Jim and Lou returned to Camp II. The plan, weather permitting, was for those of us in Camp III to carry more loads across the traverse the next morning. We spent the afternoon chatting, and the subject again was whether Dianne should be permitted to cross to Camp IV.
“I just wouldn’t risk my neck,” John said. “That goes for anybody else not qualified, too. If I’ve warned somebody they shouldn’t cross, why should I go after them?”
Both Wick and I agreed with John.
“I don’t know,” Bill replied. “I think I would have a hard time sitting in this tent knowing somebody was out there dying.”
“But we couldn’t do much anyway,” Wick said. “There’s no way to carry people across these ropes.”
“I know,” Bill said, “but I would still have to try.”
“It would be like that guy from India on the International Everest Expedition a few years back who got stuck on the traverse up to the west ridge,” John said. “Wolfgang Axt got criticized for leaving him there to die, but there was nothing he could do to save him. It was a classic example of saving your own neck.”
The discussion petered out as everyone lay thinking about the future of the climb. It was snowing heavily. After fifteen minutes John broke the silence.
“I’d like to be able to do everything I say,” he said. “Hell, I’d be out there—we all would—if anybody on the team was in trouble. Whether we risked our necks or not. I’d never be able to live with myself otherwise.”
“This mountain is going to tell us who can get across that ridge and who can’t,” Bill said.
“Yeah,” John replied, “but sometimes the mountain gets to have her word when the climber should have spoken up first.”
The snow continued through the night. By morning there was no doubt we were in for another multiday storm. Jim called on the radio, requesting that two of us go down and two stay at Camp III. That would mean fewer people using supplies up high, but still would leave a couple to excavate tents during the storm and to break trail down when the weather improved.
Bill and I volunteered to descend; despite the heavy snow, several people would be carrying loads to III, using the path Bill and I would break on our way down. I left first, sliding down the ropes, enjoying the solitude. Soon I ran into Lou heading up with another heavy packload. Then I saw Diana Jagersky, away from her job as Base Camp manager to carry a few loads to the higher camps. She filled me in on the Camp I scuttlebutt we had missed during our week’s push to Camp IV.
“The biggest and sharpest rock still in our shoe is the Chris and Cherie thing,” Diana said. “A lot has happened while you were gone. I should warn you, Terry blames the whole thing on you and John. He is only a short distance behind me, and no doubt he’ll have something to say.”
“Blames me?”
“Yeah, and Jim more or less supports him. Terry claims that Chris is a good friend of his, and that he—along with Cherie—is being badmouthed by others, especially you and John.”
“Things have certainly taken an unexpected twist. I thought Terry would be mad at Chris, and at Cherie. Now he’s bummed at John and me? I was only trying to help.”
“Don’t look at me,” Diana said. “The rest of us are trying to stay as far away from this thing as we can. It’s too weird.”
“Good luck,” she said, and went on up. In a few minutes I saw Terry. I was again impressed by his intense, cerebral facial demeanor, and I realized how very little I knew about this strange and complex man.
We exchanged pleasantries, formally and politely discussing the weather. Then I brought it out into the open.
“I suppose there are a few things you and I should discuss,” I began.
“Yes,” he replied. “I think you and John are trying to malign Chris and Cherie. I’m not sure why—perhaps you want to keep them from the competition on the summit teams. I don’t know. But I’ve talked at great length with Chris, I consider him to be a good friend, and I will support him as one of the climbers who deserves to go to the top.”
Terry spoke quietly and very analytically, looking at me the whole time with his dark, penetrating eyes. It was more than a little disconcerting.
“Look, Terry, I honestly thought—when this whole thing started—you would be hurt by it. In retrospect I sure wish I had minded my own business. But I was only trying to help.”
I was getting emotional, and those last words came with a quiver. Terry resumed in his precise voice.
“Cherie and I have been married for eight years. She wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. She’s the finest, strongest woman I know, and if you took the trouble to learn anything about her, I’m sure you would agree.”
I apologized to Terry for having meddled in what was none of my business. Again I told him I had been thinking only of his welfare, and that I did not want Chris to fall out of favor with the rest of the team. Terry’s formality loosened; with a warmer look in his eyes he accepted my apologies and we gave each other a bear hug.
“We’re going to get to the top of this thing one way or the other,” I grinned.
“We’ve still got a hell of a team,” he agreed. “It’s the strongest group of climbers I’ve ever seen.”
We went our separate directions. Feeling much better, I continued alone to Camp I. I knew Chris was there, and I learned that Cherie, having also succumbed to a sore throat, had descended earlier that morning. I felt if I could iron things out with them, the cracks in the rampart of the 1978 American K2 Expedition might be repaired before the dam broke. I found them sitting together in the cook tent.
“Welcome to Camp One,” Cherie said sardonically. Chris offered me a cup of tea.
“Let’s get it over with,” I said.
Cherie looked up. “We just feel that you and John are to blame for the whole thing. If you had minded your own business there wouldn’t be any problem at all.”
“What really bothered me,” Chris broke in, “was when I passed you that morning coming down from Camp Two, and you told me I should come back here with my tail between my legs and apologize to Whittaker. As if it was my fault. Apologize for what? And you were trying to be my friend?”
“I only thought I was helping,” I said. The weeks of guilt I had been holding, the feeling of having betrayed my friendship with Chris—first by not discussing the problem at its very beginning, then by joining up with Roskelley to put myself in the best position for the summit—these feelings focused to an emotional upwelling and tears ran down my cheeks. I sat down next to Chris and put my arm around him.
“I’m sorry, pal,” I said. “I hope we can be friends after all this.”
Chris stared at his feet, and Cherie also seemed embarrassed.
Cherie said, “Rick, I still like you. We’ve got our differences to be sure, but we can put them aside. It’s not your fault alone. Roskelley is no doubt the main culprit, but we can all get along well enough to see this thing through.”
I felt Chris’s arm tighten around my shoulder. It was the first time I had seen a breach in Cherie’s armor, and it was good to discover a regular, vulnerable human, just like the rest of us, beneath the mail. I also thought that laying myself bare, despite how difficult it was, might help heal past wounds. Once again I felt close to Chris.
There were still problems—now they blamed the whole thing on John. But I was, by then, feeling a growing kinship with the guy I had climbed to Camp IV with, and consequently a loyalty toward him. And how, I wondered, did Lou and Wick fit into all this? Jim and Dianne apparently leaned toward Terry, Chris, and Cherie, but I suspected Jim, as leader, would have the diplomacy to stay in the middle. The others seemed to stand on the sidelines, but they were really as involved as any of us. They had to be: we were in too close proximity, we depended too much on one another—even for our lives—to stay on the sidelines.
Maybe, I thought, it was not as big a problem as it seemed. I had been able to talk frankly with Terry, Chris, and Cherie and repair the rift that had bee
n growing. Perhaps John could do the same. I was not sure. But I knew one thing for certain: we had reached Camp IV, another week had gone by, and it looked like another storm might delay us yet another week. And one more garment had fallen off each of our bodies, and we were each becoming, week by week, a little more naked.
Big Himalayan climbing expeditions seem to breed contention; it is almost as predictable as the monsoon storms that swell from the Indian Ocean. Except for Diana, all of us had climbed before in the Himalaya, and most of us had been on big expeditions. We had all seen it happen—the slight difference, the sly comment, the oblique criticism—small barbs that make small scratches that eventually grow to big wounds, which infect and poison the team. We had been aware of the potential problem before leaving the United States and had agreed to do everything possible to avoid the schisms. Ours would be an open expedition; we would voice our grievances; Jim would listen carefully to all opinions.
We had all come with the hope we would work closely as a team, to have fun, to have an adventure, and to bring a successful conclusion to the forty-year American dream to climb to the summit of K2. It seemed, however, that if we were to reach the summit of K2, it would not be without dissension.
I have a few ideas why long climbing expeditions so frequently end in acrimony. The first has to do with the type of people usually attracted to Himalayan climbing, and the second with the circumstances in which—on big expeditions—these people find themselves. Mountain climbing is, above all, an individual endeavor; an individual’s reasons for such extraordinary effort and sacrifice to reach a summit are often complex, eluding simple explanation. Taken by itself, standing on top of a peak—usually too exhausted to appreciate the view (if you even have one past the clouds that, as often as not, shroud high mountains)—is about as useless as any final achievement in any sport. And if the summit happens to be one of the eight-thousand-meter peaks in the Himalaya—one of the fourteen mountains on the “Grand Prix circuit” of high-altitude climbing—you are not only exhausted but also physically debilitated from hypoxia and loss of muscle tissue and grey matter; you have a reasonable chance of losing your fingers and toes to frostbite; and there is a frighteningly real chance you will not get down alive.
Why do it then? One reason has to be days like the one of the butterflies and giant shadows cast across the glacier. A day such as that is indelibly impressed, a bouquet of flowers that forever brightens some recess of the mind. There are other reasons: meeting new, interesting people and having the chance, in the intimacy of a months-long expedition, to know them well; traveling to the earth’s most remote corners—the Himalaya, the Karakoram, the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush. But perhaps the most salient reason is secreted away in that rare moment when a climber reaches the end of a long effort and stands on the summit of a high mountain. If the mountain is an Everest or a K2 or a Dhaulagiri, there will be the accolades and laurels that attend the achievement, which no doubt strengthens the motivation to do it in the first place.
But such rewards are transitory, ephemeral. There are few climbers, if any, who persevere in their quest for that reason alone. The reward is, instead, an inner, a personal, and often a necessarily secret satisfaction—one that perhaps can be shared with no one—from having made an uncompromised effort, from having risked life itself in an all-too-real way, to achieve the ultimate goal.
There is the key word: achievement. Climbers drawn to the Himalaya, climbers who are successful in reaching their goals, are compelled to achieve; yet on big expeditions there is often room for only a few to make that ultimate achievement, the summit.
There are other reasons for discontent, to be sure: stress from danger, stress from working hard, stress from having insufficient oxygen to breathe, stress from eating poorly. All these make people irritable, and all, no doubt, compounded the problems beginning to surface on the 1978 American K2 Expedition.
It was still too early for the bitter arguments that would erupt later in the climb when it became more clear who would get the chance to try for the summit and who would not. But already there was the subtle jockeying for position and already some subdued grumbling among the team. Some felt they were working harder than others, some felt they were being left out of the action, some felt they were being used so others could reach the summit. None of these feelings had surfaced to active debate, but the seeds of discontent were sown.
Inevitably, there was a growing difference in the performance of many members of the expedition. Some were tiring of the rigors of working in the increasingly thin air as we pushed the route to higher altitudes; some were growing homesick and losing the motivation to endure week after week on the mountain; some were becoming more and more intimidated by the difficulties of climbing the steepening rock and ice. Others were, if anything, getting stronger and more determined to push on: the more bad weather and the longer the delays, the more they mentally trenched-in and prepared for a long battle. It was fascinating to observe people’s inner drives, their inner personalities emerging as the expedition continued into the month of August. There was something about this climb—its duration perhaps, stretching week after week to epic length; or perhaps its difficulty, and the stresses to which it subjected us; or maybe our competition for the summit prize—but there was something that laid people naked. For better or for worse, all of us were exploring one another’s secret places, as if each week that passed stripped each person of one more psychological garment, until, in the final days of the climb, we would stand completely bare of the protective little games we normally wore to cover our innermost selves.
| 6 |
STORMS AND TEMPERS
FROM WICK’S JOURNAL
AUGUST 5. Except for John and me here at Camp III, and Jim and Dianne at Camp II, the expedition has withdrawn to Camp I to wait out the current storm. Heavier snowfall last night and today, and some wind this morning.
Couldn’t sleep last night. Many long sequences of going to the summit and returning safely to Camp VI. I raked through my mind everything that has happened on the expedition so far. Then I thought how strong and healthy I am feeling at this stage, and I came to a very relaxed and settled notion of my own chances of reaching the summit. They are quite good. I am mentally and physically ready for the supreme effort of the past eighteen years of climbing to make a dream the reality of reaching the summit of K2.
Whether the team as a whole can make it happen is still open to speculation. To be successful we will have to work together for many more days before the attrition begins to take its toll and climbers start sloughing off. There are several who clearly do not have a chance for the summit, but I am sure they still dream of attaining the summit or they wouldn’t continue to carry loads.
Although not expressly mentioned in discussion we had a few days back when Jim, Dianne, and Lou carried to III, it was clearly understood by all present that as things presently stand the four most likely to go for the summit are Lou, Rick, John, and I, based on performance to date. A number of things could change this assessment, such as succumbing to altitude and the attendant problems that affect the human body, and ultimately I may have to eat the foregoing words, but that is how it appears as of now.
I had a good conversation with John today. Among other things, we talked about how willpower will be the key factor in going for the summit. Both of us are willing to make an all-out effort, including chancing a bivouac on the way down from the summit. We both realize the risks. John is prepared to incur further frostbite. I badly want to make it up there and return, and I too would be willing to make that kind of sacrifice. John and I are willing to lay everything on the line, except to pay the ultimate price—that would make reaching the summit meaningless.
Feel like I’m getting to know John a lot better now that I’ve spent a couple of days alone with him. He’s a bit of a redneck, but basically an honest and straightforward guy. We share one passion: climbing to some high isolated summit such as K2. Both our wives also share similar posi
tions, except that Mary Lou and I have more children. But combining the travels because of my legal work with my mountaineering expeditions, I am probably away from home and my family as much as John is on the basis of climbing alone. Both Mary Lou and Joyce accept these absences, and part of the reason for the successes of both John and me must in no small way be a result of that unfailing support. I know for me, at least, it is a continual source of inspiration, courage, and energy.
So tired. Must get some sleep tonight. Thinking of you Mary Lou. Our separation is difficult, but we can easily withstand a few more weeks to enable me to fulfill my hopes and aspirations concerning a certain mountain upon whose slopes I sleep tonight.
AUGUST 7. The storm is over. John and I left before 7:00 a.m. to break trail down for the others coming up. We met Rick in the basin (above Camp II) on his way up. He had the letters with him. One from Mary Lou and one from Anne. Nothing too new except the cat got in the house and made short work of Jimbo the pet parakeet. The news was a month old, but it was so good to hear from my wife and my oldest child.
The three of us worked back to Camp III. Dianne and Jim followed later, then Craig and Skip. Doesn’t appear Lou will make it up tonight; he has a sore throat, but nothing too serious.
Beautiful afternoon. The curious dust cloud that earlier filled the lower valleys seems to have dissipated. Should be a good day tomorrow; we all plan on making carries to Camp IV with the plan for Skip and Craig to move in the following day and begin pushing up to Camp V while everyone else continues the carries to the lower camps. Built a tent platform for Craig and Skip, then wrote a letter to Mary Lou and one to Anne.
Mary Lou, even though we are twelve thousand miles apart, I can still be with you. I can feel your presence. Mostly you are asleep when I am awake and vice versa, yet that doesn’t matter. If we can climb this mountain and if I can be fortunate enough to make it to the summit, then soon afterwards we can be together again.
The Last Step Page 19