Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure by Mimi Zieman
Falcon Guides, 2024
Even before readers turn the first page, they’ll understand that Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure, a memoir by Mimi Zieman, MD, is a chronicle of bravery, risk-taking, and perseverance against all odds—a story of resilience and survival. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the question of survival pertains only to a perilous and unprecedented expedition on a treacherous face of the earth’s highest mountain or that the icy summit of Everest was the locus of the author’s bravery.
Ostensibly, it’s the story of a twenty-five-year-old medical student, a former dancer, who in 1988 signs on to be team doctor for a group of climbers attempting to do what no one had done before—scale the remote East Face of Everest without the help of Sherpas or the use of supplemental oxygen. Zieman’s meticulous planning prepared her to ensure the climbers’ were well-nourished and to treat frostbite, injuries, high-altitude sickness, and infections. It hadn’t prepared her for the moment she describes in the book’s opening pages, when it appears increasingly likely that three of the climbers have been lost in the Death Zone—the elevation above 26,000 feet where no climber had ever survived more than three days without supplemental oxygen. Six days after they ascended toward the summit, and three months from the beginning of Zieman’s journey to Tibet, she and a fourth climber who’d been forced to turn back due to altitude sickness sat in the dark on the Kangshung Glacier with the team photographer in dwindling hope that their friends hadn’t perished. They waited for dusk, when they again could scan the distance for a glimpse of the climbers returning down the face of the mountain, knowing there was no possibility of a rescue if there were no sighting.
Zieman’s narration so sharply captures the terror and the extraordinary setting that I read breathlessly, imagining the bitterness and blackness of the interminable night, certain I could feel her erratic heartbeat, hear her teeth chattering, and her whispering, “Be strong, come back.”
But riveting as that narrative is, the deeper story is about the life she led before and the experiences that brought her to the vertex of the world, about how she found the courage to put herself in a position that might cause her to have to face such pure dread. The memoir is as much a coming-of-age story as a heart-stopping tale of adventure. The boldness required by the Everest expedition was like a muscle that had been built years earlier and put to the test again and again in more ordinary circumstances. Zieman’s backstory makes it clear that the book’s subtitle is misleading. Everything in her life had primed her for the ascent of the mountain—each time she pushed a boundary, overcame a fear (of which she had many), and did what she was certain she could never do. Climbing Everest was, in fact, an entirely likely adventure.
That ability to stare down dread may have been baked into her bones, the genetic or genealogical inheritance of a family driven by strife. After WW2, her father—who’d discovered that Nazi collaborators gathered his parents and siblings, along with others from their shtetl, and shot them in the woods—was a slave laborer in Siberia. Her maternal grandmother fled from Germany to Palestine in 1933, returning after the war, and was the family’s first to seek freedom by immigrating to the United States, traveling alone from Munich to New York in 1956. Zieman’s parents followed the next year.
Despite being from this family of risk takers, wanderers, and survivors, Zieman felt boxed in by the pressures of her immigrant family and Orthodox community—expectations about how she should look, how she should behave, and to what she should aspire. She began dancing lessons at the age of two, but it wasn’t until she saw A Chorus Line when she was in high school that the desire for a career as a Broadway dancer began to burn in her. Yet self-doubt coupled with family disapproval dashed her hopes. She took the safer more acceptable route: college. Still, she writes, “Expectations felt like a duty.” After trying and failing at a series of summer jobs, she pushed against the standards of her family and community and applied for a summer course in field biology at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado, where she discovered the lure of mountains. Set by then on a career as an OB/GYN, she chose to travel to the Himalayas—alone—before starting medical school. Laying in her sleeping bag “filling with dread,” she was on the first leg of a series of adventures with unimaginable hardships and brushes with danger that tested her mettle and forged the steely determination it would take not only to climb Everest but eventually to become a feminist doctor who advocates for reproductive rights at a time in which doing so is increasingly fraught with danger.
As it would be a mistake to see Tap Dancing on Everest as purely an adventure story, it equally would be an error to imagine Zieman as intrepid. On Everest and in her daily life, Zieman had never been fearless. She was flooded with fright. And those more down-to-earth fears form the spine of her memoir—the fears that paralyze us and stem from feeling inadequate. The book is as much about the fear of disappointing her family, for example, as it is about worrying whether in a crisis on Everest she’d fail when she was needed most. It’s as much about the courage it takes to escape the should and musts of her life, to break free from oppressive expectations and responsibilities, as it is about the backbone it takes to go where few have ever gone. Her family was “stitched into the seams of her backpack,” she writes. “I needed to loosen those threads to find my own lines.” But in those threads she also found strength and inspiration. Thinking of her grandmother stitched into those seams, she writes, “I thanked her for introducing me to dance and what it is to have a voice and take up space. I thanked her for giving me an early lesson in feeling alive.”
Zieman demonstrates, in her ordinary life as well as high above the world, that courage isn’t the absence of fear, but the ability to move forward into the unknown despite fear. Her memoir, too, is about the rewards of taking such leaps of faith.
Tap Dancing on Everest, ultimately, is about the drive to find one’s center—one’s true path—and gathering the courage to follow it, no matter the risks or obstacles.
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B.K. Jackson is a writer, editor, book coach, and founder of Severance.com, a magazine and community for adoptees and people who’ve experienced DNA surprises. She’s written for publications including the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, The Sun, and WIRED. She’s developing an anthology and is writing a memoir about family secrets.