Every summit is different, each a different life that you have lived.
You arrive at the top having renounced everything that you think you must have to support life and are alone with your soul. That empty vantage point lets you reappraise yourself and every relationship and object that is part of the civilized world with a different perspective.
On the anvil of his self-realization, life hammered out a man who in most ways had more in common with Tibet’s ascetic poet Milarepa than with superathletes like Michael Jordan.
In the autumn of 1994, Anatoli Boukreev walked into a lodge in the village of Pheriche in the kingdom of Nepal. Though he entered without pretension, he was impossible to ignore. A big man, he moved with the grace of something wild, and his presence filled the room. His composure was complete: at once cautious and curious. An unwavering gaze and the amused interest playing in his blue eyes offered me windows to his soul. Coincidentally we were thrown together at Lhotse Base Camp. Our days passed in idle conversation. Attentively generous, Anatoli shared sections of a mysterious, never-ending supply of mandarin oranges and he talked—modestly fitting the pieces of his life into a picture. Those conversations were the beginning of this book.
Our friendship became a collaborative partnership in 1996. Together, we began sorting and translating the stack of notebooks, diaries, and journals that had collected in his closet in Almaty. Composing and editing material for magazine articles, speaking engagements, and his contributions to The Climb refined a mutual vocabulary. A year of difficult personal circumstances and climbing forged a deeper understanding. When the avalanche fell in December of 1997, I could thank Anatoli for a broader view of the earth’s horizon. In his way he had given me the golden light of the Russian steppes and the celestial mountains of Central Asia. This introduction reveals what Anatoli shared with me of the people and events that influenced his life. The journals are as much as he had time to say about his motives and his experience of climbing mountains.
To be Russian in the sense that Anatoli spoke of himself is to be tied to a vast landscape with a complex history. He grew up a thousand miles from Moscow, past the Rubicon that divides Europe from Asia, and all his adult life, his home was in Almaty, a city that had once welcomed travelers who strayed from the Silk Road. The town of his birth is located at the southeast end of the Ural Mountains on the edge of the steppes. That vast grass highway extends away from Korkino for a thousand miles in three directions. As a child Anatoli explored Scythian barrows and learned the details of a long history that wove his people into the fabric of the land. Anatoli insisted the Mongol word Kazakh was derived from the Russian word for cossack, and that Kazakhstan gained its name from the czar’s soldiers, who were stationed in the Russian colony in the early 1700s. Over the next three hundred years a stream of Russian explorers and immigrants brought the trappings of Western civilization and diluted the area’s nomad populations. In the Siberian northland surrounding his birthplace, expansive wilderness and extreme forces of nature affected the psyche of new settlers. In cities to the south, Russian immigrants melted into a polyglot society of Turks and Mongols, where mature urban customs and attitudes reflected the ameliorating influences of twelfth-century Persian humanism.
Anatoli resisted canonizing the political vicissitudes of perestroika that made him Russian one day and Kazakh the next. That change occurred too quickly for him to make any peace with it. At the beginning of the twentieth century the standard of excellence set by Russians in architecture, art, music, literature, theater, and ballet put his country in the vanguard of international creativity. Pride in that rich legacy was transferred to him during his adolescent education as he was raised on Russian classics. The likes of Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin colored his life view and sense of place in the world. Just as certainly as he inculcated values from Russian culture, he acknowledged that growing up past the Urals made him an “Eastern” man. He was cautious and did not like to hurry. In business, he expected to bargain and negotiate, his word being his bond. In relationships, he appreciated modesty and honesty. To him the peoples who had washed across Central Asia and Siberia in history’s waves were Soviet. Time, circumstance, and geography had forged their union. Anything less deprived him of his country. More than once, Reuters reporter Elizabeth Hawley, the doyenne of Himalayan mountaineering history, became exasperated with his dual passports and ambivalent national identity.
His hometown, Korkino, had dubious beginnings. The founding father was a prisoner who had escaped a czarist chain gang in the late 1800s. In a lush part of the steppes he carved out a home beyond convenient reach of the authorities, dryly naming his outpost after the Russian word for “last crust of bread.” The area’s subsequent settlers were fugitives as well. Until the turn of the century the superstitious inhabitants filled in their wells when the water mysteriously turned black, thinking the phenomenon was a sign that they had been cursed by the devil. In fact, the town would develop haphazardly on top of some of the largest coal deposits on the Eurasian continent.
By the mid-1930s Korkino’s coal was firing Stalin’s lurching industrialization. Ranking high on Soviet pay scales, workers operated Pit Korkinski around the clock. Until the coal became of a poorer quality and more difficult to extract, citizens enjoyed the benefits of a stable economic base. In the twenties and thirties, upper-class peasants whom the Communists had designated for reeducation were relocated and assigned new occupations. Korkino was the site of one of Stalin’s gulags.
Unlike many of their neighbors, Anatoli’s family did not suffer the brunt of Stalin’s paranoia. His mother and father were poor and were never Party members. Likely it was emancipation of the serfs or the czar’s work details that had moved his great-grandparents to the Chelyabinsk Oblast before the turn of the century. The details of their personal circumstances were lost to family historians. Anatoli was of the narod, the common people, and such ancestral amnesia is not unusual in Russia.
In 1948, Nikolai Boukreev and Valentina Shipitsina married and moved from rustic homes in the Chelyabinsk countryside to Korkino. Valentina’s war-widowed mother came with them. Around a three-room wooden house, they fenced off enough land for a kitchen garden and a small orchard. By the time Anatoli was born, the city had grown to a population of sixty-five thousand. The old center of town had a certain charm, thanks to the large log houses that were the architectural pretension of the upper-class peasants. New classic Stalin-style buildings were constructed with a low profile to prevent the blasts at the mine from knocking them down. Residential streets were mud more often than they were dirt. Individual homes lacked indoor plumbing. Water was available from hand pumps at communal wells. The open-pit mine, which by then was five hundred meters deep and larger than any other in Europe, had drained the local lakes and significantly despoiled the environment. With characteristically sardonic humor, Anatoli replied to a reporter from the Chelyabinsk Worker’s News, who asked how he had come to love mountains, that it was Korkino’s towering slag heaps that had first inspired him to climb.
By the late 1950s the environment developed other malignant problems. Radiation leaks from the Mayak Nuclear Waste Storage Unit located one hundred kilometers away were a regular occurrence. One of the first things Anatoli told me about himself was “it was only luck that I was born.” In 1957 a massive release from Mayak dosed his mother and the rest of the population with levels of radiation higher than those from the reactor explosion at Chernobyl. He grew up with two maladies common in local children. Until he was twenty-one, chronic nephritis plagued him with a form of hypertension, and his allergies caused asthma. His older sister, Luba, died of breast cancer at age thirty-five. Anatoli was convinced that her disease was linked to a lifetime of exposure to the radiation leaks from Mayak.
The potential effects of his childhood environment haunted Anatoli, and over the years he developed a preoccupation with his health, which extended far beyond his strict fitness regimen for mountaineering. He incor
porated into his daily routine health practices recommended by American nutritionist Paul Bragg and Russian pulmonologist Constantine Buyteko. His friend Elliott Robinson remembered, “We talked a lot about keeping healthy the natural way through fasting, good diet, and training. He always believed that while Americans had a great medical system, they did not fully understand the body’s ability to heal naturally.” Anatoli believed in the beneficial effects of sauna, massage, and icy plunges. Laughing at me when my expression implied that some of his prescriptions were too extreme, he would insist that we must “work for our health, and the discomfort is very good training for climbing mountains.”
One way or another his health always threatened to jeopardize his athletic ambitions. Aside from the asthma, which was exacerbated by a night bivouac on the South Col of Everest in 1991, he was hospitalized for three months in 1981 with meningitis. He survived an auto accident in 1989, and underwent treatment for liver abscesses in 1990. Returning from Cho Oyu in 1997, a bizarre bus crash decapitated the man sitting in front of him and would have decapitated Anatoli if he had not been slumped forward behind the seat to sleep. In September of 1997 he remarked to a Moscow interviewer that from his experience, life below four thousand meters was more risky for him than the sobering odds he faced above that elevation.
I saw Anatoli angry only once, and that was for but a short time. Usually he ventilated frustration with a dry, earthy sense of humor and exercise. He looked at life differently, took personal responsibility for situations, and was alive to the opportunity of the present moment. His sense of humor and peculiar self-awareness, coupled with a master’s sense of timing, authored some hilarious stories.
Scottish expedition leader Henry Todd tells a great story that is classic Anatoli:
I had a Tibet-side Everest permit for the spring of 1995. Some of my younger team members were very impressed by Anatoli and had endless questions for him. Patiently responding to their after-dinner inquiries, he would sit with a teaspoon in his forefingers spooning down small portions of an entire jar of jam, while he slowly related some tale in his heavily accented Russian-English. These stories were always peppered with colorful, unusual metaphors. Finally every evening he would take a sip from a tiny brown bottle. This routine and Anatoli’s little bottle had a special fascination for one member. “What is it? What does it do?” were part of a nightly interrogation.
“The ingredients are a secret,” Anatoli maintained, adding something irresistible to the mystery: “But this is the source of my power.”
The game of cat and mouse went on for several weeks. Finally the young man asked for a sample of the precious elixir, on the pretext of needing extra power during his summit bid to begin the following day.
Relenting with a spark in his eye, Anatoli filled his hastily wiped jam spoon with the thick, red liquid.
It was dispatched with a shudder of distaste, followed by the obvious question.
“What is it?”
The mess tent was silent. Anatoli had drawn us all into the drama.
Pausing, he intoned with exaggerated resonance, “Blood of woman.”
Everyone collapsed laughing.
The cruel contradictions of Soviet life provided the material for many jokes that were so darkly ironic only a Russian could laugh. On the whole he was not harshly critical of his country’s political philosophy. He tended to view the shortcomings in all political systems as the outcome of individual character flaws and human weakness. “The main thing wrong with Communism turned out to be the Communist,” he maintained dryly. After perestroika things weren’t much different in his mind: “Before tyrants controlled what we thought with their fists; now, with their fists full of money, the same tyrants control people economically—the freedom which has come to the average person is the freedom to struggle desperately for survival.” Friends described him as “apolitical,” obstinately individualistic but steel-bound by an sensitivity and family-mindedness not uncommon among Russian people. The attention to detail and iron discipline that authored his phenomenal endurance underwrote his ethical behavior. Don’t waste, live up to your commitments, respect life—those things were concrete in his character. Anatoli gave a lot of credit to the educational system that had nurtured his potential and guided his development.
By the time he reached school age, his nation’s priorities had shifted to higher education and patronage of human excellence in sports, the arts, and sciences. Farmers, steelworkers, and miners extended the luxury of self-perfection to the ballerina, the scientist, and the athlete. Anatoli grew up believing his personal effort contributed to the cultural elevation of the whole society. He never thought what he did was more important than what his brother did as a coal miner. It was just different. That concept of social reciprocity, with its implied humility, was fundamental to the way he rationalized his striving for athletic self-perfection. It was the basis for his value as a unit in his society.
Secondary functions of the Soviet educational system were to nurture idealism, natural ability, and initiative. There were many avenues for self-expression. Even in a town like Korkino, where most children were destined to end up in the mines, there was an art and music academy. Individual sports such as gymnastics, rock climbing, skating, and cross-country skiing had coaches and community support. Anatoli gratefully acknowledged that his success as a mountaineer was due to the Soviet mentoring system, which refined his natural ability with discipline and technique.
He grew to manhood in the most enlightened years of the Communist experiment. After Stalin’s death, as the country emerged from twenty-five years of silent self-annihilation, a generation of poets and philosophers survived to affect Party politics. In the brief window when an officially sanctioned version of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, citizens acknowledged publicly that Stalin had charted a dehumanizing course to achieve their humanitarian goals. Actor and songwriter Vladimir Vysotskii became the voice for average people. A starring role as a mountaineer in a movie called The Height catapulted him to popular fame. Despite a season in Siberia for reeducation, he gave free rein to his opinions in poems and songs. Audiocassettes of his lyrics were reproduced in secret and made available underground to millions of fans throughout the Soviet Union. In the nineties, Anatoli’s American friends received these tapes as gifts and puzzled over the significance and appeal of Vysotskii’s gravely guttural voice. During Anatoli’s politically formative years, Vysotskii in Russia, like Bob Dylan in America, encouraged humanistic individualism, which the state sought to disallow. Vysotskii was one of Anatoli’s heroes.
Young people in Russia had a huge appetite for things Western; Levi’s jeans and disco seemed to define the freedom they were after. For twenty years a complex turbulence—at once base and noble—propelled the Soviet Union toward more permeable borders. Anatoli was not completely comfortable with the face of change he saw in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late eighties. Musing about this in 1990, he recorded in his diary: “Something terrible is happening to young people in my country: drugs, alcohol, and spiritual degeneration.”
East of the Urals, priorities were different from those in the urban centers that incubated classical Russian culture and political ambition. In the late sixties, authors raised on the Eastern frontier found their voice in a characteristic genre of literature. The “village prose writers” asked the Soviet public to look at the environmental price Russia was paying for progress both in her devastated landscapes and on their interior geography. Nature’s profound beauty and the morality of common people who eked out a living in the Siberian outback inspired writers such as Valentin Rasputin. Attempting to recall the positive mooring for Russian identity, these writers celebrated traditional wisdom, human compassion, and the land. Anatoli’s mother and father might have provided the role models for the values these writers championed.
Anatoli proudly described his parents as “simple people,” saying that “my father had golden hands and my moth
er devoted her life to the needs of her children.” Despite the hardships of difficult circumstances, Nikolai Boukreev and his wife, Valentina, raised their five children gently and with respect. Handicapped by a childhood bout of polio, Nikolai’s withered legs barely functioned; he walked only with the aid of crutches. The family’s income was dependent on his industry, discipline, and the fastidious quality of his work. In a small Korkino street kiosk, he repaired clocks, mechanical objects, and musical instruments; later on he became a shoemaker. His skill as a musician and his beautiful singing voice softened the austerity of life at home. He infected his son with a love of music. Singing was a way Anatoli remembered his father. Nikolai died in December of 1995 while his middle son was in Nepal climbing Manaslu. When Anatoli called to tell me that sad news in January of 1996, I imagined the man he mourned, so steady and generous of spirit he could sing a love song to his wife of forty-five years before he slipped away into death’s quietness.
A single word in Anatoli’s language, umilenie, is used to describe a complex emotion: the combination of tenderness, sadness, and exaltation. It is wonder that falls just short of tears. The man or woman who is unable to respond to beauty that deeply, Russians believe, has missed the point of being human. For them the scope of beauty is wide and deep: like the presence of courage in the old, the innocence of children, nature, and great music or art. Often Anatoli presented a composed reserve, for he was an intensely private man, but he appreciated life with that depth of feeling. When the barrier of language frustrated communication, he sang, celebrating these things that are universal in human experience: love, beauty, and loss. He was a romantic who took pleasure in small things and graceful behavior. I can only surmise that the refined sensitivity I saw consistently operate in his character was grounded in the tender regard of his parents and the quality of his Russian upbringing.
Above the Clouds Page 3
