The thing we do "because it is there"
Todd Whitmore
The Common Good
Over winter break my mountaineering partner, Mike, and I summited El Pico de Orizaba, an 18,600 foot dormant volcano in Mexico. Summit day itself was long. We got off to what is called an "alpine start," rising at 1 a.m. and departing from the base camp at 14,000 feet at 1:45 a.m. in order to minimize the time we would have to spend on the softer and therefore more dangerous afternoon snow and ice.
At about 15,500, what had started out as mild nausea became a bent-over stop. We then continued on. Over the next 1,000 feet of altitude gain, I did manage to keep down two fig newtons and a couple swigs of water, but decided that the accompanying discomfort was not worth it and took in no more. I went on a high altitude fast. I realized that I should have acclimatized one more day at base camp, but we were underway now. I was experiencing none of the other indicators of altitude sickness — lassitude, loss of coordination, headache. In fact, once the nausea passed, I felt strong.
We summited at 9 a.m. It was supposed to be the dry season, but we experienced a whiteout on the descent that reduced visibility to 50 feet. Due to the bad weather, in the time that we were on the mountain only one other person summited among the 17 total attempts — a professional guide from the Colorado Mountain School. When we reached base camp, I could drink and, to a certain extent, eat again. I slept 13 hours that night.
Why do such a thing? Why take up an activity where one of the best compliments that can be paid is to say a person "suffers well?" It certainly is not for the Mountain Dew/eXtreme games adrenaline buzz. Mountaineering is too deliberate an activity. Unless someone dies, it rarely makes it on T.V.
At its best, it is also not done for any testosterone-driven display of machismo. There is risk, but it is calculated risk. Chest-thumping is often a prelude to death. Besides, when it comes to Denali (a.k.a. Mt. McKinley), most American men of this sort actually aspire less to climb the mountain than to own the SUV that goes by its name. Held strictly to their own criteria, they are frauds — more consumer-driven than drawn by the mountain — no matter how much Gore-tex they might wear.
George Mallory, whose body was recently discovered on Everest, gave the most clear and succinct answer to why: "Because it is there." Above all, mountaineers climb because there is an allure, a beckoning. They might make a prudential judgement to turn around on a particular attempt, but they can no longer not climb. The closest analogue I have is my marriage: It is hard for me to imagine life (as indeed life) before knowing Susan, and it is painful even to try to imagine life without her.
St Augustine's two most well-known statements express the Christian "because it is there": "Love God, and do what you will" and "You made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you." It is not incidental that most mountaineering writings are confessionals structured as pilgrimages to Mallory's "there" and back again.
Catholic teaching provides another term for this kind of activity that will at first jar our sensibilities because the word, like many others, has been distorted in contemporary language: leisure. In addition to housing, food and health care, Catholic social teaching includes leisure — as distinct from luxury — under the basic human needs covered by the just wage. In our frenetic culture we often take the term to mean inactivity, but it is best understood as that time and space given over to an activity for its own sake. It is the vocation of avocation, the thing we do simply because it is there.
One of my brothers-in-law rebuilds "woodies" — classic wood-paneled station wagons — in his basement. At a recent family reunion, he recounted for me, with some sadness, the transition from wood to fiberglass to decals as car-makers found that buyers would settle for less. Image, even poorly done image, became everything. He is now working on a 1949 Ford, and he does so as if he is reconstituting truth. And he is.
Though he likes his job and is a very good and loving father, some days he works simply because of the need for family income and drives his children to baseball practice because someone has to. But he works on the woody because there is nothing quite like the look and feel of the grain. To be vocations, work and family must have an intrinsic draw, but the vocation of avocation, when authentic, responds only to this allure.
It is this intrinsic allure — this for-itselfness — that often gives avocations an eccentric character when viewed from the outside. My brother-in-law rebuilt one woody and then had to disassemble parts of it because in his focus on what he was doing, he neglected to consider how he might get it out of the basement. Friends kindly warned me in my pre-tenure years that I might want to keep my backpack-laden running of the library stairs discreet.
Whatever the eccentricity factor, the for-itselfness of vocational avocations serve an important protective role. Our other vocations, often propelled by their very richness, sometimes over-extend their claims on our lives. Notre Dame itself has performative expectations that often do just that, whether what is in question is the won-loss record of the football coach, the publishing record of a faculty member or the performance of a student in a class where the professor assigns a workload as if the student has no other courses or commitments. Despite ourselves we often seek to turn another's vocation into something we own. Appeals to "tradition" or "the Notre Dame family," even with their authentic meanings, sometimes serve at the same time to mask and thus facilitate this presumption.
Though the purpose in pursuing avocations is intrinsic, they also function as countervailing commitments. As such, they help us to gain perspective on the claims our other vocations make on us. In the case of Notre Dame, such perspective helps both to demythologize what it says about itself and, in turn, to make us attentive to the ways in which, in proper measure, God's grace acts in and through it as well.
Todd Whitmore is an assistant professor of theology. His column is featured every other Thursday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, March 2, 2000
