The Ledge

by Jim Davidson

  “Of myself, I ask only that you give me pieces of insight that will allow me to try to make something positive of all this. I must pick up the positive and the energy that we both carried, and continue to carry it forward into my life.”

  On September 21, 1992, precisely one seasonal click after the Rainier accident, Gloria and I set off for Nepal.

  KATHMANDU BLENDS THE mystical and the mundane, the profound and the profane. Ascetic holy men wander among slick hucksters hawking trinkets to overwhelmed tourists. Families commit the ashes of their loved ones to the sacred headwaters of the Ganges River, while discarded trash fouls the riverbank.

  Gloria and I arrive excited, and enormously relieved to be safe: Two commercial airliners crashed into cloud-shrouded Nepalese mountains in recent months. I’m not in the greatest shape; I’m on heavy antibiotics for an infection in my gut and am supposed to avoid strong sun, drink a lot of water, and brace myself for debilitating diarrhea. It’s not the best way to set out on 150 miles of high-altitude hiking and weeks of tent living, but we feel a sense of mission, so we continue.

  I want to initiate a Buddhist ceremony in Mike’s honor, though I don’t want to force anything—especially in a land of delays and the unexpected. I hope for the best but tell myself not to try to control what happens, just to let it all unfold. That’s the exact opposite of my natural tendencies. Already this journey is forcing me to grow.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE we’re to take a small plane to the remote village of Lukla, deep in the mountains, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Escape from Kathmandu, then drift off.

  Suddenly, I see Mike, dressed in climbing gear, propped against a wall, lifeless. It appears as though they’ve just pulled him from the crevasse. Rescuers flank him. I approach apprehensively; Mike is dead, but I sense that he is about to speak.

  I snap awake in our dingy Kathmandu bedroom, anxious and sweat-soaked. I calm myself, forcing my breaths at more regular intervals, then eventually doze off.

  I see Mike again. He’s more lifelike, more animated, as if he’s transformed himself to make me more comfortable. He waves me closer, and I instinctively understand that he wants to make it easy for me to say good-bye to him. I can’t utter the weighty words.

  Mike speaks.

  “It’s okay, Jim,” he says. “I’m gone now. It’s okay to go—go ahead.”

  I can’t speak. He goes on, telling me what to say:

  “Say, ‘That’s it, Mike, I’m sorry but I have to go now.’ ”

  I jerk awake. Gloria’s sleeping in the other twin bed. I briefly consider getting up to write about the dreams, but I don’t for now. Sometime after a quarter of four, I finally fall asleep again.

  Out of sleep’s blackness, Mike appears a third time—more vivid and forceful than before. We talk about the first few minutes after we crash-landed on the ledge.

  “Were you in much pain?” I ask.

  “Only for a minute,” he says. “Now there’s none. I’m in a good place.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “A little at first,” he tells me, “but that faded fast.”

  “Did you suffer?”

  “No, not really,” he says. “You went through a lot, Jim, and you did okay. You did the right thing. I’m glad you made it. It was supposed to happen that way.”

  “Did you stay in the crevasse for a while?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Mike says. “I tried to help and watch over you. You have to let it go and move on with your life. Enjoy everything. I am okay now, and you should be, too.”

  I awaken suddenly, tense and exhausted. Mike’s visits feel so real, they seem like more than dreams. Later that day, when I chronicle the experience in my journal, I conclude that Mike is trying to ease my mind, trying to encourage me to reclaim my life. That he’s trying to give me some peace by getting me to say good-bye to him. My partner Mike is urgently working to help save the part of me that is still stuck on the ledge.

  WE HIKE ALONG the verdant banks of the Dudh Kosi (Milk River), up through the Khumbu Valley toward Mount Everest. Every day we pass ice-covered peaks that soar two miles above our heads. Looking through Mike’s OM-1 viewfinder, I snap frame after frame, trying to capture the Himalayan giants he’d hoped to scale. I feel that I’m looking through the lens for him.

  As I study these majestic peaks, my eyes scan possible ascent routes—even as I remain officially noncommittal about whether I will return to climbing.

  By the time we reach the holy monastery of Tengboche five days later, we speak a little Nepali and our guide, Prem Lakpa Sherpa, understands that we wish to have a ceremony, a puja, for Mike’s spirit. At twenty-five, Prem Lakpa is young, but as a savvy guide from a strong Buddhist family, he requests an audience with the second-highest lama at the monastery, Lama Nawang Zampu.

  Gloria, Prem Lakpa, and I cross an open courtyard and walk along a stone-lined passageway, ducking under the heavy drape that serves as a door and taking a seat in the darkened room where the lama has lived for decades. Flickering yak-butter candles throw dancing yellow light across ancient Buddhist thangka paintings. The middle-aged lama has walnut skin, short-cropped black hair, and calm eyes. In Nepali, Prem Lakpa explains how we want this puja for Mike. The lama nods and tells Prem Lakpa to bring us back the next day.

  After picking at our breakfast the next morning, we return to the lama’s chamber, where it’s even darker than it was yesterday. From the next room we hear the lama pounding a drum and chanting rhythmically. Eventually, he finishes, then joins us. He smiles and unwinds a newly made string of eleven prayer flags—an auspicious number, he tells us. Impressed, Prem Lakpa explains that the lama hand-printed Tibetan prayers on these flags last night, then stitched them to a connecting string. He is pleased that we seek to hold a puja for our departed friend. I touch my index finger to the Outward Bound pin on my jacket.

  The lama picks up an ancient metal incense burner and walks back and forth waving it under the stretched-out flags, which are of five different colors, chanting.

  “He is blessing them,” Prem Lakpa tells us.

  When I close my eyes the sounds and smells permeate my memory and I feel carried off by the chanting. I sense an otherworldliness I have not felt before.

  As the lama hands me the prayer flags and silk blessing scarves, called katas, I respond as I have seen Nepalese greet other monks: With a deep bow, my palms clasped together before my chest, I say, “Namaste”—I greet and honor the divine within you.

  This has all gone much further and better than I had dared hope. But the experience is not over. Lama Zampu speaks to Prem Lakpa, who excitedly translates: We can now meet the highest lama at the monastery, the rinpoche, who is revered as the reincarnation of a previous great lama. When we arrive at a deeper part of the monastery, we remove our shoes and sit on long benches padded with yak-wool blankets until the rinpoche glides in and we stand. He is a slight man, about sixty years old, with a shaved head and orange robes. After the rinpoche sits, Prem Lakpa follows, and finally Gloria and I do, too, careful to mimic our guide’s moves. Prem Lakpa approaches the rinpoche with our prayer flags. The revered rinpoche takes some blessed rice, blows on it, then sprinkles it across the flags to bless them. He then blows on all the rice in the small paper sack and hands the bag and flags to Prem Lakpa. In the distance, through ancient stone walls, I hear the low, bass murmur of other chanting monks.

  After we quietly sip coffee together, it is time to go. Prem Lakpa stands, bows toward the rinpoche, and backs out of the room, staying bent forward in reverence. Gloria and I do the same, traverse unlit hallways, then step into the pounding sunlight. We mill about in small circles, stunned by the experience and our good fortune. The three of us take turns touching the blessed flags, rice, and scarves we now have for Mike’s puja. Because the rinpoche rarely meets with foreign visitors, Prem Lakpa says, “Very lucky for you. Very lucky for me.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, we carry our prayer flags, rice, and katas toward a summit. We are at 18,00
0 feet and the air is half as thick as at sea level, so we plod up the trail. My pulse races way past 120 beats a minute, and I fight off a familiar altitude lethargy I haven’t felt since Aconcagua years ago. With each step, Gloria shatters her previous altitude record of 14,000 feet.

  I have picked the rocky summit of Kala Patthar—“Black Rock” in Hindi—as the place for Mike’s puja. Resting at the foot of Mount Everest, Kala Patthar overlooks the Khumbu Glacier and the south side Everest base camp, and is surrounded by a dozen peaks more than 20,000 feet tall.

  We had left our campsite in Lobuche village before dawn and had seen the rising sun tint the Khumbu Valley the same burnt orange as the rinpoche’s robes. It’s midmorning now, and the sky is deep blue. At the 18,514-foot summit, there are already some piled rock pillars that we could hang our prayer flags from, but Prem Lakpa says it will be better if we make our own. We gather flat rocks, and Prem Lakpa stacks them into raised rectangular piles. With the three of us wearing our katas, Gloria snaps photos while Prem Lakpa and I unscroll the prayer flags’ string and secure it to our two rock towers. Each wind-driven flap of a flag sends a prayer up to the gods. Following Sherpa and Buddhist traditions, we set out small pieces of food as an offering to the gods.

  I had hoped to feel joy, but I don’t. This blessing ceremony will be my good-bye to Mike. I have been clutching him close to my heart for months now, and today, on this windswept Himalayan summit, I must set him free—for my sake and his. With Everest towering above us, snowy mountains stretching to the horizon, and blessed offerings from Tengboche’s high lamas, it is the best good-bye ceremony I could have envisioned. I want to speak, but I cannot.

  Prem Lakpa leads us through the puja, standing with his arms raised beneath the flapping flags, chanting in Nepali.

  (Later, he will translate his words: “Mike, dead friend of Jim, this puja is for you and your spirit. It is a good puja as we have very special prayer flags made and blessed by the lamas, as well as the katas. You were a good man, and this puja is for you.”)

  As he chants, Prem Lakpa tosses rice toward the four cardinal directions. I seize the idea to cast blessed rice at each landmark around us. I turn slowly in a clockwise circle and, mimicking Prem Lakpa’s style, flick pinches of rice at the peaks of Everest, Nuptse, and Lhotse, toward the Khumbu Glacier, the Lo La pass, and Tibet, at the summits of Pokalde, Taboche, and, finally, to the west, Cho Oyu.

  Gloria hands me the camera and takes some blessed rice, tossing it into the air as the wind gently flutters the flags. Tears pour from my eyes, and I can’t see through the viewfinder. Prem Lakpa encourages us to save some blessed rice, to “bring it home and put on your altar.” I resist; I have no altar at home, and this puja is for Mike, not me, so I intend to expend all the blessings and goodness here. I am determined not to take anything physical away from this ceremonial place. This is good-bye.

  A pained look creases Prem Lakpa’s face, and he hugs me, saying, “I am so sorry, sir.”

  Gloria joins us, and we three huddle together, saying nothing, letting the tears seep down our cheeks.

  “GLO,” I ASK, “can I have a few minutes alone here?”

  Gloria and Prem Lakpa descend a hundred yards down Kala Patthar and tuck in behind a black boulder, just out of sight.

  I breathe out long and slow, and then begin speaking impromptu and aloud.

  “We’re here to do a puja for you, Mike. Couldn’t pick a better place, eh? I have to leave you up here, Mike. You have to be where you are, and I have to live my life. I’m going to miss you, Mike—you were a good man, a good partner, and a great friend. We had a lot of fun, didn’t we?”

  I reach to the right chest pocket of my purple parka, the same one I wore on Rainier, tug open the zipper, and fish out a carabiner I have carried halfway around the world. Mike’s carabiner. The one I cut from his harness.

  Though I have tinkered with it over the months, the locking gate is still seized shut. It takes a lot of force to permanently jam a locking carabiner, so it serves as stark physical proof of how hard I fell and how hard Mike fought to stop me. Our combined energies from the moment of the crevasse fall are bound up in this stuck biner.

  “Look,” I continue, “I brought your biner. I was alone when I took it from you, and I’m alone when I’m giving it back to you. It’s your biner, Mike. I was only holding on to it for you, and now I’m giving it back.”

  I thrust it skyward to show him, teary-eyed but smiling, then extend the locking biner up toward the same alpine landmarks at which I tossed rice. I present his biner toward Everest’s summit last of all.

  Then I look around for the deepest bedrock crack I can locate near the summit. I crouch over the fissure and let go of the biner. It slithers down out of sight, clattering against the black rock as it settles in deep. I do not want anyone to find it. I scrape my hands across the hardscrabble ground, scooping up sand and rock dust. I carefully pour it into the crack, burying Mike’s carabiner, and with it a tiny part of the raw pain from the crevasse.

  In my mind, I speak to Mike again, telling him that we do not need to talk directly anymore, at least not too often, that we both need to do well with where we are now. A sense of peace—almost happiness—settles on me.

  I descend a few paces down the ridge, then turn back toward the summit, trying to imagine where Mike might be now. I can picture him sitting on the top, looking west at the mountains, facing away from me. I sense him smiling, but he doesn’t turn toward me.

  “Namaste,” I mutter aloud, grinning. I feel Mike answering me—“Namaste, Jim”—in a rising, happy tone.

  I turn away from the summit and begin my journey home.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE GRAY GRANITE is warm under my fingertips, each handhold rough and secure. We are six pitches up the Twin Owls formation at Lumpy Ridge on a perfect first day of summer. Each time the rope moves, a biner above me clanks against bedrock. Wiggling the wired nut gently, I get it to pop loose; then I push it up and out of the crack, reversing the pattern Rodney used to place it half an hour ago. Rodney, my partner and friend, is just a little bit above me now. He had been Mike’s close friend, too—the three of us had climbed together just before Rainier—and he was there as I struggled to deal with all that had happened in that crevasse.

  With 450 feet of rock behind us and just ten feet to go, I pause to soak in the joy of climbing and the satisfaction that the route is nearly complete.

  Coming back to Lumpy with Rodney today has been the right thing to do.

  It is June 21, the anniversary of Mike’s death.

  During the first few years after the accident, the twenty-first day of June was torturous. On each one, I hiked alone, checking my watch often as I thought about exactly where Mike and I were on Rainier at precisely what time. Even though I tried to make the summits of those memorial hikes happy, they never were.

  But now seven years have passed, and I’m marking June 21 by climbing with a good buddy. Rodney and I are reclimbing a route I had been on twice before with Mike. Today feels like an upbeat honoring of Mike and the rewarding pastimes he cherished, ones we still embrace. Being here has spurred me to tell old stories about Mike, about our previous successful ascent of this climb, and about how we had fun the other time even though we got rained off. As Mike’s old friend, Rodney is happy to listen to the tales and tosses in a few doozies of his own, like the story of the night he and Mike passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth while Mike recited some of his original cowboy poetry.

  Rodney and I have swapped the lead back and forth today—three pitches for him, three for me. We’re moving well. I look up and see his rock shoe–clad feet dangling off the final belay ledge just ahead.

  “Hey, I’m almost there. You got a cold beer ready for me?” I joke.

  “Not quite,” he replies. “You gotta carry my pack to the truck first. Then maybe I’ll give you one.”

  It feels good to be up here again. The mountains, the movement, the impromptu t
easing with my climbing friend. There will be some somber moments tonight, perhaps when I check in with the Prices to see how they are doing. But even so, I sense the balance tipping toward a more joyful heart. Instinct tells me that it’s going to be better now.

  FOR FIVE YEARS after the Rainier accident, the mountains were just a small part of my world. Life had taken a new direction: Gloria and I became parents with the arrival of our daughter, Jessica, and then, two years later, our son, Nick.

  Working as an environmental consultant and helping raise our young family meant that I had to put climbing off to the side. I still ventured into the mountains during those years, doing some hiking, backcountry skiing, even a little rock climbing, but no serious alpine climbs. Still, I would look at old climbing slides and feel the mountains’ tug. The sight of an elegant snow ridge would raise familiar emotions: excitement and anxiety, joy and fear.

  During those years, I couldn’t decide whether to embrace mountaineering again. Climbing had brought me the worst experience of my life in that crevasse. And at the same time, it had compelled me to be my best on the most difficult day I have ever endured.

  Just as I’d postponed my decision on whether to resume climbing, I hadn’t established a definitive place in my life for my memories of Rainier, and Mike. The slides, tapes, maps, ice screws, and tattered gear from that fateful trip still sat in a cardboard box, waiting.

  Then one day, five years after the disaster, Rodney asked me a question that forced me to finally decide whether I was still a climber: “Are you interested in helping me lead an expedition to Nepal?”

  After much soul searching, Gloria and I considered what it could mean. We both recognized that climbing was my chosen pathway to growth and self-refinement—my calling, based on passion, not logic. One night, after tucking the kids into bed, we returned to the discussion.