softly softly catchee monkey

Icy Night, Alfred Stieglitz, 1892

I’ve been really fascinated by survival stories lately. It started with a vague change in inclination from fiction to non, and it really picked up when I picked up, completely by chance, a book about an ill-fated Arctic expedition in 1913 (it’s called The Ice Masters) a few years ago. I recently finished Into the Wild, a book about a promising young man who started life pretty much where I did, but finished it frozen, starved, and utterly alone in a handmade sleeping bag, in an abandoned bus, in Alaska.

This past weekend, I saw the unforgettable, humbling, gripping (no more relevant adjectives come to mind) Touching the Void, a semi-documentary film about two British alpinists who amazingly survive(d) a disastrous climb (actually, the descent is where everything goes wrong) in Peru. This film reminded me of Open Water, another real life horror film almost impossible to sit through, and equally impossible to be done with.

I wonder why these stories are so compelling, not only to those who are drawn into experiencing them first hand, but also to people who would never dream of taking such risks on forbidding mountains or icy poles, people like me. I did have a friend in high school who vanished on one such venture. Completely disappeared. And of course, he was and still is assumed dead. For a time, I also lived on a frozen tundra where every day (not only in winter) I triumphed in my ability to survive. Maybe it’s as simple as that. We all seek challenges, great or small, that call into question our very existence, because simply existing doesn't suffice.