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Date: April 30, 2004
This is my favorite adventure in NZ. I don’t have time or money to polish
this one but I think you will enjoy it. I want to purge my mind of New Zealand
before I leave for africa in a few hours. I am tempted to write a critique of
NZ as so many travelers seem to do. However, I won't bore you with happy but ordinary
stories. NZ is a great coutry: come experience it for yourself.
* * *
After three hours of tramping through rubble and streams, following yellow-tipped
poles, and climbing up steps carved into the flanks of the Franz Josef Glacier,
we are approaching the icefalls where the top of the glacier has cracked along
numerous faults as the bottom, remaining solid from the pressure, cascades in
slow motion over a cliff, ripping the rocks off the wall and grinding them into
silt. We cross five bridges -- aluminum ladders topped with a sheet of wood and
lined with rope handrails -- the chasms deepen from a frosty white to a cool blue
to a cold, bottomless black. Distant ice tunnels and rock thunder as they collapse.
Just past the bridges, we lunch on a slope overlooking the toes of the glacier
hundreds of meters below us on the valley floor where ribbons of silver streams
braid themselves into the Waiho River which disappears through a notch in the
horizon into the Tasman Sea. “Does anyone suffer from claustrophobia or
fear of heights?” asks our guide.
”It’s a little late for that,” I laugh.
”This is your last chance to --” the wind freezes his words in
midair. Moments later he says, “It isn’t raining yet,” when,
in fact, a black cloud is forming around the tops of the mountains and the mist
slowly globing into a pissing drizzle (kiwis call this fine weather). Our guide
has a beaming smile and animated eyebrows that I imagined make women swoon --
that is, if they don’t find his legs horribly brawny and hairy as I do --
but I lose faith in his wisdom, especially when he refers to the greywacke sandstone
as “terminal moraine” as if a jeweler were referring to a pile of
diamonds as gravel.
Lunchtime ends and our guide gives us more death-defying advice, “Don’t
cover your ears with your hood so that you can hear me yell. Don’t cover
your mouth so that I can hear you squeal when you fall. And don’t trip over
your feet.” We enter the seracs, towering pillars of ice, as if the subantarctic
sea were breaking on the shores during a gail and frozen in a moment. The deeper
into the labyrinth of crevasses we climb, the cleaner and bluer the ice becomes
-- blue as the bluest sky only I could reach out and chip off pieces, intrigued
to find the ice clear or white from a frozen effervescence of air. I lose site
of the group and hurry forward but a spike on my crampon catches a strap on the
opposing foot and I topple near the heels of Chris. I bloody my hands and knees
but Chris isn’t impressed; he’s an emergency medicine specialist,
“I find bullet wounds and drug overdoses really interesting. I love the
ER.” (We could probably find you some bullet wounds in Africa, Chris.)
The trip climaxes when we shimmy down a narrow passage, one leg on each wall,
to the bottom of a crevasse filled with water. I shuffle my crampons across the
ice on either side of the water until the pool fills the entire passage. I dip
my ice axe by its cord – I can’t reach the bottom. I push aside some
ice cubs until I locate a foothold a few centimeters below the water. I take one
long step, search the pool for another foothold, find it and hop across imagining
being plunged into a subterranean river. The crevasse narrows and I have to take
off my backpack and slide through sideways. The walls are canted so I lean back
and shuffle forward like an Egyptian hieroglyph.
The Pacific and Australian plates are colliding, flowing uphill, creating
New Zealand and the Southern Alps. These mountains form a cold wall that condense
the moisture out of the perpetual subantarctic trade winds. The equivalent of
fifteen meters of rain per year falls atop the Alps as wet snow. Franz Josef glacier
is one of the fastest moving glaciers in the world, spilling out of the glacier’s
basin, or névé, at 2.5 meters per day. “Two-point-five meters,”
I think, “I don’t even have two-point-five centimeter to spare.”
I am reminded of Everest’s Khumba Icefalls -- the most treacherous leg
of the ascent -- and Goran Kropp. I met Goran in San Francisco and he told me
he is the only man to summit Everest beginning from sea level. He bicycled from
Stockholm, Sweden to Nepal where he began a look trek by foot through the Himalayas.
This was during the disaster in 1996 that Jon Krakauer details in his hastily
written book, “Into Thin Air”. Nine people died; one of them was Goran’s
close friend. Nonetheless, the next day the song of the mountain lured him past
the bodies of his friend and acquaintances to the summit of Everest.
I pause and watch the grey sky roll past the seracs. I inhale deeply, expanding
my lungs, using the sky to wedge open the crevasse. After a moment, I slide one
foot forward but my jacket is frozen to the glacier. I lean sideways and my jacket
pops loose; suddenly, as if the walls are buttered, I begin falling. I barely
reposition my heavy boot and crampon to prevent wedging myself on the bottom where
it would have been impossible to get my feet underneath me and stand. I would
have been trapped like a rabbit in a three-walled cage. (Rabbits can’t walk
backwards.)
Goran told me he intended to quit mountain climbing. “It is not good
for the head.” But the call of the wild was too strong and he was killed
several years later in a mountain climbing accident. I wonder: Was Goran caught
in a three-walled box? Did Goran die for the sake of exploration – to expand
the frontiers of humanity, or was he simply a thrillseeker, an adrenaline junkie?
What are the differences between an explorer, adventurer, traveller and tourist?
I have been told that I am on a fool’s quest. Am I caught in a three-walled
box? If I could just turn around, walk backwards, or open my eyes would I be able
to escape. Is my box pride -- am I making a difference? -- or it’s flipside,
low self-esteem? -- am I trying to prove something to myself?
I mumble, not loud enough to distract Chris, but loud enough to give my prayers
resonance, “I promise I am going to retire in Cape Town. Just let me survive
with a sound body and a sound mind. I don’t want to end up like Goran: I’ve
had my adventure.”
When handed an ice axe in the beginning of the day, I laughed, “I bet
we won’t need this but for a photograph.” However, throughout
the day I discovered many uses for my axe: as a hook to pull myself
up; or wedge to lower myself; or to brace myself against an opposing
wall; in the end, my knees weak and feet blistered, I used it as
a cane to hobble back to the bus, last out of 50 people. New Zealand
is laughing at me: You think you are special, Mister I-bicycled-around-the-world.
I’ll show you.
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