CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN

            People often ask Mark Inglis if he can be any height he wishes. In reply he says, “Yes, I am very short when I am climbing mountains and tall otherwise.” At any given time, though, this cheerful Kiwi is two centimeters shorter than he used to be till that perilous November in 1982. A heavy blizzard at New Zealand’s Mt.Cook, where he was a 23-year-old search and rescue mountaineer, relegated Inglis to an ice cave for 13 days. Following his rescue, a major media event, both his legs had to be amputated knee-don because of severe frostbite.

Today, almost 30 years later, as the first double amputee to have reached the summit of Mt. Everest, the second double amputee to scale Mt. Cho Oyu and perhaps the only double amputee to wear three-quarter pants all the time, this 51-year-old mountaineer has a lot to tell people about life. “I don’t tell them I am disabled. Disability is a state of mind. I say I’m a double amputee,” says the jolly Kiwi, who is in the city to deliver a series of motivational lectures to corporates, schools and whosoever is willing to borrow inspiration from his survival story.

Seated at the Taj lobby – where he feels people are showing a cultural nonchalance towards this strange foreigner in three-quarter pants who keeps adjusting his prosthetic legs – Inglis beams when he recalls how it all began with rugby. “I was really bad at rugby in school, and in 1970s New Zealand if you were bad at the game, what else could you do but climb?” he laughs. Initiated into mountaineering by his teacher, Bert, he soon became a professional search and rescue mountaineer, who, like every other adventure-seeker in his country, saw Mt. Everest as a stepping stone to success. But that dream had to wait for over 25 years, thanks to the terrible blizzard of 1982.

Inglis was stuck in an ice cave with fellow mountaineer Philip Doole – with five cookies between them, the duo survived on half a biscuit a day for the first five days. “At minus 20 degrees in that altitude, the human body tends to burn as many calories as a racing cyclist,” says Inglis, whose weight dropped from 70 kg to 39 kg. “The maximum someone had lasted in our situation was nine days. We spent most of our time praying for relief.” It came on the seventh day in the form of a helicopter which dropped food, sleeping bags, a primus and a radio. On the thirteenth day, they were rescued. “But the worst was seeing my legs rot later,” Inglis says.

Showing rare courage, the mountaineer tried to get back to his passion. But after the initial painful attempts and the resulting frustration, he decided to take a break from the mountains and turned to academics. A degree in human biochemistry was followed by a ten-year career in wine-making.

Meanwhile, he also dabbled in skiing and cycling, which culminated in a silver medal in the Sydney 2000 Paralympic Games. “Every day, I learnt to walk better.” Says Inglis, who renewed his tryst with the Rocky Mountains in 2002. He first scaled Mt. Cook with his prosthetic legs and later, in 2004, successfully reached the summit of Cho Oyu, which is only 649 meters lower than Everest. “It was very hard but I felt confident of going on Everest now,” says Inglis, who set out on the mission in 2006. “There were people around me with legs who were cribbing about how hard it was. And I would look at them and think, “Boy, you really don’t know how hard.”

Inglis had to climb at the same speed as others (“Otherwise I would die”) and even broke one of his stumps midway but “the best part of having legs like mine is that you can fix them on the spot”, he smiles. He takes three times longer to recover after an expedition, but all his experiences are converted into bullet points for his motivational talk across the world, where he uses mountaineering as a metaphor for life. His lectures usually begin with a photo of him scaling Mt. Everest. “What do you see?” he asks his audience. “A double amputee climbing Mt. Everest? What I see is a man whose legs won’t be affected by frost-bitten feet again.”

Inglis, who now goes on two treks to the North Pole every year, enjoys mountain hiking. Despite becoming a spectacle for the mountain people, he does not hide his prosthetic legs inside full pants. There’s deeper reason for that. “I’d rather be seen pulling my pants up to adjust my legs than pulling them down.”

                                                                                               

                                                                                Sharmila Ganesan-Ram