I loved reading The Boys in the Boat over the summer. Impossible doings, like helping build a dam by dangling over and down a cliff face, and using a hammer while you hanging there, without sending yourself into an out-and-back ride ending with a smash, are legendary, and a legend is something that you share, a story that gets passed around.

Two articles about rock climbers from Dartmouth College, in the Dartmouth alumni magazine, tapped into this same happy place. One article is primarily focused on a single person, and the other is a general description of parts of an American attempt to climb Mount Everest. The Dartmouth rock climbers formed the heart of the American team that ascended Mount Everest in 1963. (I have no other association with Dartmouth; this was just serendipity.)

Barry Corbet was the prime focus of the first article. He was on the American Everest team and pioneered a new route to the summit of Everest, chipping out steps on some particularly difficult terrain. However, he then sent two other guys to the summit using his pathway, on the principle that they had a better chance of making it than he did. They were benighted on the way down and spent the dark cold hours with two other climbers from the team, also benighted. In the morning another Dartmouth alum, Dave Dingman, found them. They had been assumed dead and he was looking for the bodies. Instead he was able to revive them, and all descended safely. Dingman was studying to be a doctor.

The article about Corbet, though it touches on the Everest climb, is mainly about Corbet’s “2nd life.” He had a shattering accident and lived for twenty or more years as a paraplegic. He became an advocate for active lives for paralyzed people. He learned to kayak; it used his strong arms, not his paralyzed legs. Eventually he wore out his arms in pursuit of his new dreams.

For a while Corbet saw his life as broken into two parts. When he died his disabled friends did not know about his climbing exploits (Everest?!) and his old climbing friends mostly didn’t know about his life as an advocate for the disabled. They met at his funeral.

In his “2nd life” he also made friends with his daughter after dissing her attempts to crew at her college. Her team qualified for the Summer Olympics and he apologized to her for his lack of faith in her. He cried when she laid her son, named for him, in his arms.

The truly buried lede in this story is this. The article says…

He had regarded his children, when they were young, as a liability to his adventurous lifestyle. Now they—and their children had become the true loves of his life.

[H]e himself, in the end,

“… came to regret dividing his life. ‘With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to see that there is no first life, no second life,’ he wrote in 2001. ‘There’s this life, and it’s everything we ever hoped for. Like it or not we are stalked by our everyday adventures, our ordinary conquests. … This luminous life that is denied to no one.’ ”

https://archive.dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/article/2013/07/01/second-chapter

https://archive.dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/article/2013/1/1/the-mountaineers

The Vast Unknown: America’s First Ascent of Everest by Broughton Coburn