(HOST) Commentator Bill Mares reflects upon the life and accomplishments of mountaineering legend Dr. Charlie Houston, a friend for thirty years.
(MARES) Charlie Houston was a world-renowned mountain climber and medical researcher who died this week at the age of 96. One endearing thing about him was that you had to do your own research to learn about his life. He never volunteered much about his accomplishments. He wasn’t falsely modest. He was just more interested in the future than in the past.
So where to start? Well, I went to Wikipedia first.
In spare prose, it describes him as an "American physician, mountaineer, high-altitude investigator, inventor, author, film-maker, former Peace Corps administrator, and participant in important and celebrated attempts to climb the Himalayan mountain K2."
Charlie began climbing at the age of 12. By the time he was a senior in college he had participated in the ascent of Nanda Devi, the tallest mountain climbed till then. During World War Two, Charlie’s studies of altitude tolerance helped the Allied pilots to defeat Japanese and German flyers. After the war his research included ground-breaking work on pulmonary edema and retinal hemmorahges.
In the early 1960’s he was the Peace Corps Country Director in India. When Bill Moyers, the Peace Corps Director, became deathly ill on a visit to India, Charlie saved his life, and they became life-long friends.
Charlie wrote five books about his climbing and altitude research, but the title of Bernadette MacDonald’s biography captured his essence in a phrase he cherished: The Brotherhood of the Rope. Geoff Tabin is an opthamologist who climbed Mt. Everest in 1983. He was a close friend of Charlie’s. He said of him: "In the 1930’s Charlie was a quiet visionary of organization and technique in mountain exploration. In his later years, when climbing had become an huge industry, Charlie was the curmudgeonly keeper of the morals of mountaineering."
For 40 years the Houston home on Ledge Road in Burlington was a Grand Central Station of visitors from around town and around the world, who came for free and spirited enquiry into the human experience. At the same time, Charlie loved his gardens, and, as Moyers said about him in a TV special, he never failed to fill the bird feeders.
Charlie’s curiosity was limitless. He followed the news closely, even as his eyesight dimmed. He would plump you down in a comfortable chair before a big picture window that looked out over Lake Champlain. With his beloved golden retriever Pooh-Bear at his feet, he’d ask eagerly, "What are you doing? What do you think about this?" And then you’d move on to politics, history, science and medicine.
As he went blind, a "brotherhood" of readers developed who rotated through to read and discuss with him books of all types and length.
Charlie Houston was trained to treat people’s physical illnesses. But until his final days, his special "brotherhood of the mind" helped maintain the intellectual vitality of hundreds of his admirers.