Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  “Bye,” Mortenson said, shutting the door before he said something he’d regret.

  He stood in the empty room, holding the half-full bottle. Or was it half empty? It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d drink anyway, and he’d thought Marina knew him well enough to understand that. Mortenson didn’t drink very often, certainly not alone, and there was little he loathed as much as sweet liqueur.

  On the television, a strident, cocksure voice told an interviewer, “We are embarked on the second American Revolution and you have my solemn vow that with a new Republican majority in Congress, American life is about to be profoundly different. The people have spoken.”

  Mortenson strode across the room to the wastebasket. It was large, made of dull metal, and battered by the impurities of the thousands of people unfortunate enough to have passed through this room. He held the bottle out above it, straight-armed, and then let go. The Baileys clanged against the metal can with a sound, to Mortenson’s ear, like a steel door slamming shut. He collapsed onto the bed.

  Money competed with pain for supremacy in Mortenson’s mind. After the holiday, when he tried to withdraw two hundred dollars from his checking account, the bank teller told him his balance was only eighty-three dollars.

  Mortenson phoned his supervisor at the UCSF Medical Center, hoping to schedule a shift immediately, before his money crisis became critical. “You said you’d be back to cover Thanksgiving,” he said. “And now you miss Christmas, too. You’re one of the best we have, Greg, but if you don’t show up you’re useless to me. You’re fired.” A phrase from the televised speech the evening before lodged in Mortenson’s mind, and he repeated it bitterly under his breath for days: “The people have spoken.”

  Mortenson called half a dozen acquaintances in his mountaineering circle until he found a climber’s crash pad where he could stay until he could figure out what to do next. In a dilapidated green Victorian house on Berkeley’s Lorina Street, Mortenson slept on the floor in an upstairs hallway for a month. Graduate students at Cal Berkeley and climbers returning from, or on their way to, Yosemite held boozy parties on the ground floor late into the night. In his sleeping bag, sprawled across the upstairs hallway, Mortenson tried not to listen to the sounds of sex that were uncomfortably audible through the thin walls. While he slept, people stepped over him on the way to the bathroom.

  A qualified nurse is rarely unemployed for long. It’s only a matter of motivation. And after a few bleary days riding public transportation to interviews, rainy days when he was acutely aware of the absence of La Bamba, he was hired to work the least desirable overnight shifts at the San Francisco General Trauma Center, and Berkeley’s Alta Bates Burn Unit.

  He managed to save enough to rent a room in a third-floor walkup on Berkeley’s gritty Wheeler Street that was sublet to a Polish handyman named Witold Dudzinski. Mortenson spent a few companionable evenings with Dudzinski, who chain-smoked and drank ceaselessly from unmarked blue bottles of Polish vodka that he bought in bulk. But much as he enjoyed the first fond soliloquies about Pope John Paul, Mortenson learned that, after enough vodka, Dudzinski simply spoke to no one in particular. So most evenings, Mortenson retired to his room and tried not to think about Marina.

  “I’d been left by girlfriends before,” Mortenson says, “but this was different. This one really hurt. And there was nothing to do but deal with it. It took time.”

  Some merciful nights, Mortenson was able to lose himself and his worries in the whirl of activity. Confronted with the immediate needs of a five-year-old child with third-degree burns across half her torso, it was impossible to wallow in self-pity. And there was a deep satisfaction he could find in working swiftly, and alleviating pain, in a well-equipped Western hospital, where every medication, machine, and dressing necessary was on hand, rather than eight hours away down a frequently impassable jeep track, as had been the case during the seven weeks he’d lingered in Korphe.

  Sitting by the balti in Haji Ali’s home, after the old man had delivered the devastating news about the bridge, Mortenson had felt his mind race furiously, like a furry animal trying to escape a trap, then slow and settle itself, until he felt suprisingly still. He was aware that he’d reached the end of the line—his destination, Korphe, the last village before the land of eternal ice. Stamping out like he’d done in Kuardu, when complications appeared, would solve nothing. There was nowhere else to go. He had watched Changazi’s thin-lipped smile grow wide, and understood that the man thought he’d won the tug-of-war for Mortenson’s school.

  Despite his disappointment, he couldn’t feel angry at the people of Korphe. Of course they needed a bridge. How was he planning to build his school? Carry every board, every sheet of corrugated tin, one by one, in a rickety basket swaying dangerously over the Braldu? Instead he felt angry at himself for not planning better. He decided to stay in Korphe until he understood everything else he had to do to bring the school to life. A series of detours had brought him to this village. What was one more?

  “Tell me about this bridge,” he had asked Haji Ali, breaking the expectant silence in the home crowded with all of Korphe’s adult men. “What do we need? How do we get started?”

  Mortenson had hoped, at first, that building a bridge was something that could be accomplished quickly, and with little expense.

  “We have to blast many dynamite and cut many many stone,” Haji Ali’s son Twaha said to Mortenson. Then an argument began in Balti, about whether to cut the stone locally, or have it jeeped in from farther down the valley. There was much heated discussion about what specific hillsides contained the best quality granite. On other points the men were in absolute agreement. Steel cables and wood planks would have to be purchased and transported from Skardu or Gilgit, costing thousands of dollars. Skilled laborers would have to be paid thousands more. Thousands of dollars Mortenson no longer had.

  Mortenson told them he’d spent most of his money already on the school and he’d have to return to America and try to raise more money for the bridge. He expected the Korphe men to act as crushed as he felt. But waiting was as much a part of their makeup as breathing the thin air at ten thousand feet. They waited half of each year, in rooms choked with smoke from yak dung fires, for the weather to become hospitable enough for them to return outdoors. A Balti hunter would stalk a single ibex for days, maneuvering hour by hour to get close enough to risk a shot with the single expensive bullet he could afford to spend. A Balti groom might wait years for his marriage, until the twelve-year-old girl his parents had selected for him grew old enough to leave her family. The people of the Braldu had been promised schools by the distant Pakistani government for decades, and they were waiting still. Patience was their greatest skill.

  “Thanyouvermuch,” Haji Ali said, trying to speak English for Mortenson’s benefit. Being thanked for botching the job so badly was almost more than Mortenson could bear. He crushed the old man against his chest, breathing in his blend of woodsmoke and wet wool. Haji Ali beamed and summoned Sakina from the cooking fire to pour his guest a fresh cup of the butter tea that Mortenson was enjoying more each time he tasted it.

  Mortenson ordered Changazi to return to Skardu without him and took satisfaction in the shocked expression that flitted across his face before he swiftly reined it in. Mortenson was going to learn everything he needed to know about building the bridge before he returned home.

  With Haji Ali he rode downriver in a jeep to study the bridges of the lower Braldu Valley. Back in Korphe, Mortenson sketched the sort of bridge that the people of the village had asked him to construct in his notebook. And he met with the elders of Korphe to discuss what plot of land he might build the school on, when, Inshallah, he returned from America.

  When the wind blowing down the Baltoro began to carry snow crystals, which blanketed Korphe, signifying the onset of the long indoor months, Mortenson began to say his good-byes. By mid-December, more than two months after he’d arrived with Changazi, he couldn’t avoid leaving any longe
r. After visiting half the homes in Korphe for a farewell cup of tea, Mortenson bounced back down the south bank of the Braldu in an overloaded jeep carrying the eleven Korphe men who insisted on seeing him off at Skardu. They were packed so tight that every time the jeep shuddered over an obstacle, the men would all rock together, leaning on each other for both balance and warmth.

  Walking home after his hospital shift toward his bare room in Dudzinski’s smoke-fouled flat, in that shadowland between night and morning when the world seems depopulated, Mortenson felt fatigued by loneliness. He seemed irretrievably far from the camaraderie of village life in Korphe. And calling Jean Hoerni, the one person who might be able to fund his return, seemed too intimidating to seriously consider.

  All that winter, Mortenson worked out on the wall at the City Rock climbing gym, in a warehouse district between Berkeley and Oakland. It was more difficult to reach than when he’d had La Bamba, but he took the bus there as much for the company as the exercise. Preparing for K2, honing himself into shape, he’d been a hero to the members of City Rock. But now, every time he opened his mouth, his stories were about failures: a summit not reached, a woman lost, a bridge, and a school, not built.

  One night, walking home very late after work, Mortenson was mugged across the street from his house by four boys who couldn’t have been older than fourteen. While one held a pistol aimed shakily at Mortenson’s chest, his accomplice emptied Mortenson’s pockets. “Sheeyit. Bitch ain’t got but two dollars,” the boy said, pocketing the bills and handing Mortenson back his empty wallet. “Why we got to jump the most broke-down white dude in Berkeley?”

  Broke. Broke down. Broken. Into the spring, Mortenson wallowed in his depression. He pictured the hopeful faces of the Korphe men when they’d put him on a bus to Islamabad, sure, Inshallah, that he’d be back soon with money. How could they have so much faith in him when he had so little in himself?

  Late one afternoon in May, Mortenson was lying on his sleeping bag, thinking how badly it needed a wash, and debating whether he could bear the trip to a Laundromat, when the phone rang. It was Dr. Louis Reichardt. In 1978, Reichardt and his climbing partner Jim Wickwire had been the first Americans to reach the summit of K2. Mortenson had called him before setting out for K2, to ask Reichardt for advice, and they’d talked infrequently, but warmly, ever since. “Jean told me what you’re trying to do with your school,” Reichardt said. “How’s it going?”

  Mortenson told him everything, from the 580 letters to the bottleneck he’d reached with the bridge. He also found himself telling the fatherly older man his troubles, from losing his woman, to losing his job, to what he feared most—losing his way.

  “Pull yourself together, Greg. Of course you’ve hit a few speed bumps,” Reichardt said. “But what you’re trying to do is much more difficult than climbing K2.”

  “Coming from Lou Reichardt, those words meant a lot,” Mortenson says. “He was one of my heroes.” The hardships Reichardt and Wickwire had endured to reach the summit were legendary in mountain lore. Wickwire had tried, at first, to summit in 1975. And the photographer Galen Rowell, a member of the expedition, wrote a book about the group’s travails, documenting one of the most rancorous high-altitude failures in history.

  Three years later, Reichardt and Wickwire returned and climbed to within three thousand feet of the summit on the fearsome West Ridge, where they were turned back by avalanche. Rather than retreating, they traversed across K2 at twenty-five thousand feet to the traditional route most climbers had tried, the Abruzzi Ridge, and, remarkably, made it to the top. Reichardt, his oxygen running low, wisely hurried down. But Wickwire lingered on the summit, attempting to unfog his camera lens to take pictures and savor the achievement of his lifelong goal. The miscalculation nearly cost him his life.

  Without a headlamp, he couldn’t make the technical descent in the dark and Wickwire was forced to endure one of the highest bivouacs ever recorded. His oxygen ran out and he suffered severe frostbite, pneumonia, pleurisy, and a cluster of potentially fatal clots in his lungs. Reichardt and the rest of the team struggled to keep him alive with constant medical care, until Wickwire could be evacuated by helicopter to a hospital, then home to Seattle where he underwent major chest surgery to repair the clots.

  Lou Reichardt knew something about suffering for and reaching difficult goals. His acknowledgment of how tough a path Mortenson was trying to walk made Mortenson feel that he hadn’t failed. He just hadn’t completed the climb. Yet.

  “Call Jean and tell him everything you told me,” Reichardt said. “Ask him to pay for the bridge. Believe me, he can afford it.”

  Mortenson felt, for the first time since coming home, like a semblance of his old self. He hung up and rifled through the Ziploc bag that served as his address book until he found the scrap of graph paper with Hoerni’s name and number. “Don’t screw up,” the paper said. Well, maybe he had. Maybe he hadn’t. It depended who you talked to. But there were his fingers dialing the numbers anyway. And then the phone was ringing.

  Chapter 10

  Building Bridges

  In the immensity of these ranges, at the limit of existence

  where men may visit but cannot dwell, life has a new importance… but

  Mountains are not chivalrous; one forgets their violence. Indifferently

  they lash those who venture among them with snow, rock, wind, cold.

  —George Schaller, Stones of Silence

  THE MAN’S VOICE on the other end of the line sounded like it was sputtering halfway across the Earth, even though Mortenson knew he couldn’t be much more than two hundred kilometers away. “Say again?” the voice said.

  Salaam Alaaikum, Mortenson shouted through the static. “I want to buy five four-hundred-foot spools of steel cable. Triple braid. Do you have that, sir?”

  “Certainly,” he said, and suddenly the line was clear. “One half lakh rupees one cable. Is that acceptable?”

  “Do I have any choice?”

  “No.” The contractor laughed. “I am the only person in all the Northern Areas to possess so much cable. May I ask your good name?”

  “Mortenson, Greg Mortenson.”

  “Where are you calling from, Mister Greg? Are you also in Gilgit?”

  “I’m in Skardu.”

  “And may I know what you want with so much cable?”

  “My friends’ village in the upper Braldu Valley has no bridge. I’m going to help them build one.”

  “Ah, you are American, yes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve heard about your bridge. Are the byways to your village jeepable?

  “If it doesn’t start raining. Can you deliver the cable?”

  “Inshallah.”

  Allah willing. Not “no.” It was a wonderful response for Mortenson to hear after a dozen unsuccessful calls, and the only realistic way to answer any question involving transportion in the Northern Areas. He had his cable, the final and most difficult piece he needed to begin building the bridge. It was only early June 1995. And without any unconquerable setbacks, the bridge would be finished before winter, and work on the school could start the following spring.

  For all Mortenson’s anxiety about calling him, Jean Hoerni had been surprisingly kind about writing him a check for an additional ten thousand dollars. “You know, some of my ex-wives could spend more fund than that in a weekend,” he said. He did, however, extract a promise. “Get the school built as quickly as you can. And when you finish, bring me a photo,” Hoerni demanded, “I’m not getting any younger.” Mortenson was more than happy to assure him that he would.

  “This man has the cable?” Changazi asked.

  “He does.”

  “And what will it cost?”

  “The same as you said, eight hundred dollars each spool.”

  “He will deliver it upside?”

  “Inshallah,” Mortenson said, replacing Changazi’s phone in the cradle on the desk in his office. Flush with Hoerni’s
money and back on track, Mortenson was glad of Changazi’s company once again. The price he paid in the rupees Changazi skimmed off every transaction was more than compensated for by the man’s vast network of contacts. He had once been a policeman and seemed to know everyone in town. And after Changazi had written him an invoice for all the building materials he was storing for Mortenson’s school, there seemed no reason not to take advantage of Changazi’s skills.

  During the week Mortenson had spent sleeping on the charpoy in Changazi’s office, under the aged wall map of the world that he was nostalgically pleased to see still identified Tanzania as Tanganyika, he’d been entertained by Changazi’s tales of roguery. The weather had been unusually fine all summer and business was good. Changazi had helped to outfit several expeditions, a German and a Japanese attempt at K2 and an Italian group trying for the second ascent of Gasherbrum IV. Consequently, Changazi had protein bars with German labels tucked into every crevice of his office, like a squirrel’s winter hoard of nuts. And behind his desk, a case of a Japanese sports drink called Pokhari Sweat propped up half a dozen boxes of biscotti.

  But the foreign delicacies Changazi savored most had names like Hildegund and Isabella. Despite that fact that the man had a wife and five children stashed at his home in distant ‘Pindi and a second wife tucked away in a rented house near the superintendent of police’s office in Skardu, Changazi had spent the tourist season tucking into a smorgasbord of the female tourists and trekkers who were arriving in Skardu in ever greater numbers.

  Changazi told Mortenson how he squared his dalliances with his devotion to Islam. Heading to his mosque soon after another Inge or Aiko wandered into his sights, Changazi petitioned his mullah for permission to make a muthaa, or temporary marriage. The custom was still common in parts of Shiite Pakistan, for married men who might face intervals without the comfort of their wives, fighting in distant wars, or traveling on an extended trip. But Changazi had been granted a handful of muthaa already since the climbing season began in May. Better to sanctify the union, however short-lived, in Allah’s sight, Changazi cheerfully explained to Mortenson, than simply to have sex.