Voyager: Travel Writings (34 page)

On the sixteenth day, we made it from Camp Two to High Camp, 19,350 feet, the last stop before the summit attempt. Our two backup summit days had been used up when we got socked in below by the windstorm: either we made the top tomorrow or we’d have to try again another year.

The plan was to wake at 3:30
A.M.
and, weather permitting, get to the top by 3:00
P.M.
and return to High Camp by dark. The wind
was steady but not gale force, and the sky was dark, and hard flecks of snow pecked our cheeks. It did not look good.

We were up and more or less ready to leave camp in the predawn dark as scheduled, but Alex was worried about the wind and held us back until, finally—as the sky in the east turned milky white and the stars overhead blinked out one by one—he gave the word, and we bucked into the wind and headed uphill. The craggy top of Aconcagua glowered in the rising sun thirty-five hundred vertical feet above us. The trail switchbacked and curled partly over open scree and partly over snow, passing through fields of
neve penitentes,
or “snow nuns,” as they’re called, head-high columns of white ice left as residue by the melting glacier, and along narrow, windswept ridges with thousand-foot drops on both sides. We were using crampons and ice axes, moving carefully because of the tricky surface and slowly because of the altitude. Barely a month before, four young Argentinean climbers had fallen to their deaths here.

David was working hard, too hard, it seemed. His face was gray and pinched, and his usual running repartee and sly jokes were noticeably absent. I was struggling, too, fighting exhaustion and the cold and the treacherous footing and the altitude. The Inca child was still on my back, but she had grown heavy, as if she had wakened from her drugged sleep and was now afraid of her fate and wanted to go down from the mountain, back to her mother and father in the village far, far below. The condor had released her. She struggled against the straps that held her to my back and tossed her head from side to side, throwing me off balance several times, causing me to trip and nearly fall.

Around 2:30
P.M.
, less than an hour before our turnaround time, we were climbing the Canaleta, the maddeningly loose, rock-studded collar of the summit, when David stopped, all but
collapsing in Alex’s arms, and sat down heavily in the snow and quietly said, “Fuck it. I’m sick.” He couldn’t go on. “Now I know,” he gasped, “what it’s like . . . when the tank is empty.” His head felt stuck with needles, his stomach and bowels were roiling, and his mind was wobbling on its axis. He said that he was afraid he was going to shit his pants.

Alex told us to go on; he would stay below with David. “Turn around at three thirty, no matter how close you are to the top,” he said.

“You going to be okay?” I asked David.

“Yeah, sure. You go on.” His breathing was labored and shallow.

With grave reluctance I put him out of my mind and joined the others making their slow, arduous way up the narrow path toward the top, looming barely two stone’s throws above our heads. I think I’m going to be able to do this, I said to myself. But then two things happened. About three hundred feet from the summit, Ed Chiasson, a cardiologist and the largest man in our group, walking just in front of me, stumbled from exhaustion. He swung around off balance to face me, and the gleaming blade of his ice ax slashed the air between us, grazing my chest as it passed.

“Jesus, Ed! Watch it!”

A house call from Doctor Death, I thought, and felt the blood drain from my face. Ed’s face was expressionless, blank. He hadn’t heard me. I doubt he even saw me. He turned and resumed walking: one step, three breaths; another step, three breaths more; and on, nearer and nearer to the top.

I followed for a few feet, and then—this is the second thing that happened—I pictured David below us, sick and maybe getting sicker by the minute, while he waited with Alex for our triumphant return from the summit. I had utter faith in Alex’s judgment and knew that he would take David down at once if he got worse. But what if that happens while I go on ahead without him? What if David’s brain starts to swell and bleed, what if his lungs fill with water, what if he has begun to die, while I stagger on with the oth
ers just to tag the summit? And what if the next time Ed stumbles, his ice ax tears through my parka into my chest? And, yes, what if I stop climbing now, here, a few hundred feet from the top, while I still seem to have the strength to get there but might not have enough left to get down? If I stop now, what will happen? What will it mean?

It was a Zen decision, which is to say, not a decision. I simply stopped in my tracks and turned and descended to where David and Alex huddled, waiting on the trail, and joined them there, relieved to find that David was okay—still sick but not worse—and sure to improve as soon as we started down.

I didn’t regret turning back so close to the summit, but I didn’t quite understand it, either. An hour later, the others rejoined us, exultant, grinning—except for Ed, who clearly had emptied his tank and had kept going nonetheless. Alex roped us together in a line, with Ed, utterly depleted, in the middle, so that if he fell as we traversed the windblown Cresta del Viento, the treacherously narrow, snow-covered ridge from the Canaleta to the Independencia
refugio
with the darkened Gran Acarreo yawning below, we’d be able to stop his fall with our ice axes.

When we made Independencia, a wind-blocking knob with a small, one-man plywood A-frame beside it, we collapsed in a scattered heap in the lee of the knob to gather strength for the rest of the descent to High Camp. We were slightly behind schedule, and light was fading fast. I lay on the ground a short ways apart from the others and sank into myself, wondering morosely if I had failed to accomplish what I had set out to do—a thing that I had trained to do for a full year and on which I had spent thousands of dollars. I wanted to know, at bottom, how to regard myself. For in the end, wasn’t that the point of a venture like this, to learn better how to regard oneself? One does not climb a mountain because it is there; one doesn’t climb a mountain to conquer it. Perhaps, I thought, one climbs a mountain for the same reason one enters a monastery: to pray.

My thoughts were broken by the appearance of a stranger next to me, a climber with a backpack and parka, crampons and ice ax, just like us, but a young woman and, most strange, alone. She seemed to have come up the mountain rather than down—but why would someone be ascending at this time of day? She sat down beside me and unwrapped a fruit bar and shared it with me. She was a lovely, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties, perhaps, with an easy smile. I asked her why she was here, and in a soft Balkan or Eastern European accent she answered that she was meeting a friend.

“Are you alone, then?”

“Yes, I’ve been here for several days,” she said. “Waiting for my friend.”

I asked her where she was from, and she said Slovenia. Slovenia? I checked my companions a few feet away: They were gazing wonderstruck in her direction. She was evidently not a hallucination—unless we were all having the same vision.

“Did you make it to the top of the mountain?” she asked me.

I shook my head sadly, no.

She smiled. “That doesn’t matter. Beyond the mountains there are more mountains. And the journey is always more important than the arrival.”

I smiled back, comforted by these familiar bits of ancient wisdom. For the first time in my life, I actually believed them. She asked if she could take my picture with her camera. I said certainly. She stood and snapped off a photo with a disposable drugstore camera and calmly turned and left the way she had come.

I felt then an inexpressible peacefulness and remembered Rilke’s line “Every angel is terrifying.” Yes, but to a conflicted mind a true angel is a balm. They’re terrifying only if we don’t believe in them, I thought. A few moments later, my companions and I, without mentioning the mysterious Slovenian visitor—or visitation, as I thought of her—continued our descent to High Camp.

Over the next few days, as we made our way down the side
of the mountain to the Plaza de Mulas and out along the Valle de los Horcones, I spoke with David of the woman I’d met up there at twenty-two thousand feet, and with the others, too. Yes, they had all seen her and had been as startled by her appearance as I. But they had not heard her speak, and no one, other than David, seemed to know that she belonged solely and wholly to the mountain and that she was still up there, waiting at the
refugio
for her friend.

OLD GOAT

T
he stomach-churning Tata Air flight from Kathmandu deep into the eastern Himalaya dropped suddenly between terraced green ridges outside Lukla. Minutes later the Twin Otter DHC-6 skidded to a stop at the Tenzing-Hillary Airport, a landing strip the size of a meadow with a steep, rock-cluttered hill at one end and a thousand-foot drop-off at the other. We quickly gathered our packs and gear and hit the trail north, headed toward the distant, snow-covered peaks.

Though not exactly a walk in the park, the first two days from Lukla were easy—a gradual three-thousand-foot ascent followed by two nights and a day at 11,300 feet in a bare-bones hostel in the crossroads trading town of Namche Bazaar, where we studied our maps and acclimatized slowly to altitude. In our free time we climbed nearby summits, growing new oxygen-heavy red blood cells by climbing higher in the daytime than where we slept at night. It was cold, the nights especially, but clear, and in both moonlight and sunlight the sky-high jagged mountains were sharply detailed, as if my bespectacled eyes had magically regained their perfect youthful sight. The ridges and peaks were igneous wedges out there, not sedimented ledges, and I could almost see the tectonic plates mov
ing, the Indo-Australian Plate plunging under the Eurasian, driving the mountains up into the sky.

It’s said that if the mountains are high enough, you’re likely to meet your feared true self up there, the self that evades you down below. It’s probably one of the several reasons why we do it, climb mountains. And indeed, I came face-to-face with my doppelgänger, my nemesis, in the Himalaya. But not in the thin air of a snow-covered summit. I met him early, on one of the lower slopes, a day out of Namche Bazaar barely halfway to Renjo-La, the first of the three high passes of the Sagarmatha National Park. I must have been looking for him even before I arrived in Nepal. Maybe as far back as a year ago, when I signed on for this monthlong trek and then talked two friends into joining me.

Besides our Sherpa guide, Dambar, and his assistant guide, Gaushal, and two porters, Yam and Prim, who seemed to have been named by Samuel Beckett, there were three of us: Gregorio Franchetti, a twenty-four-year-old film student; Tom Healy, a fifty-year-old poet; and me, the seventy-two-year-old scribbler who’d instigated this trek. Like son, father, and grandfather, Gregorio, Tom, and I are men of three different generations, and we’re close friends. We have climbed in the Adirondacks together, and two years ago we climbed Kilimanjaro more or less to commemorate my seventieth birthday. This, however, was a climb at a whole different level of physical and mental difficulty and risk. And I was two years older. For men the age of Gregorio and Tom, if you’re well made to begin with, and they are, a couple of years’ aging usually improves you. At my age, however, in two years your body can unexpectedly maderize, like an old-vine chardonnay stored at too warm a temperature. All of a sudden, gone. Undrinkable.

On the fourth day of the trek, we were ascending a narrow winding trail, making our way up a long valley gouged into the moraine by an ivory-colored river of ice melt off the Bhote Koshi Glacier. We passed packs of resigned yaks descending from Tibet top-heavy with goods, mostly Chinese knockoffs of high-end climb
ing gear and clothing to sell in the stalls of Namche Bazaar and Lukla to inexperienced trekkers surprised by and unprepared for the cold and the effects of altitude. We were headed for a high-meadow farm settlement called Thame. From there, for the next three weeks, we would steadily make our way deep into the Himalaya, to within three kilometers of Tibet. We would climb half a dozen mountains, three of them above eighteen thousand feet; cross the famed Three Passes, Renjo-La, Cho-La, and Kongma-La, also near and above eighteen thousand feet; visit Everest Base Camp; then trek back down to Lukla and in triumph catch our Air Tata return flight to Kathmandu. That was the plan, anyhow. The hope.

Crossing the Dudh Koshi River on a narrow suspension bridge strung between two cliffs, I meant not to look down at the milky river crashing against rocks five hundred feet below, but then suddenly remembered Thornton Wilder’s scary novel
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
and looked down anyhow. If the swaying bridge, as in the novel, were to inexplicably give way, I wanted to see where I’d be hurled. What I saw down there was a small herd of mountain goats, the brown Himalayan tahr, grazing on the far bank like suburban deer, six or seven females and kids and a large male with a shaggy mane watching over them. The tahr looks like a cross between a goat and an antelope; it’s rare to see them in a herd, especially with the male present.

An old goat, I thought. Like me.

The trail, where we left the bridge, cut sharply uphill, away from the river. Coming down toward us was an elderly man, European or North American, picking his labored, careful way over rocks and roots with climbing poles. Poor guy, I thought. Definitely too old for this. Balance clearly shot, legs trembling, shrunken lungs sucking air even on the descent. Too much vascular hardening, too much lost muscle and bone mass to handle this tough a climb. There comes a point when an old man ought to stay home by the fire, I thought.

But then behind the man appeared a slim, very attractive blond
woman in her early thirties. The old guy drew near and looked me squarely in the face. I looked him back and realized that I was probably the same age as he—a fellow septuagenarian. Neither of us smiled or acknowledged the other. Though we stood and stared at each other for several long seconds, neither of us wanted to see or be seen by the other. We were the same, he and I, and neither of us appreciated the fact. I knew he was hoping that I’d think the young woman was his mistress, not his granddaughter or niece, and that I’d think him an old goat, like the bearded brown alpha-male tahr, and not an old fool. And indeed, I did hope that the young woman was his mistress, not his granddaughter or niece. But I still was not sure he wasn’t an old fool trying and failing to do what’s done best by much younger men. Even—perhaps especially—as regards the young woman coming along behind him. For the first time I saw the problem. Barely four days into the trek and at a relatively low altitude, I’d met my feared true self: a man who could as easily be an old fool as an old goat.