Wellness – Page 2 – Lessons from a Stone

Accountability: For the Sake of Itself

It’s no secret how popular climbing Everest has become. Here’s a few statistics to digest before tearing into the story. I know, there are two different figures shown for “Successful Climbs”. What do you expect for AI?!

I just got done watching “Dying for Everest”, a 2007 documentary based on double amputee Mark Inglis’s triumphant summit bid on Mount Everest and the existential happenings during that climb.

Starting at a relatively young age, Inglis had been a professional mountaineer and member of an alpine rescue team based in his home country of New Zealand. He was already a gifted and highly experienced mountaineer when he spent twelve days on New Zealand’s Mount Cook, after being caught high on the mountain with his partner in an extended blizzard before they were finally rescued. As a result, severe frostbite brought an end to his legs and feet (from the knee down). While undergoing a brutally painful and lengthy rehab, he was fitted with prosthetics and began the long road back to seeking adventure.

Fast forward to the mid-2000’s when Inglis made the decision to be the first double amputee to reach the summit of Mt. Everest and went about joining an experienced team, several of whom had summited Everest on two or more occasions and were old friends. Anymore, most people are familiar with Everest, the tallest of the world’s 8,000 meter peaks at over 29,000 feet ASL (Above Sea Level) and the endless stream of climbers of all ability levels who make the attempt each climbing season (lasting just a few months). From both an ecological and spiritual standpoint, the mountain is truly under siege. Strewn everywhere are non-biodegradable trash such as plastic water bottles and used oxygen cylinders from around base camp at 17,000 feet to the furthest reaches of the mountain, a testament to the thousands of people who have attempted the climb. Only a fraction have made it safely to the summit and the return cimb down.

Inglis and his team which included a climber known as “Cowboy” who had designed and fabricated Inglis’s highly specialized climbing legs were well funded and well prepared, enough so that they were able to contribute $80,000 to a charitable group that involves amputees. The team had ample media coverage commensurate with covering such a huge human interested story. I can recall the ferver surrounding the climb as the date closed in. There aren’t many “firsts” remaining on Everest or, for that matter, in mountaineering, adventure or extreme sports, discovery, or exploration in general. The turn of the twentieth century and the twenty years on either side were banner times with the races for the poles, polar travel, arctic and antarctic attempts and crossings. It seems that “firsts abounded”. We even made it into space by the late 1960’s. Everest is not considered the most difficult of the 8,000 meter peaks. Though they are seldom used, there are far more difficult routes on the mountain than the one taken by probably 99% of the people attempting the climb. In comparison, K2 has an unbelievably low success rate coupled with the highest death rate which is one in every four climbers. With that in mind, it’s all but inconceivable that people attempt it at all. Imagine being a father or mother and having your adventure seeking husband or wife inform you that they’ve made their decision and will be joining their team of three or five others to climb K2 during the next climbing season. In the 1970’s with the world’s climbing community saying it was impossible to do Everest without oxygen, a forty year old debate, German-Italian Reinhold Messner, one of the all-time best mountaineers not only proved them wrong once, but twice while taking one of the most difficult, but direct routes up the mountain unaided by the use of oxygen. These were feats that went unchallenged until a super-climber named Ed Visteurs repeated it sometime in the early 1990’s. So, attempting to climb Everest while being a double amputee would garner a lot of press and the climb was followed by millions.

The rest of this story isn’t so much a chronicling of Inglis’s remarkably successful climb (much has been written about the endeavor), but something that occurred along the way to the summit and its aftermath. There is a point on the mountain (generally described as being over the 26,000 foot mark) above which is considered the “Death Zone” and it is thought by all to be the most dangerous aspect where an individual climber can spend only so much time within that space and the summit, on the way both up and down. This includes spending time trying to get some windblown rest at Camp 5, perched precipitously several thousand feet below the summit. There is absolutely no margin for error including ailments such as cerebral edema which happens when the blood no longer carries enough oxygen to the brain. If it goes untreated for even a full day or two, it can lead to certain death. The primary treatment for getting someone who is suffering its ill effects is getting them down to a much lower elevation, as quickly as possible. Once at basecamp, the symptoms wii disappear on their own, that is, unless more permanent damage to the brain has already occurred.

Many climbs have ended for entire teams so that the life of one of the members can be saved in an all-for-one effort to get that team member back down the mountain. Working as fast as possible, with the death zone surrounding them, often leads to more than just the one casualty. None of the climbers have their wits about them. Some more than others, but any kind of injury is made exponentially worse simply by being that high up on the mountain. Often a climber will stop to rest for what was supposed to be just a few minutes and when they try to get up and move on, they find that they can go no further.

What many people aren’t prepared for is the area known as Green Boot Cave named after a dead Japanese climber whose green mountaineering boots are still quite visible wrapped around his feet. There are some ten or eleven other dead climbers from ill-fated expeditions in the past couple of decades whose frozen bodies decorate this part of the mountain. At that elevation, it takes decades for bodies to even begin to decay, but, since they are no longer of this world, even their own climbing buddies elect to leave them on the mountain rather than risk becoming another casualty in an attempt to haul these bodies all the way back to base camp. But in the moment that Inglis and his team were passing through this frozen battlefield, there was another body in the crack in the rock, a body which was still moving ever so slowly and trying to speak, Inglis’s team stopped for enough time to decide that there was nothing they could do for him. The stricken climber was all but gone and that was the consensus amongst the team members. Throughout the day and into the night, an estimated 30 other climbers passed the man, many without knowing he was still clinging to life. Sad to say, but even if a rescue effort had taken place now, it is highly unlikely that anything could have been done for the severely frost bitten and nearly braindead climber. From the various accounts, it is all but certain that he would have been brain dead and incapable of surviving the grueling trip down the mountain. Too much time had lapsed in a place where there is no time.

By the time the story had been picked up by the media and reached the world, the public outcry was merciless and, because Inglis’s story was already being covered heavily, the story became a story within a story and Mark Inglis and his team were being blamed for the death. Judgement wasn’t nearly has harsh within the climbing community even though the mountaineering world is traditionally unforgiving and harsh when it learns of mishaps that were largely due to poor judgment, they knew that this wasn’t one of those occurrences. This case of death high up on a Himalayan mountainside was scrutinized by a general public that knows absolutely nothing about the conditions these climbers face at such extreme altitudes. Inglis’s “trial by fire” was not conducted by an objective judge and a jury of his peers. When mountaineering accidents happen, people from both inside and outside the mountaineering community want answers and above all, they want to see real accountability. But this was extremely hurtful to Inglis who’s only real crime was being there after the crime had already been committed. Where was this climber’s team? Ostensibly, having left their comrade behind, they were off chasing the summit. Though there were several teams in that general area at the time, it is difficult to get a straight story. Again, each of these climbers wouldn’t have been functioning at their normal levels, mentally or physically. Many were simply mute or mumbling, in a hurry to keep moving toward the summit with the primary goal of summiting and getting back down below the death zone.

When looking at the full measure of accidents and catastrophic events that have occurred on Everest over the last thirty years, it is clear that there are too many climbers on the mountain at almost any given time. And, at just a few months, the climbing season is very short. I can imagine sitting in a small Tibetan cafe and “feeling” the eyes upon me from the people who have lived for centuries in the shadow of this great peak and be viewed as another clueless American who has come to desecrate their most holy of religious and cultural places. Perhaps a mother of a Sherpa who lost his life trying to make a living for his community by ferrying loads for the thousands of foreigners just passing-through each climbing season. On the other end, you’ve got a huge cloud of pressure that resides over the mountain and everyone who travels so far from home and family to pay their $50K to one of the many guiding operations with the unspoken promise of getting them up the mountain. For most, just arriving at base camp is the culmination of saving money and getting physically and mentally prepared for years. If they don’t end up among the fortunate climbers who summit and make the even more hazardous trip down to complete the climb, many are willing to literally die trying. They understand that this is the downside of what they signed-up for. With that level of commitment and focus on a dangerous goal, self imposed or otherwise, you can picture the amount of collective angst that is on Everest every single day of each climbing season. I’ll venture that it’s nothing short of being palpable. No matter how well prepared your typical Everest climber might be, there are few things in ordinary, day to day life that prepare them for that kind of pressure. As the numbers have steadily risen, there are fewer and fewer climbers that have the experience or wherewithal to even step into base camp. But at roughly $50K per climber, there is big money at stake and many people simply talk their way onto a climb.

It’s not like the route taken is difficult. It is the easiest way to get people up and down the mountain and is a predominantly well-marked and maintained path interspersed with a number of quasi-technical features to best along the way. But it is not for the faint of heart. It is the sheer number of climbers that has become the greatest challenge (and hazard). During a Camp 5 to summit,-push, there may be eight, or more, teams of six to twelve climbers vying for very limited space the entire way up and down. In most places, there is a single path to be taken with invariable “log jams” occurring in places like the “Hillary Step”, a moderately technical section of the route that spells mishap for numerous climbers each year. When looking down from this vantage point, there is a seemingly endless stream of people that have been forced as if like cattle from a herd into a confined, singlefile corridor. If you stumble or fall, you’re causing an undesirable stoppage. Now picture people of all abilities from guides and those who may already have summited four or five times to work-from- home gym rats or even a celebrity or two. This all makes for a day in the life of a climber on a push for the summit, typically a sixteen to twenty hour stint when finally getting back into Camp 5.

Additional pressure builds during instances where a storm is on its way (this happens often and accounts for many bad decisions) and climbing against the greatly reduced time allotment pushes many people beyond their ability to cope with the added physical and mental strain. Perhaps they’re feeling the effects of altitude sickness, are already running low on their oxygen appropriation for the day. Or, their guide who senses that a particular climber isn’t up to the task at hand has to make the never enjoyable but hugely important decision to send them down along with another guide to ensure their safety during the long and hazardous trek back to base camp. The team leader will now become the one and only guide. If the weather holds, only a fraction of those who began their summit push in the wee hours of the morning, in the pitch black darkness of this other-worldly mountainscape, wiill summit that day. It is one of the single most difficult 24 hour periods in all of sports.

Inglis summited and spent a bit of time at the top. By the time he reached Green Boot Cave hours later on the now dark trail, the stricken climber would be no more. By the time the world heard the story, it was apparent that Inglis had been singled out from the thirty-two other climbers who were there that tragic day on Everest. In fulfilling his double -amputee dream, his story was the best one for the media to latch onto and embellish. It took considerable time for the “Trial by Public Opinion” to calm (months ) and sift fact from fiction. Numerous climbers had been informally interviewed upon returning to basecamp and it seemed that with each telling, there was a different story. But there were ample similarities, perhaps, the most important of which was that not a single climber had assigned a speck of blame on Inglis as it related to any other climber or the whole of the ignominious failure to do “the right thing”, as the world would perceive the dilemma. To comprehend what occurred (or didn’t occur) on the mountain that day, it is of paramount importance to remind ourselves that the accident happened in Everest’s”Death Zone”, a place where no one on earth could still be 100% in control of their mental faculties. It was later found that many of the climbers who passed the body that day either thought it was dead just like the other bodies they’d come upon, or didn’t see him crouched in the crack (“cave”) right next to the long-since frozen Japanese (“Green Booted”) climber.

I don’t think many of us understand the motivation behind trying to have immediate closure to some sort of tragic mystery, particularly when it involves a dead body or a person who seemingly vanished from the face of the earth, but, as we’ve all seen on TV shows like long-aired CSI, rushing to judgement rarely turns out well, especially for those persons who initially appeared to be a primary suspect or person of interest. Their lives have almost invariably been changed for the worse even after being formally ruled-out of an investigation or exonerated. It was no different for Mark Inglis whose only crime was being a celebrated person for having the intelligence, grit, and determination we all wish for but never seems to find us. It can only come from knowing the darkest of places and having the temerity to wriggle back out and never, ever throw in the towel. To attack him personally and professionally for what happened that day was wrong and the people who never went so far as to find out what really happened before pointing the finger own him one huge apology. I hope he one day gets it, at least a modicum of it.

Tibetan Prayer Flags Against an Everest Backdrop Credit Shutterstock

The Yin and Yang of Guitar Forums

Collings AT-1 Dark Burst, Courtesy of Eddie’s Guitars

I was about to undergo my fourth back surgery and knew I was going to be laid-up for a couple of months, so I was setting myself up with things to stay busy until I’d recovered enough to re-engage with my usual activities. I’d wondered about these online guitar platforms such as the Unofficial Martin Guitar Forum (UMGF), Acoustic Guitar Forum (AGF), TDPRI (Fender Telecaster discussion group), and several others, so I did a little homework and became a member of the “Big Three” and signed on to a few smaller communities just for good measure. As you’d envision, they are essentially online chatrooms formed in the mid-to-late 2000’s, at the beginning of the beginning of the social media craze. As opposed to sites like Facebook and Myspace at the time, these were guitar-centric organizations intended for the express purpose of providing a space for guitarists to commune and post questions and answers about guitars. UMGF and AGF are for acoustic guitar players and TDPRI is primarily for electric guitarists who mostly play either a Fender Telecaster or Stratocaster. There are sites that are geared toward most of the major manufacturers, though, for a number of reasons the manufacturers themselves do not own the sites and seldom contribute. The owners of such sites are typically guitar afficionados who take it upon themselves to invest in and build platforms that function as a place where guitar players can exchange information, ask the forum questions, or provide the forum with answers or solutions to problems. Essentially, to have passionate, open discussions on their faorite topic. There is also a place on each site to buy and sell guitars and related gear, talk specifically about vintage guitars, review various makes and models, post sound-clips and favorite guitar videos, and discuss famous players and their styles and techniques. There is typically a cornucopia of information as guitarists help each other make decisions on what guitars to buy and what is the best available technology in related gear.

The year was 2019 and these forums had already been around for ten or more years before I joined at a time which proved to be the beginning of the end. People had begun to jump ship and spend their time on more socially driven social media forums such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The guitar forums were in a constant state of flux and people inexplicably began leaving in droves, defaulting to the most strident members, people who tended to be older and less inclined to leave the sanctity of their beloved forums or the warm and comforable nooks in there homes where they sit, tending to these sites at all hours of the day and night. I stuck with it for several years as it was still a place where I could contribute knowledge both as a long-time player and gear fanatic. I’d become an expert on “boutique” guitar manufacturers and vintage acoustic guitars, along with curating my own fairly significant collection of both acoustic and electric guitars. To me, this great hobby of mine was much more involved than just playing guitar and learning to be a better guitarist, it became something far more intensive and that meant learning everything I possibly could about guitars, from the origins of the first stringed instruments centuries ago to to modern guitars of today and everything in-between. Before retiring, I’d had a rewarding career in engineering and project management and, for many of those years, I’d been a competitive endurance athlete for which I was now paying the price with a rapidly degenerating spine. My lower back was going to hell in a handbasket forcing me to leave many of my beloved activities behind. By the time I joined these forums I was all but done for physically and would be needing some alternative oulets if I were to save my sanity.

I wrote my first blog just days before the 2019 surgery, followed by another blog the next day, but I was so focused on my recovery and the potential for getting some of my activities back, that I dropped my attention from the blog altogether. It would be four years and several brushes with death over some other severe health problems before I would pick up where I left off. My entry into the world of blogging started innocently enough. I would write a perspective on a new guitar I’d acquired, or write about my favorite guitar influences. There might be a simple post on what strings I use and why or which “boutique” brands I believe to be at the top of the heap. Boutique guitars are typically made by smaller builders with fewer employees who are talented and disciplined enough to use “Old World” processes, techniques, and tools while eschewing the use of automation in the construction of very finely crafted guitars. In other words, companies who employ skilled luthiers in making these guitars predominantly by hand, without the obvious production benefits behind using high-tech tools and machinery. There is a lot of space on these forums which is dedicated to comparing the various boutique brands against the best production guitars made by companies like Martin, Gibson, and Taylor. Aside from writing about guitars, I’ve written pieces nature, music, social issues, endangered species, some of my adventure trips, watches, cycling, skiing, what it’s like to be caught in the crossfire of the opioid crisis, and a host of other topics.

It was before I started my own WordPress site to become more formally engaged in writing that I was at all focused on guitar forums. For the first year, or so, I enjoyed contributing to these forums but somewhere into the second or third year, I began to notice a shift in the kinds of responses I was getting, which had gone from friendly and gracious to argumentative and downright combative. This is where you need to have an understanding of the inner workings of these forums. While there are ten’s of thousands subscribers, there are cliques that form and will come together like a beehive in order to defend any one of their group who seems to be having trouble over a particular topic or is doing battle with the posts’s author (the OP, or “Original Poster”) or someone else in the thread. If you are a poster and are having differences with another member, the next thing you know, there are a half-dozen other members rushing to the aid of the one and you find yourself in the sights of a clique. Put differently, what were once satisfying replies and comments to a particular post I’d written were now belligerent personal affronts. I believe what happened was that the site’s “trolls” were OK with me as long as I wasn’t answering more complicated questions, before I upped my game and had begun accruing more and more followers. It seems that I had unwittingly wandered into their territories and they wanted to put an end to it before they lost all-too-important “street-cred”. These kinds of negative responses weren’t targeted at me alone, but anyone who was writing at a higher than average level, both in terms of content, but also in terms of writing itself. For me personally, I’ve always enjoyed writing and, over many years, have become quite comfortable with the subject matter surrounding guitars. I had no difficulty in taking these people on and found it easy to put them in their place, without the use of foul lanquage or meaningless put-downs. But things got uncomfortable during my third or fourth altercation with one of UMGF’s most prolific and longest standing members, when he decided to really let me have it and got so worked-up that I believe he would have shot me if the whole of the internet didn’t stand between us. After the second or third communication between us, he began writing childish but incendiary insults and lobbing them over the fence. I had called him out and he had all-too-willingly answered the call. Before the trouble began, the post had fostered a good number of contributors and was an already lengthy thread with dozens of replies, so we’d already attracted many onlookers as well as the site’s moderators and the site administrator, himself, who shut us down and closed the post so that it was no longer accessible to anyone, including me. What happened in the next twenty-four hours is the real travesty. The administrator had edited the entire thread from the point where the argument started to where he had ended the post. He then reposted the thread. He had done much of his editing by deleting most of what I had to say and leaving out the ugliest comments made by my opponent, cleaning-up his mess while making me appear to be the uninformed aggressor. I wrote the administrator directly and gave him no quarter while delivering both barrels. He must have felt the sting because by the next day I’d been rewarded by having my membership revoked. I’d known that this was a possibility beause I’d read about being blackballed from other members of these sites, so this came as no surprise, nor did it come at a great loss. I certainly wasn’t about to let it get under my skin. But it made me wonder how the two people, the senior member and the administrator, could have become so close for the one to so clearly take the side of the other. There are similar alliances all over these sites, often between long-standing and prolific contributors and their “followers” who tend to gain confidence once taken under the wing of a well-known member. It’s probably not dissimilar to prison gang rivalries where a less powerful, more timid inmate takes a submissive stance with a given leader (or,”shot-caller”) and does things to prove himself worthy of joining in exchange for the “protection” of the leader and his henchmen. On some of these sites, a senior member may have been around since the forum’s inception and thus has the abundant gratitude of the site’s management and even its owner(s). Some of these folks will have gained such notoriety as to have thousands of followers at their beckon call…good little foot-soldiers in the fight over who’s more knowledgable, the relative newcomer or the tried and true old-timer. These senior contributors with ten or fifteen years of membership behind them tend to be of an older crowd and enjoy the status they feel within he fabric of the forum. To their credit, they are almost invariably highly knowledgable and better that average as writers whose aim it is to get their point across. Virtual friendships and allegiances between people who have known one another for firteen years online, but who have never actually met. Somehow, I just don’t “get” this but it is a dynamic that exists on every forum I’ve contributed to, When these battles come to a head, I’ve been swarmed by as many as a dozen “insurgents” borne out of a simple disagreement between two forum users. I couldn’t passibly keep up without typing so fast as to set my keyboard ablaze, so I choose the most eggregious offenders and take on their comments along with those of their leader. I am sure that this topic would be great fodder for psychiatric experts to tear into. The “why” riding the undercurrent of ill-fated personality types and their inevitable engagement when situations like this arise. In retrospect, I’m surprised at myself for getting as angry as I did at the time. Not unlike road rage, the root of the problem between the two parties is really quite foolish but it escalates disproportionately to the the reasoning beheind it. In my own defense, it wasn’t just the one thing that got me riled enough to don armor and step onto the battlefield, but the downward trend these sites were experiencing because, aisde from those particular moments while in the heat of doing battle, I got a lot of enjoyment out of reading an untold number of posts and contributing a fair number of my own. There’s was a lot of “good stuff” to be found there. But, as someone famously once said, “all good things come to an end”.

This same thing happened to me on another of the preeminant forums. I guess I must have a problem. ;-). Perhaps that problem is that I refuse to allow these trolls to control any of these forums by fear. Many people are fearful of putiing themselves out there only to be criticized by others. I have done my best to give them a voice even if it’s not a popular opinion that they’re attampting to peddle. The problem is that the more these forums become places where people attempt to validate themselves and the site’s seemingly continue to promote their “Good ol’ Boy” networks, the more people are going to leave and take their guitar-centric worlds with them. The greater problem is that once these forums reach extiction, there will be no place to go the obtain free advice on complex, guitar related issues and nowhere for the many thousands of us who enjoy belonging to a like-minded, music based community. I find this to be unfortunate because I enjoy helping people, whether it’s about which guitars bring forth the best overall value or what kind of guitar strap to use. More complicated questions are always welcome, and haing a place to write an essay regarding tonewoods and which ones work best for differing applications, is quite satisfying. In this respect, I know that I am not alone, nor am I alone in hoping that one day there will be a resurgence of such platforms. Unfortunately, there may already be too much damage done as to how I feel about these forums for me to regain the intense interest that I once had. Unless these forum owners soon do an about face to entice their members from moving on, the mass exodus from their sites will continue and I don’t see these sites as having enough articifcial intelligence to save themselves. The fact is, these guitar forums are already on their way to mass extinction and I believe they will continue to lose members because they are clearly making no efforts to keep them. In the conext of my own experience with these sites and being an extremely knowledgable resource who is forever eager to share that knowledge, it is the rest of the membership who are penalized when I’m forced out of the picture by management. If people are afraid to share their vast knowledge for fear of retribution from some silly “gang leader”, then it is the site administrators and owners who are culpable for allowing this kind of negative atmosphere to exist while on “their watch”. It is these people who owe ex-members an appology for not meeting their expectations of providing a safe environment for people to air their collective knowledge openly without having the “other shoe drop” when they’ve lauched yet another solid, well-informed post that speaks for itself. It is the job of the site’s owner(s) and administrators to maintain such a space which was their intention when launching their creations in the first place. There are obviously greater reasons behind the loss of popularity of similar forums all over the internet. Do people only want topical knowledge on a given subject or are there others out there, people like me, who lament the loss of site’s where significant amounts of information can be found and exchanged?

2011 Fender “Telebration” Series Reclaimed Old Growth Redwood Telecaster

It was something to do during the recovery periods associated with the number of major surgeries and health setbacks I’ve had during those same times. Now, I obviously have my own dedicated space, in part, to write about music and my love of “all things guitar”. I also contribute to a number of guitar-centric platforms on Quora.