After returning from Christmas break and his climb of Mount Kenya, Tabin met Kirke. During their expedition, Tabin and Shapiro had read Heinrich Harrer’s I Come from the Stone Age, his account of climbing Carstensz Pyramid, in New Guinea, the highest peak in Oceania, accompanied by Dani tribesmen. They were trying to finance an expedition of their own to Carstensz.
Tabin told Kirke about the potential trip to New Guinea. “If you go,” Kirke suggested, “you must try the Vanuatuan vine jump.” Kirke, while casting about for ever more original ways to cheat death, had fastened on the coming-of-age ritual common to New Guinea and other Pacific island cultures, wherein adolescent boys climbed to the top of a palm tree, or a tower specially built for the purpose, tied a vine around their ankles, and dove from as high as one hundred feet, headfirst toward the ground. If the vine held, islanders believed, and the boys’ foreheads just grazed the forest floor, they would prove their mettle as men, and ensure a successful yam or taro harvest.
Kirke told Tabin he wanted to re-create the ritual in Britain and over many pints of beer they discussed how it could be done, deciding to substitute bridges for tall trees and bungee cords for vines. With improvised climbing harnesses and lengthy bungee cords Kirke’s associates “borrowed” from a British naval base, Kirke prepared his vine jump. On April Fool’s Day 1979, Kirke and three other club members tied their cords to the 245-foot Clifton Bridge in Bristol, England, and dove off.
Encouraged that no one had died, Kirke cast around for a more dramatic venue. He chose what, at the time, was the world’s highest suspension bridge, the 955-foot Royal Gorge, near Cañon City, Colorado. Kirke arranged for ABC’s That’s Incredible! to fund and televise the leap he’d convinced Tabin to leave Oxford for and take with him.
On March 6, 1980, Tabin and a dozen other Oxonians drove through a Colorado snowstorm in a convoy led by a wildly fishtailing white Cadillac convertible. They arrived to see cameramen arrayed around the bridge, an ABC helicopter circling overhead, and, more ominously, an ambulance parked nearby. They were pleased to find the piano they’d rented for the official accompanist they’d flown in from Oxford set up next to the railing where they planned to take the plunge.
Just before 3:00 P.M., Kirke passed around several bottles of champagne, fortifying his team. Then the five jumpers were all made to sign releases absolving bridge authorities of responsibility in the event of their deaths. “Kirke’s hand trembled as he held the pen,” Tabin says. “None of us had ever seen him show any sign of fear before, and we were all a bit unnerved.”
Finally, with the camera helicopter hovering overhead, the rotor blades drowning out the piano and ruffling Kirke’s black tails, the Dangerous Sports Club members steadied themselves for their most hazardous stunt to date. Tabin, clad in his well-used white tux, climbed onto the railing alongside his fellow aerialists. Kirke, of course, stood in the center. “Nearly a thousand feet below, the Arkansas River looked like a thread,” Tabin says. The canyon narrowed from a width of eight hundred feet to only sixty as it reached the river. “From where we stood,” Tabin recalls, “it looked like the canyon walls were only inches apart.”
Tabin had knotted all the cords securely, triple-checking each man’s harness, especially Kirke’s, which was longer than the other jumpers’, since he hoped to rebound just shy of smashing into the Arkansas River. But no one knew exactly how far the cords would stretch, whether the jumpers would pass out from g-forces, or if the wind whipping through the gorge would blow them off course. “I worried that if we hit the granite walls,” Tabin says, “we’d end up as strawberry jam smeared on rock.”
Kirke raised his hand, counted to three, and calmly stepped out into the air. “We all followed him,” Tabin says. “My mind screamed, ‘Error!’ My testicles retreated up into the safety of my body, and I was like a cartoon figure, desperately trying to walk back to the bridge. Then I dropped. My mind stopped as I free-fell. I came to a gentle stop four hundred feet down while Kirke was still falling; then I was catapulted violently up, out of control. I was elated. My knots had held! I could see all my teammates falling and rising, and I was so relieved none of us had become strawberry jam that I made sure to enjoy my last few bounces by doing somersaults.”
Finally, Tabin came to rest, hanging at the end of his cord, waving to the helicopter’s camera, trying to ignore the tight harness cutting off the supply of blood to his legs. He was suspended below the bridge and above the river, swaying gently between canyon walls. He’d answered the query he’d put to himself the morning Kirke had issued his invitation; he definitely would have regretted missing the experience, the voltage that pulsed through him as his body transmitted euphoric messages to his brain that he had survived.
But as he dangled, poised between earth and sky, reflexively scanning the granite walls of the canyon for climbing routes, Geoff Tabin couldn’t help pondering another question. Could he really abandon a life of adventures like these? Would he ever be able to stop swerving and embed himself in the grinding regularity required to succeed at Harvard Medical School? While the Oxonians remaining on the bridge celebrated with champagne toasts, then struggled with the problem of how, exactly, to haul the jumpers up, he had more time than he wanted to wonder.
Before enrolling in medical school, Tabin managed to squeeze in one more adventure. “Bob did some research and discovered trust funds for “strenuous holidays” that were artifacts from a time when it was considered a sacred duty for Oxford gentlemen to go off and ‘civilize’ people in ‘primitive’ parts of the world,” Tabin says. He and Shapiro applied for a grant from the “A. C. Irvine Travel Fund,” which partially paid for their attempt to climb Carstensz Pyramid. Because of the expense of reaching such a remote mountain, they were accompanied by Sam Moses, a writer for Sports Illustrated, which had agreed to pick up the remaining cost of their expedition in exchange for publishing a piece about the trip.
Moses initially found Tabin too bizarre to take seriously. Before he’d left Oxford, a girlfriend of Tabin’s had painted his toenails bright red and blue, and they were still decorated that way when a sandal-wearing Tabin first met Moses in New Guinea. “Despite [Tabin’s] intellectual credentials, it seemed to me there were some missing steps in Geoff’s way of reasoning; his conclusions appeared out of kilter with the evidence; his arithmetic somehow off. I resolved to keep up my guard [with him],” Moses said early in the thirty-page feature he wrote, which ran in two consecutive issues.
Carstensz Pyramid is one of the Seven Summits, and the least frequently climbed, because of its extreme inaccessibility. The most technically challenging thing about climbing it is the ten-day trek to the base camp, through the double- and triple-canopy jungle inhabited by the Dani, a tribe of former headhunters.
To reach Carstensz, the team had to trek forty-four miles through a maze of game trails from the landing strip where a small plane had deposited them. Shapiro had worried that they wouldn’t be able to hire enough porters to carry their climbing and camping gear, but the Dani turned the trip into a community outing, and entire families divided the loads into small bundles and set out together. Old men joined the procession for a few miles at a time to exchange gossip. Women wearing yums from their foreheads, net bags woven from reeds and adorned with colorful orchids, carried either heavy loads of sweet potatoes in their bags or babies swaddled in leaves and moss. And hour after hour, accompanied by the counterpoint of hornbills and birds of paradise, the Dani sang.
“Every day I grew more amazed by our companions,” Tabin says. “We had brought hundreds of pounds of high-tech gear, but they found everything they needed in the forest.” The men traveled naked except for their kotekas, the jutting tusklike gourds they wore to cover their penises. If it rained, they whipped together pandanus-leaf ponchos. If they were hungry, they ate the sweet potatoes they carried, foraged for roots or bugs, or caught a bat, which they’d roast over a fire built by striking flints onto handfuls of moss. Then they shared out tiny portions,
so that everyone got a mouthful.
During the ten days of trekking, the Americans’ greatest difficulty proved to be staying on top of the logs the Dani confidently strode across, rather than wading through the muddy jungle floor. Moses describes how frightening the logs could be. But “Geoff, in blue boxer trunks, a preppie gray wool crewneck sweater and galoshes, and a yum full of potatoes hanging down his back … Geoff would amble blithely and eagerly onto even the slimiest log; it wouldn’t have surprised me,” Moses wrote, “if he had taken off his galoshes and gone barefoot, like the Dani, just for fun.”
Carstensz Pyramid rises two vertical miles from the jungle floor to a height of 16,023 feet, an ominous gray shark fin surfacing from a sea of trees. Tabin, Shapiro, and Moses were only the sixth party to successfully climb to Carstensz’s summit. Tabin led most of the way as they forged a new route to the top. For the summit photo, all three posed naked, except for the long, curving kotekas they’d borrowed from the Dani. Today, that photo is framed and proudly displayed in the Tabin home.
Toward the end of his article, Moses admitted that he misjudged Tabin when he first met him. Tabin might be “cheerfully oblivious to society’s norms,” he wrote, but he would certainly “have [him] as an expedition partner again.”
For Tabin, the climb felt anticlimactic after the experience of traveling with a tribe that lived much as they had since the Stone Age. “The real adventure had been the privilege of spending time with the Dani,” Tabin says. “Watching them, I realized just how much we had sacrificed in the name of ‘civilization.’ ”
Two weeks later, Tabin found himself in a lecture hall at Harvard University. Despite his long-held fear of stepping onto the conveyor belt of conformity, when he enrolled, in the fall of 1980, he was surprised by how thrilled he was to be studying medicine. “There was a lot of grunt memorization and basic anatomy to learn, of course,” Tabin says, “but the faculty was incredible. Every week we’d listen to someone lecture who was pushing the boundaries of their field.”
For Tabin, the number of career paths open to him seemed infinite. Specialties and subspecialties began to branch and fork in his imagination like the lavishly detailed charts of the human nervous system that sprawled across the pages of his textbooks. Tabin says he had little sense of which specialty to pursue. “Vaguely, in the back of my head, was a desire to connect the idea of helping people my grandmother had instilled in me with travel and adventure,” he says. “But I had only the fuzziest notion of how that might work.”
Meanwhile, to keep the needle of his fun-o-meter from flatlining, Tabin gathered a collection of climbing partners in Cambridge, and when he had time, he’d try to solve the problem of a pitch or two of challenging rock. Six weeks after classes started, he was bouldering, climbing a small outcropping without a rope, just outside of Boston at Hammond Pond, a small body of water behind a Bloomingdale’s department store. A piece of rock he was using as a handhold broke off while he was on an overhanging ledge with his feet hooked up over his head. “The last thing I remember was torpedoing straight down,” he says.
He fell fifteen feet headfirst, knocking himself unconscious and breaking his left arm. Tabin’s climbing partner and classmate, Hansell Stedman, ran to Tabin and realized he had stopped breathing. Stedman remembers the moment vividly. He says he had the sensation of scanning all of the medical texts he’d studied to date and blacking out the sections, as if with a Magic Marker, that weren’t applicable. When he was certain of the correct course of action, he gave Tabin mouth-to-nose resuscitation, carried him several hundred yards, and flagged down a passing driver, who rushed them to the nearest hospital.
Tabin remained in a coma for thirty-six hours, and when he emerged from it, the first thing he saw was the face of a doctor swimming into focus by his bed; then he heard his alarming words. “The doctor told me, ‘You are the luckiest sonofabitch I’ve ever seen,’ ” Tabin remembers. “ ‘If your friend hadn’t done everything exactly right, you’d be dead.’ ” Tabin left the hospital after a week and returned to Harvard.
“The irony that Geoff, who’d survived so many dangerous mountain climbs, had nearly died on a boulder behind a Bloomingdale’s was not lost on our classmates,” Stedman says.
When I asked about his near-death experience, Tabin was characteristically unruffled. “There’ve been so many times I could have been killed climbing that it felt like just another close call, and it certainly wasn’t going to stop me from doing what I loved. As you can imagine, my mother saw it a little differently.”
Sam Moses published his Sports Illustrated story that March, and it fashioned Tabin as the energetic hero of the Carstensz expedition. “Geoff was up there on the leading end of the rope,” Moses wrote, “the ‘sharp end,’ as climbers call it, often unprotected, 800 feet off the ground, standing on loose little clumps of grass and clinging to a wall of rock while icy water dribbled down his sleeves to his armpits.” The article put Tabin on the climbing community’s radar.
At the end of the semester, as he was studying for his pharmacology exam, he received a phone call from a San Francisco neuroscientist named Lou Reichardt, one of the world’s most celebrated high-altitude mountaineers and the first person to summit K2, the planet’s second-highest peak, without the use of supplemental oxygen. Reichardt said he was leading an expedition to the last unclimbed face of Everest. He explained that they had a full complement of members but asked Tabin if he was willing to serve as the team’s first alternate, in case any of them weren’t able to go.
“I couldn’t believe Lou would consider me,” Tabin says. “He was one of my heroes, and I’d have been thrilled just to meet him. But a chance to attempt the last unclimbed face of Everest!” Tabin could hear himself breathing into the phone as he took stock. He knew in his gut he wasn’t experienced enough for such a challenging technical climb at that altitude. After his accident, he was in the worst physical shape of his life. He told Reichardt he was honored even to be considered and promised to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
A week after the expedition left for Tibet, Tabin received word that one of the climbers had broken his ankle, and he began jamming gear into duffel bags. From the San Francisco airport, Tabin sent a scrawled postcard to the medical school’s dean of students, saying he was off to climb Everest and requesting that the university hold his place. He knew that leaving Harvard suddenly to spend months on an expedition might permanently derail his medical career. He didn’t hesitate, and boarded a plane bound for Asia.
The Himalaya may be at their most impressive when seen from the north. Unscreened by the range’s southern foothills, and thrusting starkly up from the Tibetan plain, the mountains that would come to define Geoff Tabin’s life overwhelmed him as he walked toward them, accompanied by a yak caravan loaded with the expedition’s supplies. “I thought I knew a bit about mountains,” Tabin says. “But nothing I’d ever seen prepared me for the grandeur of the highest Himalayan peaks.”
For the first few days of the week-long trek to base camp, Tabin was so deliriously happy to be on his way to Everest that his sunburned face hurt from grinning. The Tibetan yak herders sang as they walked, accompanied by the lulling chimes of their animals’ bells. Here it was, in three dimensions, the world he’d read about in books since boyhood, the ultimate test that he’d fantasized about while climbing lesser peaks. Around each bend in the trail, new vistas appeared, each more improbable than the last. The snowfields and summits of Makalu, Chomolonzo, Lhotse, and Everest revealed themselves in stages, glittering ice cathedrals that rose from the dry brown plateau with the eccentric clarity of dreams. “It was the greatest hike of my life,” Tabin says. “Most of the way I felt like I was soaring ten feet off the ground.”
Two days from base camp, a tall, elderly man who looked remarkably like Sir Edmund Hillary strolled unsteadily toward them, his head wrapped in bloody bandages. He squinted as he tried to focus his pale blue eyes on Tabin. “Are you driving the bus?” Tabin tho
ught he heard him say.
Tabin was tempted to blame the inexplicable vision on the altitude, but Jim Morrissey, the man accompanying New Zealand’s most famous citizen, confirmed that it was, in fact, the great man. Hillary had trekked to base camp with most of the other expedition members several weeks earlier and was suffering from cerebral edema, a swelling of the fluid around the brain caused by high altitude. Morrissey, a Californian cardiologist, was rushing Hillary down to the relative safety of lower altitude. But while they’d been crossing a seventeen-thousand-foot pass on their return trip, Hillary had been knocked off the trail by a yak caravan, and had slammed his head against a rock.
“Jim was terrified that our expedition could become famous for killing the world’s greatest living mountaineer,” Tabin says, “so he was in a hurry to keep moving and I only had a moment to spend with Hillary.” Morrissey said he’d be back in a few days, and Hillary summoned the lucidity, before stumbling away, to clap his hand on Tabin’s shoulder and wish him luck.
Unfortunately, the image of a bloodied Edmund Hillary augured the low morale Tabin found infecting base camp. The first night he shared a tent with John Roskelley, who’d completed so many technically challenging first ascents that many in the media had anointed him the greatest mountaineer on earth. Tabin climbed into the tent and unrolled his sleeping bag. “I was so happy to be there,” he says. “There was so much I hoped to learn from John. I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask.”
But before Tabin could make a single inquiry, Roskelley sat up and stared at Tabin bleakly. “This face is suicide,” Roskelley said. “If you climb on this route, in these conditions, you’re going to die.” Then he rolled over and went to sleep.
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