Annapurna — a Woman’s Place by Arlene Blum (review)

328 Western American Literature is not a pastoral, for he is quite realistic about the harshness of winter, cold, starvation, and killing. Still The Medicine Calf is an elegy for a vanished world, a lost way of life. Even in the 1820’s, when there were no towns except Santa Fe and El Paso between Missouri and California, the mountain men could sense their world ending and lament the impending passage of their fierce, savage freedom and of the unspoiled, unsettled wilderness. “Ain’t no other place in the world a child would ever want to be, if he was thinking right,” Beckwourth said. “Not too many years and the settlers come. Just like always before. Once there were no Whitemen in all of America — no cities, no roads, just the animals and the Indian people. But we come and we move always to the west.” The novel ends rather abruptly, with no resolution, only an awareness of inevitable change. Beckwourth’s life was barely half over; there is more than enough left for a sequel. He returned to St. Louis, fought against the Seminóles, went to California and New Mexico, ran a hotel in Santa Fe, helped quell the Taos rebellion, carried dispatches in California during the Mexican War, prospected and discovered Beckwourth Pass, headed immi­ grant wagon trains, married several times, was storekeeper, farmer, Army guide during the Civil War, participated reluctantly in the Sand Creek Massacre and later testified against Colonel Chivington, was a scout for Colonel Carrington at Fort Laramie, and finally died among the Crows in 1866. Until and unless Hotchkiss writes the rest of the story, we can be thankful for his eloquent narrative and poetic evocation of a vanished world when there were giants in the earth. ROBERT E. MORSBERGER California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Annapurna — a Woman’s Place. By Arlene Blum. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980. 272 pages, $14.95 cloth.) “That’s the kind of book that changes people’s lives,” a friend told me when she recommended Annapurna, a Woman’s Place. Since neither she nor I are mountain climbers, her recommendation intrigued me. I found this account of a women’s expedition up one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas in 1978 to be more than just a climbing book, includ­ ing adventure, introspection and a statement of women’s potential. Arlene Blum tells of exploring Kathmandu in Nepal, pulling leeches off her bottom when she squats in the rain forest during the 10 day trek to the Reviews 329 base camp site carrying 80 pound packs, and opening champagne at 14,000 feet only to watch most of it freeze to the roof of the tent after the cork popped. She draws from the diaries of other team members to describe the horror of watching an avalanche thunder toward six members of the expedi­ tion, who miraculously escaped. There during the worst avalanche season in memory, the expedition had several such narrow escapes. Others were not so lucky; six climbers were killed that month in Nepal. Her narrative retains its suspense throughout, even though the reader knows who reaches the top and who is killed. As my friend’s comment indicated, women will reach for the book first. Blum does not overplay her team’s political achievement. Women are pitted against the mountain, not against their male counterparts. But Blum makes it clear that the women hope to remove the psychological barriers that prevent women from climbing — or facing other challenges. She para­ phrases the first Annapurna climb leader, Maurice Herzog, saying, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of women.” For several months the American Alpine Club hesitated to approve the expedition, apparently afraid it would be embarrassed if the team failed. Blum predicted that their expedition would face extraordinary scrutiny after­ ward, too. Sure enough, a recent article in Outside magazine criticized women climbers on the Annapurna and other expeditions, both for taking unwarranted risks because of female pride and for allowing Sherpas to be part of the summit team. Pride did not stop Blum from revealing her own and her companions’ self-doubts and fears, for which she also was criticized...