Snowblind (8 page)

Our liaison officer showed up an hour late. He had a daypack, a hard-sided rolling suitcase, a pith helmet, and a swagger stick. When he walked up to the bus, he thwacked it with his stick—I'm not sure whether he was testing its structural integrity or hoping to change it into a Mercedes—and said: “Now we will show the mountains what we are made of, no?”

The heat was alive back there. The sky looked like wet wool, and that's what the air felt like—hot, damp, and rotten. Smothering. It was the Magical Mystery Tour meets the Joads—eleven people and seven chickens packed into a tin box perched on top of a psychedelic bus bumping and grinding through Rawalpindi. Donkey carts held up traffic. Old men with long white beards on bicycles dodged in and out of the gridlock. Entire families with their groceries held on to fifty-cc Swingline motorbikes—dad up front, mom hanging off the back, kids on the handlebars. Some tour busses filled with freaked-out-looking white people lumbered toward Islamabad. Everyone else honked and jockeyed and waved their hands around. It was all a negotiation, like haggling over an apricot at the bazaar. No one seemed to care that they could get where they were going faster if they just got out and walked. I felt feverish. The mid-morning call to prayer echoed out of the mosques. The women in black chattered back and forth and laughed and poked each other's knees through their burkas. They had comfortable seats. The liaison officer sat across from
them with his legs crossed and his arms out and a big grin. He had huge, bright white teeth. He had a comfortable seat. Where had they gotten so much space? I was balled up in a corner like dirty laundry. Bill kept looking around and giving us all the thumbs-up. Gregor had told me that if I was smart, I'd stay up all night the night before. Now I knew why. He was snoring on top of the ropes duffle.

We were on the bus thirty hours. When we got to Skardu, I wasn't even sure I'd be able to walk. For thirty hours, I had been breathing road dust, pot reek, diesel fumes, ripe sweat. Even though it was still damp and hot, the air up there tasted so good. It was like being resuscitated. I stumbled around, just remembering how to breathe. The LO, whose name was Shafiq, but who we all called Captain,
ambled
next to me.

“Mister Chase,” he said. “Are you not very small?” I admitted that I was undersized. “But should you not be a large strapping man like Mister Bill in order to climb mountains?” I told him that Bill would make a bigger target when the mountain started throwing things at us. He chortled, and just for a moment, the buffoon look vanished off his face and he said, “Mister Bill makes a very fine target for a mountain, does he not?” Then it was like he caught himself, and his eyes went dumb and happy again, and he twirled his ridiculous stick and walked away whistling.

Skardu isn't Boulder, but it could be Moab. Restaurants. Gear shops. Guide companies. Tour groups. We had journeyed into deepest northern Pakistan, but it was the least foreign place I'd seen yet. It looked like it should be foreign—up on the hills above town, there were homes that were basically dugouts closed up with sticks—but
town was filled with white people and badly translated Urdu in a bunch of European languages. Eight Norwegian women with short shorts, ponytails, and sunglasses propped on their heads sat in a teahouse on the center street. A German expedition headed the same way as us was making a lot of noise and not very much progress packing porter-loads. An American expedition to Masherbrum was just leaving. Four French snowboarders were planning a first descent on Broad Peak. Some scruffy Poles sat on the ground against a wall smoking cigarettes, and I thought of what Gregor had said and wanted to go join them. But I still wanted to play my part, too, I guess, so I didn't. There were Spaniards walking around arm-in-arm singing soccer anthems—I think that's what they were singing. Big raindrops came down in bunches. There was concrete along the main road, but everything behind was dirt, and then the foothills jumped up into the clouds.

Everything on the main road looked hasty. People and buildings. Unfinished concrete. Jury-rigged electrical wires strung roof-to-roof, hanging down in the street. Back from the road, time ran backward. Go one block, and you stepped back a century. Two blocks, two centuries. Much further, and you lost a thousand years.

With all the foreigners around, there were guys lined up to sell stuff to us—expedition pimps, basically, which is what we called them. Food, porters, gear, vodka, hash. There were porters milling around—hundreds of them, and there still weren't enough. Bill planned on using a hundred and forty porters just for our expedition, and there was no way we were going to find that many in Skardu with all the other expeditions there too.

Nick took out the Pelican laptop case and got to work updating the expedition blog by satellite. Bill ruffled his hair, watched over his shoulder, dictated. He was pleased. “One hundred and eighty-two hits since yesterday,” he announced, which was our cue to clap. Here was a man who owned a goddamn empire, but he was slumming for a couple hundred bored armchair mountaineers to read about his expedition and wait for the mountain to start killing people. Here was one of his principles at work: “The only thing that matters is that it's happening right
now
.” That's Bill. He was always performing, and there was more than one audience. He could be vicious, too. Sometimes he got slit-eyed and furious, and I never knew whether he was playing that or not.

Gregor and I, with Captain Shafiq, had the job of buying porter rations. Hundreds of pounds of dahl, ghee, rice. And six goats. That was important, Frank told me, for morale. What the hell did I know about choosing goats? If expedition morale was going to ride on my goats, I'd have preferred a more experienced goatherd. I had a pouch around my neck uncomfortably stuffed with rupees. Captain told me not to worry. “They will try to trick you, cheat you, bully you, and swindle you,” he said, in his cheerful singsong. “But they will not mug you.” I asked him why not. I mean, wouldn't you? Pale infidels show up in your valley with sweaty wads of money—more money than you'll earn in a lifetime—and they've got machines and gear that might as well be from Mars. And for what? To walk past you and try not to die on mountains. But they could just as easily try not to die on mountains in Skardu. So, Captain, why not? “Mister Chase,” he said, “poverty does not turn men into animals. Meanness
and meaninglessness are what make animals.” And the goofy bastard was right. And I still might have snatched the money.

Negotiations began on a dirt floor in a wood hut with china teacups. Half an hour later, Gregor was snorting like a bull with his hands rolled up into enormous fists, Captain was screaming, eyes bulging, sweat pouring down his face, and the dahl man was crying and invoking Allah, which was the only word I could understand the whole time. In another half hour, we signed a receipt with all the pomp and mutual congratulations of a new-made Palestinian peace treaty. And then we joked back and forth and drank more tea on the ground. When we left, I asked the Captain how we had done. “Who can say?” he said. “It is not your money or my money or his food.”

We spent the night in the K2 Hotel, and the next morning, an aging squad of Land Rovers was ready to take us and our expanding pyramid of supplies to the end of the road—Askole. The road couldn't have been more than two inches wider than the Land Rovers—cliff on one side, air on the other. All dirt and crumbling edges. Then we stopped again and rounded up more porters and more supplies. Feeding an expedition is like some sort of nightmare paradox. For each porter, you need another porter to carry food for the first porter and a third porter to carry food for the second.

I was so antsy, those days. I wanted to
move
. In California, in Canada, Alaska, everything you do moves you closer to the mountain. You can feel yourself pulling closer. But I had been sitting in buses and haggling over goats with bags of money tied around my neck. And all of that was an experience, but none of it felt like mountaineering. I hadn't even been for a run since Banning, let alone done
any climbing. And I could see how the others were dealing with the time—Bill with his commands, read each morning to us from a list he'd made the night before, Frank and Hubert with their mantras and tea, Alan with his big talk and Norwegian girlfriends, Gregor with sleep—the man was amazing, he could sleep eighteen hours a day if nothing was going on. But what did I have to fall back on? All I knew was the climbing itself. I wasn't any good at not climbing.

What I'm trying to say is that I was hardly in my right mind when this big tan Oregonian named Wind came walking up to me in Askole. He'd picked his name himself, he told me proudly, and grown into it. No last name. He had a fuzzy blond beard and fuzzy blond dreads coiling off his head like snakes. He wasn't one for interpersonal barriers—he'd wrap an arm around you just to say “good morning.” His clothes were kaleidoscopic. Like a Pakistani bus. Impossible to tell where the old cloth ended and the patches began. But the stitches were all neat and small. He talked high and quavery, and it sounded all wrong, like size-seven shoes on a six-foot guy. Maybe he was twenty-five, maybe older, I was never sure.

I asked him where he was from. “I started out as a little newt in Camas,” he said. “I've been crawling along ever since.” A newt? What? “Dude, you know, a newt? The lizards that like creeks? They look like fetuses.” No, I told him, they don't. “Sure do,” he said. “Black eyes like glass. Half-webbed fingers. Kind of wrinkled and smooth at the same time. Take another look.” I asked him where all he had been. Up in the hills, he told me. Praying with the monks. What for? He wasn't sure. He hadn't gotten that far. “Those guys are pretty seriously quiet, you know.” For someone so hard all over—he
was a stone tower—his mouth was weirdly wide. It flapped. There was something rubbery about his lips, something gross. Loose lips for making loose thoughts, I told myself. So what was he doing now? “Waiting for you,” he said. But not for me specifically. He was waiting until there were enough people moving up the trail toward the mountains. He didn't have a permit, and he needed cover.

Captain came up to me later and asked me who the man with the dreadlocks in his hair was. I told him he was with the American team going to Masherbrum. Captain suggested that he did not look much like a mountain climber. I allowed that the fellow was unique. “I like you, Mister Chase,” he said. “Please do not put me in a difficult position.” Trouble was, I liked him too. In fact, I liked him better than I liked Wind. But he was a captain or a major or whatever in the Pakistani
army
. His job was to watch us. To make we sure we didn't take pictures of bridges or climb mountains outside our permit or pass messages to India, I guess. And Wind was—what? The pure wanderer. A miracle. He made me feel rooted, attached to my baggage and my position in Bill's machine. What made him so goddamned free? He didn't seem to be struggling at all! I was mesmerized by him. Like suddenly seeing a wooly mammoth.

The next morning, we were supposed to begin walking up the Braldu Valley. Eight climbers, the Captain, and 141 porters. It took us three hours just to get started. All we had to do was give each porter a load, a pair of sunglasses, and shoes. You put a hundred Americans together, and a line just magically appears. We do it unconsciously, without even talking. But a hundred Pakistanis look and sound like three hundred. A scrum of hands and voices, shouts,
laughter, grasping fingers. It was a mob. I thought a riot was on, though I didn't know what for, but in between translating Bill's hollering, Captain assured me it was quite normal.

The valley started out brown and a little green, but huge. Mound over mound of brown river-cut hills, bigger than our mountains. The water looked like dirty silver. Massive and fast. God, we were small in that place. We weren't supposed to carry anything—we were supposed to be saving ourselves for the real work ahead. But it made me uncomfortable to have half-naked locals doubled over with my gear while I strutted around with a daypack and a camera. I wasn't used to anyone doing anything for me in the mountains. I didn't much like it. I wasn't there to be waited on. I live in the basement—by choice, I know—but I didn't know how to behave around someone living below me. When's the last time I even ate at a restaurant? I don't get served. But it didn't bother the others. Frank would've happily let the porters untie his shoes for him in the evening. He was just a half-century late for that treatment. I caught him mumbling “coolies” to himself one day on the trail, trying the sound out in different ways, rolling it around his mouth like he was tasting the word. He shrugged, grinned at me, said that he belonged in a simpler time.

He made my skin crawl, not really so much because he was volunteering his services as a plantation owner, which just seemed outlandish, but because he assumed the white guys were all friends. I wasn't feeling friendly. I asked him how far back he'd want to go. He thought about it for a moment, treated it as a serious question.

“Nineteen twenty-three,” he said. “Imperialism falling apart, sure. That only seems fair. But I'd prefer to call a coolie a coolie
and not pretend otherwise. After the first World War, but with good years to go before the second. A year before Mallory and Irvine died on Everest. The mountains still all brand-new. That would have been the time to be in the Himalaya.”

And I was implicated in this. Wasn't I using the locals the same as him? Sure, shower them with paper currency, Tylenol, antibiotics. If the pills don't work, they can wipe with the paper. Did that change the fact that we were driving them like glorified donkeys?