![]() It was autumn, a vicious and unpredictable time of year. “I’m scared.” He swung the camera around to face himself: 30 years old and a slim 5-foot-4, alone in a field of crevasses, grimacing and breathing raggedly, with no oxygen tank, as his boots thudded into fresh snow. “I can see the summit,” he said in Japanese, in a video recorded in 2012, during his fourth unsuccessful attempt to climb Mount Everest. James Ryerson is a senior staff editor for The Times’s Op-Ed page and the Ivory Tower columnist for the Book Review.įor Nobukazu Kuriki, the mountaintop was forever just out of reach. Five years later, as an infantryman in the United States Army, Bromberger returned to Europe for the invasion of Germany, where he reckoned firsthand with the fate that he and his family narrowly avoided. From there they obtained passage on a ship bound for New York City, which would become their new home. With this paperwork in hand, the Brombergers were able to reach Portugal safely. The refugees’ passports were gathered up en masse, taken into the consulate and stamped with the necessary visas. “The line ahead of us seemed impossibly long, did not seem to move, and the Germans were presumably on their way.” “I can still feel our fear and despair,” Bromberger recalled nearly 60 years later. The situation, however, did not look promising. The Brombergers were desperate to acquire visas that would allow them to travel to Portugal. But now France had surrendered to Hitler, and Bayonne, too, would soon be occupied by German forces. They fled to France the month before, shortly after Germany’s surprise attack on Belgium. On June 22, 1940, a 15-year-old Belgian Jew named Sylvain Bromberger and his family found themselves in a crowd of fellow refugees in front of the Portuguese consulate in Bayonne, France. His forthcoming book, “Ninety or Nothing,” is about an attempt to reach the North Pole. Michael Paterniti is a contributing writer for the magazine and a GQ correspondent. Even in her baby picture, you can see it: from the optical illusion of white mist around the moon-faced child, those dark eyes, ovoid and aglitter, reaching through and beyond the lens, her spirit already in fast forward. It was her superpower, this blur, and it’s what drove her from place to place, lover to lover, world record to record, stunt to stunt. (Her mother, in fact, gave permission for the laundry-chute drops.) She lived her life - all the many lives in one - in a constant blur. ![]() We must imagine the child’s excitement, picking up speed as she drops, the adrenalized feeling of velocity and acceleration, of near-free-fall, and then, energetic bundle that she is, shooting back into the light, in a blur, the dirty laundry acting as an airbag, the yelp of joy as she lands on earth again.įrom the start, there was nothing illicit about O’Neil’s daredevilry. ![]() In the upper reaches of her grandparents’ Texas mansion, she climbed through the trap door of a laundry chute, hovering between brightness and the dark industrial maw, then simply let go. The very first stunt performed by Kitty O’Neil - or at least the first one she could remember - came when she was 4 years old.
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