Upward Bound

By Peter Stoler

MOUNTAIN PASSAGES

by Jeremy Bernstein

University of Nebraska Press 278 pages; $12.50

As anyone who reads the literature can attest, most mountain climbers cannot write. Fair enough; most writers cannot climb. Jeremy Bernstein is the exception to both rules. When he is at sea level, Bernstein is a physics professor at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He also contributes lucid and entertaining pieces to The New Yorker on such abstruse subjects as particle physics and summit-level mathematics. In his less cerebral hours, Bernstein ascends rock surfaces, especially those surrounding the Chamonix Valley of France, and writes compelling pieces about the peaks and the people who scale them.

The high-minded author begins his collection with an evocation of Chamonix and the tough, idiosyncratic guides who scratch a living from the surrounding Alps. He offers a beguiling portrait of his friend and mentor Claude Jaccoux, who is to climbers what Vince Lombardi was to football players. "I don't want you to panic," Jaccoux tells Bernstein as they prepare to ascend a pitch only slightly less steep than the side of the Empire State Building. Faced with such a command, Bernstein obeys. He draws an equally revealing picture of Equipment Designer Yvon Chouinard, whose 1972 catalogue quotes Einstein: "A perfection of means and confusion of aims seems to be our main problem."

Bernstein displays a mastery of non-fiction suspense when he recounts an alpine rescue mission that involved 44 French troops, six mountain policemen, eight Chamonix guides, ten volunteers, 70 helicopter flights and a mile of climbing rope, and cost more than $10,000, plus the life of one of the volunteer climbers. He shows a seasoned traveler's eye as he follows the circuitous route of Alexander the Great through Asia Minor into Pakistan.

Bernstein is at his best evoking the sounds and sights and terrors of a world that touches the sky. He observes that crampons (metal spikes attached to the soles of climbing boots) on frost make "the crunching sound of someone eating corn on the cob," then watches the benign sun become treacherous, turning glacier snow to sodden mush. His observations on climbing style might save a few bones: "Holding on to pitons is considered bad form but, as I see it, it beats falling." As a lagniappe, Bernstein answers the non-climber's classic question: Why?

Aficionados confronted with this query often take refuge in a mysticism more appropriate to the salons of Los Angeles than the sides of mountains. To Bernstein, the sport is, admittedly, "somewhat crazy." But, he adds, "there is a profound satisfaction in conquering one's deepest fears, a sort of spiritual satisfaction which in this age of televised and predigested experience is all but disappearing." Bernstein's descriptions of mountaineering are not likely to move the sedentary or in crease the sales of boots and tents. Yet no one who reads Mountain Passages should have any trouble understanding why mountaineers are so addicted to the ascent.

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