“Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man's Miraculous Survival” by Joe Simpson
Hardcover, 218 pages
Published in 2004 by Perennial
ASIN : 0060730552
Date Finished: Dec 23, 2020
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon
I first encountered Joe Simpson’s survival story in the form of the docudrama that was made about it. I was so effected by the gripping reenactment that I added the book to my “Must Read” list, then promptly forgot about it. Ten years later it popped back into my mind and I finally picked it up. It did not disappoint. This book is wonderful and terrifying and frankly the best survival story of all time. Read it.
My Notes:
All men dream: but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds wake in the day
to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers
of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
~ T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
We were in the middle of the Cordillera Huayhuash, in the Peruvian Andes, separated from the nearest village by twenty-eight miles of rough walking, and surrounded by the most spectacular ring of ice mountains I had ever seen, and the only indication of this from within our tent was the regular roaring of avalanches falling off Cerro Sarapo.
Tall and powerfully built, he possessed most of life's advantages and few of the drawbacks. He was an easy friend: dependable, sincere, ready to see life as a joke. He had a thatch of blond hair, blue, blue laughing eyes, and that touch of madness which makes just a few people so special. I was glad that we had chosen to come here as a two-man team. There were few other people I could have coped with for so long. Simon was everything that I was not, everything I would like to have been.
We had responsibilities to no one but ourselves now, and there would be no one to intrude or come to our rescue...
We hung on that fragile rope for twelve interminable hours. Eventually our shouts were heard and a rescue helicopter succeeded in plucking us from the wall.
I knew it would take just a couple of moves to reach easier ground, and tried convincing myself that if this wasn't so terrifyingly exposed I wold walk up it, hands in pockets, but I couldn't shake off the fear.
We took the customary summit photos and ate some chocolate. I felt the usual anticlimax. What now? It was a vicious cycle. If you succeed with one dream, you come back to square one and it's not long before you're conjuring up another, slightly harder, a bit more ambitious — a bit more dangerous. I didn't like the thought of where it might be leading me.
Not sharply enough though. I had seen the look come across his face briefly, but in that instant I knew his thoughts. He had an odd air of detachment. I felt unnerved by it, felt suddenly quite different from him, alienated. His eyes had been full of thoughts. Pity. Pity and something else; a distance given to a wounded animal which could not be helped. He had tried to hid it, but I had seen in, and I looked away full of dread and worry.
He looked pathetic, and my immediate thought came without any emotion. You're fucked, matey. You're dead... no two ways about it! I think he knew it too. I could see it in his face.
Bad, and getting worse.' He grinned at me, and I felt a stab of guilt. It was costing him. I had already paid.
I dressed like a priest before mass, with solemn careful ceremony. I felt no hurry to start down and was certain it would be my last day. Filled with a sense of condemnation, I prepared for the day in such a way that it felt as if I were part of an ancient universal ritual, a long-planned ritual which had been born during the dark thought-wracked hours behind me.
...this choice: abseil until I could find a way out, or die in the process. I would meet it rather than wait for it to come to me.
It was dirty and full of grit but I ate it continually. Water became an obsession. Pain and water. That was my world. There was nothing else.
Snowflakes feathered against my face; the wind tugged at my clothing. The night remained black. Warm tears mingled with the cold melted snow on my face. I wanted it to end. I felt destroyed. For the first time in days I accepted that I had finally come to the end of my strength.
And, at every gesture, a touch on the arm, a look, an intimacy we would never have dared show before and never would again.
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