Dan Kennedy (14:56)

Great story there from Sofia Stefanovic. The thing I love about Sofia when she tells a story is you can tell some of these stories are epic and you can tell that a big emotion is just around the corner. And I always feel like with Sophia, we're in good hands. Like, you will come from this moment that is just this most heartfelt, beautiful, simple observation about life. And right around the corner from that, there will be this wonderful, warm, huge smile, this joke, this humorous observation. And it never feels like just cheap comedy. It never feels like it's there for effect. Both of the moments feel equally weighted and equally honest. And it sort of makes it feel like we're going to be all right if we have a huge feeling there's going to be something around the corner that makes us smile and comforts us. Sofia Stefanovic is a Serbian Australian writer living in New York. She hosts this Alien Nation, which is a monthly celebration of immigration. She also hosts the best selling literary salon Women of Letters New York. She has a memoir that's about to be published and it's called Miss X Yugoslavia. It features stories about warlords, beauty queens and everything in between. The story that we just heard actually is in this book as well. It's called Miss X Yugoslavia. So check it out. It's going to come out April 17th and it'll be available everywhere. Books are sold. Up next, a story from Andy Fisher Price. He told this at a Moth main stage in Breckenridge, Colorado, in 2016. The theme of the night was into the Wild. Here's Andy Fisher Price live at the Moth.

Andy Fisher Price (16:43)

When I was a little kid and people would ask me what my parents did for a living, I would say, my mom's a pilot and my dad's a mountain climber. And that was actually true. My mom was a captain for Alaska Airlines, and my dad had climbed K2 and Mount Everest without oxygen. And his company, Mountain Madness, specialized in getting their clients to summit the highest mountains in the world. And then three days before my ninth birthday, I woke up to the sound of my mom sobbing in the hallway. And I jumped out of bed. And I somehow just knew to ask, did dad die? And she said, yeah, honey, they can't get him off the mountain. My father was Scott Fisher. He's the American guide on what's now referred to as the 1996 Everest disaster, in which unexpected storm struck Mount Everest in the peak of climbing season and caused eight people to die in 24 hours. It was a news story that kind of just didn't go away that year as 9 year old me and my 5 year old sister Katie were trying to comprehend and adjust to this new life where we no longer had a dad. And the world's focus on this story continued as Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air was published and quickly became a number one best seller. And Krakauer was critical of some of the decisions my dad made as a guide and for being a part of the commercialization of the climbing of Mount Everest, where amateur climbers pay a professional like my dad a lot of money to be taken up to the top of the highest mountain in the world. I was just a little kid when Into Thin Air came out. But I always kind of got this squirmy feeling when, when I'd see it in bookstores or on the shelves of homes that I would visit. It was kind of the ubiquitous book of that time, kind of like the Da Vinci Code in the early 2000s. And into thin Air was so successful that they just cranked out a made for TV version of it about a year after the book came out. I wasn't allowed to watch that, but I remember hearing my mom crying and cursing through the walls of my bedroom the night that it aired. And then some years later, I was, I think I was in middle school and I was up late with my little sister. We were watching TV and we noticed that it was on and I think we felt like we were doing something naughty like watching an X rated movie or something. But we were just a couple of kids watching an actor play their dad as the guy who's so arrogant and dumb that even at the beginning of the movie, you know, he's not going to make it. And they gave him this catchphrase. He would button his scenes by throwing his arms up in the air and saying, I'm invincible. I think we just felt embarrassed for each other and for our whole family and for dad. And so we got weirded out and we changed the channel to something else. But we switched back just in time to watch him die. And they did a slow dramatic zoom in on his face and he stuttered out his last words, I'm invincible. And Katie and I had kind of a hard time figuring out what this was all about because the Scott Fisher we knew was just the coolest person ever. All of our friends loved him and our friend's parents became his friends. And after he died, everyone close to him was telling us, you know, what an amazing person he was and what a great friend he had been and how hilarious and helpful he was, and how many people he had saved in the mountains. And it seemed like everybody was constantly telling us, man, he loved you kids. He loved you kids so much, and we missed him so much. So I was just struggling to figure out why this movie had made him out to look like this cocky idiot who seemed deserving of his fate. And I started to wonder, is this what the rest of the world thought he was like? And then I started to wonder if any of that was true. So normally when somebody loses a parent, it's a really big deal for the first few months, the first year even, and then it kind of just fades away and becomes a painful part of that person's past that nobody really talks about. But in our case, our dad had become a character in all these articles and in five books and now this movie. So it just. It took a lot longer for it to fade away, but it eventually did. And then a couple years ago, I got a text from a friend saying, andy, Jake Gyllenhaal is playing your dad in a movie. And she had, like, five exclamation points at the end of it. And I was not stoked to hear that because it meant that it was going to be reopening this chapter that my family had thought was closed. We didn't think that there was going to be another version of the same story where Scott Fisher, the character, dies at the end. But I went to see Everest last year at the AMC 16 in Burbank. And overall, it really was not nearly as terrible or as offensive as that first movie had been. But I didn't enjoy it, and I didn't think it was cool. And I still felt sick watching his death scene. I personally don't know anyone else besides my sister who's watched two different actors play their dad die on screen. A couple weeks before the movie had come out, Katie and I had lunch with a client on my dad's 96 trip. And she had actually been the one who paid for the construction of his chorten, which is a. It's a stone monument that Sherpas build to remember climbers who passed away in the Himalayas. And we told her that we'd seen pictures of it for years. It's on the trek up to Everest base Camp. But we just had never found the money or the time to get out to see it for ourselves. And she couldn't believe that we'd never been there. And so she said, you guys gotta go. I'll pay for your flights. You need to see it. And so two Weeks later I'm on a flight to Nepal and before we know it, we're hiking in the Himalayan mountains and we see our first glimpse of Mount Everest. And I think I had expected, I almost wanted that to be an emotional experience because we were looking at our father's grave site for the first time, not in a picture. And the whole trip felt like it was supposed to be this significant pilgrimage where we are reconnecting with our father. But I almost had to push away some feelings of guilt because Katie and I were just having so much fun. You know, we were best friends and we don't really get to see each other that often. So we were just hiking around, having a great old hilarious time in the most beautiful place on the planet. And then the night before we ended up making our ascent to see the Chorten. We bought WI Fi at our lodge for 700 rupees. And we stumbled across this article. I was interviewing a really good friend of my dad's, another client on the 96th trip, Dale Cruz. And Dale had gotten altitude sickness high up on the mountain. And my dad turned him around and accompanied him back down to Base Camp, saving his life. But instead of resting and staying down at Base Camp like he probably should have, my dad turned around and he met up with the rest of his team high up on Everest. And many people believe that that extra trip down and then up is what led to his exhaustion and then ultimately his death. And when Dale heard that his friend Scott didn't make it back alive, he ran all the way from Base Camp down to the airport, condensing what's normally a five day trek into a one day sprint. And the article quoted him as saying, his picture's still on our refrigerator. Pictures of him next to Everest and the other mountains we've climbed. He was one of my best friends and he helped save my life. And we had read the article out loud and out of nowhere we both were crying because, I don't know, the significance of the trip had found us after all. And the next morning was the only day on our entire trek that it snowed. And we'd heard that the views from where we were were supposed to be amazing. But all we could see was this dull white because we were essentially hiking inside of a giant cloud. And we walk up what seems like this endless hill and finally the ground levels out and we see just hundreds and hundreds of chortons. And I thought about how each one was remembering a different person who had just taken a trip into the mountains and never come Back. And then I saw my dad's. It was bigger than most of the other ones, this big painted white boulder. And on it was this plaque that said, in memory of Scott Eugene Fisher. And up until that point, I really had thought that I had fully grieved my father, that the process had completed itself years ago. And I felt proud of my perspective on it because I wasn't a victim of my dad's death anymore. It had happened. And so then, for whatever reason, it had to have happened. But as soon as I saw that monument, I just got pummeled by this wave of grief. It was like my body was acknowledging the passing of somebody who was directly responsible for my existence. And all of the articles and the books and the movies, the simulations and the stories of his death, none of them had ever been as real as just staring at that rock. And it occurred to us that he's still parenting us, because if he had been an insurance salesman who died in a car accident, we would never have found ourselves staring at his memorial stone in Nepal. And I don't know that I'll ever really get to know who he was as a person. Katie and I are still learning about him by discovering qualities that we share that don't seem to come from Mom. And I definitely will never know what exactly happened on Mount Everest in 1996. But standing there that day with my little sister, we knew that he was still our father. And he's still gone. Thank you.

Dan Kennedy (29:09)

Beautiful story there from Andy Fisher Price. I remember just last summer, early in the summer, we were touring that story as part of the main stage show. And we had just finished doing a show in Vancouver and we were out to dinner and Andy told me about a book. He actually made an excellent observation. He said one thing that bothers him is most of what is written about his father's life is focusing on the story of the last week or the last couple weeks of his life. Obviously, Into Thin Air was just about that, about the Everest expedition. And Andy told me about a book called Mountain Madness. It's by Robert Burkeby. And that book actually focuses on the years leading up to the Everest climb. So you have, however, 40 something years of Scott Fisher's life where you get to see all the beautiful moments, all of the successes, all the times. He was a warm father, a great husband, and just an incredibly fun soul. Just a really spirited guy. And I can't say enough about starting the story of Scott Fisher from that starting point. It's called Mountain Madness. Thanks for the recommendation for that book. Andy and thanks for sharing your story with the Moth. Andy Fisher Price is an LA based musician. He's a songwriter and also a semi retired actor who lives with his black Labrador, Poppy. He frequently tours as a bassist and vocalist for the band Smoky Nights. Those guys are finalizing mixes of their new album, doesn't have a title yet, but it is coming out in early 2019. And he's also a dedicated pareidolia photographer and you can check out his work on his Instagram for that stuff. Also, for pictures from this story, just Visit our site themoth.org.

Sophia Stefanovich (31:07)

Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock.

Intuit Sponsor (31:10)

On and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller.

Dan Kennedy (31:14)

With the Moth Podcast, production by Timothy Lou Lee. The Moth Podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.