Why climb mountains or set yourself up to face the sort of challenges that force you to grow? Does an individual’s struggle for self-perfection have any meaning for a whole society? At home, not many individuals can remember why we took this road. Those who do, I miss so much. It is easy to find like-minded individuals in the West who respect what I have done, but I long to feel such acceptance standing on the ground of my motherland. Is it patriotism, this desire to take your strength from the support of friends and dear ones, to be comforted by the knowledge that your individual personality is a unit in something greater? Over the last five years I have lost all sense of belonging to anything bigger than my inner world. I wonder if the goals I have and what I do contribute anything to my culture. Many people at home do not understand me; they believe that I pursue mountaineering because I have found a way to make easy money. Not even friends and family who are closest to me see the price I am paying for my obsession or how that commitment, made long ago, binds me forever. Money can never replace what I lost or gave up when I took up this road.
KATHMANDU, NEPAL, JUNE 8, 1995
Two days ago Demiyanich and I returned from Everest Base Camp. Earlier tonight we strolled through Kathmandu’s Thamel sector of colorful, busy streets. Though our company was brightened by the feminine companionship of Moscow businesswoman Natasha Shaginian, my mood was at level zero. Natasha and I became acquainted ten years ago; then she was one of Russia’s best female mountaineers. As we spoke about the last expedition, the reverential spark in her eyes implied that I had done something remarkable. Strangely, her exaggerated respect for my accomplishments annoyed me. She made me think of another Natasha, a woman in Almaty; an unhappy cloud hung over our parting. Her attitude toward my records was completely different. Conversations about my achievements irritated her, even if I spoke with close friends. I have never been shy about what I do. I believe a person should be able to share his victories in life with those who are interested.
Looking over at Demiyanich, I had sincere envy in my eyes. Tomorrow he will be going home to his wife, Tatiana. For weeks he has complained about being deprived of her good borscht. If a woman were waiting for me, she would not have to be as good a cook as Tatiana, just sincerely happy that I was coming home. I wondered how it would feel to have someone waiting. How I wanted what my friend had. Finding that seemed more important than climbing Everest for the second time.
Those thoughts caused a painful twist inside me. I left the restaurant, telling my friends I was not hungry. I found the nearest telephone. Kathmandu is full of them; you can call anywhere for a pittance, anywhere but Russia or the republics. Those places cost more, and making the connection is nearly impossible. I handed over my last thousand rupees for three minutes. I wanted to hear Natasha’s voice, thinking that I could make amends for the way we had said good-bye.
The relationship did not work out the way we had hoped, though no one is to blame that our two lives did not become one. In the ways of ordinary life, I am not too clever and I am too difficult to deal with. In the last year, Natasha was the person closest to me, but it seems that I don’t have the qualities that will make her love me. Abruptly those thoughts were interrupted by her voice on the line.
Jumbled words poured out chaotically, not the way I intended to express them. The last thing I wanted was to make her melancholy or to remind her of unpleasant memories. With all my heart I wish her the happiness that she was unable to find with me. Hopefully, our future encounters will be less painful and our friendship will be something positive for both of us. I don’t want to limit her freedom, nor do I demand her loyalty. Who knows what I expected from that conversation. In any event, I expressed no resentment or regret about what had happened between us. At that moment I needed someone dear to me to know that I needed her. Though it is natural for a person who loves to hope there will be positive feelings in return, I pushed such expectations from my mind.
After our conversation I felt better. Though I heard no love in Natasha’s voice, I detected a new warmth and enthusiasm. My attention pleased her, and that is enough to make me happy. When I left, she expressed only coldness and indifference to my overtures. Why was she attracted to me initially? Perhaps she was like a drowning person who reaches out to the first one who tries to help. When the infatuation wore off, the recriminations started. “Why did you offer your hand?” “No one asked you to help.” It was easier for her to run away from life, to dwell in the past. Now, I hear some sign that her spirit is rekindled. She is interested in what is going on around her. I don’t think her attitude toward me will change. She has her own notion of what is good and bad in that regard, but at least she is concerned about the world and how other people feel. So the process has begun, as Mikhail Gorbachev used to say.
Why has she become so important to me in the last six months? From the beginning, our love of sports put our souls on parallel courses of development. I noticed that she treated the mountains as I did, like cathedrals where worship gives you strength and strips off the scale of ordinary life. It seems to me that every encounter in life is predestined. Each brings with it the opportunity to correct some facet of personal development, and these events occur according to an unfathomable rhythm. When I worked as a coach, my faith in the old slogans was enough; it was our responsibility to be strong units in society. Training was creative; sports were games you took seriously, and they prepared you for something more important. Now I struggle on the front lines of existence to satisfy my own idea of meaning; because I am alone, I sense that something is missing. The hardest blows that life delivers come from behind. I have no one to protect me from those leather blows. There is a refuge behind my shoulders for the woman who possesses the strength to be a positive influence, on others as well as me. That will not be an easy job, for I am far from being weak.
Strong character is hidden in Natasha’s face; from the beginning I wanted to revive her interest in the world, restore her ambition. Part of me hoped that she was the woman who would end my solitude. Two separate lives would become a whole; unified, our struggle for spiritual development would benefit the world and us. My greatest hopes went unrealized, but the minimum was achieved. The effort that I made to understand Natasha has helped me grow, and I feel that I am a better person because of it. She has become a part of my struggle to understand the world. If I have reawakened her interest in life, then our encounter was not a waste of time. She has begun to fight on her own. For her, a period of stagnation is coming to an end. Hopefully she will reevaluate her psychological burdens, leaving behind those things that have not served her. She has great potential; I want her to find a place in society and work that will allow her to use her strength creatively. If we two can care about one another and help one another as friends, then the world is a better place. One more person struggles for good to prevail over evil. I do not want her to disappear into boundless space. I suppose that is what I tried to communicate tonight.
I am in a different stage on life’s journey; my road was clear from the beginning. Loyalty to skiing and mountaineering charted the course of my destiny. No time or energy was wasted searching for a path to self-realization. Travel and the experience of climbing became the author of my development, physically and spiritually. Remembering that helps me detach myself from the thoughts that have run circles in my head for weeks, about my life, about Natasha’s life. Though fate brought us together, and we had things in common and both of us tried to make a relationship work, there was no harmony in our union.
“You are living out a prophecy,” Demiyanich tells me, “why do you question fate?”
I cannot argue with him; fate put me on this road in the beginning.
7
THE ROADS WE CHOOSE, 19951
DHAULAGIRI, FALL 1995
The summer of 1995 was spent working for Himalayan Guides in the Tien Shan. Simon Yates, Henry Todd’s wife, Peta Waite, and I led the first British expedition to traverse Myramornya Stena. Three of the team went
on to summit Khan-Tengri.
That fall I was committed to a Manaslu expedition that was to be our Sports Club’s return to Himalayan climbing. Our intention was to tackle a new route on the difficult South Face. In 1990, on one of the last attempts to blaze that futuristic trail, our teammates Grigori Luniakov, Zinur Halitov, and Marat Galiev had died in their pioneering efforts. This climb was conceived as a tribute to those men. The permit had been purchased from the Nepal Ministry of Tourism in 1994. Subsequent organization had been stymied by the club’s inability to raise money for the expensive first ascent. When Simon, Peta, and I arrived in Almaty after the Khan-Tengri expedition, I learned the Manaslu project had been put on the shelf once again. The Kazakhstan Ministry of Tourism had reneged on its funding commitment. Irvand Illinski had been forced to postpone the expedition until the spring of 1996. This depressing news came about one week before the beginning of the autumn climbing season in Nepal.
It was too late for me to find work on any of the commercial expeditions heading into the Himalayas, but I went to Kathmandu anyway, hoping I might turn up an affordable opportunity to try some peak I had not climbed. Fortuitously I hooked up with a team of Georgian climbers who had a permit for Dhaulagiri; this was their first Himalayan expedition since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I knew these men from sports climbing in the 1980s; they were members of the military sports club in Georgia, coached by one of my old mentors, Lev Sarkisian. My friends did not need my expertise for their undertaking, but they provided me with an interesting personal opportunity. I paid a portion of the permit fee and other expedition costs and shared the work required to establish high camps during our acclimatization. My summit attempt, a solo climb, posed complex physical and tactical problems that were challenging to me as an extreme athlete. Alone, I had to count on my strength and intuition; my chances of success and survival depended on these.
My goal was to climb Dhaulagiri in less than twenty-four hours. I left Base Camp on October 7 at six-thirty in the evening and reached Camp I at 5,700 meters at 9 P.M. After resting for twenty minutes, I moved on. Gusts of wind scoured the site of Camp II. I paused with a group of Austrian mountaineers weathering the blasts in their tents. Ignoring my momentary doubts about the wisdom of continuing, at 2 A.M. I headed toward Camp III. The wind and the night cold slowed my pace significantly. Often I stopped and waited for violent gusts of the icy blast to subside. When I arrived at Camp III at 5:45 A.M., I found a Bulgarian climber warming himself by the gas stove in my tent. He had spent a sleepless night sitting on my Ensolite pad, wrapped in my down jacket. Four Spanish climbers in the neighboring tent had postponed an early-morning summit bid because of the wind. I ate a little food and warmed up drinking tea, resting with the Bulgarian, whose name was Tony. At 8 A.M. I left for the summit. The Spanish climbers came out of their tents to watch my departure; one pointed to the summit and shouted to me, “No pasarán,”” a slogan from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.2
Slowly I ascended the ridge, already brilliantly lit by the morning sun, and finally came into the leeward shelter of a steep, snow-covered slope. Camp III was far below, and I climbed on an angle so steep it reminded me of the dangerous presummit section on K2. But the situation was different; I was not so helpless with fatigue or emaciated by the effects of the altitude. My rate of ascent inspired confidence. Given my body’s ability to perform, I determined that I would have the strength necessary for the descent. Far below, following my example, Tony and the four Spaniards were moving up the slope. Their pace appeared considerably slower than mine.
On the ridge just below the summit, the wind intensified. Acutely aware of my insignificance, I sensed that I was moving into an enormous void. An impressive panorama of mountains spread around me; only clouds broke the intense blue of the sky. On a ridge overlain with deep snowdrifts, I crossed the final treacherous meters to my goal. A huge snow slab broke off and avalanched away from the grip of my crampons in the icy slope. That rendered any egotistical desire for records insignificant, and the last vestige of pride in my performance disappeared into the abyss with the falling snow. Exhaustion swept over me as I registered that a tenuous grip on ice was all that prevented me from flying down the slope incorporated in the avalanche. Losing all sense of time, I wondered at the power that the mountains exert over us, calling people to push themselves to undergo such tests of courage, strength, and purity.
I don’t know how long I stood on the summit, perhaps fifteen minutes, before I looked at my watch at 11:45 A.M. As I turned to descend, the goal that had been my inspiration below had ceased to interest me. I had climbed Dhaulagiri alone in about seventeen hours, but there was no rejoicing in my success. I understood that time was not important, that the true significance of my effort lay in my connecting with the mountains. Standing there, I realized that I needed these trials and struggles, that they are important to me. It is with myself that I struggle in this life, not with the mountains. Their greatness and strength is indisputable, only man is in transit, evolving, growing, and the road that we choose to follow in life depends less on the surrounding world than on our spirit—the internal voice that pushes one to seek new challenges.
Getting down was considerably more difficult and dangerous than getting up. Fatigue increased; the sleepless night had left its mark on me. I paused to rest about 12:45 P.M. and watched Tony as he took my trail up the route. He climbed following his own road, and a personal victory awaited him at the end of his journey. Man struggles helplessly at high altitude with inherent physical weakness—one must constantly overcome and conquer a nagging sense of inadequacy. The Spaniards turned around halfway to the summit; apparently, they were not prepared to face the test the mountain held out to them that day.
I did not linger at Camp III, but packed my gear and continued down, fatigue and dehydration slowing my steps. My progress was steady, without stopping. I did not experience the drop in strength that happens when you are a guide and your movement is constrained by responsibility for others. At Camp II, I shared tea with my Georgian friends, passing on information about the route after the assault camp. The next day they would try for the summit, their effort paving the way for other Georgian climbers in the Himalayas.
Darkness fell as I reached the top of the icefall at five thousand meters. Using the beam of my headlamp, I negotiated a way across ominous crevasses, their black mouths plummeting to the bottom of the glacier. When the terrain leveled out, fog shrouded the landscape so densely that all visibility was lost. Somewhere in the vicinity of Base Camp, I heard the sounds of voices, laughter, and music, and they became my guides. It was 7 P.M.
About twenty-four hours had passed since I’d walked out of camp. Under the growing fatigue, my feelings were more than relief that the trial was over, that I had survived. The experience had left me a long way from the end of my life’s clearly defined road. I understood that I needed to accomplish more, I had to endure more if I wanted to know what I was capable of as a mountain climber or as a human being. The end of each journey is the beginning of a new one, one that is longer and more difficult.
Autumn Encounter with Scott Fischer
At noon the next day, October 9, I walked to the hot springs in the village of Tatopani on the Annapurna Circuit and spent two days there enjoying the warmth and restorative effects of the baths. I made my way down to the tranquil lakeside village of Pokhara and rested for several more days before returning to Kathmandu on October 19. After a good night’s sleep at the Namascar Guest House, I went out for a stroll along a narrow street, daydreaming among the shops and restaurants. Then, from one of the cars jammed into the crowded lane, someone yelled my name. Walking closer, I recognized the faces of friends, mountaineers from Almaty. In a jumble of words I learned that the postponed Manaslu expedition was back on track. They had just arrived in town from the airport and were on their way to a hotel.
During the expedition, I learned the details of how my friends had managed their escape to the freedom o
f the Himalayas. Expedition leader Kazbec Valiev (chairman of the Kazakhstan Mountaineering Federation and the director of the International Mountaineering Camp Khan-Tengri) had found the theretofore unobtainable part of the money for the expedition. He had changed the team’s objective from the South Face of Manaslu to a more accessible route up the North Ridge: it required fewer men and less time and was therefore less expensive. He had invited eight climbers from the Sports Club, mostly those who worked for him at the IMCKT (International Mountaineering Camp Khan-Tengri).
Suddenly, I was faced with the question of whether I was ready to join the members of the expedition. An immediate answer was required. While I was climbing Dhaulagiri, I had not considered the possibility that another mountain would follow, one that was no less dangerous and difficult. It was important to me personally that, after a four-year break with mountaineering, the climbers from Kazakhstan had created an opportunity to climb in the Himalayas. They had accomplished that in spite of economic hardship, political instability, and the indifference of our government to our achievements in sports and mountaineering. I wanted to believe that a rebirth of mountaineering was possible in our country, that our skill and experience would not be lost, dying with us. I feel strongly that the school of Russian mountaineering with its unique perspective and extraordinary successes is part of our cultural heritage. It stands with the Soviet Union’s great accomplishments in space exploration, science, and the discipline of Russian ballet.
Above the Clouds Page 15