Adventure Divas

by Holly Morris

  We eat sauerkraut. We prepare ourselves mentally for the mountain. We grieve the lack of cheese. Preclimb rituals take the form of obsessively fiddling with equipment and an endless recitation of stories about climbs gone awry. I hear about losing hands to frostbite on Denali, bodies tossed down crevasses on Everest, glorious barroom brawls, and women’s fat asses. We talk about the weather. A lot.

  I can relate to exactly none of the conversations. One part of me can swagger with the best of peak baggers, a frequently useful trait. Another part of me thinks it is strange to have so many conversations devoid of emotion when emotion is actually the addictive opiate of the climbing experience. I opt out and funnel my trepidation into watching the handsome young guides who take clients up the mountain. An entrepreneurial idea comes to me: a Men of the Matterhorn calendar. There are a few other women in the hut also waiting to climb, and I briefly consider asking for their nominations.

  The nature of my nerves reflects my own internal dichotomy. I fear not getting up the mountain and screwing up the show as much as or more than I fear becoming a statistic. How twisted is it that I fear professional failure more than heart failure? Traditionally, professional drive has meant working to publish a book, launch a business, or film a diva, not climbing fourteen thousand vertical feet in six hours.

  “Tomorrow you will suffer,” my guide, Ricky, says as he goes through my backpack, purging nonessentials on the eve of our attempt, “but later you will see the world differently. You will be a proud girl.”

  “This,” he says, pulling Sky Prancer out of the inner pocket I hid her in, “stays behind. No extra weight.”

  Four A.M. and the dark, crisp, clear skies come as a relief—if only because they put an end to a fitful night of anxiety dreams. Though he has a climbing past, Ben shares my trepidation and charmingly confesses to scratching out a will. “Everything goes to my girlfriend and my kid, with the exception of my record collection and cameras . . . my brothers get those,” he says soberly, showing me where the will is stashed. Being devoid of assets and any significant equity, it occurs to me that this could—cosmically speaking—be an okay time for me to “go.” Nevertheless, I sneak Sky Prancer back into my pack for good luck. After all, Narishakti worked for Bachendri on her climb up Everest.

  “Ben,” I ask, as we make the final cinches on our small packs and swing them from our cots onto our backs, “what do you think happened down there in the last moments? In the sub. Do you think they turned to, or against, one another?” I ask.

  Ben looks down and shakes his head slowly. There is a long silence. “I don’t know,” he replies quietly. “But you gotta hope they reached some sort of peace in the end. All they had was each other.”

  It’s 4:15 A.M. and the temperature reads fourteen degrees Celsius. We scramble around in the dark clicking on our headlamps and putting on our gear. With dozens of other silent hopefuls, we toss back some tea, and set off. All of the young guides—March, September, January—are tying on to their clients and rushing out the door so they do not get stuck in an alpine traffic jam.

  Ricky and I, too, are short-roped together. Since the Everest tragedy in 1996, I’ve considered short-roping a dirty word because, on Everest anyway, it can lead to a shameful situation in which one climber virtually hauls another, weaker climber up a mountain. On the Matterhorn, however, short-roping is the most common and safest method, as the density of climbers makes belaying a partner (fixing into the mountain with protection and belaying with large stretches of rope between you) far too hazardous. With short-roping, the idea is that if one partner slips, the other can dig in and prevent them both from falling. Ricky and I only have each other; there’s no protection. Worst-case scenario: If I go, he goes—and vice versa.

  In the pitch black we walk in single file across a snowfield. I look up and see a trail of lights, a weaving troupe of fireflies, inching its way up the base of the mountain ahead of us. “Gently, gently,” goes Ricky’s mantra as we set out with only our headlamps, his expertise, and our combined enthusiasm to guide us. The stars wink above as if conspiring in a bit of a laugh. Zermatt slumbers below, making its leisurely living off the sweat of us naïve thrill-seekers above. Part therapist, part drill sergeant, and part Heidi’s grandfather, Ricky will be my savior.

  “Left hand here, right hand there,” he says. “Good girl, zat’s my champ,” he encourages, with his kindly accent. “Steady, steady, gently, gently, watch my feet. Step where I step.”

  LOVE Ricky!—despite the “good-girl” stuff and that he has me on a leash.

  I feel lucky. Our pace is fast, but my body and mind harmonize and remind me that this is the kind of place and circumstance that make me most happy. My eyes sting and adrenaline rushes down legs that only knew needles of pain a few days ago. Ricky encourages me to play with the mountain and the moves, to breathe, and to synchronize my legs and arms; he teaches me a certain mountain dance, a choreography. I am not alone. He and I are a team that will succeed or fail together. Ricky does not approach this as an assault. Ricky, a guru of the Alps, is wise enough to be humble.

  Dusty orange quietly emerges in the east until, from the crux between two peaks, a blazing star of light bursts forth, turning into a new day.

  “Good Holly, you do vell,” says Ricky.

  The first two hours of the climb are very rigorous but—almost—enjoyable. “Liesl!” I blurt out, suddenly remembering the name of the other Von Trapp kid. Ricky looks back and nods, as if this is normal behavior. I realize that the suffering on the Dolomites paid off. That struggle made me strong. Starting the climb in the dark helped, of course, as I can develop a rhythm without the added pressure of seeing the consequences of a misstep.

  Hour four. Misery gains a toehold, though the spirit remains intact. “Gently, gently” starts to grate on my nerves; my thighs burn from overuse as I grind up the Upper Mosley Slabs. An eight-inch hunk of rock zings by my ear, having been kicked loose by a climber above. I try not to look up or else I’ll take in the massive totality of this endeavor and become overwhelmed.

  I stop on sheer slope and struggle with my crampons. I spent an hour taking them on and off last night, but the fruits of my practice desert me in this critical moment. I chuck aside my ego, and let a guide who comes up behind us untangle my straps.

  One step at a time, usually a slightly jaded phrase in my lexicon, now becomes a totally earnest hold-steady loop in my mind. I care less about the view; I stop talking. I wish I could fast-forward this adventure. Whymper wrote: “We who go mountain scrambling have constantly set before us the superiority of fixed purpose or perseverance to brute force. We know that each height, each step, must be gained by patient, laborious toil, and that wishing cannot take the place of working.”

  Whatever, Whymper.

  Hours five and six. Mild delirium sets in. No WAY, my mind and body holler as I confront the next vertical challenge on this narrow, narrow ridge. I forget the camera. I forget the crew. I look to the right, down the four-thousand-foot drop of the Matterhorn’s north face, where four of Edward Whymper’s seven-man party fell to their deaths on their descent from the summit in 1865.

  Pain sends me crawling into my secret happy place. You’re all alone . . . but I am decidedly not. An endless stream of climbers is directly behind me. I look up at the vertical cliff in front of me that leads, tauntingly, to the summit. A mental ticker tape of tongue-lashings begins. Fuck this show. Fuck this mountain. Fuck Ricky and his goddamned lulling voice and incessant confidence in me. Fuck all these guys. I remember, in Borneo, the headman’s reluctance to sacrifice a cock for our good luck. My vision blurs with tears as my upper body screams for salvation. I look over at one of the guys. I’d do it, right now, sacrifice a cock, if it would relieve me of this mountain purgatory.

  I want to quit. Ricky looks back and sees. He recognizes that his client has crossed the line. He twirls and delivers the emotional equivalent of a smack across the face. “Be a tough girl! You are a tough girl! Act
ion! Action!” He morphs from supportive Swiss grandfather into snarling guide, determined to bring his client back from the edge. I gulp a hunk of too-thin air and begin to scramble up the cliff, crampons flailing, spitting out a considerable range of four-letter words.

  Another forty-five-minute snow climb up a seventy-degree grade. “Quit stepping on your crampons: beeeg steps, beeeg steps!” says Ricky sternly when I stumble dangerously near the edge of the narrow ridge. My last reservoirs of anger and determination plow me onward.

  I toe-kick with a vengeance, grunting with every hard-earned step, focusing only on the next one to come. I imagine my thighs as separate units that propel, without failing. I don’t know how much time goes by, but I suddenly become aware of Ricky, who is touching me lightly on the shoulder, stirring me from my kinetic revelry. I lift my eyes and take in the totality of where we are.

  Holy shit. “We made it?” I whisper to Ricky through the panting, my head slightly bowed with exhaustion. The narrow, hundred-yard summit, part Italy and part Switzerland, adorned by two crosses.

  “Here vee are at the top of the Matterhorn,” Ricky says. “I am proud of you. You vill alvaays remember this, my champ,” he says, smiling, his mustache crusted with ice.

  He is, once again, right. Alps and countries and rugged humbling peaks pour across the distance, and for the first time on this trip I see through another portal: gratitude. I am determined not to cry, or keel over with a heart attack, or plunge my ice ax into the sky in victory. Despite the cheese and yodeling, this is no time for clichés. All I can think of is apologizing to Ricky for turning into such a bitch (“It is normal, my champ,” he assures me) and getting a picture of Sky Prancer on the summit. She made it!

  I slog over to Ben. “Please take her picture,” I say, and wedge Sky Prancer into the crisp snow in front of a hard-earned backdrop, and he clicks; her blue hair perfectly matches the piercing sky behind her. Ben lowers the camera and the weary but blissed look in his eyes tells me that we have all waged our individual battles getting up here.

  Digger and Ben shake hands. Paul fastidiously covers Keith, who is shinnying toward the edge to get a better shot. It dawns on me that all of the tension these past two weeks was about the high stakes attached to our common investment—reaching this summit. So many things could have gone terribly, horribly wrong, and they did not. Caught up in my own nerves, and my own unchecked ego, I had failed to truly understand that each of us was packing a few extra pounds of pressure—but now I hear it hissing off into the nearly fifteen-thousand-foot ether.

  Our time on top is brief, filled with a wordless communication. We relish our success in the cracks between doing our jobs—filming, directing, protecting one another. Our kind of yodel, I guess. There is no high-fiving, but there is a pure and happy visceral moment together.

  We begin the descent, the most dangerous part of any climb. Adrenaline surged us up the mountain, but a new rhythm accompanies our troupe back down. Funnily enough, I don’t see Zermatt, only layers and folds and jutting peaks of snow-covered majesty.

  5.

  STROPPY SHEILAS AND MANA WAHINES

  Stroppy sheilas are uniquely Kiwi gals with grit. “Stroppy” . . . derives from the adjective “obstreperous,” meaning boisterous and untameable. Stroppy women . . . are feisty and hard to handle, and they are viewed with a mixture of annoyance, wariness and respect. “Sheila” is a curious antipodean colloquial term for women—it’s the other half of “bloke.” Sheilas lived down on the farm, wore print frocks and were good sorts. . . . It’s a term that’s dying out—sadly, because it has far more going for it than its decorative, defined-by-their-tits-and-bums successors, such as the “chicks” of the seventies or the “babes” of the nineties.

  —SANDRA CONEY, AUTHOR AND EXPERT ON NEW ZEALAND’S WOMEN’S HISTORY

  “Okay, so keep the cameras low, focusing on the boots and hooves. Don’t pull up until the last line. Is Ram Cam holding?” I ask.

  We bought an old hi-8 video camera at an Auckland pawnshop and have spent the last hour rigging it with bungee cords and duct tape to the neck of a very smelly, very oily, very fidgety hundred-and-twelve-pound ram. Two local Kiwi farmers, wearing black singlets and gumboots, yip and shuffle to keep the herd of seventy-five sheep within some semblance of control. The occasional rogue sheep is chased down by a border collie, or by one of us. We have exactly one chance at this opening standup, as these sheep are going to be too traumatized, and scattered, for a second take.

  “Okay!” I yell. The farmers start whooping and running, driving a heaving mass of off-white curly hair toward me as I start the standup.

  “Waaay down under there are a quiet couple of islands”

  Holy crap.

  “where bucolic scenes can be deceptive, and rogue politics are the order of the day.”

  Oh shiiiii—

  “It’s a place where pastoral conservatism meets twisted brilliance”

  A thundering cloud of terror-stricken sheep, who are unused to being Hollywood extras, begins to overtake me. Nanoseconds before impact, the cloud bisects and snakes around me with the g-force of spring runoff in a slot canyon. One. More. Line.

  “where biculturalism is a verb—and it’s all run by stroppy sheilas!”

  I hit the dirt and protect my torso as the maelstrom passes in a final baaaaahing melee.

  “Uh, I think we got it,” says Michael Gross, with a big, warm laugh. He gives me a hand up and we swap a the-things-we-do-for-TV look. Of medium build and height with dark hair, glasses, and a friendly, full-body slouch, Michael has been a creative conspirator on all things diva ever since he edited the Cuba show. For two unrelated grown-ups, he and I have developed an oddly fraternal relationship. Our shared sense of quirk led to this stunt, which will give sheep—which outnumber humans seventeen to one in New Zealand—top billing in the show.

  Ram Cam lies trampled in the mud, detached from its four-legged tripod (quad-pod?). The camera is destroyed, but we spool the tape back into the cracked casing. “It can be salvaged,” Michael says with uncharacteristic optimism.

  “Right,” I say, wiping a chunk of sheep doogie off my forearm. “Guess we’d better get going to the first interview if we’re going to make it on time.”

  “Good morning Auckland. Today the burn rate is eight minutes, so be sure to lather on the number thirty,” advises Channel Z, Auckland’s modern rock station.

  “Aoteoroa is what the indigenous Maori people call New Zealand,” says Simon Griffith, this episode’s producer, who lives in Seattle but was raised in New Zealand. “It means ‘land of the long white cloud.’ But the cloud doesn’t protect you from the hole in the ozone layer,” he adds, scratching his brown beard with a burly forearm. Simon is unusually lumberjack for a producer. Must be his brawny Kiwi blood. He is driving us from the pastures farther into the farming communities outside of Auckland. In addition to Simon and Michael, our crew is rounded out by Liza Bambenek, a young, strong, Santa Fe–based camerawoman with a mop of short dark hair; and Jan McKinley, a local soundwoman, who will keep us from getting lost time and time again.

  “Weird. You hear the burn rate statistics here like you might hear the price of pork bellies in Iowa, or weekend box office sales in L.A.,” I say.

  “Why New Zealand?” many people asked in the weeks running up to this shoot. “Kind of ‘soft,’ isn’t it?” A seemingly domesticated set of islands was an unlikely location for one of our shoots. Yet, New Zealand’s importance lies in its unique political reality: The country, quite literally, is run by ladies. On September 19, 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world in which women got the vote—a full twenty-seven years before the United States. And as of this writing, women hold nearly all the key positions in the country: prime minister, Maori queen, Supreme Court chief justice, governor general, and attorney general.

  Women run the country. Interesting. Outside of utopian sci-fi novels, my images of societies in which women head and control the power
structure are limited to Amazonian legend.

  What kind of sociopolitical tectonic shift occurred to create this reality? Is New Zealand a particularly fertile place for divas? If so, why? And there were other things that intrigued me about the country beyond its feminized politicians. New Zealand’s progressive political reputation extends to race relations. Today’s Maori, the country’s first-nation people, and Pakeha, New Zealanders of European descent, are said to have created a relatively peaceful bicultural modern-day society, despite the shadow of British colonial rule.

  Oh yeah, and there was a certain fish-loving writer on the wild and wooly South Island I wanted to meet.

  In any case, we decided there was more than enough here to justify a Divas shoot. We hopped on a plane, mapped out a three-week road trip through the North and South Islands, and, striving to serve both fashion and function, rented a bright orange 1972 Valiant.

  The Valiant is a sedan manufactured from 1966 to 1976 by the now-defunct Plymouth division of Chrysler. The quintessential muscle car, the Charger, might be considered its groovy uncle. Valiants were huge sellers in Australia and New Zealand and were popular as souped-up race cars. Attached to this particular Valiant’s tail end, like a poorly buried lead, is a boxy, off-white caravan with an orange racing stripe, replete with faux teakwood paneling on the inside: home.

  “Hard to believe, but the Valiant was originally manufactured as a compact car. Got the same body type as the Duster,” says Simon, who, along with fellow Kiwi Jan, will do most of the driving on this trip because the rest of us tend to veer to the right side of the road into oncoming traffic.

  “I bet the metric system stuck here, too,” says Liza, who joins me in having experienced the United States’ debacle in metrics during grade school.