Flying Ruinair in Germany is like shopping in Aldi but knowing there is a Marks and Spencer or a Sainsbury store nearby where the prices are also Lidl.
I wasn’t sure what was bugging me about Ruinair
But Ruinair is punctuated with inside jokes for continentals. I get it. I’ve flown the craptasticly cheap Irish airline, been screwed by their ridiculous rules and fees, and thanked them for it. Once, I went to London from Austria for 10 Euros. And then, on the return, when I was five minutes late to check in, they charged me a whopping 50 pounds to put me on another flight even though there was a good half hour before my flight departed. Whatever. They make no apologies and no excuses, and if you can deal with the advertising and the fast food service, it’s a screaming deal.
But I don’t really want to read a whole book about the experience. And I don’t want to have to decode the humor. After a while, I started to feel like I was sitting in a comedy club in an English speaking country not my own. Sure, I get some of the jokes – hey, I have the resume to decipher them, having worked in Dublin, lived in Austria, and taken advantage the cheap intercity flights of Europe. But I didn’t get all of them. When Kilduff mentions celebrity sightings, I don’t know who he’s talking about or why I should care. When he takes a hatchet to the service, the staff, and the colorful Ruinair boss over and over again, I get it, already. I also get the quote I’ve pulled above, but odds are that most American readers have no idea what that sentence means. Do you?
I probably could have been content with a couple of short essays, but a whole book? I gave in about halfway through.
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On a clear day, you can see the majestic peak of Mount Rainier from Seattle. I used to be able to see it from my bathroom window, while standing in the bathtub. Now, when I cross the West Seattle bridge and there are no clouds, I see the rounded white mountain in the distance towering over the shipping traffic of the Duwamish slough and the concrete strip of Interstate 5.
Living in Seattle, it’s hard to ignore the call of the mountains and for a while, I joined The Mountaineers where I learned how to climb and how much I ultimately did not enjoy the competitive edge of the sport. So it’s with some – albeit very minor – experience in the field that I cracked Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest’s Most Controversial Season
I find mountaineering maddening. I totally get the drive to see the top, but I can not get down with the conquerers aesthetic. Nature and the mountain will win every time and if you have the good fortune to get to the top and back without injury or worse, I believe it is due to the cooperation of the elements as much as anything else. Where things really unravel for me is in the life or death situation where you have teams of climbers hellbent on summiting to the detriment to the wellbeing of others.
There are two quotes in Dark Summit that I wish I’d marked so I could have them here. One is from Sir Edmund Hilary saying that there is absolutely no way they’d leave a man to die on the mountain, that they would make all efforts to perform a rescue, summit or no. The other is by a climber who says that you’ve taken your life in your own hands – when you choose to pursue the summit, you are eschewing any guarantee of life support and expect to be left to die so your comrades can make it to the top.
That is poor paraphrasing, forgive me. But they contrast two totally different ways of thinking about mountaineering. Dark Summit does an excellent job of letting the climbers express their attitudes against the backdrop of a very bad season on the big mountain. The book is a compelling read and if at times I found it frustrating, it’s because I was angry with the climbers, not with writer Nick Heil’s work. I’m afraid I’m going to compare it – like lots of other reviewers, I’m sure – with Into Thin Air, another riveting read about Everest. But there’s room for both books on your shelf. Dark Summit is compelling, engaging, and thought provoking, and a exciting – if aggravating – read.
Related:
- Travel Writing Tips from Paul Kilduff on Killing Batteries
- Ruinair: Paul Kilduff’s website
- An excerpt from Dark Summit on Outside Magazine
I remember picking up my first British gossip magazine; there was all the Hollywood stuff, safe, but also a ton of British famous personalities, dull. Why should it be more dull looking at a British starlet dressed for a London gala than it is a Hollywood star on a red carpet in front of a L.A. cinema? It shouldn’t be, but it was. There just isn’t anything great or interesting about trying to pan places the greater audience doesn’t know.
Humor is so subjective. When you add regionalism to it, it can have the effect of pushing you away, not pulling you in.
It’s because we know who Cher is. But some British radio or daytime TV celeb? No idea. We don’t care.
thanks for the publicity for the book. sorry to see that perhaps some of the humour (or humor?) does not travel so well across the Atlantic? sorry to say that much like Ruinair, my Irish publisher alas does not offer refunds 🙂 PWK