Summer Reading: Courage over the odds

By ELEANOR BLACK

Mark Inglis: No Mean Feat
Random House
$29.95

Climber Mark Inglis has become a byword for courage against impossible odds. He describes the triumphs and the setbacks in his own story.

November 16, 1982: It is like a freezer box, room enough to huddle out of the biting wind but not enough to stretch out or sit up. Snow flurries blow through the mouth of the makeshift shelter scooped from ice, and the temperature hovers between minus 5 degrees Celsius and minus 10. At night it plummets to minus 20. There is nothing to do but wait for help, and try to keep the feet warm.

At 23, Mark Inglis is already an experienced climber, a search and rescue mountaineer who has conquered Mt Cook before. He reckons he and climbing partner Phil Doole will have to spend one or two nights in the cramped hole before the bizarre El Nino weather pattern which forced them to check in to "Middle Peak Hotel" passes.

That means they will have to keep their feet supple and elevated to avoid swelling, so they can climb out as soon as the jetstream winds pummelling the summit subside. It also means rationing their minimal provisions - half a packet of biscuits, a can of tinned peaches, a couple packets of drink mix and a chocolate bar. They had planned to return to the Grand Plateau hut that night for a big cook-up.

The men get busy massaging their feet. Despite their efforts, it is obvious by the end of the first day that they will suffer frostbite. On day seven of what turns into a highly publicised 13-day ordeal, Inglis knows his feet are frozen through. They are white and waxy in appearance; he is going to lose a few toes. At times, they thaw before refreezing, a process which destroys cells.

Optimistic despite the ghastly conditions, he does not suspect that come Christmas Eve, surgeons working to save his life will have to remove his feet and lower legs - everything to a point 14cm below the knees.

In his engaging autobiographical book, No Mean Feat, Inglis - now a 43-year-old motivational speaker who has worked as a research scientist and senior winemaker - describes lying in his bed at Burwood Hospital after rescue, watching his feet change colour as gangrene took hold: from white and swollen to blue and purple, to black and "almost mummified".

He found the process fascinating, "like having your own full-colour National Geographic article on frostbite", and believed he was ready for the inevitable. When it happened, though, he was devastated.

"I woke later that evening, feeling like shit as you do after those drugs, and feeling pinned to the bed, everything dead from my hips down. As the nurse was propping me up slightly to have a sip of water, the reality of no legs was scarily apparent. The bed sheets went flat halfway down the bed ... the mound in the bed was too short."

This is when Inglis' grit, a quality which propels him from one incredible achievement to another as the book advances, saves the day. Fitted with his first pair of prosthetic legs, which require daily adjustments as his thighs shrink, he returns to Mt Cook National Park, his home for the past three years, and a job as a park ranger.

The work is not as satisfying as search and rescue, but the park is a safe place to adjust. And it holds good memories. It was at park headquarters that Inglis first glimpsed Anne, the cowboy boot-wearing redhead who became his wife.

Yet as Inglis describes - in great detail - the trials of getting used to his legs, which give him blisters and pressure sores, he starts to lose the momentum of his story. While his new legs enable him to pursue his many passions, they are not as important, it would seem, as his own force of will. He gives us little insight into the source of his bloodymindedness, a major oversight.

After 18 months, Inglis tires of living at "the fringes", unable to help with search and rescue jobs. Eager for a new project, he enrols in a bachelor of horticulture degree at Lincoln University, moving his family from a snug, three-bedroom home to a supermarket which has been converted into a "barely habitable" student flat.

Before graduating, he switches to a bachelor of science degree offered jointly by Lincoln and the University of Canterbury. Climbing has been replaced by a new obsession: biochemistry.

October 20, 2000: Inglis can hear the clack, clack, clack of his aerodynamic carbon-fibre legs as he cycles around the wooden velodrome. He concentrates on the rhythmic sound in an effort to blot out muscle pain so intense it makes his eyes water. When he crosses the finish line he falls off his bike, exhausted.

It is the race of his life - 1 minute 23 seconds in the kilometre individual time trial at the Sydney Paralympic Games. Now he has to wait half an hour while seven more competitors, the best in the world, try to outride him.

Just five days before, he rode the 250m course for the first time. Practice at home in Blenheim had been on a 440m asphalt track; the velodrome with its 42-degree corners and 12-degree short straights was a frightening unknown.

"I wasn't so much scared of falling off and doing damage ... In the elite environment that was the Paralympics, it was humiliation I was scared of."

But he soon got to grips with the sloping track and made adjustments to his equipment (so basic he was dubbed a "hillbilly"), catching the bus from the Olympic village to the city at 6am every day so he could adjust his gears at a bike shop.

His stumps were giving him trouble, too. Before flying to Sydney, Inglis competed in a 40km road race and was accidentally knocked to the ground by another racer, losing big chunks of skin from his thighs, buttocks, fingers and wrists. Part of an elbow was scraped to the bone.

The night before the race, Inglis spent painful hours standing at the opening ceremony with the rest of the New Zealand team, waiting for the cue to enter the stadium. He was excited, but more than 15 minutes standing in one spot is "bloody hard on the stumps".

Tired but psyched up on race day, he knew he was in great form and that his parents, Jim and Mary Inglis, were there to watch him claim a medal.

"Ten minutes before my time slot, as I was taping my legs on, my heart rate was only eight beats above resting. I still can't believe I was that calm."

Inglis' cool determination in the face of great obstacles is hugely impressive and makes for an engaging read. While he never properly explains his motivation, he alludes to the importance of wife Anne, who runs the household while he pursues his latest dream. It would be nice to read more about this self-sufficient woman who would probably have an interesting story herself.

Having given up his beloved climbing, Inglis excelled at university, despite constant money worries and the demands of raising three children. Honours research in biochemistry at the Christchurch School of Medicine, focusing on heparin cofactor II (HCII), one of the anti-clotting agents in human blood, earned him a job in the school's haematology research unit.

After three years, just as he was yearning to return to outdoor work, he saw a Montana Wines ad for a trainee winemaker. With his science background, he became a respected senior winemaker at the company's Marlborough winery, leaving this year after a decade to pursue a new obsession: climbing Mt Everest.

At the Sydney Paralympics, Inglis is beaten to the gold medal by world champion Radovan Kaufman, but his confidence surges. "It didn't even register that it was 'only a silver'," he writes. "It was as though I'd won the whole world."

It is while standing on the podium, clutching a bunch of wildflowers and watching the New Zealand flag go up, that he hatches a plan to return to Mt Cook.

January 7, 2002: Twenty years after New Zealand's highest mountain robbed Mark Inglis of his lower legs, he is standing at the summit again, grinning like an idiot and waving to the documentary film crew hovering overhead in a helicopter.

One of his reasons for attempting the climb was to avoid tears on November 29, the anniversary of the day he and Phil Doole were rescued. It is his second crack at the summit in three weeks, and the pressure to make it to the top has been overwhelming, intensified by media scrutiny and the presence of a film crew shooting a television doco about Inglis - No Mean Feat, the movie.

This time around, he chooses to be dropped off by helicopter at the point on Linda Glacier where he abandoned the December 14 attempt. The climb is energy-sapping. His climbing legs, fitted with crampons, are damaged by a particularly tricky stretch of ice and his forearms cramp as he drives his hand-held ice tools into the nearly vertical surface to which he clings.

As soon as he reaches the summit rocks, he knows he is going to make it and starts to enjoy the trip. Thirty metres from the top, he breaks into a smile which stays for hours.

"There was ... almost disbelief at how great it felt to be back," he writes. "I was conscious of the debt I owed to every person who helped me there, but also very conscious of the personal achievement and a rising desire to go higher and harder."

For Inglis, the optimist who has for two decades taken daily pain and struggle in his stride, this means a project of an even grander scale. He plans to climb the world's highest mountain, Everest, in May 2004. If he makes it, he will be the first double amputee to have knocked the bastard off.

As a prelude, he and the team who helped him conquer Cook will climb Mt Shishapangma in Tibet in April before skiing back down.

"Whenever you come out of the mountains, especially after pushing yourself to the limit, you have a wildness in your heart, a drive and freedom that wasn't there before. You know you can achieve things that were once only a dream."

Inspiring to the last, Inglis' book is, at times, frustrating. While the story is compelling and the teller a real-life hero, the writing is not great. Inglis would have benefited enormously from more editorial guidance.

He takes confusing chronological leaps with no warning and assumes his readers have mountaineering knowledge. A glossary would have been a useful addition.