The Ledge

by Jim Davidson

  “No, I don’t think I need to go through the slides,” Don Price says. “What you just told me will be indelibly put in my mind. I want the slides and I wanted to hear the stories because they are memories—that’s all we have left now.”

  We talk about the logistics of Mike’s memorial service. After good-bye handshakes and hugs, Gloria and I slowly walk home. Gloria says, “While you were gone in the bathroom, Donna said to me, ‘The one thing we want Jim to understand is that we never did, and still don’t, think Jim was at all responsible for Mike’s death.’ ”

  It feels like a heavy burden has been lifted from me. We discuss how incredibly kind the Prices have been to us and Gloria says, “Now I know how Mike got to be so wonderful—he has wonderful parents.”

  Later that day, Gloria and I drive to the mall so I can buy a new pair of cowboy boots for the service. Mike was a cowboy-boot kind of guy, and it seems to me that wearing a pair to the memorial service would be a fitting tribute. Maybe nobody else will understand it, but I will know.

  ON THURSDAY NIGHT—four days since the accident—I steel myself for Mike’s memorial service the following morning. Around eight-thirty, the doorbell dings, and I welcome two friends, Rodney Ley and Pat Rastall.

  Pat was a coleader on our Aconcagua expedition and a friend of Mike’s; Rodney and I are really just getting to know each other. He had been a good friend of Mike’s also, and two weeks ago the three of us climbed in the Lumpy Ridge area of Rocky Mountain National Park, up a route known as Beelzebub—the Devil. Rodney was between me and Mike on the rope. It was the first time I’d ever climbed with Rodney, and the last time I’d climbed with Mike before Rainier.

  They sit quietly as I walk through everything that happened, fighting all the time to keep my emotions in check. As experienced climbers, they understand the technical aspects, so we discuss how I escaped with so little gear. They assure me that they will share the details with others in the Fort Collins climbing community so that I don’t have to keep retelling the story.

  When I shut the door after they leave, it’s nearly eleven P.M. I am drained in every way. I head to bed, dreading the dreams that I know will come.

  FRIDAY MORNING ARRIVES, and as I prepare for Mike’s memorial service, I look in the mirror. The scabs that had stretched across my forehead and down my nose have, for the most part, sloughed off.

  I am hurting physically, but I look fine, almost normal. When Mike’s dead and I appear to be fine, it makes no sense. How can we be in such different worlds?

  On our way to the service, Gloria and I stop to pick up some large prints we’d made for the family: a picture of Mike on Rainier, looking like Joe Mountaineer with a satisfied smile on his face, and a shot of the two of us on the summit. We put them into frames and head to the service.

  Before it starts, I ask the Prices if we can meet for a moment. We wander off until we’re alone in a secluded part of the chapel.

  “Gloria and I wanted to give you something,” I say. “We had these made up for you. Here’s one for you, Daryl, and one for you, Mr. and Mrs. Price.”

  I hand them the framed photographs. I can tell that the pictures of Mike touch them, but it’s also obvious how hard it is. Don chokes up for a second.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, searching for the right words but not finding any.

  He and Daryl thank us. Donna hugs me.

  “We’ll all get through this together,” she says.

  A little later, I set up the slide projector to scroll pictures of Mike and his many travels. I feel eyes on me; there are more than one hundred people here, and I don’t know most of them, yet they all know who I am. With Gloria, I sit near the front at the memorial service, feeling the loss of Mike and the sadness of a hundred strangers right behind me.

  DONNA PRICE HAS written a simple note to Mike. It is read at the service.

  Mike—

  You moved through this world so quickly—like a firefly that glows in the dark for a minute—and then it’s gone. We wanted to hold you in our hands—to keep you safe—to share the warmth from your light. We had to set you free—to go your own way.

  Love, Mom & Dad.

  SEVERAL OF MIKE’S closest friends take some of his cremated ashes high into the Gore Range of Colorado and scatter them in a place where the only sounds are the rush of the wind and the gurgle of streams, where the only sights are the jagged peaks and wide-open sky. Another friend carries the rest of Mike’s ashes into the canyonlands of the Four Corners region, spreading them in the red rock country.

  CHAPTER 17

  I HAVE MY life back—my wife and my work and my home. It’s all here, and yet I feel empty.

  I want so badly not to think about Rainier, not about Mike dead in the gloomy crevasse, not about the terror that gripped me as I fought my way up that wall. But I can’t ignore it. On August 29, 1992, nine weeks after the accident, I write in my journal: “I think about Mike all the time now. In the 68 days since the accident, I don’t think there was a day I haven’t thought of him.”

  Although I know I can’t live like this, expelling the experience from my mind seems wrong, as though I somehow dishonor Mike if I don’t acknowledge the regret and sorrow. As though I somehow show disrespect for him and all he gave by simply returning to my old life.

  I had heard about survivor’s guilt, but didn’t understand it. Now I know that the indescribable ache is real. I see a trauma counselor a few times; it helps, but it’s not enough.

  Even that first night after the accident, as I lay in that dank sleeping bag at Camp Schurman, I told myself I would have to find a place in my heart and mind for this tragedy or I would drive myself crazy. But now I’m home, and the answers don’t come so easily.

  When someone asks me about Rainier, some days I don’t feel strong enough to tell the story; other days I try. During one intense conversation, Gloria reaches over, grabs my forearm, and interjects, “Jim, you’re talking in the present tense. It’s not happening right now. You’re not in the crevasse anymore.”

  After I struggle through each telling, I feel like I’ve just boxed ten rounds with Mike Tyson. What happened down there seems too important for me to just let the memories fade with time, but keeping them foremost in my mind for the rest of my life won’t work, either. Ultimately, I sit down in a dark bedroom with a tape recorder and spill everything I remember, talking for an hour, then two, then ten and more. After I finish, I know I have the crucial memories saved—they are there, ready if I want to revisit them, safely put away if I don’t. The tapes go into a white cardboard box, along with the Rainier maps, my pretrip notes, and a bunch of tattered gear from The Mountain. I store the box next to all my climbing gear.

  Every time I walk past that box, I’m reminded. What I don’t know is when—or if—I’ll open it.

  IN THE WEEKS following the accident, my body continually reminds me of what I’ve been through. A wrong move sends pain through my neck and shoulder blades. Dozens of checker-sized bruises fade from my right leg, but a residual green-blue shadow lingers from the football-sized hematoma on my left thigh.

  I eat and drink normally, but shed ten to fifteen pounds the first weeks I’m home. My body and my mind are still amped up, as though adrenaline still pulses through me. One night, after Gloria falls asleep, I vomit blood into the toilet, but tell no one. I figure I was lucky just to get home, so I have no right to complain or expect perfect health.

  An almond-sized lump develops in the flesh near my left shoulder blade, and gently pressing it makes my left hand feel tingly and puffy, as if someone’s standing on it. My left foot tingles; then the unsettling sensation retreats. One day, pain burns across the front of my left hip, then vanishes. The next day, an ache sears my right hip—a weird, floating pain I can’t pin down. Finally, late one Friday night the abdominal burn intensifies, so I visit an emergency room. I have a bulging disk in my neck, intermittently pressing on nerve bu
ndles.

  Surgery is an option, but we decide to wait. Given some time, maybe the physical damage will heal. Who knows about the mental stuff.

  WHAT IF?

  The question claws at me as June 21 plays endlessly in my mind, threatening to consume me. I sit around thinking, or I force myself to stand, walk out the front door, wander the neighborhood under the Colorado sun. I’m home, but not free. I begin working again, but my mind can’t escape the crevasse. I’ve physically survived, but how will I survive the survival?

  In an eight-page journal letter titled “To the Mountain Gods” I write:

  “How am I to carry this load alone—the self-doubt, the endless questioning? How can I hope to carry it alone? I feel that I am carrying it for myself and for my lost friend. I suspect, from a self-preservation point of view, that carrying it forward and someday leaving it behind for myself will be challenging.”

  What if?

  What if it’d snowed that day? What if we’d lugged our packs to the summit and descended from there instead of retreating to the saddle?

  What if?

  If it’d snowed that day, we might have called it bad luck because it would have ruined our perfect weather. But it might have been good luck—unknown to us—because it might have helped ice that snow bridge solid, and we might have tromped right across it without a problem, unaware that a crevasse lurked beneath our feet.

  If we’d lugged our packs to the summit, we would have been on the main route thirty minutes earlier. That would have been thirty fewer minutes the sun’s warming rays would have had to assault the snow bridge that ultimately collapsed beneath my feet.

  Gradually I realize that I have to put this aside or I’m going to drive myself crazy.

  I decide that pondering the question is healthy but being drowned by it is not, because continually asking, “If?” and “What if?” won’t change anything. We made our decisions, and they put us on the Emmons-Winthrop route, in the middle of the Corridor, a little before noon on June 21, 1992. A day earlier or a day later, and the outcome might have been vastly different. Maybe we’d have made it off the mountain without incident, and wolfed down steaks and beers that night. Maybe we’d have stumbled off the edge of the Liberty Wall in the dark. Maybe, maybe.

  I find a measure of comfort as I think about the many factors that go into every moment of life.

  Decisions. Actions. Good luck. Bad luck. Randomness. Fate. God.

  I don’t think I’m capable of understanding it all. I figure most things in life, including what happened on Rainier, result from a combination of individual choices as they pan out, with some good and bad luck, some randomness, some fate, and some of God’s will thrown in.

  I imagine life as if it were a tree, all the branches stretching up toward the sky, splitting, forking, and dividing yet again farther out: As you move out from the trunk, there are many possible pathways. When you make a decision, it leads you down one branch; then the next random event takes you on another new path. Each decision, action, and bit of luck is a fork leading to different outcomes, different branches. Some are sturdy and hold fast, some creak under your weight, some fracture and drop you into unexpected turmoil.

  Mike and I each embraced a life that put us on Rainier, together. On the mountain, Mike and I swapped the lead every hour or so, alternating maybe thirty or forty times over four days. Why was I on the lead then instead of Mike? I don’t know. What if we’d done any one of a hundred things differently? I don’t know. Why did that snow bridge cave in beneath my feet when a thousand others did not? I don’t know. I’ll always wonder about those things. But gradually I come to accept that those are the ifs and what-ifs I’ll never know the answers to. I’m stuck with that, so I must live with it.

  Processing and analyzing the events with my close friends and climbing buddies helps some. Supportive calls and letters bolster me. One day I open a card from Scott Anderson, the geology friend and Aconcagua partner who introduced Mike and me six years earlier. His poignant lines bring me to tears: “Thanks for digging yourself out and sharing your story. You showed tremendous strength. Thanks for doing what you could to bring Mike with you.”

  I’m lucky, too, that I sense no judgment or animosity from Mike’s friends and climbing partners. One is Mark Udall, the executive director of Colorado Outward Bound School. His title made him Mike’s boss, but his kindness and climbing expertise made him Mike’s friend and mentor. He has climbed all over the world, including the Liberty Ridge, and he had talked with Mike about Rainier before we went there. I met Mark at the memorial service, and right afterward told him, and many of Mike’s gathered friends, the Rainier story. Three weeks later, I receive a letter from Mark. In red ink, the envelope bears the Outward Bound motto—“To serve, to strive, and not to yield”—adapted from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses.”

  “I wanted to write and thank you for sharing the extremely trying circumstances surrounding Mike’s death, as well as your own tenacious struggle to survive,” Mark wrote, in part. “No doubt you will carry questions around in your mind for quite a while to come. If it is any help, from my perspective, you did all you could and then some. You should be proud. You did what Mike would have wanted and expected you to do. I know Mike’s spirit helped you find the strength to climb out of the crevasse.”

  AFTER MIKE’S MEMORIAL service, a kind relationship takes hold between me and his parents and brother, an extension of my first meeting with Don and Donna and Daryl. Mike’s death heaved them and me into a tiny survivors’ life raft and set us adrift on a stormy sea of raw emotions. There was every chance our dealings could be strained, maybe even negative, but their character means Mike’s parents and brother are cordial, caring, and sympathetic to me even as they forge their own way through their terrible loss.

  One day, Don and Donna offer me Mike’s most prized possessions: his camera gear. As an underpaid wilderness instructor, Mike devoted a sizable chunk of his modest income to his camera and lenses. When Donna tells me she and Don want me to have it all, she urges me to use it in the way Mike had: to seek and interpret the world’s natural beauty.

  I unpack the padded box, grasping an Olympus OM-1, its field-battered body outfitted just as I had last seen it on Rainier, with a wide-angle lens and Mike’s homemade shoulder strap of half-inch-wide blue webbing. When I flip the camera over, on the bottom I see the engraving: M. D. PRICE. As I clutch his adapters and lenses, I consider that acquiring each expensive item must have cost Mike fifty trail miles and a week of wilderness instruction time. That the Prices have asked me to carry on with his camera gear humbles me into silence.

  During one visit that summer, I notice Don wearing an Outward Bound USA pin, its crisp blue-and-silver logo incorporating a symbolic rope and compass. I lean in toward him to admire the nickel-sized pin.

  “I remember Mike wearing one like that on Mount Rainier,” I tell him.

  “Yeah,” Don replies, “this is it.”

  After visiting for an hour, I prepare to leave. Don excuses himself for a moment, then returns and says, “Here, this is for you.”

  He hands me a smaller Outward Bound pin.

  “We found it in Mike’s things, and I thought you’d like it.”

  Stunned into silence for a second, I finally say, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, you should have it,” he says.

  I begin wearing the pin on special occasions, including a visit to Denver’s Outward Bound office, where I chat with Udall and another of Mike’s good friends, Andy Maeding. Mark notices the pin on my shirt and asks, “Did you do an OB course?”

  “No,” I reply, “I always wanted to, but never did.”

  “You can only get a pin by finishing a course,” Andy notes reflexively. “How’d you get it?”

  “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know. Mike’s father gave it to me.”

  An uncomfortable feeling hangs in the air for a moment.

  “I think it’s fine that you wear one,” Mark says. “You earned it.�
��

  FOR MORE THAN a decade, mountains have provided me with recreation, exercise, and joy. They have been a natural temple for my self-improvement, a calming therapy, and a source of spirituality. But the Mount Rainier experience brought loss, pain, and anguish, so as the summer goes on, I’m not certain where mountains now fit into my life.

  For years, Gloria and I had heard stories about Nepal from traveling friends. We both wanted to visit the mystical land, and since we planned to start a family eventually, we decided we’d better go soon. In the spring of 1992, before Rainier, Gloria and I had already been considering an autumn trek in Nepal. On Rainier, I told Mike about our Asia plans, and I could tell he was envious.

  “Man, I’ve always wanted to climb in Nepal,” he said. “Even if you can’t climb on this trip, you should go.”

  Mike had repeatedly told me tales about two fun-loving and mischievous Sherpa friends from Nepal he worked with at Outward Bound, Dawa and Phurba. Dawa had even come to Mike’s memorial service. In the late summer of 1992, I realize I can visit Nepal and see Everest for myself and, in a strange way, on Mike’s behalf, too.

  I train and test myself gradually on summer hikes, usually with Gloria. Being in the mountains feels good—still fun—even though I don’t tackle anything technical. I’m still not sure I’ll ever climb seriously again.

  With that in mind, Gloria and I hesitate about whether to visit the mountains of Nepal. We decide, finally, to go—mostly for ourselves, partly for Mike, and, hopefully, for some peaceful healing. Afraid that I will spend my life mired in sadness or negativity, I yearn for a way to shed some of the burden, to unshackle myself, and perhaps free Mike’s spirit. In my pleading journal letter to the mountain gods, I write:

  “For my friend Mike, I have several requests. Allow his spirit to be peaceful, but allow it to roam free. Let him race up and down the slopes with the wind, let him trickle slowly through the canyons, let him spread completely and gracefully across the land with the setting sun. Michael deserved many things in this life he did not get, but he most assuredly deserves these things.