Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 105

Krakauer’s Into Thin Air

99

as he alludes to the problem of locating clean cooking snow near a high-elevation
camping zone, found on the most popular route up McKinley, littered with human
waste {Eiger 67). Although the problem of waste elimination on McKinley might
well be used to indicate the impurity of a route treaded by too many climbers, the
assumed identity of alpine life and ordinary life is revealing. In both examples it is
noteworthy that human degradation, denoted by waste, and human aspiration, de
noted by mountaineering, are hopelessly intermixed. In relating his father’s story,
moreover, Krakauer dwells on the uncanny resemblances between the unregener
ate world of professions and the regenerate world of climbing.
His father ultimately descended into a delusional state that led to attempted
suicide and his placement in a psychiatric hospital in Portland, Oregon: “That his
foolproof life plan had in the end transported him here, to this nightmarish station,
was an irony that brought me no pleasure and escaped his notice altogether.... He
never understood that the Devil’s Thumb [a climb in British Columbia] was the
same as m edical school, only different” {Into The Wild 150). Indeed, the very title
of Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains seems to equate climbing
with other “ventures” — a term with strong financial connotations — and it is not
gratuitous to observe that his father’s madness faintly resembles the psychology of
some climbers Krakauer has described. Krakauer’s identifying his own climbing
of the Devil’s Thumb with the professional teleology professed by his irrational
father complicates his portrait of Everest climbing because this identification ef
fectively undermines much of his self-criticism and his criticism of other Everest
climbers and because his assumption of climbing’s moral autonomy is often con
tradicted. In his own climbing party, after all, physicians constituted a majority:
his operative distinction between the ethos of the medical profession and the ethos
of recreation thought to exist separately from the urban political economy is often
strained or nonexistent.
Krakauer upholds a Sherpa theological interpretation that parallels
McCandless’s Tolstoian perspective on modem society and its decadence. Mount
Everest, worshipped as the God Sagarmatha, does not approve of certain activities
on the mountain’s slopes, as Krakauer notes in Into Thin Air. When Ngawang
Topche began to suffer from High-Altitude Pulmonary Edema, other Sherpas at
tributed his medical condition to fornication between unmarried couples on the
mountain’s slopes {Into Thin Air 127-28). There are allegorical implications for
Krakauer: the United States, divided by social classes and beset by its own secu
lar, Epicurean modernity, has angered Everest. In his narrative constmction,
Krakauer replays a moral contest between scientific rationalism and old-testament
orthodoxy he inherited from his father. What Krakauer calls his own “Calvinism”
is the philosophical foundation he recovers from the trauma of his experience. His
alpine theology, because it actually deviates from the realities of the climbing tra-