Why Am I Doing This?

Sometimes I am asked why I am going halfway around the world, at great personal expense, to spend 14 days on a volcanic slag heap where I will freeze, gasp for air, and generally perch like a flea on the flank of an indifferent dog.

When my friend Terri Schneider called to report that Marshall Ulrich was leading a trip up Mt. Aconcagua, I knew immediately that I wanted in, even though I knew almost zero about the mountain, not even how to pronounce it. (It’s ak-con-KA-gwah, by the way.)

I knew it was high and difficult. That’s really all I needed to know.

Now, when I envision Aconcagua, my spine tingles. I will visit a place few other people will ever see. The sun will rise on a foreign metropolis of peaks and bathe them in bronze. My face will prickle and turn numb in an icy wind. I’ll gaze up into a frozen couloir and feel a yearning in my belly so strong it hurts. I will look down from the peak, knowing that the nearest car is two and a half vertical miles below, and know no mere motorist will ever experience this.

My dirtiness and stinkiness will exceed belief. Every evening I will long for the glass of red wine and filet mignon that await in Mendoza, the town where our journey began.

When at last I get that meal, the wine will explode on my tongue, and everything will be a marvel, the beef, the tablecloth, the shiny knife in my hand. When hot water comes out of the shower I will writhe in ecstasy.

When I talk about this climb, some people (my mother and girlfriend come to mind) look puzzled, and it’s not just that they can’t imagine ever wanting to do such a thing.  It’s that when they hear me discuss some miserable part of this endeavor – the storms or the bone-chilling cold, say – they can tell that just underneath my somber tone is a barely contained enthusiasm.

Maybe my life just hasn’t offered quite enough suffering, so instead I go look for it on a remote slope of South America. My day-to-day life in California is so easy. Even when I’m earning a living, my existence isn’t quite my own. Really I owe it to the street sweeper and the grocer and the banker and the repairman.

But when reach the top and look down the flanks of Aconcagua, I will know I earned it. Just look – I can see every step.