One of the buildings has a fire escape that I could use to get up on the roof. From there, I can walk up to the edge of the building and drop down into the pool. The building can be my diving board.
There’s no one here, no one to stop me, so I could go up there right now. But first, a couple things need thinking through. I’d be dropping four stories into less than six feet of water—that seemed a bit tight. I would also need to jump out, not just down, so I could clear the ten feet of concrete from the edge of the building to the pool. I wouldn’t want to jump out too far though or else I would pass over the pool and hit the concrete on the other side.
I stare up at the building, puzzling over the odds.
I decide that the pool is a sufficiently big target, even from that height. It has enough width to allow for a reasonable margin for error. I’m confident that with just a bit of push-off, I’ll hit water and not the concrete edge.
The depth, on the other hand, troubles me. There is no way I can dive in from that height and survive it. I would plunge in with too much energy, more than the water could dissipate, and my head would split open on the pool bottom.
But what if I jump down feet-first? If I pull my feet up just as I hit the water, then I should be okay.
I could have stayed in the pool and stared up at the building, running numbers in my head, noodling over the different possible outcomes. After all, I came here just to cool off and there was no need to turn it into anything more. I could stay in the water, relax, and pass the time without incident.
Instead, I lift my elbows off the concrete pool edge, turn, push up out of the water, and stroll toward the fire escape, the water dripping off my swim trunks leaving a spotted trail behind me.
The narrow space between the buildings keeps the ladder in the shade, so I can climb it without worrying about scalding my feet. My feet touch the cool metal of the rung and I start pressing my way upward.
When I get up to the roof and walk to the edge and look down I am immediately relieved. As I suspected, the pool appears to be a big target. When I jump, I’ll push off a bit, not too hard, and I should hit the water dead center. I have to remember to pull up my feet; that’s the real problem here. If I hit straight-legged, my feet would definitely slam hard into the bottom. Would it shatter bones? I hope it won’t come to that.
I step up on the building ledge and jump.
My feet hit the water and the splash starts to rise up around me. I pull up my legs, bending into an L, plunging deeper as my back just barely avoids scraping against the side of the pool. My butt slams down hard onto the concrete pool bottom.
I stand up out of the water and put my hands to my head, pulling back my hair. I turn sideways and look at the back of my legs; there’s not even a scrape. I’ll do it again, but this time I’ll make sure I don’t cut it so close to the edge.
I jumped a few more times that afternoon, enough to satisfy myself that I could hit dead center. I went back to the pool a few days later, but this time the patio wasn’t empty.
“Are you the jackass who jumped off the building?” The tenant was angry and I couldn’t understand why. I didn’t harm anybody; I didn’t destroy anything. I was the only one taking any risk. Why did he care?
“Yeah,” I said, staring back at him. “I jumped into the pool. So what? I didn’t bother anybody. Nobody was here.”
“Well, you ass, kids were watching from the windows. This morning a six-year-old kid climbed up to the roof to jump.”
I was stunned; that was never supposed to happen. Before I had a chance to respond, he said the words that ended the conversation.
“Get out of here,” he shouted. “Stay away.”
I never bothered to ask what had happened to the six-year-old. I turned and walked away thinking that in the future, if I ever took a risk, I would do it with someone like-minded and capable. I would keep everyone else away.
There’s one more thing I should admit, for the context of it all. I remember the night that led to my becoming a scientist. I was drunk, foolish, and desperately willing to lie.
I’m a freshman in college and two strangers I met only hours before at a party are using fire extinguishers to spray people below my dorm room window. I had already taken my turn and missed.
Our laughing and our yells out the window are waking up other students on the floor. Deleep, the Indian in the next room over, pushes open my door.
“What are you doing?”
I turn from the window and face him. There’s no sensible answer to his question. It’s probably one in the morning, and we’ve had too much to drink.
Not getting a response, Deleep points toward the other two. “Are those guys students?”
I look at their faces. For the first time I realize that they are older, years older, than I am. I’m eighteen, they’re probably in their late twenties. They must have crashed the party I just left. Now they are here, all of us acting like vandals. I don’t even know their names.
“Yeah? Well try and dodge this!” One of the thugs hoists the fire extinguisher over his head and throws it out the window. The second extinguisher follows a moment later.
I hear screams from below and rush to look out the window. The few people who are out on the street are scattering now, taking a wide perimeter around the dorm. I don’t see the extinguishers, but I don’t see anybody down on the ground either. Maybe everything is okay.
When I turn back around, Deleep is gone.
“Fellas,” I say to the pair, “that guy lives on this floor. He’s probably calling the cops right now.”
They grab their beers, still laughing, and shout a goodbye over their shoulders. I would never see them again, but in two days’ time all of this would begin to determine my future.
I pick up a few beer bottles, walk them down the hall, and drop them in a trash can in the bathroom. I return to my room and brace for what’s coming.
The knock on my door comes about fifteen minutes later. The police must have already talked to Deleep, maybe they’ve even taken information from people who were on the street, because they know most of the story.
“So you were spraying people out that window?”
There are pivotal questions we face in life, and when they come, our answers can determine our trajectory for decades to come. I knew what would happen if I answered that question honestly, with a yes. I would be booted out of college, for good reason. On the other hand, I could deny having anything to do with it.
“Two guys did it. Not me.” I said those words as earnestly as I could, and then I just kept on talking. “I didn’t know them, I walked out of a party and they followed me, they walked out too, they just started going the same way I did, I didn’t tell them to leave, I would have if I knew what they would do, but they didn’t leave they just kept walking with me—”
I could have continued going on for minutes without pause, but the cop cut off my stream of blather. “You never saw them before? They just walked into your room?”
It was obvious from his expression that he didn’t believe a word I was saying, so his questions continued. Over the next half hour of probing I learned that no one was hurt, fortunately.
“Great, so no damage done?” I said with relief.
“No damage? Somebody could have been killed. Believe me,” he was firm, “this broke the law.”
As he finished the interrogation, he dropped the big news. “Well, we may have found the other guys already. We also have a witness. We’ll know soon if you’re telling the truth.”
I spent the next forty-eight hours in limbo. I went to classes, but didn’t hear a word. I ate, I’m sure, but didn’t taste a bite. Then a student on the floor filled me in on developments. That afternoon Deleep was being called into the police station to look at a lineup of suspects.
I stayed in my dorm room that day, flat on the bed, with the door open, listening for Deleep’s arrival. I had a good idea of how this would play out. Deleep would identify the two thugs and th
ey would tell the police that I was involved. Between their testimony and Deleep’s eyewitness account, my lie would be exposed. I was just starting my freshman year of college and I was already on my way out.
I heard the key turn in Deleep’s door and I spun up off my bed. I wanted to get the news from him, not the police, not the campus administration.
“Deleep. What happened?”
“Well,” he said with a smile, “those white people all looked the same to me.”
The thugs were never identified; the case was dropped. Given that near calamity, it might be natural to assume that I learned a lesson and that my life quickly improved. But I didn’t learn a thing—I had gotten away with it, after all—and so things got worse.
Within five months, I earned a series of Fs and Ds that landed me on academic probation. The probation came on top of the official disciplinary warning the administration levied on me after the fire extinguisher incident. They were sure I was involved, but couldn’t prove it, so they issued a stiff warning. I had now exhausted all options. One more incident, no matter how small, one more bad grade, and I would be thrown out.
I would find out years later that my brothers made a bet at the end of my freshman year that I would never graduate, not from this school, not from any school. I admit, they had good reason for the bet. My situation looked grim:
I had no aptitude for languages (I got an F in German).
I couldn’t recall key events in world history (a C-).
I lacked focus (I was on academic and disciplinary probation).
I showed no respect for authority (I had several incidents with police).
Regardless of how bad things were, though, I knew that there was something I could always do: I could analyze, dissect, and calculate. Numbers were always more memorable to me than people’s names. A formula would penetrate and stick in my mind where faces would fade.
And so, science became my life vest. I would not allow myself to sink, not willingly, not knowing that others were succeeding around me when I was just as capable as they were.
I needed to rapidly elevate my grade point average, start notching A’s, so sophomore year I made a practical decision. I became a physics major and bore down.
Over time, my attitude would change. I completely fell for science, for its ability to render cold, detached assessments, predict outcomes, tease order out of the world.
Eventually, after finishing a Ph.D., physics would bring me right back to the place where I nearly went off the rails. I joined the faculty of the very institution from which I was almost booted out as an undergraduate: Georgetown University.
My brother Rog saw it all happen, astounded that I could pull out of my fall, stabilize, and find direction. The summer after my graduation, he gave me a gift.
“Francis,” he said shaking his head, still surprised, “this is for you.”
I looked down into his hand. “A rock? You’re giving me a rock?”
“That’s right.” He turned his hand over and dropped the rock in my palm. “I want you to remember what you sank like that first year of school. And don’t ever forget that you rose above it.”
Nearly two decades later, when I walked for the first time into the apartment of the woman who would change my life, I noticed dozens of rocks on shelves, in bowls, across tabletops. She saw me looking at them and explained: “I collect rocks. It reminds me of where I’ve been. Do you collect rocks?”
“I have one rock,” I answered. “It turned out that one was all I needed.”
Chapter 3
THREE PILLARS
The moment I decided to set some kind of record may have come on a crisp morning in Wyoming of all places, when my brother uttered one piercing, scarring word to me: “No.”
“You can’t come with us. It’s too dangerous. You’re not good enough to climb it.”
The only sounds were the snap and clang of carabiners as my two brothers attached climbing equipment to the slings hanging across their chests. The sheer rock wall of Devils Tower rose up behind them, the tip of its granite pillar just starting to catch the glow of the sunrise.
Sure, my brothers were older and more experienced; but I was sixteen and fully capable of managing the risks. I could flash this climb and I had come a thousand miles across the country to prove it.
“You’re not going to leave me down here at the base,” I demanded. “I came all this way to climb this with you.”
“No,” is all I remember my oldest brother, Roger, saying. Then they each threw a coil of rope over their shoulder, turned their backs on me, and walked away.
My two brothers would summit that day, and I would watch their slow steady progress up the rock face while sitting under a pine tree, fuming and alone.
That rejection might be the rocket fuel that would propel me to the tops of peaks and across a world of oceans. I would make it clear to them through every mountain and every wave that I was capable—more capable than they would ever be—to manage all the terrain the world could throw at me.
A chip on the shoulder, that’s what started it. At least, that’s what my brothers think, and they are entitled to their opinion. I would even like it to be true because it might make my motive to climb the highest mountains and surf every ocean seem hard-won and earnest.
My real motive at the time may have been more cowardly and less honorable. The record would conveniently prevent me from forming any deep attachments. It would keep me perpetually in transit, either just getting back from an expedition or just about to leave. I would use my climbing and surfing trips as an excuse when I broke up with girlfriends: “I’m leaving next month for six weeks so I can’t have a serious relationship.” If I wanted to keep someone at arm’s length I would say: “I don’t have time for a relationship, I’m training for my next expedition.”
The challenge also carried a touch of vanity, the same vanity that made me think I could jump from a rooftop into a pool and survive, or outplay my tenth-grade history teacher. Physics was testing my intellectual limits; this would push me to my physical limits. But for the physical test to be satisfying, it had to be unique. I didn’t want to do it if someone else had done it before. I wanted to be first at something.
I look back on it all and those particular motives fade in importance. I understand the journey now; perhaps I didn’t at the time. There was really only one purpose for it.
I needed to restore the heart of the boy I had been.
The two aspects of my journey weren’t unique. Someone had already climbed the highest mountains. A wealthy entrepreneur named Dick Bass had snatched the record out from under more accomplished climbers for no other reason than he thought of it first.
It was possible that someone had also surfed all the oceans, although there was nothing about it in any record books.
Still, one thing was clear, no one had done the combination. At thirty-seven years old, I would attempt to complete the first global surf-n-turf.
With the skills I had developed through rock climbing—balance, endurance, a solid strength-to-weight ratio, calm under fire—I assumed setting the record would be absolutely straightforward. I would work through the list of mountains and oceans without distraction. Not being independently wealthy, like Bass, the biggest challenge for me, I thought, would be amassing enough money to get to these climbs and oceans. But that seemed manageable. I wasn’t married, didn’t have kids, and didn’t have a mortgage. I could sink every spare dollar I made into the expeditions. If at some point I came up short, I was sure I could find some way to raise the money.
The first step was to start molding my body from a six-foot, 165-pound rock climber into a stouter, thicker 190-pound mountain climber capable of carrying heavy loads under more extreme conditions.
The typical gym fitness measures don’t apply when training for mountaineering. It doesn’t matter how much you can bench-press, or how fast you can run a mile. Even the percentage of body fat is irrelevant—one of my climbing partners is bu
ilt like a walrus. Sure, he’s heavy, but he compensates for his weight by being utterly impervious to the cold. He can barehand an ice axe in a twenty-five-degree blizzard.
Scientist that I am, I came up with an eggheaded formula that I could use to tell me when I was ready for the mountains:
Those numbers all work against each other. If I increase the number of pull-ups I can do, that would lean me out and decrease the amount I can leg-press. If I bulk up to leg-press more, that would increase my resting heart rate. By balancing out all the factors, I determined, I could get an overall high number that indicates I’m prepped for a climb. Of course, my numbers, despite years of training, don’t reach Lance Armstrong status. I have a resting heart rate of 39 beats per minute; Armstrong boasts a 34.
I was fit and I had enough funds to get started on the surfing and climbing record. There was one last thing to take care of before starting the journey: I had to take time off from work. The big climbing expeditions, like Everest with its long approach and narrow opportunities for summiting due to weather, would require my being gone at least eight weeks during the spring.
One of my jobs is with the American Physical Society, the professional association of physicists, where I do public affairs work. As it turned out, they were okay with my taking time off; they were even a bit curious as to whether I could pull this off. My other job, as a physics professor at Georgetown University, could have interfered with my plan, but I didn’t let it. I had arranged a nontenured position that allowed for minimal commitment; the interests of students didn’t concern me at that time. At that point in my life, teaching was mostly about collecting a paycheck.
I had been schooled in teaching science during my years in a graduate program that valued the laboratory over the classroom. As we practiced it, teaching science didn’t require engaging with students. The virtue of science is that the answers are factual, derivable, not open to opinion. By contrast, the meaning of a poem is debatable, the value of art is fluid, the impact of a novel is subjective. What differentiates science from all these other pursuits is a clear arrow of progress—each generation builds on the scientific discoveries of the last. All a student has to do is sit back, listen to the lecture, and absorb the mathematical techniques. Conversation isn’t necessary.
To the Last Breath Page 4