Voyager: Travel Writings (36 page)

Back in November, when I had the self-confidence, the chutzpah, to sell Tom and Gregorio on the idea of making this trek, it was on the assumption that I myself could successfully climb these passes and mountains. But if I couldn’t actually do it, I’d be exposed as an old fool. And there’s nothing worse than being an old fool. Climbing Renjo-La tomorrow would be a crucial, self-defining test for me. And unless I passed it, my pride and our friendship, among other things, would be impaired. We three might travel together again, but we’d probably not go climbing together again.

We headed out the next morning in darkness and cold, guided by headlamps, locked inside our individual thoughts. It wasn’t long before the sun cracked the horizon and revealed Renjo-La above, a V-shaped notch in a jagged line of three snow-covered twenty-one-thousand-foot peaks, Makalu, Cho Oyo, and Lhotse. I chugged steadily onward and upward at my chosen slow pace, while Gregorio lugged his camera and tripod ahead and set up to film us as we ascended toward him; then, when we passed by, moved ahead again and set up at a farther, higher point. Tom seemed to withdraw
inside himself and climbed in front of me a ways, more or less alone. Our porters, Yam and Prim, carrying two duffels each, had left the lodge at Lungden even earlier than we and were now well out of sight. Gaushal stuck close to Gregorio and helped carry his film equipment. Dambar stayed by me. I couldn’t tell if it was because he thought of me as the old goat, the alpha male and leader of our group, or the pathetic old man who could screw up the entire climb if he fell and broke his leg or back and had to be helicoptered out. The old man might well not make it over the pass at all—too weak, too old—and would have to go down to Lungden by nightfall and return to Namche Bazaar the next day and wait alone for fifteen or sixteen days while the others completed the trek without him.

Dambar continued to natter incessantly on, until again I asked him, somewhat grumpily, to be silent so I could concentrate. He got it this time. He said, “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” and put on a surly sulk, as if to punish me for having hurt his feelings—suggesting that passive-aggressiveness is no more culturally specific than narcissism.

By midmorning Rocket Man was far behind and way below us, a slow-moving ant in the distance. I avoided looking ahead of me and up—it discouraged and depressed me to see how far and high the pass was and how far ahead of me Tom and Gregorio were. After six hours of climbing, my lungs were burning and my thigh muscles were threatening to go into spasm. Also, I was woozy—my brain was oxygen deprived from the altitude—and the switchbacking trail crossed treacherous, icy slabs of shale and slag. The temperature was dropping fast now, and a sharp wind shaved the rubbled face of the mountain. Patches of ice and snow crumbled underfoot. The slabs of shale and slag gave way to large, slippery, bronze-colored boulders. To keep from falling I fastened my gaze to my feet and ignored whatever might be above and ahead of me and how far up the mountain I had yet to climb. I lowered my head and kept climbing, wrapped in profound solitude, as alone as a human being can be. My world was my body, and my body was suffer
ing. Hour after hour, short step by short step, a hitch up and over one suitcase-sized boulder onto another, where I grabbed a catch of diluted breath, lungs rasping, blood pounding in my ears like a locomotive piston at full bore, and then another boulder to negotiate, my steps slowing and getting shorter, and between each step a deep inhalation, a gasp for air nearly emptied of oxygen, until it seemed I was closer to suffocating than to breathing and was barely moving at all.

I was almost startled by my sudden arrival at the pass. Strings of brightly colored prayer flags snapped, crackled, and popped in the freezing wind. Gregorio was filming, Tom was resting off to one side, and Gaushal, Yam, and Prim were grinning and waving, happy to see the old man reach the pass, while Dambar, his sulk now dissolved, celebrated with dance and uninhibited song, and this time I didn’t mind it at all.

In fact, I barely heard or saw him there. I stood with my back to the way I had come and looked out from the high, wind-pummeled pass. Before me the cloudless blue sky opened above a vast snowfield and the Machherma Glacier. Three thousand feet below, a north-running chain of turquoise lakes led to a broad, fawn-colored valley, and beyond the valley the Ngozumba Glacier sprawled from north to south for fifty miles. At the far horizon, carving out great chunks of sky, loomed half of the ten highest mountains on the planet: Lhotse, Lhotse Shar, Makalu, Cho Oyu, and the highest of them all, dark and glowering, the only peak covered in clouds, Sagarmatha, Mount Everest.

It was as if I had emerged from a fallen world far behind and below me and had entered another, purer world from above, from the sky. One climbs a mountain, not to conquer it, but to be lifted like this away from the earth up into the sky. This is what the ancient Buddhists and Incas knew, perhaps what all ancient peoples knew. Climbing a mountain is how one clutches the sky and enters it with one’s body still intact, still connected to the earth, flying through the air with one’s feet on the ground and one’s head and
hands in the sky. It’s a way of practicing, not for dying, but for death itself—a way to greet the gods on their own terms.

I had climbed to 17,677 feet and had crossed over Renjo-La, the first of the three high passes and the first real test of our trek. Feeling no ill effects of altitude, I was confident now that—barring an accidental slip and fall, which of course could happen anywhere along the way, and if it did, would not make me an old fool—I would complete the rest of the trek. My spirits were high, I was even a little giddy, and for the first time found Dambar’s comic routines entertaining, as we traversed the snowfield and rounded the gray, rubble-filled skirt of Ngozumba Glacier and stopped for a moment before beginning our descent to Gokyo, a clutch of low, cut-stone trekker huts and lodges beside the distant lake.

It might get harder and higher over the next sixteen days, but I knew now that as we ascended and descended those upcoming passes and peaks I was going to be made stronger by it, not weaker. I knew that I would make it successfully to the end. Standing here at the eastern edge of Renjo-La Pass with the wind off the high Himalayas in my face and a broad glacial valley sprawling thousands of feet below, I was no longer the anxious, perplexed man who wasn’t sure if he was an old goat or an old fool, and it made me capable of finding poor needy Dambar’s quirky narcissism amusing and culturally interesting. I was able to accept him simply for who he was.

By the time we got down to the hut in Gokyo Tom was suffering the beginnings of altitude sickness: lethargy, headache, chills. Not seriously enough yet to go to a lower altitude, but cause for concern. Gregorio seemed okay, but said he felt drugged and was thinking and moving slowly, as if underwater. I felt fine, a little leg-heavy, but otherwise ready to climb another mountain.

Rocket Man would pull in by dark, four hours after us, his bad knees about to give out, and the next morning, after his first cigarette, announced that he was through and was heading back down to Namche Bazaar. After he departed, Dambar led us on a scheduled six-hour hike from Gokyo up along the Ngozumba Glacier to view
a string of glacial lakes, and that afternoon we climbed Gokyo-Ri, an eighteen-thousand-foot mountain with a twenty-five-hundred-foot vertical approach from the hut. But Dambar may have been right after all, and we shouldn’t have left Lungden for the first pass without the extra day and night of acclimatization. After the long walk to the lakes and climbing Gokyo-Ri, Tom would become truly altitude sick, dangerously so, and would have to descend immediately with Gaushal to lower altitudes for two days and nights to reacclimatize.

He would rejoin us east of Cho-La, the second of the three passes, for the rest of the trek. We would make it to the Everest Base Camp, which was crowded and cluttered with refuse and old used-up climbing gear, as helicopters shuttled back and forth carrying out injured and altitude-sick climbers and the bodies of the ten climbers who had died on the mountain that week. The afternoon we came to visit, 150 climbers were strung along the dark bony shoulders of Everest. It would turn out to be the only depressing day of our climb. We would traverse melting glaciers with five-hundred-foot-deep sinkholes where a year ago there had been hard-packed trails. We would cross Kongma-La, the highest of the three passes at 18,159 feet, and summit 18,195-foot Chhukung Ri, the tallest of the mountains on our itinerary. Gregorio would make his movie, or at least shoot it so that it could be edited later in New York. Inspired by the extremity of the climb and the world that surrounded us there, Tom would draft most of a book of new poems. And I would finish reading
Great Expectations,
but only because I had nothing else to read up there.

The image of that sturdy septuagenarian with the climbing poles whom I’d come face-to-face with on our first day out of Namche Bazaar—the original old goat, as I now thought of him—stayed with me till the end of our climb and beyond. He had been my nemesis in the beginning, my doppelgänger, my feared self, a man too old to be out there climbing in the Himalaya in the company of a much younger person, a beautiful young woman, for God’s sake.
Now, however, I admired that old guy and hoped I was a little bit like him. All he was doing was taking the measure of his absolute physical limitations, marking the nearness of the end of everything, getting as close to that leap into the void as he could while still standing on the planet. He was no old fool. And if he wasn’t, then I was no old fool, either.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The names of some of the individuals in these essays have been changed to protect their identities.

I would like to thank my assistant, Nancy Wilson, for her help with research and in preparing the manuscript for publication. And as always, I am grateful to my agent, Ellen Levine, and my friend and editor, Dan Halpern, for their patient support of this project.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RUSSELL BANKS,
twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.

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ALSO BY RUSSELL BANKS

FICTION

A Permanent Member of the Family

Lost Memory of Skin

The Reserve

The Darling

The Angel on the Roof

Cloudsplitter

Rule of the Bone

The Sweet Hereafter

Affliction

Success Stories

Continental Drift

The Relation of My Imprisonment

Trailerpark

The Book of Jamaica

The New World

Hamilton Stark

Family Life

Searching for Survivors

NONFICTION

Dreaming Up America

The Invisible Stranger
(with Arturo Patten)

CREDITS

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover photographs: Russell Banks in 1962 (age 22) by Peter Schlaifer, courtesy of the author; palm trees © Kasper Nymann/500px

COPYRIGHT

VOYAGER. Copyright © 2016 by Russell Banks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-185767-6

EPub Edition MAY 2016 ISBN 9780062199478

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