Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  For me, the awe and wonder that these ancient climbs evoked, along with the sheer alienness of the cultures in which they were embedded, made an impact that was at once humbling and inspirational. There were more things in those heavens and earths than were dreamt of in my climbing philosophy.

  INTERLUDE

  THE QUEST for the OTHER

  For about twenty years, from age seventeen to thirty-seven, climbing was the most important thing in my life. During that stretch, I went on expeditions to Alaska or the Yukon for thirteen straight years. For me, the ultimate prize in mountaineering was the first ascent of an unclimbed peak or a difficult new route on a mountain that had been climbed only a few times. The seasons were geared almost manically to next summer’s expedition. During those decades, I was successively a college student, a graduate student, and a teacher at Hampshire College, but I conceived my real identity to be that of a mountaineer. Each September brought a huge letdown, with nothing to look forward to during another school year before I could once again chase my destiny in the remote ranges.

  By the age of thirty-seven, however, I no longer felt that the mountains furnished an all-consuming purpose in life. It was, I suppose, partly a matter of simply getting older, of realizing that I had passed my climbing prime. I also felt that I was lucky still to be alive, and sometimes late at night, when sleep wouldn’t come, I counted the close calls I had survived, rating them from fairly threatening to truly serious. I wish that I could have bowed out with some major accomplishment capping a worthwhile career, but it became instead a matter of choosing less and less ambitious goals. The list of mountaineers who quit cold after some stellar deed is indeed a short one—the great Italian alpinist Walter Bonatti being the exemplar.

  Instead of a sense of fulfillment, at age thirty-seven I felt only a dull sense of loss. Nothing in my life, not even the writing career I was beginning in earnest, took the place of the yearly round geared to a climactic adventure each summer. What was missing in my life, in fact, was just that: adventure.

  It was not as though I deliberately set out to find a new passion to take the place of mountaineering. Surviving the transition from college professor to freelance writer was scary and uncertain enough. I don’t remember even framing my dilemma in coherent words. There was just a certain emptiness that seemed to settle upon my spirit.

  In my early forties, I gradually drifted into a fascination with the Anasazi. The family visits during my childhood to Mesa Verde and Bandelier National Monument had failed to light the spark. It was only after I started hiking down canyons in southeastern Utah and stumbling upon ruins and rock art that were on no map nor in any guidebook that my curiosity bloomed into a nagging passion. My first several outings involving the Anasazi came in the guise of magazine assignments, but soon I was saving my own time to hike and backpack into more and more remote canyons. By 1990, I had solidified a habit of spending at least several weeks each spring and fall in the Southwest, almost all of it in pursuit of little-known Anasazi wonders.

  At no point did I consciously tell myself, This is what takes the place of climbing, but by the early 1990s I realized that those journeys had begun to shape my year every bit as meaningfully as the old climbing cycle had once done. I was aware of the irony of comparing my two passions. Climbing had always been for keeps, an ultimate game of life and death with the ecstatic joy of success on a difficult mountain as the reward. Canyon prowling, in contrast, was not very dangerous, while the camping and hiking were infinitely more pleasant than bivouacking in storms in Alaska. But soon there was no denying that my fixation with the Anasazi was as all-consuming as Alaskan expeditions had been. I started reading archaeological journals with the same fervor that I once had lavished on climbing magazines. The thrill of turning a canyon bend and discovering an unrecorded ruin or rock art panel came close to matching what I had once felt when putting up a new route. And because the Anasazi were themselves such gifted climbers, my explorations took on a certain tinge of dangerous discovery. More than a few of the high granaries and dwellings that I came across, I was quite sure that I was the first person to explore in at least seven hundred years.

  The essential difference between the two passions that successively centered my life was one that only slowly dawned on me. However dramatic or exciting, climbing was in a certain sense a sterile pursuit. The deed of a new route or a first ascent was of interest only to oneself, and perhaps to a small fraternity of fellow devotees. Climbing was not heroic, nor did it do anyone except its practitioners any good, nor did it really stretch the mind. But each time I found a new Anasazi site in the backcountry, the pride of discovery was subsumed in a larger concern: What was it all about? What were they doing here?

  Those forays into the backcountry, either solo or with one or two like-minded companions, felt adventurous. Sometimes the canyon itself wouldn’t “go,” when a sudden pour-over declared a dead end. Or it would go only with tricky, exposed scrambling to find a route through the scrub oak and manzanita that clung to nearly vertical cliffs. Sometimes a whole day of exploring came up empty, not a single potsherd or squiggly petroglyph in miles of what looked like a perfect canyon for the Anasazi. But the rewards were proportionate to the effort. More than once it was only when I wrenched my gaze upward from the rocky ground in front of me that I saw, hundreds of feet above, granaries peeping into sight on almost imperceptible ledges.

  What I was doing, of course, was not archaeology. Some might sneer at my pursuit as a kind of dilettantism, skimming the surface of prehistoric sites without having to commit to the drudgery of proper survey and excavation. From what little I saw in action in the Southwest, toward the end of the twentieth century field archaeology had lost any semblance of the adventurous. The major sites that were still being dug, like Sand Canyon Pueblo or the villages salvaged in the Dolores Archaeological Program before they could be swallowed by the McPhee Reservoir, were rows of room blocks laid out in relatively flat landscapes to which the excavators could drive on county roads. There was indeed a kind of adventure attached to these inquiries in the soil, but it was of a purely intellectual nature.

  What saved my canyon wanderings from the shallow stamp of hobbyism was the fact that the archaeologists had so turned their backs on the hard-to-get-to canyons with their soaring cliffs. As mentioned above, when I searched the professional literature for any discussion of hand-and-toe trails, I couldn’t find a single paper. Yet the Moqui steps that I tried to follow, often with my heart in my throat, raised genuine archaeological questions. How did the ancient craftsmen, with only quartzite pounding stones for tools, create them? Some were plainly staircases to distant ruins, but others seemed to go nowhere. What were those about? Inside alcoves, I often found short sequences of tiny steps. Were these practice tracks for Anasazi youngsters? A few of the scarier trails seem to be booby-trapped, as, far off the ground, the steps suddenly went haywire: three awkwardly placed right-foot steps in a row, for instance. Were these, as my friend Joe Pachak speculated, death gauntlets laid to seduce overcurious visitors?

  Beyond a vague general agreement that the dwellings and granaries in the cliffs were defensive, the archaeologists seemed unwilling to face the obvious questions they raised. It was hard enough to figure out how the boldest of the Anasazi climbers had gotten to those airy refuges in the first place. It was much harder to discern how the ancients had hauled all the mud and stone and water up to them to build dwellings and granaries that had outlasted the centuries.

  Many high room blocks were fronted with blank walls of stone and adobe that the Anasazi had pierced with six or eight or a dozen “loopholes.” To me their purpose was obvious: they were tunnels pointed at all the crucial vantage points so that hidden residents could spy on invaders approaching from below. Yet what literature I could find on the question drifted into (to my mind) fanciful explanations. They were watching tubes, some argued, through which hidden dignitaries could observe ritual dances in the village plaza, by analogy with
the Shalako ceremony at historic Zuni Pueblo.

  There were a few aspects of the canyon ruins that I like to think I might have been among the first to note. One was a fiendish construction that I called the “stopper wall.” Many of the inaccessible dwellings could be reached only by scuttling and even crawling on one’s belly along lengthy exposed ledges. Often, just before I could get to the dwelling, right where the ledge was the narrowest and most dangerous, the ancients had mortared a triangular wall blocking my way. Any unwanted visitor slinking along the ledge could be apprehended as he struggled to bypass the stopper wall. A thrown stone or two or even a vigorous push would suffice to send the intruder on a long fall to certain death.

  It was only after I had spent several years indulging my Anasazi passion that I recognized its essential difference from the mountaineering that had driven me to the remote ranges in my twenties and thirties. However thrilling my canyon play, however ingenious the passages I worked out, the game was not about me. It was about them.

  Were I inclined to be dogmatic, I might frame my realization thus: A quest in the wilderness to probe the mysteries of a lost or little-known culture is ultimately more rewarding than a quest to claim a trophy such as a new route or first ascent. But retrospective self-congratulation of this sort is the province of the aging adventurer. Instead, I will say only that such quests have given my life, after the age of forty, as much gratification and fulfillment as the boldest mountaineering ever did.

  In March 2016, I ventured out on the first trip of any kind I’d undertaken since my cancer diagnosis the previous July. With my friends Matt Hale and Sarah Keyes tagging along as personal custodians, I flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, and drove to Boone for Appalachian State University’s annual celebration of the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival traveling exhibition. Months earlier, Alex Honnold and I had been invited as keynote speakers, but I had held off on accepting until just weeks before the event.

  During the four days in North Carolina, I felt constantly weak, and finding food I could eat posed a challenge for Sarah and Matt. But Alex and I spoke at a pair of events, and we signed 250 copies (my personal record) of the book we had cowritten, Alone on the Wall. At the Saturday evening film screening, as I introduced the program and shared a little bit of my personal ordeal, I was stunned to receive a standing ovation from the 1,800 people in attendance.

  The event in Boone went a long way toward making up for missing the launch of Alone on the Wall at Banff the previous November. On one morning, we went climbing at a small crag infelicitously named the Dump. With Sarah leading (and Alex chiming in with encouragement), I seconded a pair of easy routes. It was the first outdoor climbing I had done in seven months.

  The next week, I got my feeding tube removed after six months of being harnessed to the grotesque contraption. My diet had expanded to include poached eggs on toast, turkey chili, and the occasional beer. I dared to hope that I had finally found a path that led to the promised road to recovery.

  Sharon and I planned a three-week trip to my beloved Southwest at the end of April. For most of the year I had been longing for Cedar Mesa, for one more brush with Anasazi mysteries. There was still, however, the business of the pesky nodules in my chest. But when another CT scan proved inconclusive—the nodules seemed to have enlarged a bit, though they were still too small to biopsy—I was freed to attempt my Southwest escape.

  Hiking again on real trails, I was mortified by how weak I felt, by how little stamina I had. But slowly I gained a vestige of fitness, and at the end of our trip Sharon and I joined Matt Hale and Ed Ward for a week on Cedar Mesa. We punctuated six days of hiking with three nights of car camping in cherished sites affording views to the southern and western horizons. We limited our outings to ruins and rock art panels I’d visited before, though all the country was new to Ed, and one or two of the hikes took Matt and Sharon to places they had never seen. The weather was perfect. None of our forays covered more than five miles round trip, but I was overjoyed to be able to accomplish that much.

  When I got home from Utah, I felt such an acute longing to travel that within a few hours I had plotted trips to Montreal in late June and to Paris in August, with a far more ambitious return to the Southwest for September and October.

  But the nodules . . . On June 6, I had another CT scan. The verdict was the worst I could have imagined. Several of the nodules had significantly grown. My oncologist, who had seen too many similar cases, could not hide his pessimism. In all likelihood, despite the intense chemo and radiation I had absorbed the previous fall, the throat cancer had metastasized to my lungs.

  To be sure, I needed a biopsy. And now matters took another bad turn. The surgeon who had performed scores of similar biopsies turned over my job to an inexperienced resident—who promptly botched the biopsy. Not only did she fail to retrieve a viable sample, she punctured my lung in the process. For the first time in months I was readmitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

  When I got out of the hospital I felt more exhausted than I had since January. The collapsed lung was the immediate cause, but I couldn’t shake the thought that cancer might be attacking me anew. Still, Sharon and I went ahead with our plans to drive to Montreal, though only at the last minute were we freed to head north to New Hampshire. My sodium level had dropped to an alarming 123 (normal being 135 to 145). My oncologist grudgingly endorsed the road trip only after I took 3,000 mg of salt tablets per day and raised the level to 125—still disturbingly low.

  Montreal gave us a few good days, as we played golf on a pricey course, toured the botanical gardens, and hung out in a lively neighborhood on the Mont Royal Plateau. There were a dozen restaurants within three blocks of our apartment, but I was finding it harder to eat than it had been in months. The temperature hovered near 90 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, and as we strolled from roses to bonsai in the botanical gardens, I had to sit down and rest on every other park bench.

  On the way home, we stopped in Quechee, Vermont, to visit a friend, who had arranged a golf game on an exquisite private course the following morning. But at dinnertime I collapsed, vomiting and nearly fainting, and for the first time since October I felt my mental grasp on the world start to dissolve. We rushed to the emergency room at Dartmouth–Hitchcock Hospital, where I would spend the next four days.

  In the ER, my sodium level measured 115. Coma and even death lurk not far below that number. Within a few days, the doctors at Dartmouth–Hitchcock came up with a new diagnosis. I was suffering from SIADH—syndrome of inappropriate anti-diuretic hormone secretion. Somehow my body was retaining too much water while it allowed the sodium level to get far too low. Chances were that SIADH was a side effect of metastasized cancer. The only treatment was to keep downing big doses of salt tablets while limiting all my liquid to 1,500 ml a day. That’s about a quart and a half. As the doctors prescribed the new regimen, I succumbed to despair. How could I hike or play golf if I could drink only a quart and a half of water a day?

  The clincher came in early July, when a competent surgeon performed a bronchoscopy, snaking a tube down my throat to snip a hunk of chest nodule (I was out cold during the procedure, thanks to a general anesthetic). The sample proved the case: the enlarged nodules were cancerous, having metastasized from the cells in my throat. Cure was no longer possible, only palliative treatment to keep me alive. All my hopes for the future seemed to vanish like a soap bubble.

  Just when I thought things could not get worse, in late August I was dealt another nasty blow. A quick visit to the hospital for low blood pressure and trouble swallowing led to a six-day incarceration, starting in the ICU. My sodium level was so low I was put on an IV super-saline drip.

  In the middle of my stay, I took a swallowing test. In February I’d passed my previous test with flying colors, which gave the technicians the go-ahead to remove my feeding tube. Now, six months later, I failed the test completely. Apparently I was aspirating part of every mouthful of food I tried to swallow, s
ending it down the wrong tube and into the lungs. If that error persisted, I would develop aspiration pneumonia, which is often fatal and not a good way to die.

  Another oncologist gave me the ultimatum: a new feeding tube, with no guarantee I’d ever get rid of it. No assurance that I would ever eat or drink normally again. At first I refused, claiming petulantly that I’d rather take my chances with aspiration pneumonia. My first feeding tube had symbolized for me the nadir of invalidism. I could not bear the thought of going back to that humiliating apparatus, and to the indignity it wreaked on my daily life.

  By the end of September 2016, however, I was once again siphoning six cans per day of mud-brown gunk (Osmolite, rather than Ensure) down the new tube—and still restricting the liquid, now to 900 ml per day, also flushed down the tube. All day and night, I took mouthfuls of water to relieve my parched, saliva-less mouth, swished, and spat it out.

  The only bright spot in my second autumn of housebound misery was that I was being infused every three weeks with Pembrolizumab, a drug that tries to stimulate the immune system to attack the cancer cells. This new frontier of immunotherapy had shown good results with melanoma and lung cancer, but it was virtually untried with throat cancer. Preliminary findings gave only a 20–40 percent chance that it would have any effect at all. Yet a CT scan after three Pembro infusions revealed that the nodules had stopped growing. It was no proof that the Pembro was working, but it gave me hope.

  Not hope of curing cancer—for the rest of my life, however long or short, I must live with the mindless proliferating cells that have made my body their home—but hope that I might forestall the brutal end.

  Hope that someday, with or without a feeding tube or a cap on my liquid intake, I might hike again, and camp out under the changeless stars, and even climb easy routes. Hope that I still have months or years to write, to reassess what the first seventy-three years of my life have meant, and to squeeze new meanings from all that I had and had not done, before it was too late to remember or even know.