Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  We parted that summer as enemies. But our bruised feelings slowly healed, and by the next summer we had organized yet another expedition, to Mount Huntington’s west face. There we climbed better together than ever, and when we reached the summit on the thirty-fourth day, the finest climb of our youthful careers seemed to restore, if only for the moment, the dream of invincibility that Deborah had shattered.

  Yet in the end, Don and I were too different from each other. After Huntington, we drifted apart. Eight years later, in 1973, out of the blue, I learned that Don had been killed on a wet road in Scotland when a truck hit his bicycle. I wept inconsolably, mourning not only his disappearance from the world, but the loss of the illusion of invincibility that had first bound us together. Forty-four years after his death, I mourn Don still.

  On Huntington, I cemented the second partnership that seemed to partake of near perfection, in Matt Hale, one year younger than Don and I at Harvard. Shy and deferential, Matt shone in the brilliance of his technical skill on rock. Two years after Huntington, we paired again on the longest expedition of our careers, to the untrodden range we named the Revelation Mountains. Among the six of us, Matt was the strongest climber. When, on the forty-ninth day of the expedition, he and I turned back only 750 feet below the summit of the Angel, the most beautiful of the peaks surrounding our base camp, after four previous attempts by our team on its south ridge, we stained our souls for life with the steepest pang we would ever suffer of Oh, what might have been!

  Matt is still, in 2017, one of my closest friends in the world. During the decades after the Revelations, we climbed together all over the Lower 48, as well as in France and Italy, and we shared all kinds of other adventures ranging from Mali to Kashmir and Ladakh. In my beloved Southwest, Matt became the steady companion of one jaunt after another in search of prehistoric ruins and rock art.

  At Hampshire College, where I started teaching in 1970, I met two other of my longest-tenured cronies in adventure, in the persons of Ed Ward, whom I bumped into by chance at a local crag, and Jon Krakauer, who showed up in 1972 as an impressionable student in the third year of the college’s existence. Ed and Jon soon became inseparable partners on the rope, not only with me but with each other. On the two finest climbs of my life after Huntington, the first ascents of Shot Tower in the Brooks Range in 1971 and of the southeast face of Mount Dickey in the Ruth Gorge in 1974, Ed was the driving force. On my one expedition with Jon, to the Tombstone Range in the Yukon in 1975, our friendship was sealed in a single terrifying moment, when, as he tried to push the last pitch up a 1,000-foot wall, on sketchy ground with no protection, a foothold broke and he fell through space. All that attached us to the world was my hanging belay. As Jon flew past me, I hunkered against the rock, screaming to myself, Hold on! The belay did its job, though I ended up with a mangled left hand, Jon with bad bruises but no broken bones. Only 50 feet short of the summit, we had to back off the whole wall, setting up one exhausted rappel after another. That moment in the Yukon dusk remains the closest call Jon has undergone in the mountains.

  Only a few years later, he and I became comrades in writing, after I persuaded him to give up pounding nails to support his climbing habit and try crafting articles and books for a living instead.

  Long after Jon and I became friends, I formed the last of my enduring partnerships in adventure, when I talked Greg Child, who had moved to Utah in the late 1990s, into coming along with me on a hike down a canyon on Cedar Mesa full of Anasazi wonders. I had known Greg casually for years, as we shared the occasional beer at meetings of the American Alpine Club. I was in awe of him as a climber, for I knew that this Aussie genius, fourteen years my junior, had an all-around record matched by no climber of his generation: cutting-edge firsts as a teenager in the Blue Mountains, new routes on El Capitan in Yosemite, big-wall breakthroughs on Baffin Island and in Alaska, and daring triumphs in the Karakoram and the Himalaya on such cynosures as Shivling, Gasherbrum IV, and K2. The Anasazi bug bit Greg as keenly as it had me. During the last fifteen years, Greg has been my partner on my happiest excursions into the lost world of the Old Ones, on which his talent as a climber and his gimlet eye for the faintest of fugitive traces have delivered us to sites no one else has visited in at least seven hundred years.

  As of 2017, Matt, Ed, Jon, Greg, and I still climb together, no matter how modest our outings, and the camaraderie and cajolery that ricochet among us remind me every time of Saint-Exupéry’s “new vision of the world won through hardship.” The forging of friendships too deep for words is almost never the reason we set off into the wilderness to probe the unknown. But in the end, it is what glows in memory.

  In October 2016, Sharon and I celebrated our forty-ninth wedding anniversary. It was a gray, chilly late autumn day, and, limited by my fatigue, we contented ourselves with a pokey drive along back roads to some of the colonial towns north and west of Boston—Carlisle, Littleton, Groton, and the like. In Concord we hiked a short piece of the trail memorializing the ragtag American army’s holding off the Redcoats in 1775, the trail of Emerson’s “shot heard round the world.” We asked a stranger to use our camera to shoot a couple of pictures of ourselves, one of which I liked enough to print up and frame in a small mount that now stands perched on our living room cabinet—an image that captures my emaciated feebleness but also the happiness of that day.

  We met in a creative writing class at the University of Denver in 1966, during my first year of graduate school and Sharon’s last as an undergrad. We got married only a year and a half later, at ages twenty-four and twenty-three—too young, perhaps, but we knew we were in love in a way neither of us had felt before. Our wedding day came only two months after I had emerged from the Revelation Range, still throbbing with the joys and terrors of the longest expedition I would ever go on, and one of the three or four most intense. Already I was planning another venture among unclimbed mountains in the Far North for the coming summer.

  After five straight years of coming to grips with the challenges of the Alaska Range, in all its glaciated and storm-tossed glory, I had set my sights on the Brooks Range, at latitude 67 a good 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but an outback I knew to be far gentler than the environs of Denali or Deborah or the Kichatna Spires. Sharon had spent little time in the outdoors before she met me, but I dragged her along on hikes up 13ers in Colorado’s Front Range and tied her in for beginner climbs on the Flatirons in hopes she would take to the magic of ascent. Nothing came easily for her, and she never tamed the primal fear of the void that yawned beneath her boot soles. But she was game.

  In the summer of 1966, only weeks after we had met, I talked Sharon into spending the summer with me in Anchorage, where I had snagged a job teaching English on an air force base, a lucrative penance that would allow me to head off to the Kichatnas in September. We rented a squalid one-room shack in a dingy suburb of Spenard. Sharon got a job as a sales clerk in the sewing department of J. C. Penney. Neither of us had ever cohabited with a lover before, and the claustrophobic intimacy of those months took its toll, but we survived that summer and the school year that followed. Then, throughout August 1967, while I was out of touch in the Revelation Range, Sharon endured a lonely month on a pioneer homestead in Homer, Alaska. Under the mistaken notion that she was a welcome guest, she holed up in a barn, subsisting on white bread and Coca-Cola, while the dysfunctional family that took her in like a stray cat acted out their deep-rooted craziness all around her.

  Undaunted, Sharon came along on my two expeditions to the Brooks Range in 1968 and 1969. From the start, the rigors of those month-long campaigns, which I had advertised as easy-going larks, tested her nerve and stamina to the breaking point. The first summer, we landed with two teammates who were serious climbers on a gravel bar near the headwaters of the Noatak River, then backpacked for three days and 25 miles up nameless valleys and across an ancient Inupiat pass to base camp under unclimbed Mount Igikpak, the highest summit in the western Brooks Range. For Shar
on, the trek was an unrelieved ordeal—a 45-pound load, hordes of mosquitoes, tundra tussocks that threatened to sprain her ankles with every wobbly step. And she was terrified of bears, though we carried a 30.06 rifle with which we had both fired a couple of practice rounds back in Denver. Indeed, as we deduced from fresh scat the next morning, a bear had walked right through our camp on the pass as we slept, and the next morning we spotted a massive grizzly browsing among the bushes just across the stream that led to base camp.

  Still, Sharon settled in to the empty magnificence of the Brooks Range. We had our halcyon off-days, when she and I went off to fish for trout in a pocket lake, or sunbathed on tundra shelves, or filled our bowls with ripe blueberries plucked from thickets close to camp. But then, as the three of us climbers set off to figure out a way to get up Igikpak, Sharon sat alone in our tent, the loaded rifle laid across her lap, trying to read and not count the minutes, listening for the thud of paws on the ground, while we were gone for two days before coming back bursting with summit pride.

  Likewise the next summer in the Arrigetch Peaks, when my comrades and I claimed the first ascents of Ariel and Caliban and the Albatross while Sharon hunkered alone in camp. In August 1969, there were no mosquitoes, because freakish early snowstorms ruled the month, so Sharon wrapped herself in our double sleeping bag as she waited and wondered what to do if we didn’t come back. We ended that expedition with a float trip down the Alatna River, and during those lazy days, sharing a Klepper kayak with me, she lapsed into a reverie that made up for the anxious vigils of the previous weeks.

  After Sharon came into my life, the untroubled commitment that carried me into expeditions became more complicated. At the end of our summer spent in the boxy shack in Spenard, she flew back to Colorado as I flew in to an unnamed glacier in the Kichatnas. By now, Sharon knew enough about Alaskan mountains, and enough about me, to gauge how risky any climbing expedition was. Back at DU, soldiering through classes in Shakespeare and the English novel, she worried about me. And in our base camp igloo on the glacier, I worried about her worrying. We had no radio, no phone, no way to get in touch to tell her, Don’t be afraid—everything is all right. The invisible threads that stretched 3,000 miles between us mired me in a new ambivalence. On Denali, Deborah, and Huntington, nothing going on in the outside world had disturbed my dreams. There, the universe had reduced to the mountain and the men I had paired with to solve its puzzles.

  In 1966, a pattern that would persist throughout our married life emerged. “Be careful,” Sharon always whispered as we kissed goodbye, but I carried that pledge of love with me into every new adventure like a stone in my pack. Even through the decades after I stopped climbing in Alaska, that strange tension warped the bond between us. If only she wouldn’t worry, I often said to myself, knowing not only that she could not help it, but that in an odd way her concern gave me an anchor.

  When I began to write for a living, I would head off to Mali or Brazil or New Guinea, Svalbard or Ethiopia or China, often for as long as a month at a stretch. It was a blessing that in those days it was impossible to phone home from a Dogon village or an uninhabited island in the Barents Sea, for however welcome some burst of contact might have proved, it would have diluted my resolve and only redoubled Sharon’s anxiety. Among younger adventurers in our more connected times, I’ve seen how the sat phone and the radio can undercut the headlong flight of a mission into the unknown, or vex the one who waits at home with the intermittent pain of separation.

  We decided early on not to have children. I was sure that kids would further attenuate the single-minded zeal I needed to pursue my phantoms, and I knew that a writer who traveled more than two hundred days a year would have made a negligent parent. Though Sharon was not so sure at first about childlessness, as her career as a psychoanalyst began to flourish, she learned to cherish her independence as keenly as I did mine.

  You cannot be married for forty-nine years without going through rocky stretches, and we had our share of those, our bitter quarrels, our temptations to flee. But we never came close to divorce, chiefly because, I think, we never ceased to respect and admire each other. Sharon’s worries when I was incommunicado were normal, not neurotic. As for me, I never quite realized how much I depended on her, how much I counted on her being there, until my own freedom was irrevocably threatened.

  The onset of cancer in June 2015 changed the dynamic between us profoundly. Under the onslaught of chemotherapy and radiation, I grew too weak to drive or shop or cook. When my exercise was limited to a halting walk of a single block, Sharon took my arm and helped me sit on some neighborhood wall to catch my breath. On bad mornings, I needed help getting out of bed or getting dressed. When I vomited into the toilet, she held my shoulders and wiped my mouth afterward. Several times I fainted at home, once keeling over backward in the bathroom, cracking my back and head against marble sills and walls. Sharon came running and got me slowly back on my feet. A hundred times she drove me to Dana–Farber or Brigham and Women’s, and sat through the waiting room ennui and the sessions with men and women in white coats, asking the sharp questions I was too confused to articulate. On the two or three occasions when a doctor botched my treatment, she batted away their obfuscations and took them relentlessly to task.

  The worst times of all came during my hospitalizations, seven or eight of them all told. Drugged up with intravenous feeds and painkillers, I sometimes lost track of where I was, or why. But hour after hour, day after day, Sharon was there, sleeping on a cot or in an armchair beside my bed to see me through another night in hell. My nadir came in October 2015, at the end of my last radiation zapping, when I contracted aspiration pneumonia and came close to death. I lay immobile, in so much pain despite the morphine drip that in rare semi-lucid moments I thought, It wouldn’t be so bad to give up now and die. It would be a relief. But always Sharon was there, the anguish on her face, her hand stroking my brow, her lips bending near for a kiss. For her alone, I had to live.

  I believe that the ordeal of my cancer, which continues even now, actually took a greater toll on Sharon than it did on me. She effectively gave up her practice as a psychoanalyst to take care of the invalid I had become. I was not the only one who saw her caring as nothing short of heroic—out of her earshot, some of my closest friends told me, “I hope you know how lucky you are to have her with you.” Often I wondered if I could have done the same for her, and the guilty answer wormed to the surface: Of course not. You’re too selfish.

  So often during the decades of our marriage, I had felt Sharon’s fears for my safety, whenever I ran off toward the exotic promise of yet another adventure, as a drag on my freedom, a yearning for intimacy between us that I feared like a barbed wire threatening to fence in my spirit. But now, post-cancer, I recognize that I craved that island of safety as longingly as she did, that as much as I thought I needed to flee from the oasis of domestic tranquility, its absence had left a hole in my life. Love in its purest form had always terrified me. Was it too late now to look for it?

  In July 1970, in the third year of our marriage, Sharon and I shared the only expedition I ever concocted for just the two of us. A month before, I had graduated from the University of Denver with my PhD in English, while Sharon secured her MA in the same discipline. I had landed a teaching job in Amherst, Massachusetts, at Hampshire College, an “experimental” school that would open its doors the next September. It was a hectic sprint to the finish line for both of us, but also the crossing of a new threshold half a continent away in New England.

  In early June, I skipped the DU graduation and set off at once for my eighth Alaskan expedition. On a spur-of-the-moment whim, Hank Abrons, my former teammate from Denali, and I decided to head for the Kichatnas, where four years earlier our team of five had made the first ascent of that small but spectacular range’s highest peak. On a two-man expedition planned for only twenty days, Hank and I hoped to bag the second highest summit, a graceful pyramid called Middle Triple Peak, which I had a
dmired in 1966.

  Hank and I were out of shape, however, and weeks of storm loaded even the gentlest ridges with treacherous plumes and cornices of snow through which it was impossible to dig to reach the solid granite beneath. Not only did we never set foot on Middle Triple (whose first ascent would fall to a pair of brilliant alpinists six years later), but we failed on the smaller, easier peak we chose as a consolation prize. As we hiked out to Rainy Pass Lodge, I felt stung by the first unequivocal failure among my eight Alaskan quests for new routes and first ascents.

  A few days later, I met Sharon in Anchorage before we took a commercial flight to Dillingham, a fishing port on Bristol Bay in western Alaska. The objective of our two-person jaunt was the Tikchik Lakes, in a swath of wilderness I had discovered not from the air but via a perusal of the maps. The Tikchik–Wood River system, unique in Alaska, was a set of eight major lakes, all of them long and skinny and aligned east–west, stacked back to back like firewood, ranging from 10 to 80 miles north of Dillingham. The eastern ends of the lakes sprawled out into the taiga lowlands, but the western ends headed in cirques carved out of an unexplored massif of peaks ranging up to 5,000 feet in height. Only one of the peaks, Mount Konarut, had an official name.

  My plan was to focus on the two most northern lakes, called Chauekuktuli and Nuyakuk, which were linked on their eastern ends by a stream that flowed from the former into the latter. We would land by float plane at the head of Chauekuktuli, then paddle during eighteen leisurely days the lengths of both lakes, covering a mere 67 miles, toward a pickup on the west end of Nuyakuk. We would have time to poke into the countless arms and bays of both lakes, as well, I hoped, as climb some of the peaks that loomed in the west. We might even hike across a low pass to the northernmost lake of the Wood River chain.