Green Boots: The Story of the Mountain

Let us all step onto our mountain, swim our rivers, do our training, live wild, open our hands to blessing.

As a child, we were not allowed television, movies, newspapers, magazines, or most books. But we watched one movie once a year. It was about an hour long, made in 1953, a documentary called The Conquest of Everest about Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who scaled Mount Everest on a shared expedition.  

As children, we grew up to expect that we would climb mountains and that our whole lives would be overcoming insurmountable obstacles like Everest.

We climbed the Presidential Range and Mt. Garibaldi. We hiked the West Coast Trail. I climbed Mt. Washington in bare feet. That year, I had no shoes. We were training. 

In the documentary, the climbers have huge packs. At twelve and thirteen, we had to backpack with eighty-pound backpacks while wearing Keds. Our nutrition was a combination of canned food, hard-boiled eggs, and loaves of bread. We were preparing for our own Everest. 

On my own, after I left, I kept training for whatever adventure might happen up ahead. I hiked, swam, and got ready for the big climb of my life.

When my son biked the Annapurna circuit, he heard the stories of hikers going up Everest, the hundreds of bodies now strewn across the mountain. You can’t hike Everest without seeing these bodies. There’s one body they call “Green Boots.” The green boots, seen by climbers on the Northeast ridge, belonged to Tsewang Paljor from Ladakh, India. He was an accomplished climber. But in 1996, Everest was his last climb. 

I thought about what makes people turn around. Sometimes, it’s the weather.  Sometimes, you tell yourself you aren’t ready, and then you aren’t. I found out while running marathons that finishing a marathon was all in your head. If you thought you could, you could.  

I wondered, though, about seeing Green Boots. If I am climbing a mountain, and I see Green Boots, do I say a prayer and keep hiking? Or am I discouraged by so many people who haven’t made it?

This choice is the key to who we are and whether we overcome great difficulties. Your business needs to succeed. There’s a mountain you want to climb. A cancer you need to cure. It’s not possible to live in the world and accomplish anything great without walking through a landscape where someone has failed. Something has fallen apart.  

What do you do with that story? The Green Boots story isn’t your story. Your story is the story of prayer and climbing the mountain.

When I am doing something difficult, I like to find out the stories of whatever fell apart and say a prayer. But that isn’t my story. 

It’s a challenging time to be in publishing. It’s like swimming in Greece and being out at sea beyond the edge of the coastline with the big waves. When I swim out there, I start to get pulled out toward the ocean, and it takes a long time to get back around the point to the harbored waves, and an hour to swim back to shore. 

That’s what it feels like. I’ve swum out beyond the point, and I’m trying to get my bearings, and wondering if I do get swept out to sea if Mark will get in a boat and come get me, but there is no boat, so I really need to swim back to Lampi Beach. Publishing is like that now. 

But my story is this: I’ve been training my whole life, and my team are all smart, like Nepalese mountain climbers, and we are going to figure out the best route. If anyone can mastermind change, it’s our crew.

When I watched The Conquest of Everest as a child, I thought climbing Everest was something men did. Everything important was done by men. Publishing used to be run by men. But the world is changing. My children grew up in a world unclouded by such ideas. This is our day to climb. 

Whether I think of this as a swim or climb, we got this. With a prayer, and a moment of mediation, we will solve one of life’s great mysteries: how to make book publishing work. It’s not a business that really makes sense. But we’re going to find a way to do things differently. 

Let us all step onto our mountain, swim our rivers, do our training, live wild, open our hands to blessing.