You know, I think most about things when I’m on mama’s lap (or papa’s, but he doesn’t like my claws hanging on to his leg when I’m about to slip so he puts me on mama’s legs instead), and she’s just reading along, having a great old time with the IHT (International Herald Tribune), the best newspaper in English we can get in France and Italy, and the other day, there was a photo of a sherpa—yes, a real, live sherpa who climbs BIG mountains and shows climbers where to go and tells them how to survive in very dangerous places and, in short, risks his life, really, for a bunch of tourists who may not even know how to climb stairs, much less Everest!
Being a climber myself, I felt compassion for those men whose sherpa guiding (he said) are really over at 40. “It’s a young man’s sport”, he said, and then they have to choose something else with which to make a living. I was shocked to hear that hey are only paid $125 a pack, although he did say that some of the tourists are generous and have actually contributed to the sherpa’s lives in their villages, as they have no way to really make a living—no agriculture, no businesses—only the pay from climbers.
(A kitty is a born climber, although with all those firemen stories going up trees to rescue kitties, one wonders….hmmm.)
So there was this incident of several climbers saying that 100 sherpas attacked them, threw rocks and one pulled a knife but did no harm with it, but the sherpa’s story is that the climbers wanted to go ahead without the sherpas and had made a dangerous decision, and one simply does not tell the sherpas what to do, no way! The climbers were skilled, but they appeared to be doing something that was not on the sherpas’ agenda, and the sherpas are responsible for the climbers safety.
Anyway, when mama or papa sees something dangerous that I should avoid or at least consider before doing something dumb, I listen to them. They are the sherpas of our household, and even though I know that climbing our household rock is easy as pie (whatever that means), I’d listen if mama thought there was something that might make me fall or dslip and crack open my little pea brain on the tile floor!
I have great admiration for sherpas—they love and respect their mountains and they know their mountains and know that the mountain is often stronger than the climber by a long shot and that to conquer it, one must have humility and consideration for the rules of climbing, but especially for the guides who may be their lifesavers in an emergency.
I’m headed up my Annapurna right now to get my kibble that mama puts there so I get climbing practice.
And I’m going to follow this climber/sherpa story to see just what exactly happened on that mountain.
Sherpa family (from Wikipedia)
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