48. August 6th, 2008 1:10 am
Edmund Hillary visited our little elementary Wood Road School in Centereach, NY back in 1961 and impressed on us our “luck” for having a school or even wood for that matter to build one. He was going back to Nepal to do just that, build schools. Later in college, I heard from an anthropologist who had been in Nepal, that Edmund Hillary had lost a daughter when a wing flap frozen on a small plane she was on crashed. More recently working in NYC I marveled in it’s oldest drug store, Kiehl’s on 3rd Ave near 14th St., it’s then owner Mr. Heidegger, a friend of now Governor Schwarzenegger, had ascended Mt. Everest without oxygen. Even more recently I watched on WNYC, the Nepalese Sherpa woman who I think has been three times to the top of “the mother of us all” I’ve heard “Everest” called, where Mallory had tried and failed, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascended first together. These are brave people to lose and I was sorry to hear about it, though glad there have been some survivors. I’m not sure what the man from New Zealand meant when he said “because it is there” but maybe meant it was “where we would be” like “Mont Blanc” written about by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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