She paused, and for a moment, neither of us spoke.
Then she finished, “I had been fighting it, but with Wick up there, gone too, I had to accept it. When you lose somebody close to you, you refuse to think about it, to accept it. You force it out of your mind. But I could no longer do that. I think it was the image of Dusan falling, but for the first time I knew he was not going to come back; for the first time I knew he was dead.”
The griffon was a distant dot against the cerulean sky. Diana shouldered her light load (I was carrying nothing) and we continued hiking under the shade of the poplars. Finches bounded in the branches of the nearby apricot, chirping morning songs, and sunlight spilled through the leaves highlighting the trail before us. For Diana, it was more than just the trail home, but the trail to the rest of her life. The past was still many warm memories, and still many quiet evenings occasionally filled with tears, but it was behind; she was ready to continue forward.
I thought, Dusan would have liked it this way. I looked up. The griffon was gone.
FROM WICK’S JOURNAL
SEPTEMBER 22. A little more than an hour from Seattle. The final leg homeward. One hundred and two days of separation from Mary Lou, Annie, Cathy, Susy, Bobby, and David. In an hour we’ll be together, even if briefly before I go in the hospital. All of my efforts for the past two weeks have pointed to this reunion today. They were out in front, as a goal during that endless journey down the Baltoro, through the long nights of little or no sleep. I am indeed a man of great good fortune to be able to return to the persons I cherish more than anything in this world.
I should be on a terrible binge of euphoria now, but I am not. I have a cerebral satisfaction about the achievement. But gutwise, deep in my emotional side, there is no spark. This I attribute to the bivouac at 27,800 feet, and to my illness. Both have drained me, and have cut sharply into the joy of standing on that high, isolated summit.
My old life resumes; a new life begins. Nearly thirty years later, Maurice Herzog’s words still shine, with meaning: “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.” Ahead lies the task of identifying and surmounting these other Annapurnas.
Mary Lou Wickwire stood waiting in International Arrivals at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. She knew she was at the right gate—there were the several TV cameras, the large lights poised to be turned on as soon as the passengers cleared customs, the dozens of TV, radio, and newspaper reporters. They had somehow learned that part of the K2 expedition, including at least a couple of the summit team, was to land that afternoon. Mary Lou avoided talking to them. She had hoped they wouldn’t be there; she had wanted the moment to herself.
She was nervous. Her children, however, were excited—not only was Dad coming home, but they would be on television, too. To Mary Lou, it seemed like it was taking forever to clear customs. She wasn’t certain what to expect, and she didn’t know exactly what shape Wick would be in. There had been little information. A week earlier she had received a telegram from Skardu:
NOW IN SKARDU. HELICOPTER BROUGHT HERE FROM BALTORO SNOUT. HAVE PNEUMONIA. DON’T WORRY. IN ROB’S CARE. SHOULD BE HOME BEFORE END OF MONTH. MUCH LOVE. JIM.
Then, only the day before, Joanne Schaller had called. Rob had phoned her from London; he and Wick were on the next flight to Seattle. Wick would be in a wheelchair, and he would have to enter a hospital for a checkup shortly after arriving.
Joanne had been surprised at Mary Lou’s apparent nonchalance on hearing this news. Mary Lou, however, was hiding her real feelings. She didn’t want to alarm the children, but she was very anxious to learn just how sick her husband was. There had been nothing to suggest to her, though, the ordeals that lay ahead: the major surgery, the removal of a small part of his left lung, the amputation of the end of his big toe.
This last expedition had seemed more drawn out than the ones before—even longer than the 1975 K2 expedition. Maybe it was because this time she had had few illusions about her husband’s climbing. In 1975 she had been more naive about the danger. She had had no doubts, then, that Jim would return, and in one piece. After all, he had been climbing mountains for the entire sixteen years they had been married and nothing had happened to him. When they married in 1962, she had been skeptical and decided to accompany him on one of his rock climbs and watch from the ground. She saw that he was careful, and she concluded that he would never put himself in a dangerous situation.
So she had happily bid him Godspeed in 1975. The time passed quickly, and he was home and soon involved in another expedition to go back to K2 in 1978. If Mary Lou felt any resentment, it was that the preparations took so much of her husband’s time. She felt often, as the time of the climb neared, that he would begin to focus his thinking on that goal and shut himself off once more from his family. She also was mildly jealous of the men with whom he climbed: There was an intimacy of common adventure that she would never share, and she felt, simply, left out.
But she also knew climbing was an absolutely necessary part of Wick’s life, and she was supportive of his desire to go back to K2, to reach the summit of his dreams. Overall, she had good feelings about his return to K2. Good feelings until that day in June 1977, when she learned that Al and Dusan, climbing with Wick in Alaska, had been killed.
She was brought up short; her illusions were shattered. There was no hiding it—it could happen to him next. When finally he left for K2, she steeled herself. She had thought it through; she knew it was a possibility; she knew if it happened it would be a great responsibility with the kids; she wasn’t sure it was completely fair, but she accepted it.
It had been a long summer. She found time passed more quickly if she stayed busy. She was house-sitting for Jim Whittaker and Dianne Roberts, so she spent many days in the garden or entertaining friends, or taking care of the kids as she patiently waited for word from Pakistan. The mail was horribly slow; the most updated news was the newspaper stories radioed in from Base Camp and relayed by wire to the States. Mary Lou grew impatient with the endless phone calls, wanting news of the climb. “Read the papers,” she said, “and you’ll know as much as I do.” She remembered most vividly the afternoon of August 25. It was their anniversary. She was across the street, in a blackberry patch picking fruit for pie and thinking of Wick. She saw the Western Union man arrive and with blackberry juice still on her fingers, she tore open the telegram. The news was good: The climb was progressing, despite the storms, and there was yet a chance they might reach the top. And happy sixteenth, he had said. What she remembered most, though, was the last line, which had been garbled in its transmission over the international wire. It read: WEEP MIMMS ON ICE. She read it several times, thought of different interpretations, substituted letters in the words, finally deciphered the message, and laughed and laughed. Every year, for their anniversary, she and Wick had celebrated with champagne, saving the corks. Wick’s message intended to say: KEEP MUMMS ON ICE.
She waited, anxiously reading the newspapers and listening to the radio. Finally the news broke: Jim Wickwire and Lou Reichardt had reached the summit. The hordes of friends and well-wishers were surprised how cool she was to hear the news. She showed little elation. To Mary Lou, it was not yet time to celebrate. She remembered too vividly that Al and Dusan’s accident was on the descent. She waited. No news came, and she interpreted that to mean the descent had gone without incident. Then came the cryptic telegram about helicopters and pneumonia and finally Joanne’s message from Rob. Wick was sick, although apparently not seriously. All she really wanted at that point was to have him, as soon as possible, in her arms.
Mary Lou prayed, too—every night, and several times a day. She felt it had worked and in the next few weeks, when she learned more of the details of Wick’s bivouac alone at nearly twenty-eight thousand feet, and his subsequent struggle to live through the hike out, she became more and more certain her prayers had been answered.
But waiting at the airport’s arrival gate, she as yet had no clue to the trials he
r husband had suffered. All she knew was that he was supposed to enter a hospital for a checkup. She thought perhaps they could do that in the morning. All that really mattered was that he would be home and she could hold him.
Finally, after an eternity, the passengers started emerging from the door. They must have been surprised to be greeted by bright lights, TV cameras, and news reporters. Mary Lou thought how the passengers must have thought they had unwittingly been on the same flight as some political bigwig. She first saw the flag—one of those ridiculous little orange pennants attached to a tall wand they always have on airport wheelchairs. The lights were on—so bright and hot—and the cameras and newsmen seemed intrusive. She hadn’t wanted it that way; she had hoped it would be intimate. The kids pushed through first, and then she saw him.
Mary Lou saw him and she froze. She stared. She looked at her husband, and their eyes held. The kids rushed to hug and kiss their Dad, but Mary Lou stayed back, paralyzed. She could not go forward to greet her husband.
He was there, sitting in the wheelchair, not the man who had left her four months before. He was too small. He was too shrunken. She looked at his black beard, flecked with gray, his sunken face. She could see he was trying to talk to her children, but he could make no voice, only a gasping, harsh sound. She thought, He couldn’t be so small, he couldn’t have shrunk. He was so solid and strong.
Joanne Schaller, standing behind Mary Lou, lightly pushed her forward.
“Go on, what are you waiting for?”
Mary Lou only later realized, when watching television, that she cried as she gently bent over to hug her husband. All she remembered was touching him, again and again, to make certain it was him, and she kept wondering how he could be so small. She cried for a long time. It was only then she knew, in full, just what it was he had been through, and what it had taken for her husband to climb to the summit of the mountain K2.
EPILOGUE
IN THE FALL OF 1998, twenty years and a month after we arrived home from K2, the Mazamas mountaineering club of Portland hosted a reunion not only for our expedition but for other K2 climbers as well. Charlie Houston and Bob Bates of the 1938 and 1953 American K2 expeditions attended; Bob Craig, George Bell, Tony Streamer, and Dee Molenaar, also of the 1953 attempt were there; Greg Child, who climbed the north ridge in 1990, perhaps the greatest ridge-climb on earth, attended; and all of us from the 1978 climb were there, except for Lou Reichardt and Cherie Bech, who couldn’t make it, Terry Bech and Diana Jagersky, who now live in Europe, and Chris Chandler, who died of cerebral edema during a 1985 attempt on Kanchenjunga.
A few wrinkles and some gray hair notwithstanding, we had aged well. Perhaps more important to the occasion, we all got along well. It wasn’t that anyone’s personality had changed, but I do think the years had healed our differences, and there was genuine conviviality. That’s not to say that had our reunion been on a ship that sank and cast us adrift together in a lifeboat, differences might not have resurfaced, but it is to say, as in most reunions, we enjoyed catching up with what had happened to us in the intervening twenty years.
Craig Anderson showed up with his wife, Anne, and all four of their children. The two oldest had been young lads during our climb, and it was only now, at the reunion, as a parent myself, that I understood how much Craig must have missed them during the long months we were away, and also why he climbed as cautiously as he did on K2. “I got what I was looking for out of our climb,” he said. “It satisfied a hunger that drove me to high adventure in my younger years and left me free to focus on the more important challenge of my life, raising our four children.”
Bill Sumner still owned his endearing Einstein countenance, and he was still passionate about theoretical physics, mountain equipment design, and mountain adventures. With a twinkle in his eye he told me he discovered that “quantum wave functions evolve with space-time geometry, which means that the universe is now collapsing!” At Mountain Safety Research, where he has been for years, he designed the WhisperLite stove that so many of us use and love. After K2 he led many trips to the Soviet Union and lived for awhile in Uzbekistan with his wife, Flura Zhirnova, a champion Soviet rock climber. He and Flura have a new son, Sasha, and they now live in Eastern Washington where, as Bill put it, “I’m seriously toying with the idea of building a real house and maybe even settling down.”
Skip Edmonds has spent the last twenty years “juggling family, career, and recreation: pick any two, because you can’t do all three well.” But he’s done a good job trying. He is happily remarried, gets away climbing with his seventeen-year-old son when he can, and continues his career in medicine. In addition to keeping up his climbing, Skip is also an avid ski-mountaineer.
The K2 climb was a turning point for John Roskelley, but more because it steered him away from big expeditions to smaller teams attempting extreme alpine routes on smaller Himalayan peaks, and harder new routes on larger ones. Over the next ten years he became the most accomplished Himalayan climber in the United States, and one of the best in the world. “But it was self-indulgent,” he told me recently, “and along the way I metamorphosed into someone more concerned with long-term environmental, community, and social issues. It was not a hard transition.” In 1995 he ran for and won a seat as county commissioner in his hometown of Spokane, a position he was re-elected to and continues to hold today.
Lou Reichardt returned to the big mountains, making the first ascent of Everest’s Kangshung Face in 1983, and at the same time becoming the first American to climb both Everest and K2. Just as impressive—or perhaps even more impressive—he continues as a professor at the University of California San Francisco, where he is on the cutting edge of his discipline, studying molecules that regulate the early development of the nervous system, determining, among other things, which ones live or die (he doesn’t think he lost any molecules on either Everest or K2). He and his wife have four children, three of whom are either in or have graduated from college.
After arriving at the Seattle airport in a wheelchair, Jim Wickwire underwent lung surgery at a local hospital. He made a remarkable recovery and went on to climb Denali again and make three expeditions to Everest, as well as expeditions to Kanchenjunga and Menlungtse. Wickwire continues to practice law with his Seattle firm, and Anne, the oldest of his five children, has now given him and Mary Lou twin granddaughters. Grandpa Wickwire continues to climb, and, as recently as 1995, he put up a new route on Sarmiento, a remote peak in windswept Tierra del Fuego.
Jim Whittaker and Dianne Roberts left Seattle in 1985 and moved to Port Townsend, where the two of them built a beautiful log house looking out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and pursued their passion for sailing. In 1990 Jim again reached the summit of Everest as the leader of a joint expedition of climbers from the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. The expedition was known as the Peace Climb, and its intent was to demonstrate the desire of the common citizen for a more peaceful world. Two years ago Jim and Dianne sold the house, bought another boat, and set sail. They were at the reunion having left the Impossible anchored in Mooloolaba, Australia. Once the younger of their two sons finishes his school term, and Jim completes his autobiography, they intend to return to the Impossible and complete their circumnavigation.
In 1988 Rob Schaller remarried and had three more children, including one named Sierra, which means high mountain. “K2 still means a lot to me,” he said at the reunion. “It was one of the last of the old-style expeditions, before GPS and fax and satellite up-link, and we were there on our own.” He continues to climb, and a couple of years ago, when he was sixty-two, ascended Mera, a twenty-one-thousand-foot peak near Everest. He and his family live on a ten-acre farm in the Cascade foothills, and Rob is professor of surgery at the University of Washington, and a very active and accomplished pediatric surgeon as well. Referring to his work, he said, “I would buy tickets to do what I do. I love my work and I love my life.” He and his wife Teresa also volunteer their services to preserve o
ld-growth forest in Washington State.
As for myself, like Wickwire and Roskelley, I continued to climb in the remote ranges although I took a hiatus—after nearly dying in 1980 in an avalanche on a remote peak in eastern Tibet—to reconfirm that the rewards of mountaineering outweighed the risks. I also married during that time, and my wife Jennifer and I have three children. I continue to make my living from a combination of endeavors related to climbing and adventure: I have a line of packs, sleeping bags, and tents called Ridgeway by Kelty, I make documentary films, and I continue to write books.
After the K2 climb, I traveled to Seattle to see Chris Chandler, to try and repair our friendship. I was writing The Last Step at the time, and Chris told me he didn’t want me to refer to his friendship with Cherie Bech. I told him it was so central to everything that happened on the mountain that I didn’t know how I could avoid referring to it, or even avoid making it one of the central themes of the story. That didn’t mollify Chris, and, of course, I wrote the book, and Chris never really talked to me again after that. Terry Bech, who eventually moved to Europe to take a job playing the viola for a Dutch symphony, felt the same as Chris about including any reference to the affair in the book and even threatened to sue me (although he never did).
Later Cherie wrote about the affair, and about her deep love for Chris, in her own book, Living on the Edge. Opposite the title page there is a wonderful photograph of Chris, his long blond hair as wild as any Norseman’s, his broad smile enough to stop any woman in her tracks. He was one of the most handsome men I’ve ever known. In her book, Cherie tells how she and Chris sailed his 34-foot ferro-cement ketch Laylah on voyages in the Northwest and the North Pacific. They also continued climbing, attempting a satellite peak of Kanchenjunga, then returning in December 1984 to attempt what would have been the first winter ascent of the third highest mountain in the world. In a snow cave at their high camp, Chris quite suddenly was blinded with cerebral edema. Cherie and one Nepali struggled to get him down, but he died the next day, and she had no choice but to leave him where he lay. Cherie just escaped with her own life, losing all of her fingers and toes to severe frostbite.
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