Attitude at Altitude
Interview with Chris DeMuth Jr
For years I made a point of refusing to do interviews. I’d been poisoned by the misrepresentation that occurred in the cesspool of the fitness industry, rather, the fitness media industry. These days, when possible, I scan the questions to see if it could be an interesting exercise, a way to learn or feel something different. When Chris sent his questions and demonstrated deep familiarity with my work and words and history I said yes. These questions kick-started my thinking:
When you forge friendships with people who have risked everything together, is it hard to relate to people who haven’t risked anything? Can you care? Having dealt with mountain survival and rescues, does contending with death make it easier to relate to the military people you’ve trained?
Some years ago as I was trying to understand why a relationship couldn’t evolve beyond its tentative initiation despite attempts by both parties to deepen it. At one point, when a dear friend’s son, who also happened to be a very capable climber and a man I’d known since he was seven or eight, killed himself my partner said things that showed she had never experienced terrible, life-altering loss. This got me thinking about previous relationships within which I had not been seen much less understood. Oh, this again. At the time this occurred nearly one hundred friends, climbing partners and students had been killed, most in climbing accidents, but also car and aviation accidents, suicides, military events, and some natual causes. That much loss affects a person, it changes them permanently, and plays a role in all relationships that person may have. It also separates. Loss and death should unite but often those who survive develop different understanding and language.
I’ll paraphrase a military friend, “When all of the friends with whom you did the greatest things in your life get killed how do you talk with someone who hasn’t lost anything?” Admittedly, the incident was still very fresh but I understood exactly what he meant. How can we communicate the feeling of a shrinking peer group, of the survivors wading through life weighed down by ever greater loss, and trying to make sense of experience once shared but never again to be shared, and the reciprocity of love cut short, life cut down, killed? Even among fellow survivors it is difficult. And while I can and do care, I limit my investment in anyone with whom that common ground is not shared.
So I said yes to the intevriew and you can read it on the Vale Tudo page.
