COLUMN: young, rich and looking to die

From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy," Fall '99 From Andrew Exum's, "Perilous Orthodoxy," Fall '99Early this past summer, 17-year-old John Nazzaro walked into Alaska's Matanuska Glacier region for 26 days of guided snow and ice climbing. He never returned. According to the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, emergency room visits on account of mountaineering injuries went up 20 percent from 1996 to 1997. Snowboarding accidents increased 31 percent over the same one-year period. And skateboarders visited the emergency room a record 48,000 times. And the numbers continue to climb. So why do Americans continue to walk tightropes with such alarming frequency? A recent report by Time magazine came to the conclusion that it is the lack of risk inherent in the post-Cold War generation's everyday life that leads many to seek risk elsewhere. "Previous generations didn't need to seek out risk," the report concluded. "It showed up uninvited and regularly: global wars, childbirth complications, diseases and pandemics from the flu to polio, dangerous products and even the omnipresent Cold War threat of mutually assured destruction." One college professor quoted in the report noted that adventure sports wouldn't have appealed to previous generations even had they been around in abundance: "Coming back from a war and getting onto a skateboard would not seem so extreme." That's true, of course, and that argument highlights the fact that the current extreme sports movement is one largely confined to younger Americans. Much of that has to do with the affluence and boredom of America's upper and middle classes. Spurred on by the current financial boom and an apparent lack of anything else to do, many Americans today can simply afford to do things that used to be done only by professional adventurers. But being able to pay for a trip to the top of Everest doesn't explain why you would risk your life and actually go. Somewhere in the American conscious lies the need to take risks and be adventurous. Call it the Lewis and Clark syndrome. If given the opportunity to take risks, we will. Thus it should come as no surprise that rock-climbing gyms now litter American suburbs like bowling alleys. Vacations spent skiing with the family are the norm for many well-off kids. Name-brand clothes like Patagonia and The North Face -- initially developed for experienced mountaineers and outdoor guides -- can just as easily be spotted on the streets of Brooklyn or West Philadelphia as on the face of Cerro Torre or Mount McKinley. While in Wyoming this summer, I had the opportunity to spend a day with Chuck Pratt, the legendary climber who established many of the routes up El Capitan in Yosemite National Park that continue to confound climbers to this day despite all their modern equipment and finances. I asked Chuck what he thought of the climbers paying for guide services today, as opposed to the people who pioneered the sport decades ago. Pratt, now 62, was quick to point out that while some climbers today are experienced in their own right and hire guides merely to better their skills, most people who come to the mountains these days have little or no climbing experience. They simply rely on the guides to keep them alive while taking them on an adrenaline rush that they can brag about at the water-cooler back home. That's what it's really about -- the opportunity to communicate a primitive toughness to others within an environment like a university, workplace or suburban neighborhood, places that don't require any toughness for one to survive. That's dangerous business. While many had hoped real-life accounts of outdoor tragedy, like Jon Krakauer's best-selling Into Thin Air, would discourage people from getting into hazardous territory, it apparently only fed the rush of Americans looking to test themselves. In my opinion, the more popular extreme sports and the image they convey get, the bigger the danger is for ordinary citizens to get maimed or killed in ways they haven't fully considered. Two summers ago, I was attending the national Wilderness Medicine Conference in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn., when I met Beck Weathers, the Dallas surgeon who lost both of his hands and his nose to frostbite on Everest in 1996. As I shook what remained of his right hand in greeting, I found myself wishing that others could do the same. The risks are real and the souvenirs many in our new risk-adoring society get from expeditions can come in the form of scars and prosthetic limbs, not pictures and fond memories.