Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  Wiedman shared Tabin’s enthusiasm for mountains. He had once trekked to Everest base camp and was interested in high altitude’s effect on the eye. It was difficult to gather data from extreme heights, and Wiedman saw the expedition as an ideal research opportunity; Tabin could assist him by examining the eyes of his team members as their climb progressed. Wiedman was curious whether any evidence of retinal hemorrhaging Tabin might observe could predict whether climbers would later suffer cerebral or pulmonary edema, the flooding of the skull or lungs with fluid that endangered many mountaineers. He gave Tabin basic training in the use of an ophthalmoscope, so he could examine and photograph his teammates’ eyes at altitude, and his blessing to pursue the dream of conquering Everest’s most intimidating face.

  The next fall, Tabin arrived in base camp wearing two hats: those of climber and of ocular researcher. Dan Reid wore even more. He arrived as the team doctor, as an aspiring summiteer, and as a fully kitted-out representative of his Scottish heritage. He’d brought a formal kilt to wear whenever he wasn’t actually climbing and had also embroidered the phrase THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD on all of his gear.

  This time Tabin arrived in peak physical condition. To test his stamina, he says, he sprinted across New Hampshire’s Presidential Range in four hours, a route that often takes hikers two days. He jogged the five miles between his apartment and Harvard twice every school day, detouring to sprint up and down the steps of the football stadium. He climbed every weekend. He ran the Boston Marathon and had so much energy left after crossing the finish line that he drove to New Hampshire and completed a five-pitch climb later that afternoon.

  Tabin arrived at base camp prepared and confident. Older masters he’d clicked with on his previous trip, like George Lowe and Lou Reichardt, had returned. Jim Morrissey, the cardiologist who had escorted Sir Edmund Hillary to safety, led the expedition. “Jim was the perfect leader for this kind of trip,” Tabin says. “He had vast experience, lots of common sense, and because he was primarily a doctor, he didn’t have a climbing ego that would clash with the rest of the team.”

  But when Tabin saw the younger professional climbers wandering around base camp, shirtless, he felt his confidence waver. “Kim Momb, Carl Tobin, Carlos Buhler, and Dave Cheesmond did nothing but climb full-time, and they looked like miniature versions of the Incredible Hulk,” Tabin says. “In my daily life I was used to feeling pretty invincible, but at Everest I realized I was the weakest member of the group.”

  Relations among the members of the 1983 team proved to be far more harmonious than those of the 1981 expedition. Reichardt once again took the lead, carrying enormous loads. Base camp manager John Boyle arrived with a novel plan to cut down much of the grunt work that had demoralized members of the earlier expedition. Knowing they were climbing from the east, where they would once again be unsupported by native load carriers, Boyle had brought an important ally: a rocket launcher. By firing off a rocket tied to rope from a high point on the Kangshung Face, he hoped to attach the rope to yachting pulleys and a generator, then haul their supplies up into place. The first two launch attempts fizzled. But their last rocket cleared the Kangshung’s rock outcroppings, and they were able to ferry hundreds of pounds of rope, fuel, and food up the mountain, saving the climbers dozens of trips.

  Tabin’s main task was still hauling gear. They had named one narrow ice chute that accessed the top of the face the Bowling Alley, because every day, when it was warmed by the sun, bowling-ball-sized chunks of ice and rock ricocheted down its length. “I raced up it every time as fast as I could, like a scared rabbit,” Tabin says.

  After depositing one load, Tabin was rappelling down the Bowling Alley when he heard a roar above him. A house-sized block of rock had broken off and was accelerating directly toward the spot where he hung in the center of the chute, as helpless as a bowling pin. “It hit and shattered one hundred feet above me,” Tabin says, “and car-sized chunks rained down all around me. I curled up as small as I could and prepared to die.” Tabin remembers how blank his mind became as he calmly watched three large pieces scream by within five feet of him, leaving him dangling unscathed, while the acrid gunpowder scent of shattered rock drifted through thin air.

  On October 8, after six weeks of labor, the men had their tents and gear positioned at 25,900 feet and a window of perfect weather. Morrissey divided the climbers into three summit teams. The strongest—Reichardt, Momb, and Buhler—would make the first attempt. They set out at 4:00 A.M. By noon, their Chinese interpreter had radioed from base camp to say that he’d spotted climbers ascending the summit ridge through his telescope. In the background, Tabin could clearly hear Tibetans chanting mantras for their success. At 2:45 P.M., Momb’s voice crackled over the radio. “We’re on top of this fucker!” he said, openly weeping. The three walked the final steps to the summit together, where they spent thirty minutes enjoying the view from the top of the world in air calm enough that they could have lit a candle.

  The second party—George Lowe, Dr. Dan Reid, and Jay Cassell—summited the next day. The strongest, Lowe, sped to the top by 10:00 A.M, turned around, and warned Reid and Cassell, whom he met while they were still on their way up, to descend if the weather worsened. Lowe hurried to lower altitude but turned his headlamp on and left it hanging inside a tent for his teammates. Reid and Cassell didn’t reach the summit until nearly 4:00 P.M., and more than four hours later, they were still stumbling through darkness and blowing snow. They were arguing about whether they’d descended past their high camp when they spotted the light Lowe had left for them, just beneath the spot where they stood. They collapsed into the tent. Lowe’s forethought almost certainly saved their lives.

  The window of fine weather had iced over and frozen shut. On October 10, high winds and two feet of new snow meant Tabin had to turn around. “It was agony,” he says. “I was elated that we’d succeeded in solving a face many considered impossible. But I’d been waiting my turn for two days. Ever since I’d read Rébuffat’s Starlight and Storm, I’d taken his mantra to heart: I prefer dreams to memories. And I dreamed of standing on top of the world. Now the weather wasn’t going to give me that chance.” Morrissey radioed the group remaining at their high camp that their only job now was to get everyone safely off the mountain.

  Descending through the Bowling Alley, Tabin slipped, his heavy pack spun him upside down, and he couldn’t right himself. As he hung there, helpless, spindrift avalanches swept down the chute, filling his mouth and nose, and he feared he was going to drown. Then the indefatigable Dr. Dan, barely recovered from his summit climb, came to his rescue. “Dan Reid labored back up ropes he’d already descended, untangled me, and saved my life,” Tabin says.

  “We weren’t the strongest group of American climbers you could have put together that year,” Jim Morrissey told me, still a confident, commanding presence in his mid-sixties, wearing a blue blazer and a crimson tie embossed with a logo of the Khangshung Face.

  “But we were the best team,” Lou Reichardt said, finishing Jim’s thought before stuffing a seared tuna hors d’oeuvre into his mouth. I was with surviving members of the expedition, who’d met for a reunion in San Francisco.

  On the top floor of a skyscraper at dusk, they looked past the tip of a man-made mountain, the Transamerica Pyramid, toward Alcatraz, and raised their glasses to departed friends, including Dr. Dan Reid. He had fallen to his death in 1991, along with his wife, Barbara, on Mount Kenya, the mountain where Tabin had first discovered his ability to climb tough technical routes at altitude. Nearly thirty years after making the first ascent of the Kangshung Face, this tight-knit group of fit middle-aged men still seemed mildly shocked that they’d made it. In the years since their first ascent, no one else had repeated their route.

  Tabin survived his headfirst fall while bouldering, his two leaves of absence, and his two brushes with death in the Bowling Alley to graduate from Harvard Medical School in 1985. The high-altitude ocular data he collected on Everest beca
me the basis of several papers he published with Professor Wiedman. But Tabin wasn’t planning a career in ophthalmology. He figured the best way to combine his interests in outdoor adventure and medicine was to become an orthopedic surgeon, perhaps eventually establishing a practice in a mountain town.

  While his classmates had been preparing single-mindedly for specialized careers, Tabin had alienated the medical establishment with his serial escapes to the mountains. “The way they saw it, I was an unreliable loose cannon,” he says. His applications for residencies in orthopedic surgery were all rejected.

  Tabin enrolled as a general surgical resident at the University of Colorado. His disappointment was tempered by his proximity to his favorite climbing partner from Everest, George Lowe, who offered an escape hatch from the grind of hospital rounds. Lowe would collect Tabin after his overnight shifts in the emergency room, feed him thermoses of strong coffee, and fly him in his single-engine plane to sandstone pinnacles in the deserts of eastern Utah. The Aspen mountaineer Neal Beidleman would often join them on these outings.

  In the clarifying desert light, Tabin was able, for a few hours at a time, to empty his head of the gunshot and knife wounds he’d treated the night before by narrowing his concerns to the precise placement of fingertips and toes on sunbaked rock.

  Beth Peterson, a second-year resident in Denver, remembers how distinct Tabin’s bearing was from that of the other doctors. “Geoff was always bubbling with energy and wit and focused like a laser beam on his patients. His joyfulness and ability to completely inhabit the present is unique among humans, not just first-year residents. I was wowed by him.”

  One evening, as they were leaving the hospital in a dense snowstorm, she mentioned that she needed a ride. “I’m taking you to dinner,” Tabin said, inhabiting the moment in a matter of seconds. Their romantic relationship would last six years.

  Peterson had run away, briefly, from the medical establishment herself. She’d come to Denver fresh from a year she’d spent in a bungalow without electricity or running water among the rice paddies of central Bali on a Henry Luce scholarship. “Officially, I was researching public health in Indonesia. But really,” she says, “I just needed a break before deciding if I wanted to dedicate my life to becoming a surgeon.” Once word spread that she was a doctor, however, Peterson was besieged by patients, who lined up outside her door every morning. She enjoyed ministering to the unpredictable problems her patients brought to her so thoroughly that she returned to America to begin her residency.

  Tabin adored Peterson and Denver’s proximity to mountains. But after his first year in Denver, he snapped at the opportunity to transfer to a prestigious orthopedic residency at the Michael Reese Hospital, at the University of Chicago. He and Peterson continued dating long-distance, while he tried to devote himself to his chosen specialty. “Geoff was not only a risk taker physically, but his social behavior was risky as well,” Peterson says. “Even though he only wanted what was good for his patients, he could be blinded by his sense that everyone should be enjoying themselves all the time. And he seemed unaware that a lot of forces in adult life drag you down. You could already sense that he wasn’t going to fit in a formal medical community.”

  Tabin was nearly booted out of Reese when his antics in the emergency room were reported to the head nurse. The mother of a six-year-old boy with an injured arm had brought her son to Tabin for treatment. She seemed unusually devout, praying fervently for her son’s arm to heal. “So I just sort of went with the flow,” Tabin says. He examined the boy’s arm and recognized that he was suffering a dislocation common among young children called “radial head subluxation.”

  “The cool thing,” Tabin explains, “was it was an injury you can cure simply by pulling on the arm and popping the bones back into place.” Tabin put the booming theatrics of a faith healer into his voice as he sat his patient in his mother’s lap and swept his hands dramatically over the entranced boy’s arm. “Sweet Lord Jesus!” he chanted. “We need a miracle! I’m imploring you to help this boy heal!” he shouted, grabbing the boy by the wrist and tugging his elbow joint firmly into place until he heard the telltale pop that indicated the procedure had been successful. The child was distracted by Tabin’s theatrics and laughed, flexing his healed arm happily. “Praise Jesus!” Tabin hollered. “But let’s confirm the miracle by X-ray.”

  Summoned to the chairman of orthopedics’ office the next day, Tabin was contrite, promising to curtail faith healing in the future, but he was genuinely baffled that such a satisfying and successful interaction with a patient could be grounds for his dismissal. As he progressed through his residency, Tabin became increasingly concerned that he’d chosen the wrong career. “It was nice to be near my parents in Chicago, but I missed the mountains,” he says. “I wasn’t finding the work all that fulfilling, and, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t where I wanted to be, or even on a path toward someplace I could imagine being genuinely happy.”

  Tabin put out feelers, itching once again for adventure, inquiring whether any of his climbing buddies knew of an expedition that needed his medical skills. In the summer of 1988, halfway through his residency, the invitation to serve as team doctor for a group trying to put the first American woman on the summit of Everest came just in the nick of time, as Tabin saw it. His colleagues at the hospital viewed his plan to rush back to the Himalaya somewhat differently. “They told me I was crazy, that if I walked out on an orthopedics residency I’d be blackballed from medicine for life.”

  Tabin called Beth Peterson and asked her advice.

  “I was Geoff’s best friend the whole time he wavered between medicine and mountaineering,” she says. “Of all the people I’ve known, Geoff has listened most carefully to his inner voices. I knew he’d already made up his mind, so I told him to follow his heart.”

  The Lhotse Face is an immense snowfield that rises nearly four thousand feet toward the summit ridge of Everest. Tabin trudged up it, setting his crampons carefully into sun-warmed snow the consistency of Styrofoam. He paused to check his pulse and says he was delighted to learn that even though he was climbing above twenty thousand feet, his heart rate barely exceeded his resting pulse at sea level. After six and a half hours, Tabin joined his potential summit partner, Nima Tashi Sherpa, in his tent just after 2:00 P.M.

  Two days earlier, Tabin’s teammate Stacy Allison had reached the summit, quickly achieving the expedition’s goal. “Like Dr. Dan, who was supposed to be a team physician but insisted on climbing, I’d argued I was of more use to the team if I stayed high on the mountain, where they were most likely to need urgent medical care. That was true,” Tabin says, “but I also knew it meant I was more likely to get a shot at the summit.”

  Tabin crawled into a small tent at the high camp he’d leave later that night to make his summit bid, feeling strong but unbearably thirsty. Nima Tashi handed him a bowl of noodle soup, flecked with hot chilies, which Tabin devoured; then Nima served him seconds. “I felt fantastic but tired,” Tabin says. “I asked Nima if he’d melt snow so we’d have water for our summit attempt while I slept for three hours; then I’d do the same while he rested.”

  Tabin woke and glanced at his watch, which said 11:00 P.M., then at Nima Tashi. “Why didn’t you wake me?” Tabin asked.

  “It’s okay,” the Sherpa said, grinning, and handed Tabin a thermos full of hot tea.

  “The Sherpa belong to the Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism,” Tabin says. “They believe in delaying nirvana for themselves until everyone on earth is able to achieve happiness. I can’t think of more delightful companions to be with on a big mountain. Nima had sacrificed his own sleep so I could have seven blissful hours of uninterrupted rest.”

  They melted more water and set out at 2:00 A.M. The batteries in Tabin’s headlamp died just as a full moon rose over the horizon, spot-lighting Everest’s highest ramparts as brightly as if it were day. Tabin climbed confidently along a two-foot-wide ridge, avoiding the fixed ropes so h
e could move faster. Beyond a fragile cornice running along the eastern edge, twelve thousand feet of empty air separated him from the camp where he’d twice attempted to reach this ridge from Tibet. “After all this time,” Tabin says, “I knew I was going to make it, to fulfill a lifelong dream. The feeling was indescribable.”

  The summit of Everest was a rectangular platform of ice, six by three feet across. “The size of a small desk,” Tabin says. He climbed on top of it just after 10:00 A.M., stamped his crampons into the ice, and leaned into the wind, savoring the view. He saw the burned-looking brown Tibetan plateau he had trekked across years earlier on his way to the Kangshung Face, saw how it dropped away and vanished beyond the curvature of the earth. He saw morning sun lick like flames at the peaks of five of the world’s eight highest mountains. “For fifteen minutes, until Nima Tashi arrived,” Tabin says, “I was the highest person on earth.”

  Trekking back toward Kathmandu, Tabin enjoyed the same floating sensation he’d had on his first memorable hike to Everest from Tibet. His career in high-powered American medicine had once again gone off the rails, so after celebrating in Kathmandu with his teammates, he decided to linger in Nepal. He volunteered to work at a small medical clinic Sir Edmund Hillary had built in the mountain village of Phaplu, on one of the less-traveled trekking routes in the Khumbu. Tabin made himself useful, and he found some satisfaction setting broken bones and treating respiratory infections. “But there was just so much sickness and poverty and need,” he says, “and I felt frustrated by how little I could do to change it.”