Left for Dead (8 page)

The power was full on. His hands were frozen on the controls. His head didn’t move left or right—that changes your depth perception. We grabbed Makalu like a sack of potatoes, ran him over there and threw him in the back of this machine, slamming the door shut. The tail of the helicopter rose up. It did not
lift
up, but it did move forward toward the Icefall, where it plunged out of sight, as did my heart, because I knew he was not coming back.

When I flew over Camp One they tied a rag to an ice ax to show me which way the wind was blowing, and they marked a spot for me to land. I later heard they used Kool-Aid. I saw the one little spot on the snow. It was too slopey, so I just moved a little farther to the left, where I decided to land. I said, “Now, God, you make it possible for me.”

We were between two
big
crevasses. There were only a few feet on either side of the helicopter. The crevasses were dark blue. You could fit a whole house in them. And I found out there were two sick people. I was not giving any attention to them. I couldn’t move my hand from the control, and I didn’t want to move my head. That could affect my judgment. I said, “Only one,” and they finally understood.

I took off very nicely and dropped the guy at Base Camp. But he was not the Beck. So I went back for the Beck.

That mission was specially requested for the Beck. It was
really a very, very difficult mission. There was no room for the helicopter to move if something went wrong. There were high winds—tail winds. You want head winds that give you extra lift.

And I had to land as close as possible to them. To walk fifty meters they need an hour. I only had a few minutes of fuel.

We stood there maybe five minutes. We didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say. And then I heard one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard in my entire life, that
whap! whap! whap!
—the distinctive chop of a helicopter. Long before we could see this thing we could hear it claw its way up that two-thousand-foot wall, once again this same lone man rising into view. He moved up the valley with greater authority.

With the same consummate skill he lay those skids down again. Not waiting, I hot-footed across there and dove into the back of this machine. They slammed the door and one more time the helicopter tail went up and we moved toward the precipice, crevasses gliding by beneath the skids.

We crested the edge and then went screaming down that face with the blades whipping around above us, trying to grab hold of cold, heavy, dense air that would provide lift. The machine felt alive beneath us as it pulled us out of the dive, and we knew we were safe.

We retrieved Makalu at Base Camp and put him back in. We got the copilot and put him back in. We got all the gear that Madan had stripped off this machine, and we put it back in.

That’s when I discovered that when Madan returned to get me, he was flying the Squirrel on just seven minutes of fuel.

Madan is to me the most extraordinary person in this story, because he didn’t know me at all. He didn’t know my family, and he has his own family, for whom he is the sole provider. We were separated by language, by culture, by religion, by the entire breadth of this world, but bound together by a bond of common humanity.

This man will never have to wonder again whether he has a brave heart.

I had a talk with the Beck on the way back to Katmandu. He was very excited, crying and patting me on the back. He was crying and saying, “You saved my life.”

Peach later would write Madan, thanking him again for his extraordinary act of courage in plucking me off the mountain. I later learned from Madan that in all the hundreds of times he had rescued individuals in the Himalayas, this was the first time he’d been so thanked.

Maybe we all just take our heroes for granted.

David Breashears and others told me as we came down the mountain that all those deaths on Everest, and my own unlikely revival, were a major international news story. “Seaborne” Weathers’s battered profile would appear on page one of
The New York Times’s
May 14 editions.

But the tragedy’s resonance outside the climbing community and our families did not hit me until we landed at Tribhuvan. Reporters, most of them Japanese, began banging on the sides of the helicopter the moment we stopped. Flashbulbs were popping like crazy.

I really wasn’t ready to meet the press. I felt and smelled and looked like the inside of an overripe Dumpster, and I had hardly come to terms myself with what had just occurred. Moreover, I was dressed in full mountain gear, boots and coat and all, not the most comfortable getup for a morning press conference in steamy Katmandu.

To my relief, the first person there as the helicopter door opened was David Schensted from the embassy. He introduced
himself and then hustled me past the microphones and cameras and off to the Ciwek Clinic in Katmandu, where an American physician, Dr. David Schlim, would examine me.

While I was at Schlim’s clinic, I also took advantage of my first chance to call home to Peach. Until that moment, she hadn’t been given a clear description of exactly what had happened. I explained that although I was pretty well bunged up, I thought that I was going to be okay. She told me that my younger brother, Dan, who is a physician and at the time was in charge of the emergency room at Medical City Hospital in Dallas where I also practice, was on his way to Nepal. This was especially welcome news: I had begun to wonder how I was going to get home with no hands.

I deeply love my husband and always have. But when Beck left for Mount Everest in March of 1996—he spent our twentieth anniversary there—I decided this was the last time he would run away from us. Beck was living only for his obsessions, and I saw no further hope of making our marriage work. I simply would not live my life that way any longer.

Beck seemed selfishly determined to either kill himself or get himself killed. He’d never admit this, but I think he went to Everest half convinced that he was going to die there. I sensed he was scared, even at the airport. I don’t know that I’d ever seen him really scared before. He didn’t articulate it, but you can just look at someone and tell. The body language, everything.

When Beck went away on these trips we
never
heard from him. Weeks would pass with no word. We all could have been wiped out in a tornado and Beck would not have known.

But this time he kept the lines open. I remember he called home on May 4 to tell us that after a month on the mountain they all finally were ready to climb it. Both Meg and I spoke to him.

I got faxes from him at least every other night. He wasn’t so self-assured. Wasn’t having as good a time. Moaning and groaning a little bit. Mr. Bulletproof was scared, and he needed to communicate. I thought, If you didn’t want to talk to me here, why do you want to talk to me when you’re there? Something about this simply doesn’t make sense to me.

When he didn’t hear back from me, he was concerned. “Why didn’t I hear from you?” Actually, I would type up faxes for him, but you couldn’t always get them through.

Of course, the real question was: Why did he have to do this in the first place?

While Beck was away, I watched a PBS program about this Scotswoman who had died climbing in the mountains. Her husband later took their two children back to the Himalayas so they could see where their mother died.

I remember thinking at the time, Fat lot of good that’s going to do them, telling a four-year-old and a two-year-old, “Mommy’s up there in the clouds.”

I thought, That’ll sure make them feel better. “Mommy was such a brave person.” That’s not going to help them when they fall down and skin their knees.

On Friday night, May 10, I received a brief call from Madeleine David in New Zealand. She said that Beck had not made it to the summit with the rest of the climbers, but that he was fine, and that they all were now coming down the mountain.

There was nothing in her voice to alarm me. Yet after the conversation, I couldn’t sleep. I moved from my bedroom into the den, and slept on the couch the rest of the night.

When she called again the next morning to report Beck was dead, all I felt was shock. My worst nightmare had come true. But I couldn’t respond. It was the same as when you break your leg. Numb. I couldn’t cry. I just kept thinking, Oh my God, what will I do now? My children suddenly had no father, so there was a fair amount of anger there, too.

I was alone in the house with our son, Beck, a junior in high school, who was asleep in his room. Our daughter, Meg, who was in the eighth grade, had spent the night at her school, chaperoning a group of younger children on a sleep-over.

I didn’t want to have to tell either of my children that their father was dead, and so I tried to postpone doing so. Instead of going into Beck’s room and awakening him with the news, I first made several telephone calls.

Instinct rules when a catastrophe strikes. My instinct that morning was to draw in my strength. So I called my brother Howie in Atlanta, and our Dallas friends: Terry and Pat White, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, Jim and Marianne Ketchersid, Linda Gravelle and Victoria Bryhan. I also called Beck’s younger brother, Dan. Most of them came over at once. Through the morning, I reached out to several more dear friends. I needed these people around me.

They were my friends and Beck’s friends, people to whom I repeatedly had turned for help and strength over the past ten years. They were loyal to both of us.

Once they arrived and I had no further excuse for delaying, I
went to my son, woke him up, and told him that his father had been killed. Bub said something like “You’ve got to be kidding.” He didn’t cry. Bub never cries when you expect him to. He always cries later, at the funeral.

I know a lot of people were afraid my Dad would get hurt on Everest. But I really hadn’t paid that much attention. There was nothing new about Dad being gone to climb mountains. I may have had a twinge of foreboding—Everest has a weight that no other mountain has—but to be honest, I think I was somewhat blissfully ignorant.

Then I woke up that morning with these words: “Your father has been killed.” My mom told me and turned away and left the room.

I thought, “All right, weird dream.” Then I realized what she had said. I didn’t know what to feel. More an absence of feeling than feeling. I got up. My mom’s friends were all bawling. I walked around the rest of the morning wide-eyed, my jaw open. I wasn’t in denial, I was just numb.

I remember there was a lot of talk about how to tell my sister what had happened. Everyone agreed that neither my mom nor I should drive, so Mom’s friend Linda Gravelle drove us over to Meg’s school.

My science teacher got me up an hour early. “Your mom’s here,” she said.

So I got ready and went downstairs. Everyone was looking at
me weird. I was like “Okay …” We walked outside, where Mom says, “Daddy died.”

There was a moment of shock, like maybe this was a dream. Then I burst into tears, dropped everything I was holding. I sank down. My brother picked up my stuff, and my mother got me into the car.

We drove back to the house, and I just sat in a chair in the den, like in a dream. It wasn’t really me, but someone watching me. Eventually my friend Katherine Boone came over, and my other real, real good friends filtered over and we all sat in my room. I started saying, “I told him not to go! I told him to stay home! I begged him not to go to Everest.”

A little while later, I was talking to another of my friends, Mariana Pickering, when I heard my mom on the phone saying, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” Then she turned around and said, “Beck’s alive.”

I burst into tears again. Such is my wont. I had this overwhelming feeling then that he’d be fine. I know my Dad. If he lives through the initial thing—whatever it is—then he’s going to hang on, because we’re both really stubborn. If he’d held on to life all night on that mountain, he wasn’t going to let go now.