Charlie Wittmack plays with his son James at Raccoon River Park in West Des Moines in mid-August.
Hi gang, Rick Ostler here from North American Waterway bringing you Used Pontoon Boats along with news and views from the boating industry. At heart, Charlie Wittmack is a storyteller.
He tells stories about bicycling across the country, about climbing Mount Everest, or spending a summer at Yosemite National Park, where he lived in a pickup truck and made a living telling climbing stories to tourists.
So, before the 31-year-old Des Moines man attempts this week to become the first American to both climb Mount Everest and swim the English Channel, here’s a Charlie Wittmack story:
It’s a story about the man who will accompany Charlie on his 21-mile swim across the world’s busiest shipping lane - the man charged with ending Charlie’s dream if the swim becomes too dangerous or celebrating alongside him if he reaches France.
“We had a pontoon boat,” Charlie begins this story. “I was either 16 or 17. My friends and I had taken it out for the Fourth of July. We watched the fireworks go off down by the Statehouse and listened to the symphony and all that by the river. Then we pulled up the anchor and went to turn the engine on. And the motor didn’t work.
“The pontoon boat is going toward the dam. We’re all freaking out, drifting toward the dam, about ready to go over. Everybody was just beside themselves.
“And all the sudden, from the shore, my dad had just driven up. He yells, ‘Charlie!’ We look over, and there’s my dad standing there. We said, ‘The motor’s not working on the boat!’ He’s just calm as can be, like nothing is happening at all. He picks up his cell phone - and nobody had cell phones back then - and he calls somebody. And next thing you know there’s this boat, down to rescue us.
“My dad just always made me feel that I could try anything, because I had this awesome backup. It makes you probably a little overconfident when you have parents like that.”
As Charlie sees it, his story is a story about fathers and sons. Everyone else sees Charlie Wittmack’s story as one of a man obsessed.
A few of Charlie’s obsessions:
• In fifth grade, he decided he could turn his BMX bike into a paddlewheel boat. That wasn’t enough, so he made the paddlewheel BMX fully convertible into a snow sled. He won an award for Iowa’s best invention.
• As an adolescent, in between playing so many video games of “The Legend of Zelda” that his fingers blistered, Charlie spent a year trying to build a laser. That didn’t work, but he figured out how to put the microphone from his dad’s old tape recorder into the telephone to record conversations.
• At 14, Charlie decided he liked bicycles. He got a job at Barr Bicycle and learned every last detail about fixing bicycles. He filled his parents’ garage with a dozen bikes and learned to ride a unicycle.
• In high school, a girlfriend told him she wouldn’t kiss a carnivore, so Charlie gave up eating meat. For 12 years.
• At the University of Iowa, where he majored in art history, Charlie started an adventure tourism company, Adventure Consulting, which organized climbing trips around the world. He worked so much that he nearly flunked out.
• During his first day at a law firm in Washington, D.C., Charlie sat next to a woman. That night, he called his father. “I just met this girl that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with.” No matter that the woman, Cate, already had a boyfriend. He took her to dinner. They talked of his desire to go into politics. “Politics can be a really hard life,” she said. “Yeah, we’ll be all right,” he said. “What did you say?” she said. “We’ll be all right,” he repeated. “You mean, you’ll be all right,” she said, calling for the check. “We’ll see,” he said. That was September 2001. By November, he had Thanksgiving dinner with her family.
And then there was Charlie’s biggest obsession: the 29,029-foot summit of Mount Everest that he had dreamed of since he was a child.
To a less driven person, Charlie Wittmack’s obsessions may seem impossible.
“I’m always motivated by things that could be really bad if you don’t do the proper preparation,” he says.
“You’re motivated to train to be able to climb Everest well because you know for every five people that make it to the summit, one person is going to die trying. … So it’s just this kind of obsession. All you think about is failure. That’s what fuels it.”
Charlie started climbing as a teenager, when friends took him to the 25-foot Clark Tower in Winterset.
He scaled bigger and bigger mountains: El Capitan, Mount McKinley, Mount Kilimanjaro. After seven years of climbing, he needed to tackle Everest.
He quit his job in Washington and moved back to Des Moines. He trained up to eight hours a day, running the stairs of the 35-story Ruan Center, creating ice waterfalls on the Mississippi River so he could practice scaling them.
He raised money toward the $20,000 it took to climb Everest - for permits, oxygen tanks, Sherpas, yaks, food, plane ticket. When Charlie was short of money, his father was there to help him out.
Charlie flew to Katmandu, Nepal, in March 2003, hiked 50 miles to a base camp and then began the three-month ascent of the world’s highest peak.
He climbed into the Valley of Silence, where hurricane-force winds pass above but silence envelopes the inside of the bowl. He passed above 25,000 feet, known as the “death zone” because there’s not enough oxygen to sustain human life.
“It’s such a tall mountain that the elevation itself will kill you,” Charlie says.
“It’ll do it one of two ways. The first is called a pulmonary edema. Your lungs fill up with your own bodily fluids and you literally drown to death. The second is where those same fluids will go up into your skull and crush your brain.”
The weather was terrible on Everest. Near the top, teams from France, Canada and India turned back, saying weather made the climb impossible.
Charlie and a Sherpa pushed on. Nearing the summit, he spent three days without food, two days blinded by snow, one day without oxygen. His tongue swelled like a balloon from dehydration.
He made it to the south summit: 300 yards to go. But he’d run out of ropes and screws. He could go no further. Then seven Sherpas arrived, coming up the trail Wittmack had broken.
“They gave us this yellow-brick road to the top of the world,” Charlie says.
On May 22, 2003, Charlie Wittmack raised the Iowa flag on top of the world.
At age 26, he had achieved his life ambition.
So what next?
Time to settle down. Two months after climbing Everest, he proposed to Cate. Went to the University of Iowa law school. Got a job at a premier Des Moines law firm. Bought a house. Had his first child, Charles James Wittmack, his family’s 18th Charles in a row.
But settling down was not in Charlie’s constitution.
He needed a new obsession. Something dangerous. Something impossible.
How about this for impossible: The “Peak and Pond.” Climb Mount Everest, swim the English Channel.
Sound tough? Fewer than 3,000 people have reached the top of Mount Everest. Fewer than 800 people have swum the English Channel. And only three have done both: a Briton, a Mexican, and a Greek. No Americans.
Climbing Everest was made for someone with Charlie’s wiry body type. Swimming the English Channel was not. On the mountain, his short limbs meant easier circulation. His low body mass meant using less oxygen at higher altitudes.
In the water, 5-foot-8, 148-pound Charlie will wish he were tall and bulky. Long limbs make better swimmers on the 21-mile route that, with tides pushing you out, ends up being 30 or 40 miles. Bulkier swimmers are less susceptible to cold waters.
This is not to be taken lightly. People die swimming the channel, and hypothermia is the cause in 80 percent of failed swims.
None of this fazes Charlie.
“It’s like being a good law student, or a good lawyer, or a good spouse, or a good father, or a good adventurer,” Wittmack says.
“You have to decide you’re going to do something. And then you have to do it every day. It’s like fatherhood. You have to be there every day.”
So, every day this summer Charlie has been swimming three or four hours. On weekends he has driven to the Great Lakes for practice swims. He’s tried to gain weight with a diet of two doughnuts and two 2,220-calorie shakes daily, plus nuts, avocados, steak and candy bars.
A week ago, Charlie, his wife and their 6-month-old son hopped on a plane to England.
In his first practice swim in the channel’s 60-degree water off Dover, he couldn’t move his legs after an hour. Other channel hopefuls told Wittmack he should have gained another 50 pounds.
He figures the odds are against him. His father, Charles “Art” Wittmack, chairman of Neumann Brothers Inc. in Des Moines and an avid sailor, will be in a boat alongside Charlie, watching the weather and the ever-changing tides.
If Charlie gets too cold, it will be up to his father to pull the plug. He will watch for hypothermia signs: less kicking, different coloration in Charlie’s back, inability to answer questions.
They’re taking all the precautions: Charlie’s father-in-law, a physician, will be aboard the boat. They will have a defibrillator available, just in case.
Like a politician trying to tamp down expectations before the Iowa caucuses, Charlie gives himself a one-in-10 chance of finishing the swim, which he figures will take about 12 hours.
“I only participate in sports where the odds are severely against me,” Charlie laughs. “What’s the point otherwise?”
But if Charlie does make it, he will have company at the end:
Art Wittmack, 60, hopes to jump in and swim those final strokes alongside his son. And Charlie Wittmack’s wife and son will be waiting on the shore for the conclusion of his latest obsession. Thanks to REID FORGRAVE for this; Charlie’s mighty obsessions: Iowan to attempt English Channel swim | DesMoinesRegister.com | The Des Moines Register
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I can’t wait for fall! Did I mention that I love life and just can’t wait to experiece more and more of it.
