March 2, 2020 Issue

Mountain tragedy – death by falling or suffocation – is a Nick Paumgarten obsession. He’s written several variations on it: “Life Is Rescues,” “The Manic Mountain,” “The Ski Gods,” and “Dangerous Game” are four that come to mind. His excellent “The Altitude Sickness,” in this week’s issue, is his latest and deepest exploration of this fraught subject. It’s about the psychic toll of mountain climbing and a therapist, Tim Tate, who treats it. Paumgarten describes a number of Tate’s clients, e.g., Hillary Allen:

Hillary Allen, known to friends as the Hillygoat, is an ultra-runner sponsored by the North Face. She also has a master’s degree in neuroscience. In 2017, when she was twenty-eight and competing in a thirty-five-mile “skyrunning” race along a ridge in Norway, a rock gave way, and she fell a hundred and fifty feet. She broke fourteen bones in her back, rib cage, arms, and feet and tore a bunch of ligaments. “I was pretty shaken up,” she said. “I had nightmares forever. I was mentally trying to figure out a way to get back. I was dealing with the guilt of wanting to devote myself to something that nearly killed me. People suggested a sports psychologist or a regular counsellor, but that wasn’t really the right fit.” Instead, she travelled to Bozeman for an intensive with Tate. “He’s my cup of tea. I’m a mountain person. I’m not an ooey-gooey dress-everything-in-pink kind of woman.”

But Tate isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and Paumgarten makes it clear why. He describes Tate as a “kind of visionary sage” with “shamanistic attributes, which are deeply rooted, perhaps even innate, and yet not uncultivated.” When Paumgarten first witnesses Tate’s approach, at a gathering of North Face athletes in Puerto Rico, he’s sceptical:

With the scarf, Tate bound together the wrists of Anker and Nelson, their mates looking on with some measure of bafflement at this quasi-matrimonial sacrament. A few people in the back got the giggles. “The energy in this room, and the love of these people, is the authority that this moment signifies,” Tate’s voice boomed. “This man is transferring the power to this woman. We honor them and bless them, and we wish you the best, Hilaree.”

Confession: I was one of the gigglers. As a knee-jerk eye-roller, I was wary of Tate at first. The apparent hodgepodge of recycled folklore, cultural appropriation, performative grandeur, and Jungian bubble magic reminded me of some people I have chosen through the years to avoid. And yet before long I felt drawn to him—to his charisma, his sense of humor, his eagerness to listen, his over-the-topness. He’d been around. He had heft. He seemed to be tuned in to a cosmic thrum.

Paumgarten describing himself as a “knee-jerk eye-roller” made me laugh. I’m in the same camp. If I’d been at that meeting, I likely would've giggled too. But that’s the thing – I wasn’t there. Paumgarten takes me places I wouldn’t get to otherwise. In “The Altitude Sickness” he visits Tate in his office in Bozeman, Montana:

That afternoon, we spent some time in his office. Tate sees clients on the ground floor of an old brick house in downtown Bozeman—“behind the blue door,” as he often says. (He took the blue-painted front door, his local trademark, from his former office, on Main Street.) He’s tall and fit, with a white mustache and soul patch and long, receding poodley hair that he often pulls back in a bun. He wears a tie in the office, on this day with a checked shirt and hiking trousers and boots. The space is decorated with feathers, bones, and cowboy and Native American art. A deluxe edition of Carl Jung’s “Red Book” sits on a stand, open to a chapter about Hell. 

He goes out with Tate, Conrad Anker and the writer David Quammen for a drink. He, Tate, and Anker hike a canyon trail, a trip that shows Anker's incredible energy:

He attacked the rest of the evening this way: splitting wood, making a fire, rigging a tripod over the fire for the pot, cutting vegetables, cooking a stew, drinking beer, playing air guitar, crushing empty cans with the side of an axe. “I had A.D.H.D. as a kid,” Anker said. “Hyper-situational awareness.” His energy was palpable. Semiretirement didn’t suit him at all, but hanging around a bonfire with a few dudes certainly did. The snow started to fall before midnight, and by morning there was half a foot on the ground.

And he attends the North Face gathering in Puerto Rico, where he first sees Tate in action. Artfully woven through all this are stories about death – the loss of climbers to mountains and their deadly avalanches – and its impact on the survivors. The piece is deeply absorbing – one of Paumgarten’s best.