Life Lived Wild: Adventures at the Edge of the Map

by Rick Ridgeway

In outdoor sports, as in business, we learned from our mistakes, but in outdoor sports, we knew if a mistake was too egregious we wouldn’t get the chance to learn from it because we would be dead. In mountaineering—and in business—it’s not about taking risks but managing risks.

“Why do you Sherpas think we climb?” “I don’t know,” Nima laughed. “But we do talk about it. Maybe you people have too much money and you don’t know how to spend it. You wear good clothes and you drive nice cars. Maybe when you have a holiday you don’t know what to do, so you go to the mountains.”

“You need to stay open to getting to know new people. You never know where that can lead you.” It was the first of many instances in the years ahead that would confirm for me the adage that two parts can be bigger than their sum, even if the parts were so different.

“He told me once, ‘It’s not how much you sell something for, but how much you pay for it.’ So you see, he taught me about margins. At the same time, he was scrupulously fair. One time I tailed along to a church in the middle of nowhere that was selling some furniture. My dad immediately spotted this rectory table that he wanted. He asked the priest how much they were asking, and the guy said two thousand dollars. My father then told the priest he wanted to buy it, but for four thousand. When we were back in the car, I asked him why he did that. He explained that he would sell the table for eight thousand. Then he looked at me and said, ‘It only works when it’s fair to both sides.’”

They were all so certain in their opinions that it was a default response for them nearly always to take sides on any issue.

The best journeys answer questions that at the outset you never thought to ask.

Conrad felt another connection to the man whose body was next to him, the man who had defined for the generations the lure of reaching the summit when he had answered the perennial question “why” with the pithy answer “because it’s there.” It was that Mallory had died utterly alone. Where now a climber almost certainly would have a radio to call for help, Mallory had no one but himself. Yet he had continued to struggle, whether for his teammates, for his Stella, or for himself, it didn’t matter, because what mattered was that he had not given up. That was the quality that did not need to be passed between generations, because it was the quality that most climbers already owned when they ventured to the high mountains.

I don’t know . . . you lose and then you gain, and you count your blessings.

The word obsession gets a bad rap from its association with mental health, but when you look over the history of human achievement you realize much of it happened because one person had an obsessive laser focus on one goal.

As Yvon liked to say, it isn’t an adventure until something goes wrong.

none of us knows when our life, or the lives of those around us who we most love, will end, and that the ending can take us by surprise. We all know this, of course, but how many of us have the wisdom to go about our daily rounds integrating this awareness into all our actions, into all our decisions, whether those decisions are matters of consequence or matters of inconsequence, to find pleasure in the commonplace, to integrate into our lives what it really means to, with profound awareness, live fully in the moment?

I don’t believe in the idea of closure. It is a misguided response to death. It is healthy to face toward, rather than turn away from, the gap left by the death of someone you love, even as you face the pain of no longer hearing the voice of the one you loved in your ears while you continue to hear the voice in your mind. Love is the truest balm against the pain of the loss of love.