In a recent blog, I mentioned that I needed to have a new computer built for me. Slowly but surely I’m plodding through all my e-mail. I wanted to thank you once again your patience as I recover from this major inconvenience.
I selected a new background for my desktop from my Windows program that shows a mountain peak at night and a moon high overhead. I can just imagine what it must be like to climb to a lofty peak by moonlight.
In a blog posted January 12th, 2008, I mentioned the passing of a great mountaineer, the death of Sir Edmund Hillary at the age of 88. The blog was called “The Mountain.” You might want to read it as an extra companion writing to tonight’s radio show.
In one of my earlier profiles on this website, mention was made of the fact that I used to do a little rock climbing in my younger more foolish years. It all started with a little mountain just south of Montreal. It was a leisurely drive outside the city on a weekend that a lot of Montrealers took to get away from it all. It had some spectacular hiking trails. One of them led to a small mountain lake nestled in the trees about halfway up. The other was a rigorous climb to the very top of the mountain. In tonight’s radio program I detail some of what I remember on those exhilarating climbs. Some years later, I took up the sport seriously. Instead of following well-appointed trails, I found my own route up the side of some fairly steep hills. I always had a dream of tackling some very large mountains in the Himalayas, but that was not to be.
One of the most exciting adventures I ever had was climbing a tall mountain on horseback on the north shore of Haiti. We were led by guide the steep trails on the side of this mountain. The trails were just wide enough for the horses to be able to negotiate the climb. At the very top was a fortress in the shape of a gun. We heard all the history of the place and enjoyed the spectacular view. Then it was time to make the long, arduous descent. All you had to do was lean slightly over to look straight down the mountain. It was a sheer drop to the ground far below. The horses would occasionally lose their footing for a brief moment, but they were used to ferrying riders up and down. They seemed to be well cared for, even though this was a particularly impoverished area of the country. I whispered a sincere “Thank you” in the horse’s ear when we arrived safely at the foot of the mountain. I paid a few extra dollars to make sure the horse got a little extra in its feedbag that night. I did not get a sense that these animals were mistreated in any way, but I was only there for the day.
On the way back to the resort we were staying at, the bus driver pulled the vehicle over to the side of the road. This was a winding road that traveled through some fairly dense jungle. He shut off the lights and motor and told us to open our windows. Off in the distance you could hear voodoo drums. A religious ceremony was underway just beyond our limited sight. Once our eyes became accustomed to the dark, you could faintly make out flickering candles in the distance. I’ve often wondered if it was done solely for the purpose of tourism, or if this was an actual ceremony that we happened to stumble upon.
This was many, many years ago, long before cellphones, satellite phones, home computers and the Internet with its instant worldwide communication via e-mail and text-messaging. At the time, a listener sent me a letter to the first radio station I worked at in Montreal. It was my first job there in the late 1970s. That person told me that a few hours of my radio show had been taped on cassette and carried on an expedition to the Himalayas. They enjoyed my style of broadcasting so much that they wanted a familiar voice at the camps at night. Today, it would be a relatively easy thing to get a wireless Internet connection at a base camp. A climber could then listen to the radio show by logging on to our website. Back then, you needed to make a tape and then carry it with its player along with all the rest of your supplies. The idea of a climb that high always intrigued me. Even though I never progressed to that level of attempting a Himalayan climb, one of my early radio shows made it to “the rooftop of the world.”
Finally, an anecdote from Bartlett’s Book Of Anecdotes. “The dramatic photograph of Tenzing Norgay on the summit of Mount Everest went around the world. Later people wondered why there was no companion picture of Hillary. The explorer wrote that he he had not asked the Sherpa to reciprocate because ‘as far as I knew, he had never taken a photograph before, and the summit of Everest was hardly the place to show him how.’”
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Don Jackson
