What I Did Last Weekend

Spent the first part of Saturday here. Although the newspaper reporters seem to have gone out of their way to find pro-war people to interview, most of the bypassers, bystanders, merchants, and other folks along the route of the march seemed friendly and supportive. One restauranteur in particular seemed to be having a great time dancing to the marchers' drumbeats, many downtown walkers flashed grins and/or "peace"-signs, and some of the policeman assigned to traffic control seemed to regard their assignment as a pleasant excursion, waving cheerily to the marchers as they passed by. Of course, "A-squared" is anything but a typical midwestern town in its politics.

Since I was already on the U-Michigan campus, I spent most of the late afternoon exploring their graduate library (Digital Sanborn maps! Hurrah!). It's a towering, monumental structure with a richly-decorated lobby, a palatial reading room, and a Gormenghastian warren of tunnels and cramped stacks for the staff and the printed collection. If only I could work in such a library -- but I probably never will.

Touching the Void

I closed out the day in A-squared by walking over to the State Theater to see Touching the Void, a documentary film about two mountain-climbers in the Andes whose assault on a previously unclimbed mountainface results in a disastrous injury to one of them, and an ethical quandry worthy of a law-school hypothetical case.

Situation: Your climbing partner has sustained an injury which makes it virtually impossible for him to climb back down the mountain unaided. You are lowering him down the treacherous snow-covered mountainside on a rope, one rope-length at a time, when suddenly you feel more weight on the rope as he disappears from sight, and he stops responding to shouts or tugs on the rope. You keep your hold on the rope for a long, long time, as your feet start slipping further and further down through the unstable snow under the strain of the unrelenting weight. It's getting dark, the weather's getting worse... and you remember that you have a penknife in your pocket.

It's a grim story, although the intercut segments of a present-day interview with the two climbers make it clear from the beginning that both of them somehow survived to talk about it. The re-creation of the climb was filmed using actors, but the continuing narrative of the principals keeps the film firmly tied to their actual story. It begins innocuously enough, with stunning vistas of the Andes that remind one why early film directors like Leni Riefenstahl loved making Alpine dramas (All that white backdrop for the actors, inherently dramatic situations, and beautiful scenery, too!). The re-creation of the fateful climb steadily gets more brutally realistic as the film goes on, with grime, frostbite, and decidedly unsanitary sanitary arrangements all on gruesome display. The mountains are awe-inspiring in their beauty, but what those mountains can do to the men who challenge them can be very ugly, and there several truly winceworthy moments when the viewer can almost literally feel the pain. There are only a few moments of humor, as when one of the climbers, hurt, exhausted, and dehydrated, starts experiencing hallucinations as he crawls through a maze of immense boulders. He gets a song stuck in his head -- and he doesn't like the song. The camera adopts a jittery, jerky, disordered viewpoint as he glares in bewilderment back and forth at the rocks around him and "Brown Girl In The Ring", a truly annoying piece of Euro-disco, swells in and out of audibility. "Bloody 'ell... am I gonna die hearin' Boney M?", he recalls thinking to himself. "I don't like Boney M."

It's hard to say that a film this brutal is "enjoyable", but it is awe-inspiring to see just how unbelievably stubborn human beings can be. And the mountains are beautiful.