Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  “I really had only the fuzziest idea about my future in those days,” Tabin says. “I had a vague idea of working as a mountain guide. I liked science, and in an abstract way, I remembered my grandmother’s advice and thought of medicine as a way to help people. But above all, I began to think of myself as a climber.”

  At Yale he devoured the literature of climbing and exploration. He was drawn to adventurers like Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian alpinist who escaped an Allied prison camp in India during World War II, crossed the passes to Tibet, and became a tutor to the young Dalai Lama. Or Sir Richard Francis Burton, the rogue British explorer, scholar, and erotically omnivorous translator of the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, who, among dozens of other swashbuckling achievements, added Arabic and Pashtun to the twenty-seven other languages he was said to speak fluently, disguised himself as an Afghan doctor, and, risking death if he was unmasked as an infidel, snuck into the holy Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina.

  “I guess if you had to sum it up,” Tabin says, “my heroes weren’t the people who asked, ‘Why?’ They were the ones who asked, ‘Why not?’ ”

  After graduation, Tabin was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to study philosophy for two years at Oxford University. The summer before classes began, he moved to England and played in several European professional tennis tournaments. Though he won a few matches, his results were disheartening. “I was really fast in those days. I could run down shots anywhere on the court,” Tabin says. “But when you’re playing against a fit Swedish player who’s six foot four—and there were a lot of guys like that—the difference in strength was just too much.”

  When he arrived at University College for the beginning of the fall term, Tabin continued playing tennis recreationally, but his mind was focused on mountains. Fortunately, Oxford’s academic calendar offered ample opportunities for escape. “I was used to Yale, where most of my time was structured,” Tabin says. “But at Oxford, we’d have eight weeks of classes, then a six-week break. That meant twenty-eight weeks a year of paid vacation. ‘Work’ meant reading philosophy, then getting together with a tutor and arguing for two hours a week while we sipped tiny cups of sherry. It was paradise, and I had all the time I wanted to run away and climb.”

  On Tabin’s first day at Oxford, in University College’s common room, he spotted a tall, thin man dressed in rugged outdoor clothing, pacing impatiently. “Does anybody else here climb?” he asked. “My gear is all packed in my car, and I want to go.” After four years of single-mindedly studying biology at the University of Pennsylvania, Bob Shapiro had also won a scholarship to Oxford, where he was reveling in the freedom he had to read philosophy and psychology, subjects he’d missed during his premed college career. Shapiro viewed his time at Oxford as a pleasant interlude during which he could indulge his passions, before buckling back down to pursue a career in neuroscience.

  “It’s one of the great good fortunes of my life that Geoff and I were both at University College at the same time,” Shapiro says. Tabin had met a kindred spirit, a peer who would become his climbing partner, confidant, and lifelong friend. Like Tabin, Shapiro was addicted to the literature of mountaineering and exploration. Like Tabin, he was not merely an armchair adventurer but someone willing to take risks in the real world. They left the next day to climb the sea cliffs of Cornwall.

  In a quaint country inn where they stopped to dine on the way back to Oxford, Tabin called out loudly for two cold beers before they’d even been seated. While the waiter bent to take their order, Shapiro noticed that Tabin had lifted a heavy silver fork from the spotless white tablecloth and was using one of its tines to scrape dirt from his fingernails.

  “My first impression of Geoff Tabin was that he was very young and very oblivious to cultural norms and expectations,” Shapiro says. “I mean, this was a real restaurant, someplace nice. I thought, ‘How is this guy going to survive in a place obsessed with manners?’ ”

  The Oxford social calendar is crammed with formal events, each requiring a strict dress code. “I think Geoff just saw it all as a series of costume parties,” Shapiro says. “He had a white polyester tuxedo with wide lapels, the kind you’d rent for a high school prom, and whether the occasion called for white tie, black tie, dinner jackets, or tails, Geoff would show up wearing that same tux with tennis shoes. There are people who can’t stand Geoff because of this sort of thing, who consider him a clown. But to really know him is to utterly forgive anything like that.”

  Soon Shapiro and Tabin were slipping away to places where the only code that mattered was the “brotherhood of the rope,” the reliance on your climbing partner to protect you. They ticked off classic climbs across the British Isles and dashed off for weekends in the Alps, where they’d repeat ascents of famous climbing routes over the course of a few sleepless days and nights. “We were ideally matched as climbers,” Shapiro says. “I’d do the planning and worrying. Geoff would charge in blithely with his ‘damn the torpedoes’ approach. We complemented each other’s weaknesses. I gave him a little injection of common sense, and he helped me screw up my courage. And of course we both shared the pleasure of torturing our Jewish mothers with our climbing obsession.”

  During the fall of his second year at Oxford, Shapiro read Felice Benuzzi’s No Picnic on Mount Kenya, the true story of Italian climbers who escaped a British POW camp during World War II to climb Mount Kenya, Africa’s second-tallest and most technically challenging mountain. Benuzzi’s team fashioned crampons and ice axes out of scavenged scrap metal and, even in their weakened state after years of imprisonment, nearly managed to reach the summit before a storm and depleted provisions drove them back down to captivity.

  “To me, it’s the greatest mountaineering book ever written,” Shapiro says. Benuzzi planned his escape for the sheer joy of challenging an unknown mountain, knowing that the price he’d pay for his temporary freedom was to be recaptured and locked in solitary confinement after he descended. Shapiro pressed Tabin to read the book, then proposed that they attempt Mount Kenya over their Christmas break. They left for Africa on a cold December day at term’s end.

  Benuzzi’s first glimpse of the summit, from captivity, so overwhelmed him that he immediately began to plot his escape. He describes the moment when he saw “an ethereal mountain emerging from a tossing sea of clouds framed between two dark barracks—a massive blue-black tooth of sheer rock inlaid with azure glaciers, austere, yet floating fairy-like on the near horizon. I stood gazing until the vision disappeared among the shifting cloud banks. For hours afterward I remained spell-bound. I had definitely fallen in love.”

  For route planning, Felice Benuzzi had only the distant view of the peak he could see on clear days from his barracks window, a crude map he’d copied from another prisoner’s book on the customs and folklore of the region, and a label from a can of Kenylon brand preserved meat that featured a detailed and, he hoped, accurate drawing of the south side of the mountain, the side he couldn’t see from camp. Shapiro, too, had fallen for Mount Kenya from afar. But he reached base camp, after months of study, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the historical first ascents and common routes to the summit and surrounding peaks. Tabin arrived only slightly better informed than Benuzzi. “All I really knew about Mount Kenya when Bob and I set up our tent,” he says, “is that it was huge and there was no easy way to the top.”

  Tabin and Shapiro tried the traditional route to the summit first and were discouraged to find that they were climbing too slowly to reach it before their energy and supplies would both be depleted. They spent a bitterly cold night on Nelion, the lower of Mount Kenya’s twin summits. When daylight arrived, the view was obscured by swirling, powdery snow, and they headed back to base camp, dejected. They wondered what kind of Übermenschen would be able to complete such a hard technical climb at altitude.

  After a few days of acclimatization, they felt stronger and attempted another classic path to the summit, the more difficult “Ice-Window Route.” After a t
housand feet of maneuvering up a steep ice-and-rock ascent, they entered the eerie cave that gives the route its name. Scrambling up through a sloping forest of sixty-foot icicles, they reached the rear of the cave and found a wall of blue ice more than a foot thick blocking their progress.

  They were the first climbers to attempt the route that season, and they set to work with their ice axes, hacking toward the brightness they could see beyond. Finally, they climbed out the narrow window they’d fashioned, clung to the nearly vertical headwall of the Diamond Couloir with their crampons, and were rewarded with a frightening and spectacular view. Below them, ice cliffs fell away for two hundred vertical feet. And above, the pinnacle of Batian, the tip of the rocky tooth that had lured Benuzzi through barbed wire, sparkled in fine weather, beckoning them on.

  This time, they’d come equipped with sleeping bags, stoves, and extra food and clothing and slept in an alpine hut built for mountaineers that Shapiro had circled on his map. They reached the summit of Batian in bright equatorial sunshine the following morning, elated, and snapped celebratory photos. “Reaching the highest point on Mount Kenya led to a strong sense of accomplishment,” Tabin says, “and a powerful realization that mere mortals could safely do tough technical climbing at altitude.”

  Back at base camp, Tabin and Shapiro buzzed around on an adrenaline high. “Following established routes in a guidebook was great fun,” Tabin says. “But I began to understand the thrill of climbing into the unknown, the excitement that making your own way up a big mountain could provide.” Tabin and Shapiro decided to attempt the sort of high-risk, technical route that had made the heroes of their mountaineering books famous, the type of climb that only a week earlier they’d believed was beyond their ability. The Diamond Buttress was considered the toughest hard-rock route on the mountain and had been climbed only three times before.

  Tabin and Shapiro set off at sunrise.

  “We could both sense something profound had changed,” Tabin says. “We were climbing as easily and confidently as if we were down at sea level.” Tabin led the way up the first two pitches. They were “free-climbing,” threading their rope through hardware Tabin placed in the rock for protection in case either of them fell, but relying only on their hands and feet to ascend the daunting sunbaked face. Some toeholds were only the width of a quarter.

  Shapiro suggested that since they were making such good progress, they attempt to free-climb the entire Diamond Buttress, something no one had ever accomplished. “On the third pitch,” Tabin says, “I found myself a hundred and thirty feet above Bob with nowhere to go. I was hanging by a single finger from a crack and could see no holds above me. After ten minutes my arm was shaking and stretched to its limit. My mind started seizing up.” Tabin eased his bruised finger out of the crack and down-climbed twenty-five feet; there he met Shapiro on his way up. Tabin told him he couldn’t sense any way to safely proceed. So with the symbiosis of perfectly compatible partners, Shapiro summoned up his courage and led the next section. He set off on a long traverse to their right, tiptoeing with the sticky rubber edges of his climbing shoes along a ledge only a few inches wide. “This is pretty thin stuff!” he yelled to Tabin. “But I think we can do it!” Tabin followed, trying not to look down at the sheer drop to a glacier five hundred feet below.

  They reached a ladderlike series of handholds and hauled themselves up the buttress’s final pitch to a wide ledge, big enough for both of them to lay out their sleeping bags. They decided to spend the night there and celebrate.

  “When we reached the ledge,” Tabin says, “It looked as comfortable as a five-star hotel. I collapsed and let out a whoop of joy. I couldn’t believe we’d achieved the sort of thing that until then I’d only ascribed to mythical creatures, to the climbers I’d idolized. I realized that you never know what your true limits are until you test them. I learned that the most difficult obstacles to overcome, in mountaineering as in life, are mental.”

  Gaston Rébuffat was one of the mythical figures who loomed unusually large in Tabin’s imagination. In his book Starlight and Storm, he explains why such moments are so precious to mountaineers. “In this modern age,” Rébuffat writes, “very little remains that is real. Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind and the stars. They have all been neutralized: the rhythm of life itself is obscured.… What a strange encounter then is that between man and the high places of his planet! Up there he is surrounded by the silence of forgetfulness. If there is a slope of snow steep as a glass window, he climbs it, leaving behind him a strange trail. If there is a rock perfect as an obelisk, he defies gravity and proves that he can get up anywhere.”

  Tabin had come to Oxford to study philosophy. But the most meaningful philosophical discovery he made during those two years dawned on him not among sherry-sipping, pipe-smoking professors but during a spectacular clear night, connected, as if by electrical cables, to the life force climbers like Rébuffat sought, on a ledge protruding from a snow peak in equatorial Africa, sprawled beneath a blanket of stars.

  A Bit of Sport

  Our ignorance proved an insuperable handicap from the point of view of material achievement; but from the spiritual point of view, which is of far greater importance to the true mountaineer, it was in the nature of a gift from God. Every step led to new discoveries, and we were continually in a state of amazed admiration and gratitude. It was as though we were living at the beginning of time, before men had begun to give names to things.

  —Felice Benuzzi, No Picnic on Mount Kenya

  With his last term at Oxford winding down, Tabin planned to enroll at Harvard Medical School. He’d been accepted before he’d left Yale and had deferred admission twice, reapplying successfully both times. But Harvard’s administrators had made it clear that they would look unfavorably on any further delay. Tabin felt conflicted, since he still harbored dreams of working as a mountain guide. He made plans to move to Boston in the fall, figuring his path would become clear once classes started. But before he left the tea party circuit behind, he was introduced to an indelible fixture in Oxford society named David Kirke, who offered him a glimpse of another brand of adventure to be found far from academia.

  One morning at 3:00 A.M., a nearly sober Kirke pounded on Tabin’s door. “Geoff,” he slurred, “do come to America and have a bit of sport with us.”

  “I can’t,” Tabin said. “I have a tutorial at eleven and exams coming up.”

  “Pitch it!” Kirke commanded. “We’re going to jump off the highest bridge in the world. We need you to fix the harnesses and handle the safety angle. I will pick up all of your expenses. The flight leaves Heathrow in eight hours. What do you say?”

  “I thought,” Tabin says, “ ‘Will I regret this more if I do it, or if I don’t?’ ”

  Tabin told Kirke he was in.

  David Kirke was the founder of the “Dangerous Sports Club.” Most afternoons, Tabin says, he could be found lunching on omelets and ale at a pub called the Bear. Afterward, he installed himself in his favorite gentlemen’s club, perusing newspapers and downing single-malt scotch. With his beer drinker’s paunch, gray-flecked beard, and receding curls, Kirke didn’t look like a typical adrenaline junkie. But, inarguably, he was.

  Tabin says that Kirke, a former journalist, had discovered that he liked making news far better than writing about people he found less fascinating than himself. Tabin was so taken with Kirke that he was happy to oblige. He wrote a profile of Kirke that was published in Playboy called “The World’s Most Daring Sportsman.” In the piece, Tabin detailed how Kirke began concocting outlandish sporting events, and inviting sponsorship and media coverage. In the summer of 1977, Tabin wrote, with no serious climbing experience to speak of, Kirke hauled himself up the Matterhorn. The following month, he launched a kayak down the Landquart River in Switzerland, surviving one of Europe’s most fearsome stretches of whitewater as a novice.

  During his drinking sessions, Kirke and the other members of the club designed an offi
cial club tie (black with silver wheelchairs) and competed to invent the most original and artistic ways to risk death or dismemberment. They participated in the running of the bulls, in Pamplona, on skateboards. They snuck onto bobsled runs in the Alps and slid down them at preposterously high speeds on blocks of ice fitted with saddles.

  Kirke’s first major splash in the media came when he convinced the BBC to film a documentary about members of the Dangerous Sports Club climbing Kilimanjaro and sailing off the summit on hang gliders. Kirke, the least fit-looking member of the group by far, took pride in his ability to stride straight to the top of the nineteen-thousand-foot peak, while his younger and stronger clubmates wheezed and suffered from altitude sickness. “Kirke had portrayed himself as a champion hang glider to BBC producers,” Tabin says. “But actually, he’d never bothered to master the basics of the sport.”

  As the cameras rolled, Alan Weston, the only experienced hang glider pilot in the club, crashed on takeoff, destroying his glider and injuring his ankle. Two of the other club members abandoned their plans to jump as they struggled with altitude sickness. That left Kirke to salvage the club’s reputation. He launched himself off Kilimanjaro’s summit, wobbled, and smacked his wingtip against the side of the mountain, then rose on an updraft before power-diving out of control, and out of sight. “The film crew captured twelve seconds of the Kirke posterior disappearing into a bank of clouds,” Tabin says. “It was a disaster for the BBC, but made Kirke into a media darling.” He flew on through the clouds and mist, without a compass or altimeter, eventually gliding in for a gentle landing on a coffee plantation twenty-five miles away.

  “You could call Kirke the ultimate dilettante, and say that he was deranged to take such outrageous risks,” Tabin says. “But there was a psychological toughness to him I couldn’t help admiring. He believes he will survive, and through sheer force of will, he does.”