Tonight I went and saw the movie Touching the Void. I highly recommend it. Has gotten great reviews too. In case you aren’t familiar with the story, let me synopsize it for you.

In 1986, two mountain climbers attempted an ascent on Siula Grande in Peru. This is a mountain peak that had never been successfully climbed. Mountaineers get off on that I guess. On the descent, one of the climbers, Joe Simpson, broke his leg. His partner, Simon Yates, attempted to lower him down, but oops, it was over a cliff he couldn’t see in a blinding snow storm. Yates ultimately faced a tough choice - cut the rope or have them both be stuck there and die. He let his partner go and assumed his death..but incredibly, Simpson survived the fall, and agonizingly climbed off the mountain on his own. The movie focuses on what happened in that week of hell.

I actually read a blog entry about it a week or so ago where a blogger posed the question “would you cut a friend lose? And which friends would you cut lose”. (I couldn’t find the blog again, if anyone knows what entry I’m talking about please post so I can link to it!) It was an interesting question that made me think and sparked enough interest to have me go look up the movie and decide to go see it.

Everything I read about focuses on whether he should have cut the rope or not. I personally didn’t see he had much choice. He could have held out a bit longer perhaps, but ultimately, he had to choose either to die with his friend or try to save himself. He chose to give himself a chance. I don’t fault him for that.

To me there is another place to question his judgement. The faulty judgement was not “cut the rope” but rather the judgement that “my friend is dead because I cut the rope”. Surprise! Your friend was not dead. And your faulty assumption caused him additional days of pain and suffering.

I guess Yates took a lot of flack from the mountaineering community about cutting the rope but to me, they should have given him a hard time about hauling his ass off the mountain without verifying what happened to his partner. I mean… he didn’t see a body. He saw the crevasse. He didn’t spend a lot of time yelling down there. He didn’t look around. He didn’t see a body. Isn’t that really where there is an error in his judgment? He should have spent some time looking for the body.

So the life lesson I take from this movie to apply to my own relationships is:
When you cut a friend loose…shouldn’t you have to verify the death? Otherwise… there might be undue suffering. Otherwise you might be leaving someone you care about to crawl out of a deep dark cave or suffer needlessly. If you cut the rope, for God Sakes Man… verify the death!

Or maybe what I really learned is that you should always carry a flare gun.

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