A Fall Of An Unfortunate Red Shirt

 

Man Dies In Awful Way, Follows Family Tradition Of Dying In Horrible Ways

Vienna (Reuters) It has been said that mountaineering can be an unforgiving way to enjoy the great outdoors. One small mistake can be your last. In the history of mountaineering, there have been many who have died in the face of adversity while trying to gain one more summit. This past week saw another of those deaths, but one with a bizarre background.

Jean Chemiserouge, originally of Paris, had spent the last fifteen years climbing around the Alps, establishing a record as an accomplished climber. Friends described him as best at home while on a cliff, ascending a difficult route. "Jean was a great guy," Marcel Dion told reporters, looking shaken. "Always willing to help out, real humble. Everyone knew him quite well. The jovial, calm and steady Frenchman who was always seen wearing a red shirt, no matter the occasion. I can't believe he's really gone."

Chemiserouge was leading what some advised to be an ill-thought climb, given the time of year. He was ascending the Eiger, a mountain well known to him, but very late in the fall, when the optimal time of climbing on that treacherous mountain is in the late summer into September. "He lived life to the fullest," Dion said regretfully. "We tried to convince him and the others that it wasn't a good idea, but he just wouldn't listen."

There were six in the climbing party. Five survived. Jean Chemiserouge did not. 

They were ascending the Heckmair Route on the North Face of the mountain, described by some as the most treacherous face on the continent. Chemiserouge was taking the lead on an ascent in an area three quarters of the way up when he slipped. His fall arrest gear failed, and he plunged to his death, in full view of his compatriots. What was left of him was found by search and rescue teams down below, and for obvious reasons, the funeral was a closed casket situation.

"A tragic day," Father Alain Javert said with a sigh. "And a family filled with tragedy," he added to this reporter days after the service. "Everyone was in tears. The only funerals I've seen that were sadder than this were those of children, and fortunately those are very rare."

The family has had some dubious distinctions in history, all related around death. Chemiserouge had an Australian cousin who died several years ago, eaten by a cranky saltwater crocodile. One Chemiserouge was said to have been the first French death at the Battle of Agincourt. Another was said to be the very first French settler to die on the North American continent in the New France era by falling into an icy river. 

There was Jacques Chemiserouge, who met the guillotine during the French Revolution. And his son Pierre, who was the first French soldier to die at Waterloo. An American member of the family was the first Union officer to die at the Battle of Gettysburg. Another Chemiserouge was the first to meet his maker at the outset of the Franco-Prussian war. Members of the family drowned in the sinkings of the Titanic, Lusitania, and Empress of Ireland. A father and son, decades apart, had the unusual distinction of being the first French soldiers killed in the First World War and the Second World War.

"I don't know if it's a curse," Javert admitted. "I'd like to say I'm more rational than that. But how does one explain all this death? Over and over and over again? It surely can't be the family habit of wearing red shirts. I mean, yes, that Roddenberry fellow did speak to Jean's grandfather Andre before he started that science fiction series full of red shirts dying horribly, and yes, Andre's death was pretty public, what with being chased off a cliff by angry kangaroos while he was in Australia. But the point is, of all the Chemiserouges to have died in the family's history, not one of them died peacefully in their sleep after a long and well lived life."

Time will tell if it ever happens. There are, at this time, approximately 1500 members of the family scattered around the world, all at least distantly related to each other. "I try not to go out," Michelle Chemiserouge, a sister of the deceased Jean admitted. "I couldn't even attend the funeral. What are we to think? Is the family cursed? Did we do something before living memory that offended God? Is this all some big cosmic joke at our expense? I don't know. All I know is... I don't want to die a horrible death. I don't want to end up like my brother, screaming all the way down to the ground and getting pounded into the earth."