Left for Dead (24 page)

I could be very frank with them. Most people don’t want to tell you what’s really going on in their lives. Looking around, it is easy to think that everyone is okay
but
you. That’s just not true. If you really sit down in a soul-baring discussion, everyone has her little story to tell. And I think the stories can be shared without male-bashing and-slamming. I suspect the same thing is true for men.

I could not, however, confide in anyone else, particularly my family. Even Howie would not have understood. This was a challenge I’d face with a lot of help from my friends.

Our discussions would start with, “
I
would
never
let my husband do that!” I’d say, “Well, tell me how to stop it! I’m open.” Pretty soon it became “My husband doesn’t do
that
, but let me tell you what he
does
do.”

I built emotional bridges to these women, my buddies, because I needed to talk. I needed to express my confusion and my anger. And in the process, I discovered that
everybody
has problems. You realize everyone has a different twist; we’re all plodding along the same road with slightly different stories.
Father Knows Best
doesn’t exist and, for us, neither does Prince Charming.

Another woman I knew was going through a divorce. Someone else had a total breakdown; I was really surprised because I would have thought this woman was one of the strong ones. Still another had a control-freak husband. We saw one’s husband in a restaurant with another woman. Another’s husband was having a long-term affair; I’d thought she had the strongest marriage of any of us. One was having a ton of problems with a younger brother whom she and her husband had to support.
Another one, who really wasn’t a friend, revealed her husband was an alcoholic and had to have an intervention.

The perfect marriage probably doesn’t exist. As with kids, you’ve got to work at it, even if working at it seems to get you nowhere, the way it got me nowhere. I still preach that, because I don’t want people giving up too soon.

Our after-Aconcagua dinner and party was held in Mendoza. We went to a nice place just a few blocks from our hotel, and drank a whole lot of
cervezas
. One of the guys had a jug of Jack Daniel’s and we passed that around.

Dinner was over by eleven or twelve. The sane members of our group headed for the hotel. The three or four who remained, including myself, voted one more for the mountain. I was already more than moderately buzzed.

One of the guys, my roommate, drank a layered parfait thing and started baying at the moon. We’d invaded a quiet, family bar, as I recall, and there he was, holding on to the rail with both hands, baying at the moon. I thought maybe it was time for me to leave.

Besides being inebriated, I was night blind. Within five minutes I also was lost. An hour and a half later I wandered into a bus station I recognized as our point of departure from Mendoza to the mountain several days before. I had the sense to get a taxi cab for the brief ride to the hotel and my room, where I discovered that my parfait-quaffing roomie had vomited everywhere.

So much for the romance of the high country.

For me our boozy revel around Mendoza was not the trip’s true exclamation point. That had occurred the night before at the ski lodge. After we walked out the twenty miles from Plaza de Mulas, we enjoyed a good dinner at the lodge and drank some mescal that could take the enamel off your teeth.

We all then got in the sauna and sat there swapping mountain stories. At one point, I turned to Ricardo and asked him what it takes to try Everest. He casually answered, “Well, somebody like you could do it.”

A little light went on. This was a watershed moment.

So far my interest in mountain climbing hardly had been dilettantish; I had worked very hard and prepared well for each climb. But now, uncharacteristically big dreams started crowding into my consciousness. Depending upon your perspective, this was the beginning, or the beginning of the end, for me.

My thoughts quickly focused on two connected objectives. I decided that I would point my training and my climbing toward the ultimate goal—Everest—and in the process attempt what Dick Bass and very few others had so far accomplished, the Seven Summits Quest. Bass had accomplished the Seven Summits in four years. With a huge dose of luck, I thought, the inconceivable might become reality and I would join that elite circle.

Such grand plans were highly unusual for one so cautious. I can account for the departure on a number of levels. First, my depression was by now fading. It hadn’t vanished altogether—I
still felt dreadful most of the time I was home—but it was not nearly the same crushing presence it had been, and I believed the mountains were responsible for that. Although my response to the depression surely added to my family’s pain and my estrangement from them, it could reasonably be argued that mountaineering saved my life.

I also had discovered how much I enjoyed the company of high-altitude mountaineers. They have traits in common that I admire. For example, this kind of climbing entails misery. There’s not a lot of bitching and carrying on. They also tend to be fairly driven, and usually they’re successful at whatever their life’s work might be.

It takes a lot of effort and mental maturity to climb a big hill. It is not something you do on natural gifts alone. You’ve got to learn the skills. High-altitude climbers must enjoy putting themselves in situations where they’re not sure how they’re going to respond. It is one of the most intriguing aspects of this type of climbing. No matter how good you are, you’re never sure you can do it. You’re testing yourself. You hope you will be honorable, that you won’t fall apart, that you’ll maintain, that your courage won’t desert you, that you’ll give fully of what you have. But you don’t know until the moment of truth. At some level you fear that when tested you’ll prove a person of little character, nothing but a coward.

Third, I had handled Aconcagua with ease. This was a big mountain, and every time it challenged me—as on the Caneletta—I had plenty with which to respond. I felt strong. Moreover, I had gone to nearly 23,000 feet without experiencing
a single problem with altitude. Objectively, I could agree with Torrez that I seemed to have enough of the right stuff to try Everest.

Fourth, not unlike most males, I needed to measure myself against something concrete and external, like a mountain. Earlier in my life, I’d collected degrees and certificates, and accumulated numerous high-gloss artifacts of the good life. Now I had bolder, and grander, aspirations.

Had I been emotionally whole I would have recognized that last sentence was nonsense. There was stark incompatibility between my risky pleasure seeking and my responsibilities as a husband and father of children. Rationally, that is not a difficult concept to grasp. But if you are blind to the natural imperatives of fatherhood, if like me you cannot see how your family vitally requires you, then it’s a relatively simple thing to desert them. After that ego stroke from Torrez, if I
genuinely
had a better opinion of myself, there would have been no need to climb any more mountains.

Instead, I was not to be deterred.

I had been training approximately eighteen hours a week, not really understanding much about the business of getting into top shape. As a result, I probably had done myself as much harm as good. Both my shoulders ached all the time, and I could not sleep on my left side. One knee was gimpy as hell from arthritis. I could barely run five miles on it.

I gradually decided I was incapable of real strength. I didn’t know if it was my muscle fiber or my frame or whatever, but I worked harder than anyone ever seen in that gym and yet I rapidly plateaued at a pretty pitiful level of strength. The max
I could bench-press was maybe 210. Small girls bench-press that kind of weight. I have real tiny bones.

Furthermore, I now faced an unusual problem of bulk that I was unsure how to address. I knew from my conversations and reading that most climbers lose about thirty pounds on Everest. Since I weighed about 150 pounds at the time, I was clearly too slight. Somehow, I needed to increase my weight by one fifth, and those extra pounds had to be all muscle or I didn’t stand a chance on Everest. Plus I wanted endurance. On a mountain, you want to be able to destroy your muscles and then use them the next day.

Oddly enough, it was Peach who found my solution for me.

In 1990, I was diagnosed with osteoporosis. Part of my doctor’s program for me to add bone mass was weight training, which I began with the help of Brent Blackmore, a personal trainer. Within two years, I had completely restored my bone density. Brent is a very careful and accomplished trainer.

Over that same period, I watched as Beck gradually destroyed his body. He was working out eighteen hours a week and going lame in the process. He believed that no pain equalled no gain, which added up to no brain.

I recommended that he try a trainer. Beck said personal trainers were for sissies, or something to that effect. But I kept after him until one day he reluctantly agreed to go see Brent.

Beck couldn’t understand why Peach had to have a personal trainer. She finally told him, “Well, I’m not the one who’s injured, am I?” Beck already had messed up both his rotator cuffs, probably by trying to lift too much, with poor technique. He was recklessly trying to get stronger.

Peach said to me, “Would you be willing to work with my husband, Beck?”

I’d never met him. She set up the appointment for 9:00
A.M.
on a Saturday, and he reluctantly came to see me.

He said he was training for Everest. I’d never trained a mountain climber before, nor had I ever worked with an adult athlete getting ready to take on something so big. It was a big challenge.

After the first workout, he left without saying a word.

Frankly, I thought personal trainers were for bored housewives. Brent and I sort of eyed each other. He was obviously fit, practiced what he preached, but I still didn’t really believe I needed this stuff. When he was done with me that first day, I was just about able to get to the car before I threw up.

In the middle of the next week, Peach asked me if I had time to work with Beck again.

He came in, worked out, walked out and didn’t say anything.

Peach had set up a third appointment for him. Finally, he asked me himself if I could train him.

Beck wasn’t in very good shape. If I recall, at the time he had to sleep on his left side because his right shoulder hurt so much. He had to put a pillow between his side and his right elbow. If he rolled out of that position, he’d wake up in pain. His right knee bothered him, too. There were certain exercises we had to avoid at the start.

After a while, Beck said, “You know, it’s a long way from Saturday to Saturday. Can you work with me during the week?” So we started doing 5:30
A.M.
workouts on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I really beat him up, and I showed him he could do more in three hours a week than he had been doing in eighteen. He discovered that he was so sore on Wednesday mornings after working with me on Tuesdays that he couldn’t get out of bed to go work out, as he usually did. Beck was also afraid of working out Wednesday nights because he was to see me Thursday morning.

The approach we used is called muscle setting, or working opposing muscle groups in the upper body. For instance, after warming up he’d start by pushing, doing bench presses to complete muscle failure. Then I’d take him to a back exercise that was a pulling motion, like rowing. Those pulling muscles had been relaxed, resting, while he was doing the pushing motion. We’d work them to failure.

We’d just go back and forth like that, and do the same thing with his legs. We’d go from machine to machine and lift weights that whole hour. We’d never stop. He really worked hard. I
made him focus, think about what his muscles were doing. Slowed him down, made him feel the weights.

He’s the best student I ever had. Very determined.