A Word In Edgewise: Be Sure To Make It A Round Trip

Many who label OceanGate’s Titan a Titanic Taxi for billionaires, who deny the doomed five were in any way explorers, may harbor in their own hearts yearnings for glory. To conquer Everest, for example, despite photos of long queues inching up the slopes, having paid tens of thousands for the privilege, sometimes using deceased humans, like “Green Boots” as landmarks.

Why seek the depths, the heights? Fame? Hubris? Because they can? Asked “Why?” in June, 1924, as he prepared for the third Everest attempt, mountaineer George Mallory snapped, “Because it’s there!” His body was discovered in 1999, and buried in situ.

There was always a first human: to ascend in a hot-air balloon, to tinker an aircraft out of a bicycle…to craft the first spear, to discover mastodon tastes better held over this hot flame struck with flint. Fewer opportunities today? Some let themselves be sealed into rocket-driven containers and shot into space, others wedged into submersible tubes hoping they will not implode during the 2 1/2 mile drop to gawk at the grave of an earlier “Unsinkable” vessel, that they’ll return to daylight with bones intact and blood still running in the proper tubes. Humans are like that. Some, anyway.

It’s difficult to fathom a modern submersible pilot claiming safety is over-rated, or ignoring multiple safety warnings by fellow submariners. We’ll never know why two of Titan’s more seasoned voyagers, who’d already made the descent on other vessels, joined, and I thought back again about Green Boots. Who was he, would anyone ever know? Why couldn’t someone just remove him?

I searched, and was surprised to learn the green boots’ owner had been identified in 2014, that he was 28-year-old Tsewang Paljor (1968-1996); that the body was not recoverable, and he remains as a North slope trail-marker for other Everest aspirants. He was a member of the elite ITBP (Indo-Tibetan Border Police) attempting to be the first Indians ever to summit from Everest’s North side. When ordered back because of bad weather, three went on, their leader, already behind, turned back. He was elated when the three radioed they’d made it. But they never returned. Summit Fever? Altitude will take its toll. Paljor in his shallow cave became “Green Boots” from 1996 to 2014.

High-altitude mountaineer Ed Viesturs has remarked “People make decisions on success, not survival.” He himself once stopped 300 feet short of a Summit. “My rule,” he explained, “was that climbing had to be a round-trip.”

The update on Titan is that a “debris field” has been found some 1,600m from the target debris, and that an unmanned rover had descended and retrieved it, together with, as it was tactfully described, “Presumed human remains,” the volume and aspect of which has not been detailed.

Further online exploration uncovered yet another oddity concerning young Tsewang Paljor. It would have been prohibitively expensive to reclaim the body identified in 2014, but when an attempt was made to see about a possible on-mountain burial, the corpse had vanished, along with others along a swathe of Everest’s North side. Like Superior, the Heights and the Depths are equally reluctant to give up their dead.

Humans will remain curious, and the less critical thinking they apply, or the greater their ignorance of the desired target, the greater need there will be for those with their feet on the ground to have protocols for what will (or won’t) be expended in coinage and human life to rescue the reckless from themselves.