Maria Coffey’s infinite connections

by Jill Sawyer

In her new book Explorers of the Infinite, Maria Coffey writes about a 1992 kayak expedition she took with her husband, Dag Goering, on the Ganges River in India. Though they had been warned about the disease lurking in the polluted water, the bodies of cremated Hindus floating in the currents, and the threat of armed thieves roaming the riverbank, the two of them made it safely from Haridwar to Varanasi. Along the way, Coffey began to believe that the spirit of the river, Holy Mother Ganga, was protecting them, and when it was time to take their boats out of the water at the end of the journey, she felt a sharp physical and spiritual separation from the river.

”Our voyage along the river had turned me inside out, challenged and exhausted me on every level”, she writes. “Yet it shines in memory as one of the most memorable experiences of my life — an accidental pilgrimage that forced me to step beyond my Western sensibilities and, for a time at least, into a place of magic.”

This is one of the few passages in Explorers of the Infinite in which Coffey tells a story from her own life. The book captures with exquisite detail the spiritual transcendence found at the far edge of extreme adventure — dreams that predict death, ghostly presences that appear in near-unsurvivable terrain, and mind tricks that allow athletes to physically push themselves through extreme endurance races.

She writes about Peter Hillary, who recounts a three-man expedition to the South Pole, when he was accompanied through staggeringly difficult whiteout conditions by a series of ghosts from his past. Free climber Dean Potter tells Coffey about a dream, recurring since childhood, of a fall from a cliff with a dead tree at the bottom. He found the dream cliff in the Yosemite Valley in 1998, climbed it without protection several times, and is still pondering the meaning of it. In another chapter, mountaineer Carlos Carsolio describes how the voice of a dead colleague guided him safely through a near-death experience on Kanchenjunga.

Intensely detailed and backed up by forays into neuroscience, psychiatry, and high-altitude physiognomy, the book tells dozens of personal stories, but for most of it, Coffey keeps herself out of the picture.

She has told her own story before. Coffey’s association with The Banff Centre began in 1999, when Bernadette McDonald, then director of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festivals, asked her to participate in one of the Festival’s popular live panel discussions. For years, McDonald had been trying to pull together enough people to fill out a panel on the tragic collateral that comes with a life at high altitudes — the emotional costs borne by family members who are directly affected by their loved ones’ extreme pursuits.

Coffey was the author of Fragile Edge, a deeply personal memoir of her relationship with British climber Joe Tasker, who disappeared on Everest’s Northeast Ridge in 1982. Participating on the panel, Coffey saw first-hand the visceral reaction that alpinists and other adventure addicts had to the idea that their actions could have a rippling effect that would eventually encircle everyone around them. It inspired her next book, Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow.

Tasker’s death on Everest had freed in Coffey the inspiration she needed to become a writer. Working on Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow, she interviewed dozens of adventurers, athletes, and mountaineers, their wives, husbands, parents, friends, and loved ones. In the midst of the writing process, she arrived back at The Banff Centre for the Cultural Journalism program, which sparked another creative leap.

“I gave part of the manuscript to my editor in the program, Ian Pearson, and he asked ‘where are you in this?’” she recalls. “I said I had already told my story in Fragile Edge, so I didn’t need to bring it into this book, but he disagreed. He said I was asking people to be so honest, that I needed to do the same. I was furious at first, but he was right. It was a turning point for the book, it became much more personal.”

She calls the Cultural Journalism program a highlight of her literary career, and the connections she has made in Banff over the past ten years have been crucial to her ability to write about the world of extreme adventure and mountaineering.

The experience of writing Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow led indirectly to Explorers of the Infinite — Coffey’s agent asked her if any of her interviews had uncovered ghost stories. She started researching and interviewing again — not just climbers, extreme skiers, alpinists, and cyclists, but long-distance yacht racers, Polar explorers, and people who had broken records for non-stop flying. She spent months reading about scientific studies just to be able to put a proposal together. “I started with the science, and I knew it would be challenging,” she says. “I’m not a scientist.” The topics of spiritual transcendence, near-death experiences, psychic communication, and premonition, also added to the difficulty. “I had to wade through a lot of bogus science in paranormal phenomena,” she adds. “I wanted to reference only scientists who were accepted and respected on both sides of the debate about whether this phenomena exists or not.”

Her research took her deep into the place where thought and imagination intersect with human anatomy, and philosophical ideas about where memory exists. “It made me realize how little is known about the brain,” Coffey says. “Nobody knows what the self is. These are questions that science is still grappling with.”

By the time she had made it through the research and interview process (the book took five years to research and write) everything had shifted in focus, and Coffey wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue the project. “I had done endless drafts of the book, and at one point I just gave it up,” she says.

In 2005, Coffey returned to The Banff Centre as a Fleck Fellow to participate in the inaugural Mountain Writing program, which combines the resources of the Centre’s Literary Arts and Mountain Culture departments to support creative and nonfiction writers working in the genres of mountain adventure, environment, and climbing writing. “The book had become such an overwhelming project at that point. I came back to Banff to decide if I was going to finish it,” she says.

Coffey worked with both faculty editors, Marni Jackson and Tony Whittome, and they steered her back toward the original concept that she started with for Explorers of the Infinite, and helped her cut through the chaos of a massive amount of accumulated research. “I didn’t make a lot of writing progress, but it allowed me to go home and make a fresh start.”

The finished book has a few stories taken from her own life, including the story of the Ganges trip, and it concludes with a remarkable retelling of a near-drowning experience she had in the undertow of the Atlantic Ocean off Morocco. Coffey says the work represents a conclusion of sorts, that through the three books Fragile Edge, Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow, and Explorers of the Infinite, she slowly divested herself of the emotional burden she carried. “When I finished it, I felt lighter,” she says.

Coffey returned again to Banff late last year for the 2008 Banff Mountain Book Festival as a featured speaker, to present Explorers of the Infinite. The book had been named one of the “Books of the Summer” by O the Oprah Magazine, and she would take a break from four days in Banff to fly to Chicago to do an interview with Oprah for the Soul Series webcast. Then she was off to the Galapagos Islands to lead another tour, part of the adventure travel business, Hidden Places, that she runs with Goering. She’s not sure which literary project she’ll take on next, but she says the return to Banff was “joyful.”

“I have a feeling that I’ve really completed something,” she said a few days after her reading. “I’ve brought the book home.”

Maria Coffey greets the morning on a Hidden Places kayak trip.
Photo: Dag Goering.