Left for Dead (10 page)

My strongest impressions during the two days Dan and I spent in Katmandu were of contrasts. One minute I had been as good as dead on that cold, sterile mountain; the next, I was safe and warm in Katmandu, which teems with life.

I remember looking out the window of my ground-floor room into a beautiful garden. There were flowers and birds flying around, a jarring contrast to Everest. One night they held a huge formal party in the garden, very fancy with bright lights. It was a scene of rampant life enveloping me, even as my thoughts turned again and again to the five people I knew pretty well who were frozen dead on Everest.

I also noticed another type of contrast, now that I resembled some creature out of a B horror film. My hands were two huge balls of bandages. My face was red and swollen with black scabs of dead tissue, called eschars, covering my nose and cheeks.

The Japanese in Katmandu utterly ignored me. It was as if I
had not so much as a hair out of place. On the other hand, I recall walking into the hotel hallway where a Nepalese housekeeper was mopping the floor. She took one look at me and froze, her mouth agape, her mop clattering to the floor.

On our second day in Katmandu, after doing an interview with American television at one of the government buildings, I encountered a senior Nepalese official walking with his Gurka guard. I fascinated (or was it repelled?) him. He walked up to within three inches of my face and stared me up and down as if I were some sort of anthropology exhibit. He wasn’t the least bit shy about his curiosity.

Dr. Schlim took one more look at me before we left. While I was at his clinic I was debriefed by Elizabeth Hawley, who’d rumbled up in her old Volkswagen. Hawley is something of a legend as the unofficial historian of mountain climbing in Nepal. Anyone who comes back from the mountains with a story must submit to a detailed grilling.

The Lufthansa flight home—we splurged on first-class seats—was long and, for the most part, uneventful. Dan and I set some sort of high-altitude record for repeatedly stuffing two adults into tiny airliner bathrooms. In Frankfurt, where we had a layover, I was surprised to be approached by a young woman from TV journalist Diane Sawyer’s staff. She asked if I’d agree to a live satellite interview with Sawyer—immediately. I agreed automatically, almost without thinking. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to say no.

Then on to Dallas. As we taxied to the gate, finally home, a fellow passenger who’d been drinking heavily for hours started yelling, “I’m never going to leave fucking home again! I’m
never
going to leave!” He was pretty emphatic.

I toyed with asking why he’d stolen my lines.

As we walked off the plane we were immediately turned through a door adjacent to the gangway. My escort said it would be easier to handle the crowd of reporters if I were willing to ride a wheelchair through the lounge. I agreed to do it.

We met briefly with the press; Bub read a statement my family had prepared. I was just incredibly grateful to be back. I told them it wasn’t Kansas, but it was home.

Peach waited for me in the VIP lounge. Someone from Lufthansa had given me a rose, which I placed in her hand. I saw love in her eyes, but also a look that said, I’m not sure where we’re going to be when we get back to the house. At that instant, all I wanted to do was hold her. I wasn’t thinking of anything else. I wanted to smell her hair and feel her face against mine. I had a sense that I was finally back, no longer just journeying.

I just felt tremendous relief he was home. I was totally unbothered by his appearance. He didn’t look good, but Beck is Beck. I was just taking things in order, one crisis at a time. He’s sick, so let’s deal with that. I must have liked him at some time.

Beck would say that he always loved me. But my definition of love did not include what I felt he’d done to me and especially to our children. If he loved me, I thought, he would never, never, ever have done this.

I had long ago convinced myself that my relationship with my family might be salvageable if I refocused. If I could get the
mountain-climbing part behind me, I believed that we could work it out. Now that the mountain years definitely were over, it was time to test that hypothesis.

On the flight home, the joy at having survived mellowed into a sense of relief I was off the mountain and coming back. But there was apprehension. What about my wounds, the future, Peach? At that point, all were unknowns.

I don’t have a lot of self-confidence, and most of the time I don’t feel that wonderful. Chasing up and down mountains had helped keep that problem at bay.

Now the future had suddenly become very uncertain, and I’m not wild about uncertainty. I worried about being crippled,
how
crippled; how things were going to stay together at work. I realized, too, that Peach had said I was going to get myself killed, or maimed, and here I was!

I was not looking forward to that conversation.

That first evening at home Peach told me the years of climbing and obsession had driven her and the children away from me. She’d had all she could stand, and had decided while I was on the mountain that as soon as I got back into Dallas, she was going to inform me our marriage was over, and that she would then leave.

“Damn you for doing this to me,” she added.

I told her I knew that I was to blame for everything that had happened to me, and that I’d have to bear the consequences. She did not have to stay through this—certainly not out of pity. I’d never blame her for leaving. I’d understand and never, ever speak ill of that decision.

She said, “No, I’m going to give you one year. If you’re a truly different person at the end of that year, we’ll talk about it.”

I decided at that moment that I’d dedicate all my obsession, drive and determination, and by the end of that year I truly would be a different person. Somehow, I’d reclaim not only her love, but the trust I’d lost. Even at that moment I believed Peach still loved me, but the pain in her eyes eloquently expressed her lack of trust in me.

One singular joy of that first day back was a sip of a really fine single-malt scotch, a gift from our friend Dan Lewis. The next day I ate a small bowl of Blue Bell homemade vanilla (not the French) ice cream. It was absolutely wonderful. In the first week home, I went to see the alien invasion movie
Independence Day
with Bub and Meg. As we sat in the darkened theater, they watched the movie as I, sitting between them, stared at my two children and was supremely happy.

Peach was under incredible stress. Anybody we’d ever met in history decided now was the moment to call up and quiz her on something, or try to get involved. They didn’t realize our need for some peace to get control of our existence.

I felt like someone had taken me out and beaten me up. I’d lost the thirty pounds I’d purposefully gained in preparation for climbing Everest. My body was
tired
. I also developed a ripping infection from the IV that had been placed in my right arm on the mountain, an added memento of the climb. It had started to swell and was painful. We didn’t know exactly what the germ was, other than it didn’t respond to a number of antibiotics until we finally found one that worked.

Despite my brother Dan’s opinion, I at first was hopeful I’d only lose the tips of my right fingers, and that the damage to my left hand might be trivial. Perhaps I’d need an amputation down to the first joints or possibly to the palm. But I’d end up with a
working left hand, more or less, and at least
something
on the right.

That was before my hand surgeon, Mike Doyle, ordered a scan that showed both hands were dead; there was no circulation at all. Soon thereafter my right hand began to self-amputate. Greg Anigian, my plastic surgeon, was concerned that the tendons were going to snap. Surgery was necessary
now
.

I began slipping. I was full of medicine. I realized I probably was going to lose both my hands, and possibly wasn’t going to work again. I didn’t know if I were going to be able to continue providing my family an income. That was vitally important to me, because it meant I was contributing. Before Everest, that was one of the ways I rationalized that I was doing something good.

After Beck learned he was going to lose both hands, he asked me, “Will this make a difference to you?”

I said, “Well, no.” But the truth of the matter was that I wasn’t sure.

I grew depressed; not the old black-dog darkness, but what I believe psychiatrists call a reactive depression; in other words, a very reasonable response to a world of problems.

I brooded about a future of being alone, sitting and watching daytime television by myself in a custodial venue. Not an attractive
prospect. I remember being given catalogs for prosthetic devices, looking at stuff to help you turn pages with your teeth. I wondered if I’d ever eat another hamburger, or would I have to take gruel through a straw for the rest of my life? And since I’d become seriously depressed twice before, I was scared of the potential for that to happen again, too.

You could say that I saw a very limited upside to the situation.

It was about then that I realized I needed to do a couple of things. One was not to fall apart. I had to find something to live for each day, to think about. For the foreseeable future, I needed a sense of something concrete that I could do physically.

So, I made a whole series of decisions, mostly having to do with avoiding the pit. I was not going to feel sorry for myself under any circumstance, and I was not going to dodge responsibility for what I’d done and the harm I’d inflicted. I felt pretty guilty. If possible, I was going to redeem myself in Peach’s eyes. Whatever it took, I was going to give it a shot.

I could not then have imagined the avenue to redemption that ultimately opened to me, or the trials that lay ahead for both of us. Suffice it to say that when the shadow of a second life-and-death crisis suddenly fell over the Weathers household that summer, it was my time to give back so much that I’d stolen away.

Dan, Beck and Kit Weathers, 1951.