To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  In all my years of traveling, I’d always managed to steer clear of local political trouble. I figured we would go, climb, leave, end of story.

  Mike and I came up with a straightforward plan. We would land in the capital city of Jakarta, on the island of Java, and catch a flight to Timika, a small town in the eastern province of Papua. From there, we would hire a helicopter to take us as close as possible to the base of Puncak Jaya.

  The helicopter ride was advertised on an Indonesian Web site. The site was in English, catering to precisely what Mike and I had in mind. I swapped e-mails with the company and secured confirmation, as easy as that.

  We estimated a seven-day round-trip for the climb. A snap.

  In hindsight I should have picked up the phone and made direct contact with the helicopter operators before we left the United States. The site appeared reliable, their e-mails reassuring, but a brief call would have pulled back the curtain and revealed the sketchiness of the operation. With that one call, we might have recognized that they were unreliable, looked for another option, and then the climb—and the next seven years of my life—would have unfolded much differently.

  Downtown Jakarta looks as if a collection of modern glass and steel buildings were air-dropped into the middle of a shantytown. The transition from modern to ramshackle, from rich to poor, happens in just a few paces down a block. Within one hundred feet, you can travel through a culinary time tunnel descending from four-star restaurants to smoky street food.

  I’ve always enjoyed sampling a meal scooped onto a plate from the ladle of a street vendor. My hunt for some local food would always start the same way. I would say something like “Well, we didn’t come all this way to eat McDonald’s” and then dive into a mound of some local cuisine. As a result, my expeditions are inevitably punctuated by 2 A.M. retching, with me moaning in a hotel room or in my sleeping bag, body curled into a comma, waiting for the antibiotics to kick in.

  These moments are as unforgettable as witnessing a solar eclipse, and they are always accompanied by a strong memory of the food that took me down. There was the rancid water buffalo I ate in Kathmandu. The stinking shashlik in Ashgabat. That bad fig in Samarkand.

  I remember sweeping the last bit of curry up from a street vendor’s plate in Delhi. I handed him back the plate and he dunked it in a bucket of water as brown as mud, and then he placed it back on top of the stack for the next customer. That meal sidelined me for days. I vowed to use better judgment.

  Our first meal in Jakarta was off the main strip, but in what seemed to be a reliable spot. I was proud of myself; this was indeed showing good judgment. First of all, we were sitting down at one of three tables; we weren’t on our feet at a vendor’s stand squinting through the billowing smoke trying to get a glimpse of whatever was being blackened in a pan.

  Second, they appeared to have a menu. At least, there was a sheet of paper at our table with a list of items on it. Not being able to read Bahasa, I wasn’t sure what it said. I suppose it could have been an unpaid plumber’s bill the owner carelessly left on the table. Still, that would have suggested a concern for plumbing, which is more than I can say for other establishments we’d been to.

  Third, and this was the most impressive, they brought out a large tray stacked with bowls full of all their options. We peered out over the display and pointed at the food we were curious about.

  That tray of bowls, which seemed to be a positive feature of the restaurant when we ordered, turned out not to be. We had large servings and couldn’t finish the meal. So the cook came to our table with the same vast tray we had picked from. He scooped up our remains and ladled them back into the bowls for the next person to eat. I’m not sure exactly what we ate, although now I knew it was what someone else couldn’t finish. Miraculously, I didn’t end up retching into a sink that night. It was my first bit of luck on the expedition; it was my only luck, as it turned out.

  The next morning we had a weather delay; storms were keeping planes grounded. There would be no flights leaving from Jakarta to Timika, where we would begin our climb. With time to kill, we toured the National History Museum.

  The museum tells the history of Indonesia in rows of glass-encased dioramas. It became clear from the miniature replicas that the more than 200 million people on Indonesia’s seventeen thousand far-flung islands have little to unite them. In the United States, our differences form a melting pot. In Indonesia, it’s a powder keg.

  There are dozens of guerrilla movements on the islands. Some fight for control of local resources or political autonomy. Others fight to maintain their ethnic identity. Still others, the Muslim extremists, fight to establish strict Islamic law. And fighting them all is the Indonesian military, with a long record of human rights violations.

  In the middle of the jungle on Papua, where we were headed, sits Freeport-McMoRan’s Grasberg mine, with an estimated deposit of thousands of tons of gold, making it one of the largest in the world. The 1.25 million–acre colossus starts near Timika and runs northeast right up to the base of Puncak Jaya. A Louisiana financier owned the mine; consequently, according to the local Papuans, the bulk of the profits goes to the United States, creating a source of deep resentment.

  After a riot by local residents in 1996, the mine’s management increasingly began hiring Indonesian soldiers to protect it and keep trespassers off the property.

  Clearly, the mine was a political hot spot. Fortunately, we didn’t have to worry about that, since we would be helicoptering over it. It was one more local conflict that I could ignore, as I had numerous times before.

  The next day the weather cleared and we flew to Timika, where we met Taufan, the operator of the company that we had booked the helicopter ride with. His first words were not encouraging.

  “The helicopter is broken. It will not fly.”

  I don’t know anything about helicopters. But we had reconfirmed with him just a few days earlier and I would guess that it is highly unlikely that in such a short amount of time something so disastrous could occur to a helicopter.

  I was doubtful. “What happened?”

  “It doesn’t work,” Taufan said matter-of-factly.

  I had expected more detail; now I was even more skeptical.

  Mike tried a different approach.

  “When will it be fixed?” Perhaps we could simply wait this out for a day or two.

  “It cannot be.”

  We could have continued to ask questions, but the outcome was already clear. We wouldn’t be helicoptering to the base of the mountain. There probably never was a helicopter.

  “What now?” I asked Mike.

  We began exploring options. Since the base of the climb sits at the edge of the Freeport mine, we contacted the mine to check whether they would let us pass through. A manager said no; no non-mine employees were allowed on the property.

  We settled on an option that is used the world over to open doors that are otherwise closed. In some countries they refer to the method as a “donation” or “gift.” Other countries are more straightforward and call it what it is: a bribe. The local travel company that was supposed to provide the helicopter was very willing to help us grease our way through the mine. That may have been their plan all along.

  Taufan contacted someone in authority at the military unit patrolling the mine. He passed along some cash, and a military commander agreed to escort us through personally. After midnight that night, the commander pulled up to our hotel in an army jeep, and we jumped in for the long ride.

  It was well after midnight when we entered the mine, yet it was alive with activity. Trucks as tall as two-story houses drove by us, hauling load after load down the road. The mountainside was glowing with spotlights that illuminated deep gashes that were being clawed at by the shovels of immense mechanical excavators.

  We saw the machinery for miles and miles as we continued up the mountainside. Unrelenting, operating twenty-four hours a day, this was a determined effort to extract every availabl
e ounce of gold the ground had to offer.

  We still hadn’t reached the end of the mine when the sun started to come up. We couldn’t risk being spotted by mineworkers, so we pulled into a military base, and were quietly ushered into a barracks. We withdrew from the daylight, out of sight.

  That night, we climbed back into the jeep and continued up the mountainside, the grind and rumble of the mine machinery now familiar, the glow of the activity creating a cityscape.

  The sudden transition to darkness came as a shock; everything went black as we entered the mineshaft. The jeep’s headlights clicked on and pierced through the thick darkness, the driver confident in the turns, selecting the path that would continue to lead us up the mountain amid an octopus of passageways.

  We emerged from the shafts at the top of the mine, where a squad of soldiers occupied a machine gun nest strategically placed at the highest point overlooking a valley below. Equipped with floodlights and coffee, their job was to keep the area clear of trespassers—trespassers such as Mike and me.

  The commander hopped out of the jeep and walked up to the soldiers in the nest. Evidently, all this had been prearranged; the soldiers expected our arrival. In fact, this didn’t seem like the first time the soldiers had seen climbers. I had the impression that this was a steady moneymaking venture for all those involved.

  We clarified our plan with the commander, Taufan translating. In five days, we would meet the commander for the return trip out of the mine. We would emerge from the valley below, stepping into view of the floodlights at 10 P.M. The understanding, of course, was that the soldiers who were in the nest securing the mine wouldn’t fire their machine guns when they saw us.

  With the return arrangements settled, we trekked down the rubble-strewn slope, the floodlights casting our shadows ahead of us.

  A few days later, as we stood on the 16,024-foot limestone peak, a light snow began falling. The flakes provided grounding, familiarity; this was a genuine mountainscape. For the first time, and for the only time during the entire climb, we felt we were in the wilderness instead of walking distance from a gold mine.

  Right on schedule, at 10 P.M., precisely five days after we were dropped off, we stood just outside the range of the floodlights, whispering to ourselves in the dark perimeter.

  I don’t recall Mike or myself being nervous, we weren’t concerned that the soldiers would fire down on us from the machine gun nest. Taufan had radioed earlier to confirm when we would arrive, and they had assured us that the guards would let us pass without incident.

  We stepped into the light.

  There were no rifle cracks, no whistle of bullets. All was going according to plan and I assumed we would be safely out of the mine within a few hours.

  We hiked up the rubble slope over the planks and stepped into the soldiers’ machine gun nest. It was immediately clear that something had gone wrong.

  The commander who had driven us up the mine wasn’t there. He had sent someone else to drive us. The replacement didn’t have any brass on his uniform, not even a stripe. We no longer had a potent military escort. For the first time, I felt a twinge of concern.

  Over the next few hours, we drove on in silence. Then, sometime around 2 A.M. I would guess, as we passed the military camp we had stayed at days earlier, an armed posse suddenly stepped out in front of our vehicle.

  Our driver came to a stop as men in military uniforms surrounded our jeep, rifles at the ready. Our driver shouted to the soldiers, and one of them began yelling back. As the soldier continued his shouting, the driver turned back to us to explain the situation in broken English.

  Amid the chaos, I caught only a few words, but they were troubling. Our driver was now claiming he only had authority to get us through “the top half of the mine.” Apparently, we had passed the halfway point in our descent out of the mine and it sounded like he was telling us that someone else, not him, was in charge of “the bottom half.”

  Evidently, the person who was in charge of the bottom half of the mine was standing in our headlights, surrounded by a half dozen armed soldiers. He knew at least five words of English:

  “Get out of the jeep.”

  I’ve thought about that moment many times, particularly in light of what would unfold over the next decade.

  For so much of my life I had thrived on dramatic moments of consequential decision making. Years earlier, Pax and I went to the Ruth Glacier in Alaska to climb one of the signature mountains in North America. We were two thirds of the way to the summit when we had to rappel down into a notch.

  Pax was seventy feet directly above me, preparing to descend the sheer ice wall. In another minute he would touch down beside me and we’d face an irreversible decision. Should we pull the rope, eliminate all possibility of reversing our steps, and commit ourselves to going to the summit?

  Two days earlier, in a grocery store in Talkeetna, Alaska, my biggest decision was whether to get a muffin with my coffee. I opted for blueberry and then Pax and I walked into an airplane hangar full of Twin Otters and asked a pilot if he could take us to the glacier.

  The Ruth Glacier sits in the heart of the Alaska Range and is scarred by deep crevasses. Fortunately, there are a few patches of smooth, hard, stable ice just long enough and wide enough to land a plane. With a steady hand, the pilot skied his air taxi onto the ice, dropped us off, and flew away. There wasn’t a soul for miles. No birds, no trees, just two climbers and a mountain of rock and ice.

  The mountain is nameless. Climbers simply refer to it by its altitude: 11,300. It probably would have remained completely unknown to the rest of the world if it weren’t for Steve House, one of America’s premier mountaineers, who identified 11,300 as his favorite climb on the continent. That doubled the traffic on the mountain to about six climbers a year.

  The only sensible way to climb a mountain like 11,300 is to move fast and light to beat the ever-approaching blizzards that are notorious in this part of Alaska. To stay light, we ditched all spares. No extra food. No extra clothes. One rope.

  We started the climb by ascending a gully, a steep scar in the rock filled with waist-deep snow. We topped out of the gully and climbed along a ridge to ten thousand feet where we reached a notch. The only way across the notch was to rappel down seventy feet to a snowbank and then climb up the other side.

  So here we are on the snowbank with the rope threaded through a metal ring above us. To continue up the mountain, we’ll need the rope. If we pull the rope down, then there’s no going back. The sheer seventy-foot wall we just rappelled down is unclimbable. The only way off the mountain will be to go up to the summit and then down the back side of the mountain.

  The three most challenging sections of the mountain still lie above us: the narrow rock chimney nicknamed Thin Man’s Squeeze, a razor-sharp ridgeline with a two-thousand-foot drop, and a final fifty-foot wall of ice to the summit.

  It’s 9:00 P.M. Snow is starting to fall. Decision time.

  Most decisions made on any one day are utterly inconsequential. Paper or plastic? Grande or Venti? Red or white?

  On those rare occasions when the decisions rise above the ordinary, they are typically hedged, safely reversible, buffered by a money-back guarantee or cushioned by a prenuptial agreement. And in Washington, D.C., where votes are regarded as the ultimate decision points, even those moments are lubricated by talking points that were tested by focus groups in Peoria.

  That’s why this moment, in a snowbank on a desolate Alaska mountain, is so pure. And that’s why I am drawn to this sport: it presents irreversible decisions. Either we pull the rope and continue up, with no chance for backtracking, or we haul ourselves back up the rope and go home. We have just a few moments to consider the situation, each of us silently evaluating the risks, balancing those against the opportunity to face the challenges.

  I look up at the icy slope rising sharply above us, and pull the rope. I just committed us to going up into the night. Now this moment matters.

 
That is why I climb.

  Unlike that moment in Alaska, this situation—standing in the glow of the jeep’s headlights, surrounded by soldiers with guns at the ready—was totally outside my control. There was no rope that I could decide to pull or not pull. Instead, there were only triggers, and it was up to the soldiers, not me, to decide whether to pull them or not. This wasn’t the kind of dramatic moment that I seek; this was utter helplessness.

  Still, we didn’t break down; we didn’t plead. We just stared back into the eyes of the soldiers.

  This isn’t to say that we have ice in our veins. In fact, our steadiness at that moment shouldn’t impress anyone. I think the reason we acted calmly was because we never really believed that violence would erupt. It hadn’t the last time I stared down the barrel of a gun.

  Years earlier I had visited the Dominican Republic with a friend who was on a work trip. While he was attending a business meeting, I explored Santo Domingo, wandering through the town and eventually into what appeared to be a mausoleum. A wall of etched plaques, each covering a space that could accommodate a casket, stood in front of me. A flame flickered nearby.

  I heard someone call out and I turned. I remember focusing on his face before noticing that he had a rifle pointed at my head. Then he started yelling.

  I’m half Ecuadorian, but that doesn’t do any good since I can only speak English now. My mother spoke Spanish in the house; relatives who passed through our home spoke it on a regular basis. But I hadn’t been immersed in Spanish in the decades since she had died.

  I stared back at the guard, not comprehending.

  He gave up on sentences and simplified his communication to what was the one essential word.

  “Pantalones!” Still yelling, he lowered his rifle, pointing it at my knee.

  There was no way he would blow my leg off. This had to be a simple misunderstanding; I was certain we would figure this out. The weapon was incidental, not really threatening, merely a means of getting my attention.