You Haven't Earned It

Success produces confidence, and breeds ambition.

In the first Everest Turbo piece I noted that Eric Escoffier was an integral part of the OG Turbo effort in 1989, and reminiscing about him reminded me of the following essay, which is #39 in the second edition of Poison. I first met him in February 1987 when I stopped off in Chamonix on my home from a winter expedition in the Himalayas. Bruno Cormier, the founder of Vertical Magazine, set us up for a lunch date and in each other we found different yet kindred spirit. I last saw him in 1998 on the Arete des Cosmiques where he was filming part of a documentary ahead of his attempt on Broad Peak. He was a good, and kind man who I wish was still alive.

Alone on the Croz Spur ©Escoffier Collection

One of the most memorable moments of my life happened in France at a multimedia presentation given by the late Eric Escoffier. In his time Escoffier was a brilliant climber. In a single year he climbed 8a+ (hard 5.13), soloed the Croz Spur and Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses in a day with Christophe Vaillant flying him from the summit back to the base under a two-person hang glider, and made the first winter ascent of the Slovene Route on the Jorasses with Daniel Lacroix then climbed three 8000m peaks in Pakistan in less than three weeks. But his adrenal addiction was his undoing. He was an early adopter of paragliding as a means of descent from alpine summits and drove his Peugeot 205 GTI hard. Bad luck in the latter (he smashed into a boulder that had fallen on the road), followed by a miscalculation in the former left him injured and hobbled but did not temper his desire for the high mountain experience. He was killed headed for the summit of Broad Peak in the Karakoram in 1998, one month shy of his 38th birthday. But I digress.

At Escoffier's show, which happened before the 1987 car wreck stripped a bit of his cockiness away, he started off by saying (I paraphrase), "I'm going to show you some things I've done recently and for 99% of you this is as close as you will ever get. These accomplishments and experiences are out of your reach." In the US these comments would not have gone over well. In France the audience applauded. For some reason, in the US, we hold our heroes in awe while simultaneously believing ourselves capable of similar achievement. In France, the plodders know their place, and accept it. In the midst of the applause I was in shock. I marveled at the balls it took to say such a thing. I was astonished by the audience reaction. I learned a thing or two about myself in that instant. Belatedly, I too applauded, because he said something I had never had the courage to say though I believed it through and through. Age mellowed this feeling but to this day I know that certain experiences, which are not available to everyone - because very few believe in themselves enough to attempt them - result in a level of consciousness where sensation may be heightened, where confidence soars, and where a sense of separation from one's fellow human beings is strongly felt. It is the heightened sensation I wish to address.

Certain experiences increase sensitivity to a degree that the so-called trivial can have an extremely powerful effect. In an interview with Yukio Mishima he comments about a fellow sportsman who, after a particularly hard boxing practice, exclaimed that the woman doing the dance aerobics of the time will, "never know what it's like to stand under a shower like this." And it is true. A shower after the Zumba class is a different "get the unclean sweat off of me" task than the shower one experiences after a four-hour, hypothermia-inducing, mind-numbing, sodden and epic bike ride. In the first too-hot splash of such a post-ride shower it can feel like warm, running water was invented by God himself. And the first shower after 31 days without during a winter Himalayan expedition takes on epic meaning: the water washes away far more than filth. Tim Krabbé wrote in "The Rider" that, after the finish of the hardest races the suffering melts and changes and is oddly replaced by memories of pleasant things, and, "the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure." Virtual experiences — video games, shopping, the 5km fund-raiser plod, one hour of scrolling — leave us wanting more because they cost virtually nothing and rarely satisfy.

Getting hit in the face, shitting yourself out of fear on a mountainside, riding into the gritty teeth of dead cold wind and rain, spending yourself utterly — and I mean truly emptying the tank and then burning the reserve — on a manufactured training challenge in the gym, these experiences make the little things in life mean something, more. After such hardship, such powerful sensation, we can begin to appreciate the moments we might otherwise fail to notice. And without hardship to put these ordinary things into perspective we lose respect for them, and since life is made up of mostly little things, we can easily lose respect for ourselves.

This should be a sort of call to arms, a battle summons to curiosity, a siren to awaken the desire for experiences that will make the hot shower meaningful. What will it take to make the heat of the midsummer sun trigger the memory of uncontrollable shivering, with numb hands barely able to steer the bike, or to close around the ice tool, or to do something as simple as squeezing a water bottle? What will it take for the smell of your gym to unleash a wave of memories, some of overcoming and some of suffering defeat? And when you see your own blood on the towel or on the floor will you be horrified or will you be satisfied that finally, maybe, this time you went too goddamned far? Or perhaps just far enough.

Experiences produce memories. Success produces confidence, breeds ambition. With ambition comes expectation. And that expectation can unchain us from a self-image that holds us back. Escoffier's belief in himself was like nothing I had ever witnessed at the time. He launched himself on routes and projects that others wouldn't try because they didn't see themselves as any better than those who had failed on those same routes before. He did. He believed. Few have ever achieved what he did. His presentation was as close to his accomplishments as most of his audience could ever come so they never knew what it was like "to stand under a shower like this," never made the trivial into something far more meaningful by having done something extraordinary. And that's a shame because such a powerful experience is just a single decision away — if you are willing to choose it and see it through.