Voyager

by Russell Banks

  None of us wanted to hang around outside, as we had every evening so far, and watch the sky transform itself into the celestial universe of the Incas, a darkened theater of the old sky god’s birth and death and resurrection. We were too tired, and it was too cold, even with parkas on, and the wind was howling now, up to seventy miles per hour and sustained, making it difficult to talk normally. We’d begun to shout to one another. Mostly it was Alex shouting, making sure that we were prepared for a tough night—he’d attempted Everest twice and knew what to expect. Check the ropes again! Make sure your packs are weighted down with rocks on top! For Alex, this was a military-style expedition, and his role was that of the war-weary lieutenant, whose first responsibility was to get his men, not safely up the mountain, but safely down. We did as told, then withdrew to the darkness of our tents and curled up inside our sleeping bags and waited for sleep.

  The sound of a sustained seventy-mile-an-hour wind is like no other, especially when a thin nylon skin is all that separates you from it. It howls like a stampeding herd of prehistoric animals for ten or fifteen minutes straight, long enough for you to start thinking that you’ve grown used to the roaring and can sleep in spite of it, because it’s steady and the volume does not vary. So you close your eyes and unclench your hands and drift toward a dream of home. Then suddenly it stops. Black silence. No one in the tent speaks. You can hear the others breathing rapidly in the thin air. You blink your eyes open and wait and count off the seconds, ten, eleven, twelve . . . and then the howl returns at full volume. The tent fabric slaps against itself like the sails of a galleon in a hurricane, and you pray that the ropes and the double poles hold, because if the tent starts to tear anywhere, the whole thing will be shredded in minutes, and you will die of exposure. The trap you’re in protects you, but barely. It can also kill you.

  We’d gone through three consecutive nights and two days like this. We melted snow, cooked, ate, pissed, and washed in our tents, leaving only when absolutely necessary to shit behind a rock. Day and night merged. Time stopped. We feared wasting our headlamp batteries, so we rationed our reading and sought a semihibernated state of consciousness. Sleep we treated with suspicion. At this altitude, when you fall asleep, you neglect to breathe rapidly enough to compensate for the thin air, and periodically you lurch awake, gasping and light-headed and disoriented, as if you’re suffocating. You are suffocating. You may even be suffering from cerebral edema, which can be cured only by descending the mountain, a thing we could not do because of the storm. In the middle of the second night, David, who slept next to me, sat up suddenly, moaned, and mumbled incoherently. Talking in his sleep or altitude sickness? I shook him and gave him the only diagnostic test I could think of: “Say something witty, David.”

  After a few seconds, he said, “When we landed at the Lima airport, the money changers and taxi drivers outside were like grizzlies at a salmon run.” Then added, “Don’t worry, man, it’s just a panic attack.”

  The wind took on a personality. It became a monstrous god with a malignant will, like Melville’s whale, and it was difficult not to take its punishing power personally. I ran down the list of my recent and ancient sins of omission and commission, hoping that if I could find a crime that warranted my execution, I could somehow claim extenuating circumstances, and the wind would stop. For the first time since beginning this climb, I saw that I had put my life at risk. And, unexpectedly, I was ashamed. I thought of my wife and my children and my grandchild: If I die here, once again they will have every right to remember me only with anger.

  On the morning of the third day, the whale swam away and the wind stopped, leaving behind a wake of playful gusts, as if to remind us that it was merely absent, not weakened, and might well return soon. The sky cleared, and the temperature rose into the twenties. We stumbled from our tents blinking and grinning like inmates granted last-minute pardons by the governor and proceeded to change out of our funky clothing and air out our stinking sleeping bags by draping them over rocks and tent lines. After breakfast, we began the climb to Camp Two, 18,900 feet, at the base of the Polish Glacier. The bearlike, affable Michael Zanger, David’s and my personal guide, as we thought of him, would not be with us, however. His son, Chris, whose altitude sickness had worsened, needed to descend at once, and Michael would take him.

  On an expedition climb like this, you ascend the mountain twice. You climb high and sleep low at each camp, dividing your supplies and gear into two hauls, so that you can carry the load you don’t need immediately to the next higher camp, stash it, and return to the lower camp for a second night. Three days earlier, on our first ascent from Camp One to Two, before the windstorm hit, as we chugged steadily uphill, the highest peaks of the Andes—gigantic, snow-covered, serrated blades of uplifted rock—had unfolded all the way to the horizon, a literally breathtaking sight, and I had caught the first glimmers of a fantasy evolving into a hallucination, and it had eased my climb considerably. Now, on our second ascent, it returned unbidden, a full-blown hallucination, no longer a fantasy. I was a coca-chewing Inca priest in vicuña cloth vestments, and instead of hauling a fifty-pound pack on my back, I was carrying a young girl, perhaps ten years old. She was drugged against the cold and the effects of altitude, and I had been entrusted by her family and the people of her village with the responsibility and honor of carrying her to the top of the Inca world, to Aconcagua, the Quechuan Sentinel of Stone, to give her over to the god of the Incas, who, in gratitude, would bless the coming year’s crops and keep the village from famine. She was not heavy, though she wore gold amulets on her wrists and ankles and a brilliantly colored dress woven of wool spun from the hair of baby llamas. It was as if her body were made of feathers or as if she were inhabited by a bird, a condor, pumping its huge wings and half lifting me from the tilted ground as I climbed up and up and the mountains slipped from above to below me.

  At one point, while we were slumped on the ground taking one of our hourly rest breaks, I leaned in to David and in a low voice told him who I was and what I was doing here. He would understand, I knew.

  He nodded. “Do you know her name?” he asked.

  “She has no name,” I said. “She left it in the village for another to use.”

  “You’re very lucky,” he said as he stood unsteadily and, grunting from the effort, wrestled his pack onto his back.

  There was for me and David a dense, complex context for this trek, one created inadvertently by the week we had spent earlier in Peru, hiking the grassy ridges and pre-Columbian terraces outside Cuzco, gazing on the remnants of the Inca walls in the ancient city, and wandering awestruck across the plazas and through the magnificent stone temples of Machu Picchu. David is a playwright and screenwriter and a longtime friend. Our fevered imaginations tend to fuel each other, and in Peru, we had given ourselves over to wild speculations and intellectually reckless intuitions regarding the history and sensibility of the ancient Incas. In our minds, this landscape was connected seamlessly to the Inca ruins and their sacred art. For us, climbing Aconcagua was a pilgrimage, not merely an assault on one of the so-called Seven Summits.

  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 others 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

  The 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 follow
ed 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 moving, 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.