Dead Lucky

by Lincoln Hall

  When I awoke, it was early the next morning. At least, I assumed it was morning because I found myself in the same place surrounded by the same eerie whiteness. Again I looked for somewhere different to sit, but nothing about the scene had changed, except that now I could see no people. But I sensed that Mike and Julia were still nearby. I sat on my cold rock and thought about Julia. I needed her presence because she is an organizer. She is a lawyer at work and a troubleshooter at home, juggling life with her partner and three sons under twelve. Our dad lives nearby. Our mother died of cancer a half dozen years ago, and now Julia holds us all together, always remembering birthdays and arranging family holidays—usually somewhere along the coast south of Sydney to make it more convenient for Michele, our elder sister, who lives even farther south. The cold reminded me that I had been unable to gather firewood. My failure in that respect led me to accept that I would not find Julia.

  Time must have passed, but I did not sense its passage. The white other-worldliness had gone. The reality of my situation began to manifest as I felt the familiarity of darkness surrounding me, the first darkness I had experienced for what seemed like days. There were no stone cottages, no Julia, no Mike, no firewood, no hope of fire. I was alone. I could sense that people had been with me, but they had left on their own important journeys. I found myself in a small shelter sitting cross-legged on grass that had been laid on the dirt floor. It was the most basic of structures, a low hut with shaped timber uprights and a hastily thatched roof. Even though I was sitting down, there was very little headroom. Behind me was a wall of rough-hewn planks, but the sides were open so the occupant could keep watch in all directions. I was aware of these features despite the darkness. I took the shelter to be a goat-herder’s shack in Nepal, and that made sense because I knew that the last words spoken to me had been in Nepali. It seemed that I was making some kind of progress because now I had a crude shelter and grass to sit upon, and yet I had no sense of where I was progressing from or to. I seemed to be endlessly watching and waiting.

  I was aware of an expanse. There was only the slightest breeze, but the air was so cold that it chilled me. I could see many lights in different directions, just pinpricks indicating distant houses and settlements. Everything else was pitch-black. There must be a track or a road, I thought, that led to each of those houses. The tiny lights were welcoming but only for those who knew where they were going. When dawn came, I would hunt down the path to the nearest house. With that comforting plan in mind, I let myself drift back to sleep.

  Suddenly—after I don’t know how many hours—I awoke with a feeling of great fear. In one sense, nothing was different; I was still sitting cross-legged on a ridge-top high in the sky. Disoriented, I stretched out a gloved hand. I felt nothing. I removed the thick insulated gauntlet, and with my bare hand I scooped up a granular substance. It flowed through my fingers, but there were no tactile messages for my mind to decode. Then I realized that my fingers were frozen and that what I was handling was snow. I tried to feel my toes, but they were completely numb. Frostbite had struck, and the full force of the truth struck me at that moment: I was exhausted, frostbitten, and alone on the summit ridge of Everest. I had begun the decline, which would finish with me freezing to death.

  The pinpricks of light that I had coveted were not distant houses welcoming me. They were the stars in the sky, and the only welcome they could offer me would be to heaven. Physically I was already there, surrounded by the cosmos, the highest person on the planet, and set to be the next Everest statistic. This was not how it was meant to end. This was definitely not how it was meant to end.

  The horror of this realization snapped me into complete lucidity. I knew I had to escape from this awful predicament. My body was not in the best of shape, nor was my mind, but that was of no consequence. The vital point was that I take action, however bad my condition might be. I had to return alive to Barbara and the boys. This mattered to me more than anything else, more than my own death. If I let myself die, I would not notice my own passing, but the foursome of our family was too joyous and complete to be allowed to disintegrate into pain, despair, and endless thoughts of what might have been. I knew that death would be so easy for me now. All I would have to do was close my eyes and let myself slip away from the cold and the loneliness, as too many others had done these last weeks on this same deadly ridge. But for me, at that moment, death was not an option.

  I was not in denial by repudiating death; I was not attempting to conjure up some outrageous idea of survival in the hope that it might happen. Hope had nothing to do with it. The odds were stacked against me, and the body count was proof. My only chance in such desperate straits was total belief. I had to live these next hours, next days—however long it took—with the certainty that I would survive.

  In Sydney in April 2006, as I prepared to leave for Everest, I had renewed out loud to Barbara and the boys my commitment to coming home. I had repeated it silently to myself weeks later when I stood beneath Everest, wondering what it would demand of me.

  And now I knew. Everest wanted everything I had, every last scrap of commitment, of determination, of belief. The focus of my life from this point onward was to be with Barbara, Dylan, and Dorje again. Some might say I was deluded, shrugging away the guilt of shattering our family while fooling myself I could do the impossible. But I had learned many years back that the impossible was not always so. I had been on other mountains when events went so horribly wrong that the question was not whether I would die but when. Each of those times, despite the odds, I came through alive. There may have been some luck involved, but luck is of no use unless you have a never-give-up attitude.

  The only way for me to survive the remainder of the night was to maintain two things—my core temperature and my wakefulness. I needed strategies for each. My pack would provide valuable insulation from the snow, and inside it were my down mitts. In its top pocket were heat pads, which could provide up to twelve hours of warmth, produced by chemical reactions. In the darkness I felt for my pack, but it was nowhere to be found. My oxygen set would have helped my frostbite and my mind, but it was long gone as well. There was no sign of a mask or a regulator or a cylinder. The pack and the oxygen may have been a few feet away, but I did not know where the edge of the precipice was. The darkness was total.

  My only option now was to conserve the heat my body produced. I continued to sit cross-legged, my arms folded across my chest, my hands crossed not far below my neck, my head tilted forward. This position was the best for keeping my vital organs warm. I wriggled my numb fingers constantly. I could tell they were moving, but the tips felt wooden, totally without sensation.

  On other unplanned bivouacs, when it had been either impossible or unwise to sleep, I had spent the night singing. But here I had no breath to spare, and my mind was empty of songs. I felt that even humming would eat up some of the energy I needed to conserve. Deprived of oxygen, my mind had already played tricks with me and was likely to do so again.

  Staying awake would be my biggest challenge. I would have to focus on something concrete, and the obvious choice was my body. I maintained my cross-legged position and swayed rhythmically from side to side. The movement kept my blood pumping through me. Soon I found that the variation of rotating my upper body felt better, clockwise then counterclockwise. With my shoulders, I traced small erratic circles, as though stirring my upper body with my spine. There was no need for precision behind the actions—they were just something for my mind to hold on to. I repeated the sequence again and again.

  During years of serious meditation, I had experienced different levels of consciousness, but here on the mountaintop I did not want to go any deeper. I did not even want to think about where those other levels might take me. Instead, I clung to the grossest form of mind control, the only one I could manage in my weakened, oxygen-starved state. I set my mind to watch, feel, and steer my movements, and as time ticked by, they became as familiar as well-practiced tennis swings�
�backhand, forehand, backhand again.

  In happier times, less close to death, when meditating I liked to focus my attention on my breath. As the minutes pass and I am drawn deeper into a meditative state, my attention rests longer on the spaces between inhalation and exhalation—that is where the perfect stillness lies. But up here on the mountain I was not looking for stillness. The process of breathing is an automatic one, which happens whether you observe it or not. The danger of attempting a breathing meditation in my current state was that my mind could easily be aware of my breath and yet not focus upon it. Before I could stop it, my mind might drift off, bouncing from meaningless thought to meaningless thought, keeping my breath in the background, forgetting the need for watchfulness, forgetting that my battle was to stay alive.

  Even with my easier routine of observing my movements, my mind still managed to steal away, grabbing onto random thoughts. How long it would be until sunrise. What an inconceivable distance I had put between myself and my family. I dragged my mind back to the rotations, to the counterclockwise sweep of the forehand, the clockwise grace of the backhand. They were only small circles, really, but I gave them grander names. The process was simple, with nothing except the reversal of direction to separate one rotation from the next. Soon this became inconsequential as well, leaving me with no need to remember anything at all.

  And so I have no clear memory of facing death and then rejecting it. But I did have an experience to which no name can be given.

  Toward the end of that night, I found myself on a hill, which I somehow knew to be in Poland, although I have never visited that country. It was dark and I was sitting on a grassy knoll, still waiting and watching. Despite the darkness, I knew I was looking out over treeless rolling hills, all of which lay below me. I was wearing a cloak made of the finest wool; it was thick and warm and all-encompassing. The drape of the cloak made it exceptionally comfortable, although it was not designed for sleeping in, and I had difficulty finding the best place to tuck my hands.

  The night sky began to weaken and fade, so I knew that dawn was coming. I looked around for Barbara. I had not seen her, but I knew she and I had been traveling together somewhere in the recent past. Light came quickly, but Barbara was still nowhere to be seen. The cloak was heavy enough for me to be undisturbed by the wind that had picked up as darkness turned to dawn. Although it had invested me with a sense of completeness, the cloak was not mine to keep. I knew I had to return it. I knew without turning my head that it belonged in the building behind me. With the coming of light, I could now see that the cloak was a gray color, and its unusual cut made me think it was ceremonial. As I slipped out of it, I noticed that the hood formed an integral part.

  With the cloak in my arms, I turned around and began to walk. There was a slight drop from the knoll, then a gentle rise as I approached the building, which I sensed was some kind of house because it had a welcoming aspect. It was only twenty yards away, but the first light of dawn had not been able to reach it, which meant I had to walk back into the night. Despite the darkness, I was able to find the few steps which led up to the porch. There was no need for me to ring the bell. To the left of the closed door was a row of wooden pegs. Instinctively, I knew which peg the cloak belonged on, so I carefully put it back in its place. It was the only cloak on the row of pegs.

  I turned to face the light, conscious of the gloom behind me. Soon I was back on the knoll, where there was still no sign of Barbara. I thought that perhaps she was never meant to come to this place, and I must take this part of my journey on my own. The sky had brightened considerably in the few minutes it had taken me to return the cloak. The hills were as bare of trees and houses as I had envisioned them to be, but there was a wide path that began beneath the knoll where I had spent the night and continued into the shallow valley. It dropped out of sight but then reappeared on the hillside beyond, curving upward to the rounded crest of the final hill.

  I surveyed the scene briefly and then began to walk, setting off with no destination, not knowing what the future would bring but eager to be on my way at last. The walking was effortless. I felt only the sense of making the journey and not the passage of time. I found myself cresting the final grassy hillside to be greeted by a freezing wind.

  Suddenly, there was a sharply different reality, as though I had stepped between worlds. I stood upon a narrow snow-covered space where the coldest touch of sunshine reflected from the peak above. In front of me was a steep and icy mountainside, which dropped into a dark valley far below. Behind me, where the grass-covered hills had been, there was only a precipice so enormous that it was beyond belief. Whatever the place was that I had been traveling to, I had arrived.

  Eighteen

  AWAKENING

  ON THE EVENING OF May 25, my fate was sealed. At Mushroom Rock, high on the Northeast Ridge, I lay motionless on the snow. It was obvious to Pemba that I was close to death—so close that I might have already passed into the next phase of the life-death-rebirth cycle. As a Tibetan Buddhist, he was aware that over the next three days the different levels of consciousness would leave my body.

  Pemba himself was in very bad shape. Wounded by my accidental crampon-kick to his leg, drained and desperately thirsty because he had given all his food and water to Thomas Weber, he was now feeling the effects of snow blindness after a full day with no eye protection in bright sunshine. The pain was like having chilies in his eyes. After twenty hours on the go, most of them without oxygen, Pemba looked at me and decided he wanted to die as well. But then he remembered his family and slowly began to make his way down to High Camp. Dorje followed, carrying with him my camera, the only records of my final climb.

  Dawa Tenzing and Lakcha stayed with me at 28,000 feet for another two hours, attempting to rouse me in whatever way they could, including poking me in the eyes. Both men were totally exhausted, having done absolutely everything within their power to keep me moving and—when movement was no longer an option—to keep me alive. Darkness was drawing near, and from 7,000 feet below at Advance Base Camp, Alex instructed them to retreat to High Camp. Dawa Tenzing was also snow-blind and has no memory of how he made his way back to High Camp. But the camp was not a sanctuary—it was dangerous for the exhausted climbers to spend the night at the extreme height of 27,000 feet, particularly when severely dehydrated, yet they had no energy to go any farther down.

  The Sherpas were sadly familiar with altitude-induced deaths on the mountain, and they saw that the only difference between my body and those of David Sharp, Vitor Negrete, Igor Plyushkin, Jacques-Hugues Letrange, and Thomas Weber was that mine was not yet frozen.

  Alex had instructed them to cover me with stones, in the way that stones had been placed over Igor, but it was not possible to do so at Mushroom Rock. The ridge at that point was a solid spine of rock, capped by a six-foot-wide snowbank tilting upward to the lip of the Kangshung Face. One of the cornices overhanging the lip had broken away, revealing a vertical precipice and a dizzying drop of 9,000 feet to the Kangshung Glacier. The pedestal of Mushroom Rock itself was six feet high, and beneath it the North Face sloped away steeply. Only a few shards of rock lay exposed at the edge of the snow. There were no stones that could be used for my burial.

  AT BASE CAMP that evening Mike, Richard, and Christopher were in a state of shock and did not talk much. Richard started smoking heavily, which he had not done for years. Christopher listened to music. Mike’s therapy was to busy himself with necessary tasks. He began with the issue of informing the authorities, but as Base Camp manager, Maxim decided he should handle that particular job. In my tent Mike located the notebook which had my insurance details written in a prominent place. He then began to pack up my belongings—not the most joyous of activities—and the tent that had been my Base Camp home for the last two months.

  The plan had been for an early start, but the 7Summits-Club convoy was not ready to leave until ten o’clock. As the Landcruiser bounced across the rocky flats, Richard talked about retur
ning next year and building a memorial to me at Base Camp. When Mike looked back at the mountain, he had never seen it more beautiful, so beautiful it was almost luminous.

  LATE ON THE MORNING of May 25, Greg stood outside our house in Wentworth Falls. He remained there for a good while, taking in the spectacular view. The fresh, cold air did not soothe his emotions or ratify his disbelief, but his mind did become less clouded. When he came back inside to the living room, he found that the warmth from the slow-combustion stove, and the body heat of the people standing and sitting where they could, was anything but comforting. Instead, there was a heaviness in the room, a dank and close intensity from the deathly emotions of trauma, shock, and disbelief.

  He immediately wanted to go back outside, but he also wanted to be a part of it. As one person consoled another, there were glimmers of humor, gentle ways of maintaining solidarity. At a different level there was a need to conduct rational conversations with people who were ringing up with questions or condolences. These were largely handled by Julia, who was sitting on a low stool that had been made by Roley Clarke and given to Dylan on his fourth birthday. Greg took advantage of a silence between phone calls to place a call to Base Camp. Christopher picked up the phone; he could only theorize about what had befallen me. Foul oxygen was one possibility, he said, and a faulty oxygen regulator was another. It was touching that human fallibility was not suggested.

  Barbara thought of one phone call that she wanted to make herself— to Ang Karma in Kathmandu. When they spoke, she asked him if he would perform the appropriate Buddhist ceremony, one that needed to be completed within a certain time of my death.

  There was a silence, and then Karma spoke with a hesitancy in his voice that Barbara had not heard before. “I can do that,” he said. “I will miss his friendship. He was a good man.”

  TOWARD MIDDAY, Margaret Werner drove to the Wentworth Falls shops and returned loaded with supplies. She set about making leek and potato soup, and when it was ready, she laid out bread and cheese and a few extras, creating her usual irresistible spread. For many years Margaret had run the Bay Tree Teashop at Mount Victoria, which at the time was heavily patronized by Blue Mountains climbers needing a post-climb feed before the two-hour drive back to Sydney. But today Margaret’s leek and potato soup was a post-climb offering, which reminded everybody that for one of our number, there would be no more two-hour drives to Sydney. Or anywhere.