I were able to continue our lives’ journeys for another fifty-plus years: a bonus, a mortal afterlife.
We live in change; it lives in us; and our changes are not over. Change dominates the storyline of our lives, individually and collectively. The less-storied line is that of continuity: less-noticed, less-celebrated, but no less essential. A sense of continuity connects past, present, and projected future. Without it, we are lost as surely as if we are flying over the trackless ocean. We need to glimpse, now and then, a rainbow whose arc invites us to connect with the other shore. Repeating a journey, like writing history, arises not from an impossible desire to relive experience, but from an essential need to understand it.
1. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” stanza 5, in Four Quartets (1943).
2. Hanover, N.H.: SwissHikes.com, 2007.
3. Referring to the classic work by Marjorie Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, first published by Cornell University Press in 1959. For a more popular treatment, specifically of the Bernese Alps, by a self-described adventurer, see Richard Bangs, Quest for the Sublime: Finding Nature’s Secret in Switzerland (Birmingham, Ala., 2008).
4. E. B. White, “Once More to the Lake,” in One Man’s Meat, 8th ed. (1938; reprint, New York, 1944), 248.
5. Wilfried Haeberli and Michael Zemp, “Mountain Glaciers: On Thin Ice,” with contributions from T. Chinn, P. Mool, and M. Zapata, in Mountains and Climate Change: From Understanding to Action, ed. Th. Kohler and D. Maselli (Bern, 2009), 21–29.
6. Ibid.
7. See news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7770472.stm and glaciology.ethz.ch/ messnetz/index.html. Mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashears has undertaken extended photographic comparisons of mountain glaciers in the Himalaya in a Glacier Research Imaging Project sponsored through the non-profit organization GlacierWorks: http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/about (all websites accessed 9 May 2011).
8. Haeberli and Zemp.
©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.
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