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By the time Linda drove me to the airport she had long since seen through my prevarications. She sensed the true dimensions of my desire, and it scared her. “If you get killed,” she argued with a mix of despair and anger, “it’s not just you who’ll pay the price. I’ll have to pay, too, you know, for the rest of my life. Doesn’t that matter to you?” “I’m not going to get killed,” I answered. “Don’t be melodramatic.”
I’d kill you
I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace.
“With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.”
“If you’re bumming out, you’re not gonna get to the top, so as long as we’re up here we might as well make a point of grooving.” At the moment, however, Scott did not appear to be grooving in the slightest;
Just back from the lip of this chasm, at the Col’s westernmost edge, the tents of Camp Four squatted on a patch of barren ground surrounded by more than a thousand discarded oxygen canisters.* If there is a more desolate, inhospitable habitation anywhere on the planet, I hope never to see it.
Within three hours of leaving the Col, Frank decided that something about the day just didn’t feel right. Stepping out of the queue, he turned around and descended to the tents. His fourth attempt to climb Everest was over.
Boukreev had come down to the South Col hours in front of anyone else in Fischer’s team. Indeed, by 5:00 P.M., while his teammates were still struggling down through the clouds at 28,000 feet, Boukreev was already in his tent resting and drinking tea.
Although a strong climber might require three hours to ascend 1,000 vertical feet, in this case the distance was over more or less flat terrain, which the group would have been able to cover in perhaps fifteen minutes had they known where the tents were.
‘Look, this is an emergency. People are dying up there. We need to be able to communicate with the survivors in Hall’s team to coordinate a rescue. Please lend your radio to Jon Krakauer.’ And Woodall said no. It was very clear what was at stake, but they wouldn’t give up their radio.”
Eisuke Shigekawa and thirty-six-year-old Hiroshi Hanada were taken aback to see one of the Ladakhi climbers, probably Paljor, lying in the snow, horribly frostbitten but still alive after a night without shelter or oxygen, moaning unintelligibly. Not wanting to jeopardize their ascent by stopping to assist him, the Japanese team continued climbing toward the summit.
Shigekawa explained, “We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality.”
Girl fuk u
At that point, says Beidleman, “Klev and I just stared at each other in disbelief. It was like, ‘What’s going on here? What have we done to make this mountain so angry?’”
First, he relayed a message to me that some spare batteries were stashed in one of the IMAX tents on the Col; by midafternoon I’d found them, allowing Hall’s team to re-establish radio contact with the lower camps. Then Breashears offered his expedition’s supply of oxygen—fifty canisters that had been laboriously carried to 26,000 feet—to the ailing climbers and would-be rescuers on the Col. Even though this threatened to put his $5.5 million film project in jeopardy, he made the crucial gas available without hesitation.
I located his tent, which had been blasted flat by the hurricane, and saw that both doors were wide open. When I peered inside, however, I was shocked to discover that Beck was still alive.
beck is the terminator apparently
The ordinary pleasures of life at home—eating breakfast with my wife, watching the sun go down over Puget Sound, being able to get up in the middle of the night and walk barefoot to a warm bathroom—generated flashes of joy that bordered on rapture.
Walter Mittys with Everest dreams need to bear in mind that when things go wrong up in the Death Zone—and sooner or later they always do—the strongest guides in the world may be powerless to save a client’s life; indeed, as the events of 1996 demonstrated, the strongest guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save even their own lives.
Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a
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But my people went the other way. They helped outsiders find their way into the sanctuary and violate every limb of her body by standing on top of her, crowing in victory, and dirtying and polluting her bosom.
