THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 41
sions of themselves. A guy like Tate,
in spite of the affectations, helps them
figure out who they might be.T
ate and Anker began pitching the
idea of a “wellness initiative,” a
comprehensive approach to mental
health, for the North Face team. But,
by this past fall, the company was in
the midst of some upheaval. It was
moving its headquarters from the Bay
Area to Denver, into the same build-
ing as its parent, the Vanity Fair Cor-
poration, the owner of more than a
dozen brands, including Timberland
and Vans. More than half of the North
Face’s workforce wouldn’t be makingthe move. The turnover and the tran-
sition gummed up whatever momen-
tum there had been around the initia-
tive. “For now, it’s kind of bespoke,”
Arens told me. The new executives
didn’t know Tate, and the idea of build-
ing a company-wide program around
a single character, especially one like
Tate, with a practice based seven hun-
dred miles from Denver, was not eas-
ily digestible to what one climber in
Puerto Rico had half jestingly called
“the corporate fucks.”
“‘Chaos’ is too liberal or romantic
a term, but there’s some tension in the
organization,” Tate told me. The new
global head of marketing had comechosen through the years to avoid.
And yet before long I felt drawn to
him—to his charisma, his sense of
humor, his eagerness to listen, his
over-the-topness. He’d been around.
He had heft. He seemed to be tuned
in to a cosmic thrum. “Within the
first seconds of sizing each other up,
you just know,” Sam Elias, a climber,
said. “He’s the elder in the tribe who’s
modelling for the younger people in
the tribe. He is proof that it’ll be O.K.
in thirty-plus years.”
Although tropes like the hero’s
journey, or the pitfall of persona, did
not seem immediately germane to my
meek and cynical urban existence,
they struck a note with this adven-
turesome, big-horizon crowd. The
mountain people routinely and pur-
posefully put themselves into states
of extreme privation—exposure to the
elements, and to gravity and chance.
Days, even weeks, in a tent or a biv-
ouac, the hours empty of all but numb-
ing chores and the howling of the
wind. Occasional, life-defining epics
of survival or attainment, stumbling
half blind through storms, all hope
lost, along with some fingers and toes.
Ecstatic or even numinous encoun-
ters at the edges of the earth. To such
people, the Crow Sun Dance, or the
ordeal of the vision quest, or Bud-
dhist principles of nonattachment and
transience might be more than met-
aphor. The hero’s journey is a better
description of a doom-hounded or-
deal up and down a sacred peak in
the Karakoram than of, say, a prod-
uct rollout or a takeover war.
In the elements, performing tasks,
the climbers achieve a narrowness of
focus—a lizard-brain braid of adren-
aline, expertise, and choice—that be-
comes a demented kind of medita-
tion: Zen, on ice. Tate told me, “The
challenge for each of them that I’ve
met is how do you live a life of moun-
tain sport and then return to your
community and your relationships.
It’s a little like soldiering. The ab-
sence, when you go home, of that in-
tensity, that danger, that high-stakes
energy, that camaraderie.” Back home,
as high-country conquerors and life-
style salespeople, the climbers tell their
stories, over and over, until even they
risk coming to believe in these ver-
“Hold on—your boarding pass says ‘possum,’
but your passport says ‘opossum.’ ”