Counting the Loose Screws in a Mountaineer’s Head

It was Friday night in a backyard garden. We pressed the play button on the trailer of our Chimborazo documentary and my recorded voice came out of the speakers. I cringed – as one does. But I was saying something important. “What we were doing was crazy. We crossed the Atlantic to climb 4 mountains in a week, all of them volcanoes with one being active.” I bet you wouldn’t overhear stuff like that in the random voices you pick up every day.

Two days later, we were climbing Jebel Yabanah in Ras Al Khaimah. The hike was stretched on the way back and we ended up walking for 5 hours in the dark. As we stopped at some point to take one of our rare breaks after our water had run dry, we turned off the lights to save our batteries. I looked up at the stars and laughed. We were in the middle of nowhere, dehydrated and tired. My phone was buzzing with worried messages from friends and family asking if we were safe, if we knew the way back, if the snakes had come out or yet or if any wild animals were lurking about. I looked at my friend next to me and I almost cracked a joke but I refrained from doing so. Instead, I laughed it off in my head and thought it crazy that I found it in me to joke in a situation like this. I wondered if my cool was due to experience, courage, foolishness or all of those combined.

Two more days later, we were sitting with a friend and his parents. Mountains were brought up, as is usually the case, and I was called crazy. I stood silent for the rest of the conversation while my friends picked it up and talked about their own modest outdoor experiences and how larger-than-life they felt. I just smiled.

If you’re grammar-obssessed, you might ask who “we” are since I am only talking about myself in most instances. In context, I am referring to the company that was with me. But in essence, I’m talking about every single one of us who finds it so natural to press that “Book Now” button and take off on an adventure. I’ve been told we’re so courageous to do this and I couldn’t relate, because it just comes so naturally. Life prepares you for things like driving and succeeding in your career, but it never prepares you to be anywhere above 4,500m roped up to a bunch of strangers you met a week ago, withstanding adverse weather in the hopes of standing on top of a rock for mere fleeting minutes.

This begs the question then: why do we do it? How many loose screws have we got in our heads? Are we crazy? There’s a reason why there are no permanent human settlements above 5,000m. We are not meant to live there. But for mere fleeting moments, we are the ones that dare to be there not because we wish to challenge nature, but as fellow LHOer Nada wrote, we do it because we feel too much. We feel it deep, we feel it all and it’s how we let go, how we grow and how we reset our mindset. There is a certain poetry in the sight of a mountaineer’s face pushing for the summit. We look dead, we look sleep-deprived and we almost look high. But we’re there undertaking a massive physical endeavour with only a third of the oxygen level we’re used to. Our minds on the other hand, are at complete peace and in complete harmony with our surroundings. Just think about that for a moment.

So if you clicked on this article wanting an actual count of the loose screws you’d find in a mountaineer’s head, I can at least answer for myself so you don’t leave empty handed. I’d say I have somewhere around 6,350 loose screws in my head. That is the highest altitude I’ve been to as of the moment this has been written. But it’s not really about that. It’s about loosening up the screws in one’s mind (if that is indeed the price to pay) to be able to witness our planet in its full majesty, from viewpoints we are not even built to exist on. Because that is perspective for you. If Carl Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot granted perspective on how small the Earth and all it carries are in comparison to space, then maybe a fool standing atop a rock can grant perspective on how much we can achieve, how fleeting everything is and how lucky we are to exist, to explore and to feel it all.