by Jeff Long
But the rewards far outweighed the losses. Margo’s songs were one reward, a revelation. Out of the blue I received the American Alpine Club’s Literary Award, which led to me joining the committee, a huge honor and also a way to indirectly extend my voice. The greatest honor was the British Boardman-Tasker award for mountain literature, triply significant because The Ascent was its first American winner, and because it brought attention to a human rights novel and helped spread my preachments about climbers as witnesses.
Around the same time Steven Seagal optioned the novel. Warner Brothers commissioned me to adapt it for film. Our first meeting, in his living room showcasing a select few samurai swords, took me by surprise. As we discussed the story, one element after another fell away. The opening chapter was all wrong? So was the second chapter, and pretty much all the rest. The expedition? He did not speak. Everest? Not necessary.
My education was just beginning. To begin with, Seagal is a very smart man who knows his market. Over many years and films, he has crafted a persona that is bankable. Bankable means a fairly steady box office return, and that means a fairly predictable budget for his next films. Budget sets the scale and scope of the concept.
Take the words mountain, Everest and snow. They are the kiss of death in Hollywood. To us they name environments we know as climbers. To a producer, they are shorthand. Midway through my script one afternoon, a production assistant stopped reading and asked pointblank if I was crazy.
She pointed at a passage: “Night: the horses’ hooves clap on the frozen river.” “The horses?” I asked. “The night?” ‘Ice,” she hissed. Clearly ice was bad, very bad. I came to appreciate that to her the word represented a universe of problems and uncontrollable expenses. Ice meant cold, and brought with it accidents, higher insurance rates, more expensive sets, lost time waiting out storms, remote locations with long distance logistics, and much more. Ice also spoke to other films with ice, including the size of their budgets, cost overruns, and the big ticket flops like K2.
I changed the sentence. “Night: the horses’ hooves splash in the river.” “Don’t let it happen again,” the lady warned me, and continued reading.
Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet came out. China was not happy. It became known that any other anti-Chinese films would lock the production company out of their market, not just for that film but the company’s whole backlist of cartoons, dramas, and so on. It worked. Warner Brothers killed the film. My screenplay for a completely different story, but still based on the film rights to my novel and titled The Ascent, disappeared into a vault.
- JEFF LONG
Abe (The Ascent)
From far north, a breeze rushed and the forest creaked in a wave. The rescue men waited in the frozen white of their car beams, acid from too much coffee, souring among the pines. Abe had never felt cold like this. He tried warming himself with the memory of their midnight breakfast in a truck stop—the fake maple syrup, the bacon, the men’s jokes to a waitress with yellow teeth—but then another breeze came through.
It had been an all-night drive to reach this dead end in the heart of Wyoming. Sometime around one the Jimi Hendrix on their airwave had surrendered to honky-tonk and then near four the cowboy ballads had fallen into dark mountain static. The road had quit at dawn and the forest had swallowed them whole and now here they were, kicking about a wild goose chase. If the dead or wounded—the lost—in fact existed, there was no evidence, none, no car, certainly no tracks, not with this fresh dusting of snow.
None of them were big men really. And yet they mustered like unshaven giants—at least to Abe’s eye—stomping the snow with lug-soled boots and snorting great streams of white frost through their nostrils. They scared him, though for the most part that was because he had finally, at the age of almost eighteen, succeeded in scaring himself. For as long as he could remember, Abe had wanted to climb mountains. The trouble was he was no mountain man, just an east Texas oil patch brat, a college freshman who’d never climbed in his life except through the pages of National Geographic and adventure books.
A ghost of white powder cast loose from the boughs to ride the air in ripples. Snow splashed Abe in the face, then went on. Once more he was left facing the forest in a cupful of men, a watchful boy with a long blade of a face and brass wire-rims and a squared-off homecut. He was wearing immaculate white-on-white winter camouflage purchased with hurried guesswork yesterday afternoon at Boulder’s army surplus store. The rest of the men were dressed in real clothes: wool and down mostly, most of it patched up and greasy from use.
Abe could tell they weren’t yet finished hanging their jokes on him. It was hard saying what stung more, the justice of their mockery or the mockery itself. He didn’t blame them. He looked ridiculous. He didn’t belong here, that was sure. But then again, they were all outsiders. Dawn had broken an hour ago with a bright but steely winter sun. And so their engines were kept running and their headlights were on and they were pretending to get illumination and heat from the man-made beams. To some extent, they were all making believe.
At long last their wait ended. “Got him,” a voice among them shouted, and the pack of men thronged the shortwave set. It was a Fish and Game pilot calling in. He’d been scouring the peaks since first light and had, he announced, just sighted one of the accident victims.
The rescue leader spoke up, a gruff, meticulous sort with a stained mustache and a white helmet stenciled with ROCKY MOUNTAIN RESCUE. “Ask him can he sweep for the other victim,” he said to the radio man. “Tell him there’s got to be two. Nobody climbs alone. Not in this kind of backcountry. Not in winter.”
But the leader was fishing. In fact, they had no facts. No names, no locations, no missing person reports. Nothing but a drunk elk poacher’s phone call about a climbing accident on a mountain in Wyoming.
The pilot answered from far off. He refused. The weather had turned and he couldn’t stay. There was only the one victim. He’d looked. He approximated his coordinates for their map finding.
“Ask him the man’s condition,” said the leader.
“Oh, he’s down there,” came the thinning voice. “He’s alive all right. Flopping around on the high glacier.”
“Damn it,” snapped the leader. “Is the man hanging on a face? Is he wandering? Is he tore up? What’s his condition?”
“Wait till you see this one,” the pilot said. “In all my days...” Their reception tore to rags.
“Repeat, over.”
The voice resurfaced, small and halt. “... like a gutshot angel,” they heard. That was it, just enough to frown at and shrug away.
“Screw that,” someone said.
“Well, whoever he is, let’s go save him,” said the leader, and they broke the huddle to go saddle on their gear.
In all the mass of hardware and meds they off-loaded from the trucks and jeeps, there was not one single item Abe knew how to use or even handle. Abe recalculated his foolishness. He was a liability, not a savior, and his bluff was getting called. But he couldn’t bring himself to confess.
He had joined up, gambling the rescue team would teach him the ropes, literally, as time passed. Afraid they would judge him too young, or his unchipped fingernails or bayou accent would expose him as a flatlander, he had entered the rescue office shyly and with his hands in his pockets. When they asked if he had experience, Abe had said yes, though carefully, keeping the sir off his yes, and dropping the names of some mountains in Patagonia which he figured to be safely obscure. Only two days later—yesterday afternoon—they’d phoned him in urgent need of dumb backs and strong legs. And now he could not share that this was the first snow he’d ever seen and the coldest sun he’d ever woken to. This was his first mountain.
They set out through the trees, shortcutting along a frozen river. The water was animal beneath its sturdy shell. Abe could hear it surging under the ice. Its serpentine motion came up through his boots. Here and there the river ice had exploded from the cold and its wounds showed turq
uoise and green.
Christmas was near and so they were undermanned, meaning everyone was overloaded. Some carried hundred-meter coils of Goldline rope and homemade brake plates, others hauled the medicines and splints and the team’s sole, precious Stokes litter, a crude thing made of welded airplane tubing and chicken wire.
Abe stayed alive to the other men’s cues, to how they breathed and how they set their feet and leaned into their pack straps and to how they just plain managed. With every step he was reminded all over again of his hubris, for he’d loaded his pack himself, hastily and without any order, and now something was stabbing his kidneys and the bags of saline solution kept rocking him off-balance. Each boot step chastised him. He didn’t belong, he didn’t belong.
The sun died at noon in a gangrene sky. Shortly after, they broke the treeline, but their first clear view of the coppery mountains was undermined by dark storm clouds looming north and west. Even Abe could tell the advancing storm was going to be a killer, the fabled sort that freezes range cattle to glass and detonates tree sap, leveling whole forests.
The line of men struck north across a big plateau scoured bare to the dirt. The wind sliced low, attacking them with a fury that Abe tried not to take personally. In a matter of minutes his glasses were pitted by the high-speed sand. If not for the ballast on his back, the wind would have sent him tumbling down the mountainside.
Midway across the plateau they startled a herd of skeletal deer grazing among the stones. “They oughtn’t be up here,” one rescuer observed. “It’s strange.” The deer clattered off with the wind.
The cold day drew on. The air thinned and people quit talking altogether. They hunched like orphans beneath the overcast. Wind bleated against the rocks, a maddened sound.
As it turned out, none of the team had ever visited this region. For budgetary reasons, Wyoming was far beyond their normal range of operations. Abe was secretly gratified that the group seemed as lost as he felt. When the leader unfolded their USGS topo to match its lines with the geological chaos around them, the wind ripped his map in two and then ripped the halves from his hands. After that the group tightened ranks. The mountains took on a new sharpness against the ugly sky.
Nearing the coordinates given them by the pilot, the team reached a natural doorway that suddenly opened onto a hidden cirque of higher peaks. Despite the poisoned sunlight, it was a spectacular sight in there. To Abe it looked like a vast granite chalice inlaid with ice and snow. On every side glacial panels swept up to enormous stone towers girdling the heights. All around, men muttered their awe, and Abe thought this must be how it was to discover a new land.
And then they saw the climber.
“He’s alive,” someone said, glassing the distance with a pair of pocket binoculars. “There’s one alive.”
Abe couldn’t see what they were talking about until a neighbor handed him a camera with a telephoto lens and pointed.
Perhaps a half-mile distant and a thousand feet higher, a lone figure was kneeling upon the glacial apron, unaware that rescue had arrived. His head was bare, black hair whipping in the wind. He swept one arm up and out to the storm and Abe could see him shouting soundlessly.
“That poor bastard,” the man with the binoculars declared to the group, “he’s talking to the mountain.”
“Say again.”
“I swear it. Look yourself.”
Abe breathed out and steadied the telephoto lens. The mountain dwarfed the tiny figure and Abe tried not to blink, afraid of losing this solitary human to all that alien expanse.
The climber repeated his motion, the arm raised high, palm out. Abe realized that he was seeing desperation or surrender or maybe outright madness.
After a minute, the climber bent forward and Abe noticed the hole in front of his knees. It was a dark circle in the snow and the climber was speaking to it as if sharing secrets with an open tomb.
“He’s praying,” Abe murmured, though not so anyone could hear. But that’s what he was seeing, Abe knew it instinctively. Abe was shaken, and quickly handed the camera and telephoto lens back to its owner.
“Well if he’s got a buddy, I don’t see him,” the man with the binoculars pronounced. “One’s better than none, folks. Let’s go snatch him before this front hammers us in.”
They hurried. Another twenty minutes of hard march over loose stone brought them to the base of the glacier. Abe edged over and stood on the ice, feeling through his boot soles for the glacier’s antiquity. He’d never seen a glacier before, but knew from his readings that this plate of snow and ice had been squatting in the shadows ever since the last ice age.
The rescuers opened the big coils of rope and strapped on their scratched red-and-white helmets and their cold steel crampons. Abe watched them closely and covertly. Between bursts of wind, they heard a distant howling. It didn’t sound human, but neither did it sound animal. A gutshot angel, Abe remembered.
With a hunger that startled him, Abe wanted to get up close to the blood. It was imperative that nothing keep him from that fallen climber. Something profound was awaiting them up there. He could tell by the way these hardened men had turned somber and frightened. Whatever it was, Abe wanted to see the sight raw, not after they had packaged it and brought it down in a litter. It was an old hunger, a simple one. Abe wanted to lose his innocence.
They set off up the glacier, three to a rope, alert for crevasses. Abe was alive to the new sensations. They stepped across a two-foot-wide crack in the field. It cut left and right across the glacier. As he straddled the crevasse, Abe filled his lungs, trying to taste the mountain’s deep, ancient breath.
One of the rescuers pointed at skid tracks leading up the glacier. It reminded Abe of an animal’s blood trail. “There’s his fall line,” the man said. “How’d he live through that?”
Abe stared at the rearing stone and ice, but it was a cipher to him. Standing here in the pit of this basin, it struck him that ascent was less an escape from the abyss than the creation of it. He peered at the heights. A girdle of hanging snow ringed the upper rim. It was an avalanche about to happen. The thought gave new urgency to his step.
As they drew near, Abe heard more distinctly the climber yelling and calling to himself. Closer still, and the climber heard them and he turned his shaggy head. Abe was surprised. The climber was a boy, no older than himself.
But even from twenty yards away, the young climber’s eyes were too bright and his clothes were rags, what was left of them, and on his knees in that limbo of gray light Abe thought he looked more like the Lazarus of his grandmother’s worn leather King James than a mere teenager in the wilderness.
The rescuers slowed their mechanical pace, intimidated by the strange sight. His jacket was gone and his sweater half off. Now Abe saw that the boy had pulled the clothing away himself. He had started to bare himself to the wilderness.
“You’re okay now,” someone offered to the climber. But there was no trust in the climber’s look, no welcome, certainly no relief. He didn’t speak.
Abe saw that his white T-shirt was soaked in blood and that his left shoulder bulged with a dislocation. His left hand clutched a short ice axe, and with the blood on its silver pick, the axe looked like a medieval weapon.
The rescuers formed a wide circle around the young climber as if they had brought something dangerous to bay. His black hair hung clotted with snow and he had wolf eyes, blue and timid, and he’d been weeping.
“Hey there.” Someone’s cold voice. “We got you now.”
“You want to lay down that axe there?” another rescuer tried. His voice was too loud, and it struck Abe, they were afraid of this boy.
The way the climber stared through them, Abe felt like a ghost. The boy didn’t lay down his axe. Its handle lay loose in his gloved hand, a green wrist strap in place. Abe guessed the axe was responsible for the long, seeping gash in his opposite arm.
While the climber knelt in their center—mute now, seeming deaf, too—they discusse
d him, diagnosing his wounds and trying to understand what had made him so empty and menacing. But to Abe’s ear, they were simply diagnosing their own fear.
“What do you think?” one of the rescuers asked another. “Hypothermia?”
“Maybe concussed. Probably. I don’t see a helmet.”
“One way or the other, he’s about as gone as they get.”
“Well what we need’s his second,” the leader got on with it. “Where’s your second at, boy?”
Getting no answer, the leader turned away. “Joe,” he said, “take some men and hunt around. There’s got to be a body somewhere. Maybe it hung up higher on a rock or what have you.” The one named Joe patted three men on their helmets and they started up.
The two men by Abe’s side continued their evaluation. “I don’t see frostbite. A puncture wound on the right thigh, though. And look at the inside of his hand. It’s cut to the bone.”
At last they noticed the rope tied to his waist harness. It was a beautiful blue rope with red hatching and it led directly into the hole. Abe saw the pink blood marks in the snow and recognized that the climber had stripped his hand raw pulling on the rope.
“Now we’ll just take it from here, son,” said a man with brushy sideburns. He edged close and gently reached for the blue rope. With a howl, the boy reacted, swinging his axe in a wild arc. He missed goring the rescuer by an inch.
And then they heard a voice.
Dreamlike, it called from far away. It could have come from another valley or from the top of the mountains. Or the bottom of a crevasse. “Daniel?” it said.
“Oh dear God,” one of the rescuers breathed.
The leader whistled loud and sharp, and uphill Joe and the others came to a halt. “Down here,” the leader shouted. “We found the other one.”
“Daniel?” someone said. “Is that your name, Daniel?”
The boy looked at them with a mask of pure horror. “Daniel,” the rescuer pressed him. “Is that your buddy down there?”