KEY POINTS:
I was in Lisbon, Portugal, at a dinner that my clients were holding in a large restaurant. "Come over here," Todd said. "I want to talk to you."
It didn't occur to me that he was going to tell me my father had just died on the other side of the world. Really, I couldn't have been further from home at that moment and the news was all across the media. When your father dies it feels as if your little world just stops.
No one else's world stops, of course, but yours does, and you step around slowly inside this "paused" space and you try to think. It gives you cause for much soul-searching and grieving because with their passing comes the end to all conversations and all sense of possibility. You have a strangely urgent sense that there is no time to lose in your own life.
It's a panicky feeling of "there, too, go I". It is what you do between childhood and the end - that comes to us all - that is the measure of who you are. No time to waste.
Boy, oh boy; that is one thing that my father taught me. Dad lived one of the most extraordinary lives of the 20th century. It wasn't all good - it had its ups and downs. But the "ups" included some of the seminal challenges and adventures of the post-war era. And people felt it was important both in his native New Zealand and around the world. What he and his accomplishments represented was something that struck a chord with people.
They were great events: the climbing of Everest, the much- publicised race for the South Pole, the search for the mythical Yeti, building schoolhouses in the Himalayas, and the constancy and responsibility he felt for the mountain people of Nepal like no other. But he also represented something of that mid-20th century generation that so many people yearn for now and admire - of pushing through when things get tough, of standing by your word, of a perceived humility.
The truth is, underneath that self-effacing guise, that generation was as egotistical as the rest but they didn't talk about it like that and a friend was a friend - full stop, end of story - and not a chattel to be traded in the bad times and paraded in the good. Amazing things happened when you were in the company of Ed Hillary: The Ocean to Sky Expedition in jetboats up the Ganges River in India and into the Himalayas in 1977, flying into the North Pole with Neil Armstrong and Stephen Fossett in 1986, building 42 schools and hospitals around the foot of Mt Everest over a 40-year span. And amazing things happened when he died too.
In New Zealand there was a State funeral for him on January 22, which was televised around the world. On February 29 we scattered his ashes upon the Waitemata Harbour, free at last from the great responsibilities he felt for so many people. We stood on the deck of the Spirit of Adventure, watching flowers and ashes mingle with the green tidal waters. In a way, it reminded me of the little ceremony we had at Ganga Saga at the beginning of our Ganges River journey; the adventure we both agreed was the very best of them all.
The colour, the culture, the warmth of India embracing us and guiding us up its miraculous river. At the beginning of April my wife Yvonne and I and all four of my children travelled to London where Queen Elizabeth held a special service at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle for my father - a thanksgiving for his life and his energy - in the centuries-old centre of British regal power. This was an incredible journey in many ways - for us to experience it, for a humble bee-keeper from the far-flung Antipodes to be celebrated here at the end of his life and that today's royalty would think to celebrate him.
In May I held a 55th Everest anniversary banquet at Tengboche Monastery at the foot of Mt Everest for 80 trekkers to celebrate my father's and Tenzing's climb of the world's highest mountain in 1953. Monsoon cloud had choked the valleys around the mountain for the previous week and when my daughter Amelia and I arrived at the monastery we hadn't even seen the great mountains that filled the head of the valley. On May 29, the anniversary itself, a superb day dawned, clear as a bell, with blue skies and Chomolungma dominating the northern skyline above. Pale yellow rhododendrons bloomed in the forest and Himalayan pheasants croaked their staccato alarm calls from above the monastery. Monks dressed in elaborate costumes and, wearing fearsome masks, twirled in the paved courtyard of the gompa.
The Rimpoche, the reincarnate lama of Tengboche, leaned over towards where I was sitting and gestured towards the mountain. His assistant translated, "Rimpoche says Chomolungma and Ed Hillary are looking down on us now. That is why we have good weather. They are happy with our festivities." And all the Nepalese trek leaders chorused in with this view as the idyllic day continued.
The next morning thick cloud filled the valley and we didn't see the great mountain again as we headed wearily down the valley to Tenzing Hillary Airport, the little airstrip Dad built in 1964 out of a steeply-inclined cluster of potato fields. I am glad to say the charitable work in the Himalayas continues to be a common theme to both of our lives. It is interesting how a climb of a mountain led to half a lifetime of dedication to a remote mountain people with all the education and health facilities and services they lacked.
Much of this came from the powerful camaraderie of the expeditionary experience and a genuine desire to help people. But it also came from my father's family and their search for philosophical meaning and their readings of old scriptures like the rather tortured account of the Book of Job. If ever there was a thesis for mountaineering it would surely be Job: regardless of how bad things get, hold your course, keep on going, never be shaken from your beliefs.
Climbing Everest is a painful business. Three months of homesickness and uncertainty about the outcome of the climb - "you could die up there" - with all the nastiest altitude symptoms thrown in for good measure: Cheyne-Stokes breathing, hypoxia, anorexia, insomnia. In many ways the climb of Everest has remained the same - it is still a lot of hard work, it is dangerous and the reward is merely a moment on an elevated crest of snow nearly 9km above sea level.
In other ways it has changed completely - we know the way, it can be done, we have greatly improved logistics and our confidence and expectations set us up for success. For Dad and Tenzing, and for their British and Nepalese climbing companions down below, there was the yawning gulf of uncertainty that is the hallmark of any frontier; the unknown. Being raised in the Hillary family meant that I was raised on these stories of how to make it happen, how to reach the top, how good it feels.
These accounts were not mythical, ripping yarns that other people go out and do; this was what "my" people did and I wanted to be one of them. So when I climbed Everest in 1990 I became the first of the second generation to do so and in 1999 we established new routes across Antarctica's icy wastes to the South Pole. My father's Antarctic journey in 1958 was hilarious, really, as he did it in utilitarian Massey Fergusson farm tractors converted to tracks for the snows of the polar wastes. They worked magnificently and Dad loved the ubiquitousness of his equipment.
Dad's death and the way I learned about it in January 2008 came full circle for me from the deaths of my mother Louise and sister Belinda in 1975 and the message that told of the plane crash in Nepal. I had been in Assam visiting a tea garden that was managed by an old family friend, Bhanu Banerjee. We were having the most wonderful time in the hills of Assam when the news came that shattered and irrevocably changed the world that I had, to that moment, taken for granted.
There were no survivors. So now, with the death of my father, I am the oldest member of the oldest generation of my immediate family. There's just my sister Sarah and me up there on the top shelf. You seem to get here so quickly. I miss those who have gone. Inside my greying, balding cranium I miss them. I try not to forget that it is what you do on the way that counts. With the people that count.
So on a clear winter's weekend in July we assembled the Hillary clan. Not to tell stories of "derring-do" but for my dear old Aunt June, who has outlasted both her younger brothers Rex and Ed, to finally divulge the secret Hillary recipe for pavlova. The historic family event was photographed as the family divided into teams for competing culinary creations. Perhaps all that fluffy white pavlova on the Hillary family dining table led old EPH to a love affair with fluffy white snow-capped peaks?
In any case, the recipe is out. Last month I flew to Alaska to climb Mt McKinley, Denali, to complete my Seven Summits; the climbing of each of the highest mountains on all seven continents. This climb had become a tribute to my father, a quiet communion between a son and his memories of his departed father. Not that Roddy and I had time to linger on the summit of Mt McKinley to contemplate, because at - 70C windchill, getting down to Camp 5 was a priority. But the two weeks on the mountain did give me time to think about how Dad would have enjoyed being up there.
The sight of a snowy peak on the horizon always seemed to illicit a longing gaze from him and I would be sure another adventure would be in the making somewhere inside his thoughts. That night back at camp in the dazzling 24-hour sunshine of summer in Alaska, I hoisted a "karta", a silk scarf, that the Rimpoche of Tengboche Monastery had given me on the day of the 55th Everest anniversary.
As the karta arched between my hands into the Arctic sky I thought of Tennyson's words: "all experience is an arch wherethro gleams that untravell'd world". One journey had ended, and another was about to begin.
* Peter Hillary is guest speaker at Royal Oak Primary School on August 8. His speech will be a tribute to his father, including stories about life in the Hillary family. The public are invited and all proceeds will go to the Royal Oak Primary School hall. For more details: peterhillaryevent@xtra.co.nz
