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BIO
Peter Stark is a contributor to Outside, Smithsonian, and The New
Yorker magazines. His article for Outside, "As Freezing Persons Recollect
the Snow"-- the inspiration for this book-- was cited as a notable essay in BEST
AMERICAN ESSAYS (1997). He has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and has
published a collection of essays, DRIVING TO GREENLAND. He is also the editor of an
anthology of writing about the Arctic, RING OF ICE. He lives in Missoula, Montana.
INTERVIEW
November 9, 2001
TBR: In LAST BREATH, you chose to use second person narration or to invent characters to tell your harrowing stories. Why did you do the book as a mix of fiction and fact as opposed to doing a straight nonfiction account?
PS: I gave this issue a lot of thought before I researched and wrote the book. Basically, using invented characters allowed me much greater flexibility to explore the physiology and psychology of outdoor adventurers on the edge of death than I would have had if I'd tied the chapters to the stories of actual individuals. What I've done is chosen what I think are the most fascinating and revealing details from the stories of many survivors or victims, from the accounts of medical specialists and medical journals, and from my own experience and created the most vivid portrait of the human body in these extreme outdoor situations that I could. I needed to be able to manipulate the character's body, to pin his arm in a certain position when buried in the snow, or have him rip off his clothes (as some, but not all, hypothermia victims do) when his core temperature reaches about 88 degrees. I wanted to be able to explore his thought processes when he's on the edge of consciousness and he is having auditory hallucinations (another symptom in some hypothermia cases) that he believes are the sounds of welcoming bells on the door of a warm cabin he imagines is nearby. An actual victim of hypothermia loses memory of what happens very early in the process and --- assuming he survived and could be interviewed --- probably would not remember any of these details.
TBR: LAST BREATH is about some seriously risky situations. What is the stickiest place you have found yourself? What draws people to these "extreme" situations? And why do you think other armchair adventurers want to read about them?
PS: I've found myself in many sticky situations outdoors although none, I hasten to add, as harrowing as those in which my characters find themselves. I've stood at the top of countless steep, snowy slopes in the wilderness mountains and wondered if they'd avalanche if I skied them. Once, when I was 16 or so and a naive Midwesterner on a trip to Colorado, a friend --- who was even more naive about winter in the mountains than I was --- and I took off into the mountain wilderness on skis. At one point I said to him, "This slope is really steep and the snow's really deep. I wonder if it could avalanche." I casually stomped my ski, and in that instant, the slope just beneath my feet broke away into an avalanche that rumbled down into a gully and would have buried us both if we'd been below it. It was incidents like that ---on snowy slopes, or paddling whitewater rivers --- that got me thinking about writing this book.
As for why people put themselves in these risky situations outdoors or pursue so-called "extreme sports," I don't think that they do it because they have a death wish. Rather, quite the opposite. There's an intense sense of being alive when climbing a rock face, or paddling big whitewater, or pursuing a number of these other activities, when all your senses are focused on the moment, when you're not thinking about the past or the future but only the present. When you run out the bottom of the rapid or complete the climb, there's an enormous satisfaction in having completed it, and an appreciation of every breath, every beam of sunlight, every drop of water. I also think that people are trying to get in touch with something beyond their immediate selves, in touch with --- for lack of a better expression --- the limits of their own mortality. In the introduction to LAST BREATH I quote the novelist and adventurer Paul Bowles on why people are compelled to go back to the Sahara Desert despite its sometimes fatal attraction. He said in the desert one is put in touch with "the absolute." I think the same could be said for a number of these so-called "risk" sports.
Armchair adventurers, I think, are drawn to these situations for the same reasons the actual participants are. They'd just rather experience the risk and revelation vicariously. I love reading about others' adventures in the outdoors. This was one of the great pleasures of writing my book --- that I went on these adventures vicariously with my characters but, of course, unlike many of my characters, I survived them.
TBR: How did you research LAST BREATH? What did you know going into the research? What did you THINK you knew? Could you survive an avalanche?
PS: I filled 35 yellow legal pads with research notes on the physiology alone. I interviewed dozens of medical specialists in these areas, read probably hundreds of medical journal articles or abstracts, interviewed a number of survivors of near-death experiences in the outdoors. I personally had a lot of outdoor experience and I had already traveled to many of the faraway places --- Tibet, the Sahara, etc. --- I used as settings in LAST BREATH. So establishing the dicey outdoor situations and foreign settings were relatively easy for me. But I knew little about physiology going into this book, and that took a lot of hard work. I've always been good at translating complex subjects into fairly simple terms, which is a skill that helped a lot in researching and writing LAST BREATH although the weaving of the science into the narrative line was a tricky and delicate thing until I got the hang of it.
As for what I THOUGHT I knew: I didn't think I could survive very long at all in an avalanche and doing the avalanche research was actually somewhat encouraging for me because I did come across a number of survivors' stories, although I'm acutely aware that avalanches are very often fatal. On the other hand, I'm much more wary of heatstroke now than I was before I did the research and more careful about exercising heavily in the heat. It amazes me how quickly the body can overheat to fatal levels if its cooling systems --- the ability to sweat, for instance --- are not working properly.
TBR: Why did you choose to do stories about death and dying? In what way are these "cautionary" tales?
PS: I chose to write stories about death and dying in the outdoors because I feared dying in those situations myself --- in an avalanche or in big rapids, for instance --- and I feared death in general. I wanted to UNDERSTAND what happens to the human body --- and mind --- during the process of dying in these situations. As I mention in the introduction, in modern Western society we do not have much everyday exposure to the process of dying the way people did 150 years ago when an elderly grandparent typically would die at home instead of in the hospital. I think this is one of the reasons we both fear death and are intensely curious about it --- or at least I am. For LAST BREATH I've tried to take a premise from the Tibetan Buddhists, who believe that you must understand death and be familiar with it to live a full and satisfying life.
I've found that after researching and writing the book, I'm less afraid of dying in the outdoors. In a way, the process of dying was demystified for me by doing the research and writing. But I find I'm also more willing to turn back when I'm in the outdoors. These are "cautionary tales" in that I've wanted to show both the consequences of going too far in the outdoors, and also tried to convey, through my characters and their motives for engaging in these outdoor activities, that there are nevertheless good reasons for pursuing these activities.
TBR: You are married and have small children. Does that change the way you view risky sports or travel? Does your wife or your family ever politely discourage you from going out into snowstorms or hiking in rebel controlled areas? Do they clamor to come along?
PS: Yes, children very much change the way I view risky sports and travel. My wife, Amy, on the other hand, has a very adventurous spirit, is the daughter of a foreign correspondent and grew up in Bangkok, Manila, and Cairo, among other places. She usually wants to travel more --- and go farther --- than I do. But now that I have children, I'm much more inclined to ask why I'm putting myself in a risky spot, if that's what I'm doing. I think that's a key ingredient for judging risk --- that you need the self-knowledge to know why you want to climb that mountain, or kayak that river, or travel to that potentially dangerous area. If you understand why you want to do it in the first place, I think it's easier to turn back if necessary.
The travel I do these days is almost always with my wife and children, and with them, we've been to the Arctic in the wintertime, to the Sahara Desert at the height of summer, hiking in the tribal highlands of Irian Jaya. When traveling with children, I'm acutely aware of the risks of these places. What we've found is that it works best to go one step at a time with children, talk to knowledgeable locals whenever possible, and if it looks difficult, turn back. Most often, these places look scarier from a distance than close up.
And, of course, I've also learned that you don't have to go to the ends of the earth to have a great adventure with kids. With kids, everything can be an adventure --- a trip to the local park, say.
TBR: What is it about the wilderness that speaks to you? You also tend to write more about the winter and the cold than about the tropics --- and I'm too cold when it dips below 70! What is it about the Arctic, say, that you find so fascinating?
PS: Part of what speaks to me is the sense of self-reliance that the wilderness forces on me. In the wilderness, there are no yellow lines that mark the spot where this is too far, that you should turn back here, there is danger over there, or whatever. You constantly have to make your own assessments and judgments about the weather and terrain, your physical condition, and countless other factors, in order to proceed. There is a lot of ambiguity in assessing all these factors and risks, and I find it both disconcerting at first, but ultimately very rewarding. There are no "right" answers. I think everyone --- whether in the wilderness or not --- has to choose the level of risk he or she feels comfortable with and weigh it against the rewards. One of the things that I think is particularly disconcerting for many people about the events of September 11 is that these events have made us much more aware of the risks in our everyday world, some of which have been there all along, and it's a new experience to have to judge those risks. In the wilderness, one constantly has to assess the threats to safety and security, and now we're forced to do some of that kind of assessing in our everyday lives.
Another part of the wilderness that speaks to me is the sense of "the absolute" that Paul Bowles writes about in the Sahara: "Once one has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough..." I find the Arctic casts a similar spell, that it is a place that is as "strong" as one could wish for, and so I'm compelled to write about it. Snow and ice are also mediums I grew up with (from ski racing, winter sports, childhood in Wisconsin, etc.) and am naturally drawn towards. But I find all extreme environments cast a spell on me --- desert, Arctic, tropical jungle, ocean. In the course of researching and writing LAST BREATH, I have been deeply struck by the transience of the human organism against these powerful forces.
TBR: What books are on your nightstand right now?
PS: Quite a few: THE LAST GRAIN RACE by Eric Newby (about sailing around Cape Horn on a windjammer, which my father did also, in the late 1940s, and is writing a memoir about the experience); THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING by Sogyal Rinpoche; BEYOND RISK: Conversations with Climbers by Nicholas O'Connell; THE FINAL COUNTRY by James Crumley (an old friend); THE SPEED OF LIGHT by Elizabeth Rosner.
TBR: What can we expect from you next?
PS: I have a number of ideas, none of them final. But I suspect the next book will have an element of adventure, and will weave in science and anthropology like the last, and will take me --- and I hope the reader --- to some of the extreme environments I mentioned above.
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