LESSONS FROM THE CAVE (The title essay from an unpublished book of essays)

In 1968 I was one of a group of climber friends who drove a 1965 Ford Econoline van from California to Patagonia where we made the 3rd ascent of Fitz Roy, an 11,171 foot high granite, snow-blasted peak. The trip and the route are relatively well known in the climbing world because of the films “Fitz Roy” and “Mountain of Storms,” the book “Climbing Fitz Roy 1968” and the subsequent resumes of my mates on the journey, Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, Lito Tejada-Flores and Chris Jones.
The entire trip took nearly six months, two of them on Fitz Roy. Thirty of those days the five of us lived in two different ice caves on the mountain, each approximately 10’ by 10’ in size. At one point we spent 15 consecutive days living in the highest one. The weather, particularly the infamous Patagonian winds, made movement impossible. Most days we were unable to even leave the cave. It was a life changing trip and significant climb filled with memories and lessons for each of us, many of them from the cave.
For several years after the trip I periodically gave slide show/talks about it and, of course, mentioned without excessively dwelling on the 15 successive days we spent confined to the second cave. After one talk, sometime in the mid-70s, a woman from the audience came up to me and introduced herself as a leader/facilitator of encounter group therapy sessions. She asked if I knew about encounter group therapy. I told her I had heard of but didn’t know much about it. My impression was that people in the group let out their repressed hostilities and agressions and ignored social politeness and correctness to express their truest feelings and thoughts, uninhibited by how those might be taken by others. It was said to be a therapeutic technique of letting it all hang out on whoever was there as well as being on the receiving end of whatever came out of the others. The theory was that such venting produced a healthier psychology.
She replied that my impression was more or less correct. She then said something to the effect that our 15 days in the cave had to have been “the all time encounter group therapy session.” I thought about it a moment and told her, truthfully, that unless my impressions of encounter groups were wrong that wasn’t true. So far as I could remember, there was never an intentionally unkind, hostile, aggressive, demeaning word or encounter between any of us during those 15 days, though there was abundant good-natured, uninhibited ribbing of the smelly fart and body odor variety, especially during the close-quarters, visually/audibly/olfactory disagreeable if personally comforting once a day ‘shit call’ when a hole was dug in the floor of the cave and we took turns relieving ourselves into it. She replied, not unkindly, that she didn’t believe me and that I was either repressing or not remembering the way it was. She seemed sincere, friendly and not engaging in an argumentative encounter and we talked about it for a few minutes before she left. This woman’s genuine if erroneous belief that the five of us could not have spent that much time in such conditions without conflict because that is what humans do and that is how humans are has intrigued me and influenced my subsequent standards of observing my own and others’ interactions. It is one factor that leads me to periodically ruminate on that time in the cave. Encounter group therapy turns out to have been more an exploratory branch of the human potential movement than a root of the tree of human psychological healing, but more than 40 years later that woman’s erroneous certainty about our personal dynamics in the cave has stayed with me.
That humanity’s past, present and, if those are any indication, future are and will be filled with conflict, brutality, and letting incomprehensible hatreds and hostilities hang out on the encountered group of the day—the religious, political, sexual, racial, ideological, economic, geographical OTHER—is not in question. The news of any day is filled with innumerable examples. I am not a psychiatrist, psychologist, therapist, counselor or even advisor, but it seems to me that the same individual dynamics explored in encounter group therapy are similar to larger conflicts between nations, tribes, ideologies and business interests (drug wars and those over who controls oil in the ground are business interests). Conflict and cooperation begin with the individual (though they do not end there), and, as every climber knows, climbing is a great metaphor and schooling for larger arenas of living. The encounter group therapy leader’s contention that five men could not exist together in a small cave for two weeks without conflict is not to be lightly dismissed, and I do not.
Still, five of us—each in our own way opinionated, strong minded, not reluctant to speak up, sometimes abrasive and always right—-existed for two weeks in a cramped, damp, cold snow cave without conflict and with a great deal of camaraderie, good cheer, cooperation, consideration, re-told stories, bad odors and worse jokes. We survived, successfully completed the climb, went on with our individual lives and have remained good friends for nearly 50 years (Doug died in December 2015). I have been involved in and know of many other climbing expeditions in which the personal dynamics of its members, both during and after the expedition, were, to put it mildly, filled with conflict, hostility and demeaning behavior. Some climbers learn and move on from their personal contribution to those dynamics, and some do not, and, as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Having written about some of my own expeditions I am often reminded that the written word keeps alive the dynamics of the past, as they are intended to do, though not everyone enjoys or is capable of remembering the past. That is, climbers are human and climbing expeditions are microcosms of the human condition.
And there are lessons to be learned from them.
Some of those lessons from the cave on Fitz Roy are worth repeating, writing down and contemplating. None of these ruminations would have occurred if that woman had not appeared after a slide show to offer her assurance that conflict is the natural way of humanity and that encountering it is the path to psychological healing and good health.
Au contraire. I think conflict (which is not the same as disagreement) and good health is antithetical. By the time our little group arrived at the 2nd cave we had spent a few months together in a small van driving the length of South America—sleeping on the ground and in the van, surfing, skiing, cooking and eating and cleaning up, learning the strengths and weakness, follies and genius, social and other skills and their absence, philosophies and prejudices, histories and dreams of ourselves and each other. And, yes, there were a few disagreements which we worked through and, thereby, learned and kept moving on from. The more we learned the better we worked together as a team, a unit, an expedition, an interdependent band of humans on the same path up a mountain. That path included time in the cave which I’ve come to think of as a microcosm of human life on Earth, past, present and, one hopes, future. Despite the opinion of the well intentioned encounter group therapy leader, our cave time was marked by cooperation, encouragement and interdependent care, a good model, it seems to me.
I don’t pretend to speak for my cave mates, but the cave lessons speak to me for both the time in the cave and for the previously mentioned microcosm. We were in the cave together and there was nowhere else to go. Challenges and discomforts were shared equally. When food supplies ran low, rations were distributed equally. Cooperation, companionship and compassion were not so much conscious choices as necessities guided by instinctive intelligence and gratitude for the present moment. With nowhere else to go there is no ‘other’ but only ‘us’, and survival is dependent on equal sharing, cooperation, companionship and compassion. That seems to me a timely and apt metaphor for human life on planet Earth. For those who divide humanity along social/racial/religious/sexual/political/economic ‘us’ versus ‘other’ lines and endlessly blather about building bigger, better walls instead of healthy relationships or who fantasize about colonizing Mars as a survival option, the metaphor is lost.

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