You know how they say that married couples start to look like each other? Well at eight months of marriage, it's a little soon for that, but there are definitely things I've picked up from my husband, like an appreciation for REM and baseball, and now, he's penchant for obsessions.
By obsessions I mean that he will get really interested in a particular subject and read and watch everything there is about that subject for about two months. A few months ago it was the Mafia: several seasons of The Sopranos and three or so books on the mob. He's currently into the World Series of Poker and has been reading about poker players, watching WSofP on YouTube, and playing online poker on Facebook.
I admit to having often kidded him about this, and of course, now I am doing the same thing about Everest. A few months ago we picked up a second hand copy of Into Thin Air, and last week, being in between books, I decided it would be a quick read - and indeed it was, as I couldn't put it down. Then Mr. Cleaver informed me that the Frontline episode "Storm Over Everest" was available for viewing on their website (until 6/13 at least), so I watched that and read every interview excerpt on the site, and then I went to Wikipedia, which led me to other sites, which lead to me other sites, and you get the picture. And then I went to the library today and ending up with the stack to see here.
The thing that intrigues me about Everest is the 1996 season in particular, because there are so many gaps in each version of the story I've looked at so far. Jon Krakauer admits in his book that things that he was 100% sure about were later proven to be untrue, and the Frontline film makes a very clearly goes out of its way to not mentioning several people on the mountain, to the extent that it makes it seem as though they were'nt even there and from what I've read so far, Anatolli Boukreev's version is clearly written only to bite his thumb at Krakauer and make himself look good. The activities of the numerous sherpas on the mountain and their views on the whole thing are also surprising absent from all accounts.
All of this, coupled with the obvious lapses of memory/coherence from lack of oxygen/hypothermia and possible deliberate omission of events, leave a very swiss-cheese tale. And to me, makes it into an intriguing mystery, I'm not likely to solve, but it's a fun trip, so I'm going to let this obsession run itself out for a while.
In other news, I received a lovely little package from Bitter Betty in the mail today, containing an awesome wood-handled tracing wheel I won in a give-away on her blog. Thanks Betty!