by Roland Smith
HE GAVE US A BREAK on the fourth day because he wanted us all to cross into Tibet together.
We reached the Friendship Bridge about noon. I suppose if you're crossing south from Tibet into Nepal the name fits. But if you're going north from Nepal into Tibet there's nothing friendly about it.
The Chinese border soldiers were surly, suspicious, and rude. They examined our papers for nearly an hour and peppered us with questions I didn't understand. Zopa handled the answers calmly, but the rest of us were nervous—especially Sun-jo, who had started to sweat even though it was only thirty-five degrees.
"What's the matter with you?" I whispered.
"Nothing," he whispered back. "Chinese."
The soldiers nearly dismantled the truck looking for contraband. They didn't find any, but they did manage to steal some of our stuff in the process. Food mostly. But no one called them on it.
The day before, as we had walked, Sun-jo had given me a short history lesson about Tibet and China. It wasn't pretty. The People's Republic of China invaded Tibet fifty years ago. Since that time over six thousand Buddhist monasteries and shrines have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have been killed or jailed.
Which brings me to that boulder in the middle of the road the prisoners were cracking into gravel. We passed by it an hour after we got over the Friendship Bridge, which sort of sums up what's happening to the Tibetans.
Or as Zopa put it later that night, "Our brothers in Tibet have been made slaves in their own country."
We stopped at every monastery that hadn't been burned to the ground or dismantled by the Chinese—some of them well out of our way. The monks were grateful for the food, supplies, and gossip Zopa and the Sherpas brought. It was clear that this was one of the half dozen reasons Zopa had for taking me to Base Camp.
Sun-jo and I hiked every day and climbed every evening. By the time we arrived at Base Camp ten days later I was feeling strong. So was Sun-jo.
PEAK EXPERIENCE
WE ARRIVED AT BASE CAMP just in time to see Josh get into a fistfight with someone. At 18,044 feet, though, it wasn't much of a fight.
An older, red-faced man took a swing, which Josh easily ducked and countered by pushing him in the chest. The man landed on his butt in the snow. After this it was pretty much over except for the shouting.
"I want a full refund!" the man shouted. "If you think I'm going to sit around Base Camp while you and the others climb to glory, you have another thing coming!" (He was obviously one of Josh's clients, and not a very happy one.)
It's hard to get up when you are out of breath, swaddled in down clothes, with crampons strapped to your boots. Josh offered his hand to help him up, but the man slapped it away.
"George, you're in no shape to go any farther up the mountain," Josh said. "You heard what Dr. Krieger said. You have a bad heart, which you should have told me about before you signed up."
"My heart's fine! That witch doctor of yours doesn't know what she's talking about."
A pretty woman stepped up next to Josh. "You have a heart murmur, George," she said with a slight German accent. "Blocked arteries would be my guess. You need to get it looked at as soon as you get off the mountain."
"Well, I'm getting off this stupid mountain today," George wheezed, getting to his feet. "And my first appointment is not going to be with my doctor. It's going to be with my attorney! I'll sue you for everything you have, Josh."
"If you want to sue me for saving your life," Josh said, "go ahead." He turned and started to walk away, then noticed us and stopped.
"Looks like you have an extra climbing permit," Zopa said.
"Two, actually. We had a woman leave two days ago, hacking up her larynx. Apparently I'm responsible because she's threatening to sue me, too."
Josh looked at me. The beard he had cut off for my arraignment was growing back in nicely. "So, how was it?" he asked.
"It was good."
He looked back at Zopa. "Can he make it up the mountain?"
Zopa shrugged.
Josh glanced over at the truck where Sun-jo, Yogi, and Yash were standing. "Do you have room to take George back down?"
Zopa nodded. "Those three are staying. That is if you have work."
"We'll see," Josh said without much enthusiasm. "We might need some Base Camp help, but with two less climbers we don't need any more climbing Sherpas."
He looked back at the small truck, then looked back at Zopa. "It'll be a tight fit. You'll have to haul George's wife down, too, and all their gear. She's in her tent sick as a dog. You'll need to get them both to the hospital as soon as you get to Kathmandu."
"There will be enough room," Zopa said. "I'm staying here, too. At least for a few days. I'll talk to the driver. He'll get them to Kathmandu safely."
Zopa started toward the truck but didn't get very far. A Jeep came roaring up and skidded to a stop, blocking his path.
Josh swore, then said under his breath, "Captain Shek. Be cool. Let me do the talking."
A tall Chinese officer in a crisp green uniform got out of the Jeep and walked up to us, frowning. "Papers!"
"Good afternoon," Josh said with a smile.
"No one go until I see papers!"
"Of course," Josh said.
But the captain was too late. Sun-jo, Yogi, and Yash were already gone. (Poof!)
"Show him your visa and passport," Josh said.
I dug them out of my pack and handed them over.
Captain Shek carefully scrutinized them, glancing between me and the photo.
"You climb?"
"He's my son," Josh answered. "He's on my climbing permit."
"Last name no match."
"He has his mother's name. We're divorced."
(I guess it was too complicated to explain that they were never married.)
The captain handed back my passport. Next he checked Zopa's papers, then the driver's. After he finished he locked his dark eyes on each of us and said, "We watching all you." He climbed back into the Jeep and drove away.
"He's not kidding about that," Josh said. "Captain Shek and his men are always watching." He pointed to a small rise with a ramshackle building on top of it. "They have a spotting scope set up there, and the rumor is that he has night vision equipment as well. They monitor the radio transmissions, looking for violations. Shek's already booted two climbing parties this year. Try to stay clear of him."
"And he doesn't always show up dressed in uniform," Dr. Krieger warned. "He sometimes dresses like a climber and wanders around camp catching people unaware. I'll be in the Aid tent." She walked away.
"What do you think of Base Camp so far?" Josh asked.
Because of the argument and Captain Shek I hadn't paid much attention to the camp, but I saw now that it was gigantic. Red, blue, green, and yellow tents were scattered around for what seemed like a mile.
"How many people are here?"
"Three hundred fifty or so," Josh answered. "Maybe another fifty acclimatizing farther up the mountain."
Most of them must have been in their tents trying to stay warm because there weren't too many people wandering around. I looked at the temperature on my watch: fourteen degrees. According to the wind gauge (the watch Josh gave me did everything), the wind was blowing ten miles an hour, which brought the temperature down to three degrees above zero.
Josh looked me over. "You breathing okay? Any problems on the way up?"
Both were good questions considering this was only the second time I'd been this high on a mountain. The summer before I had almost made it to the top of Mount McKinley in Alaska. We were at 18,000 feet (2,000 feet short of the summit) when our guide turned us back because of weather.
"I've had a headache the past two days," I said. "But it's going away."
Josh pointed at George, who had returned to his tent and was angrily packing his gear. "My headache's going away, too," he said. "At least one of them."
He looked over at the truck. Sun-jo and the bro
thers had reappeared and were helping Zopa unload it. "Who's the kid?"
"His name's Sun-jo."
"Is he with Zopa?"
"Yeah."
"Interesting," he said. "Did Zopa tell you he was going to stay at Base Camp for a few days?"
I shook my head. "Like you said, Zopa doesn't talk much."
"Yeah ... Well, he's up to something."
"Like what?"
Josh smiled. "He'll let us know when he's ready. Let's head over to Peak Experience headquarters. I'll introduce you to the Base Camp crew."
"Peak Experience?"
"I didn't name it after you exactly," Josh admitted. "But I probably should have."
"What are you talking about?"
"Peak Experience is my adventure travel company. We started it last year. Almost wish I hadn't now."
I followed him to a giant orange tent with peak experience tagged on the sides. The A in Peak looked like a mountain. He pulled back the flap and waved me through.
Inside were several people and more electronic equipment than I had ever seen in a tent at 18,000 feet (or any tent, for that matter): laptops, satellite phones, two-way radios, fax machines, television monitors, and other gizmos.
The crew was so busy talking on phones, listening to radios, tapping on keyboards, they didn't seem to notice us. None of them looked like climbers.
"What is all this?" I asked.
"This is what happens when you get old and start worrying about your future." He pointed to a pudgy guy talking on a satellite phone. "That guy over there is my business partner, Thaddeus Bowen. The rest of the people are support staff. There is another bunch of them back in the office in Chiang Mai, and some up on K2 and Annapurna."
"You're running three expeditions at the same time?"
He smiled. "Get this: Most of our clients are rank amateurs—some haven't been higher than twelve thousand feet. Stupid, huh? But I'm not alone. There are at least ten commercial operations like this at Base Camp. Some of them are running four separate expeditions. Things have changed since your mom and I were living out of the back of that rusty old van at El Cap."
When he said that he had clients I assumed he meant experienced climbers, nothing like this.
"People!" Josh said. "This is my son, Peak."
I felt a flush of pride. Some of them nodded, some smiled, though none of them fully stopped what they were doing. Thaddeus walked over, covering the mouthpiece of his satellite phone.
"How'd George take the news?"
"He took a punch at me," Josh said. "Says he's going to sue."
Thaddeus rolled his eyes. "Great. I'll call our attorney and tell him to get ready." He walked away resuming his phone conversation.
A woman came over and handed Josh a sheet of paper. "The film crew should be here later this afternoon. And I finally tracked down the whereabouts of Holly Angelo."
The name sounded familiar to me, but I couldn't remember where I'd heard it.
"Where is she?" Josh asked.
"She's with the film crew," the woman answered. "Apparently she came in on the same flight. The film crew is threatening to murder her. She brought along her own personal chef and massage therapist, and so much gear they had to rent a second truck."
"I told her she couldn't bring anybody," Josh said. "And to travel light."
"She didn't listen," the woman said. "She's also found out that you have an opening on your climbing permit. She wants to go to the top."
Josh swore. "How'd she find out about that?"
"Word travels fast at high altitudes."
"She's here to cover Peak, not herself."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I'll tell you about it later," Josh said distractedly. "Can you reach her on the sat phone?"
"If she's not in the middle of a massage," the woman answered, then started punching in numbers.
Josh turned to me. "I need to take care of this. There's a spot for your tent next to mine. The blue one out back. Why don't you go out and get set up."
Sun-jo helped me haul my gear and set up the tent. When we finished we took a little tour.
Now, you might be thinking that Base Camp on Everest would be one of the most pristine places on earth. The truth is that you have to watch where you step. And here's a tip: Avoid digging up yellow snow to melt for your drinking water. At ten degrees below zero no one strays far from his tent to take care of business. Everest Base Camp is a frozen outhouse/garbage dump with decades of crap, discarded food containers, and busted gear. I had read that some of the climbers and Sherpas were trying to clean it up, but by the looks of the camp they hadn't made much of a dent. Sardine cans, chip bags, cartons, toilet paper, and other trash blew around the tents like tumbleweed.
Climbers from all over the world were here. Japan, Bolivia, Mexico, Italy, Canada, Luxembourg ... There were women's teams, military teams; there was even a team made up exclusively of people over fifty. (They had a placard outside their camp that read: THE GERIATRIC TEAM. BEWARE OF GRUMPY OLD CLIMBERS!)
You could pick out the commercial climbing operations by the size of their tents and their camp spots, which were usually the best on the slope. I counted eleven of them, and that's when it began to dawn on me that Josh might be just as cagey as old Zopa.
There was a lot of competition sitting on the mountain under those large tents. Getting a dozen clients to the summit could bring in as much as a million dollars, and if you were simultaneously mounting other expeditions on other 8,000-meter peaks, several million dollars.
If an Everest wannabe was going to plop down a hundred grand (or several thousand to get to one of the lower camps) who were they going to give their money to? The company with the best success rate? The company with the best safety record? Or maybe, the company who put the youngest person in the world on the world's tallest mountain, who also just happened to have the same first name as the company that put him on the top. And did you hear about him climbing those skyscrapers in New York?
Don't worry about the money. I'll get my portion back.
The film crew should be here later this afternoon.
She's here to cover Peak, not herself.
I suddenly remembered where I had seen the name Holly Angelo. It was a byline under an article about me climbing the skyscraper. She was the reporter who broke the news about who my real father was. Did she dig up this information on her own? Or did Josh give her a call and spill his guts?
The youngest person so far to reach the top of Everest was a fifteen-year-old Nepalese girl named Ming Kipa Sherpa.
If I were one year older I might still be in ... I stopped in midstep.
"What's the matter?" Sun-jo asked. "Nothing," I said.
Would Josh have bailed me out if I had already turned fifteen? I didn't think so. Was he using me? Probably. Did I mind? I wasn't sure at that point. He was paying more attention to me than he had my whole life.
"I'm going to head back," I said.
"I should go, too," Sun-jo said. "Zopa wants me to talk to the cook about helping in the mess tent."
"A job?" I asked.
"For room and board." Sun-jo smiled. "Or tent and food, I should say. Perhaps it will lead to something else."
Tent and food was not going to get the tuition paid. "I could talk to my father," I offered. "If I asked him, I think he'd hire you for more than tent and food."
Sun-jo shook his head. "We had better leave that up to Zopa. He brought me to the mountain. It is for him to decide."
ROCK WEASELS
RATHER THAN CONFRONT JOSH, I crawled into my tent, wrapped myself in my sleeping bag, and fell asleep.
I know what you're thinking: CHICKEN! Maybe you're right. But what was I going to say? "I will not be used, Father!" Or how about this: "Send me back to New York so I can do my time. Take that, Dad!"
Besides, I needed some sleep before I talked to him. Walking around at 18,000 feet wears you down. And it turned out that I didn't have to find him because he foun
d me.
"You awake?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said, although I hadn't been until he stuck his head into my tent.
He crawled in and zipped the flap closed. "Did you get a chance to look around the camp?"
"A little. There's a lot of competition for your company up here."
"You noticed, huh? Next year there won't be so many commercial operations. There's only a finite number of people who have the money, time, and desire to get up this mountain. This will be the last year for a lot of the operations."
"Including Peak Experience?" I asked.
He grinned. "Your mom told me that you're smart," he said. "I guess you got that from her."
Flattery has never worked on me. "So, how much trouble are you in?"
"Like the judge said, I look good on paper. But the truth is, I'm in debt up to my crevasse."
Humor, on the other hand, always worked on me. I laughed.
"If we have a good season this year," he continued, "we might be able to recoup some of our losses next year. It's all riding on how many people we get to the summit in the next few weeks and how much publicity we get."
"Which is why I'm here," I said.
He gave me a sheepish look. "Not entirely," he said. "But yeah, that's one of the reasons."
That's the main reason, I thought. Might as well get it over with. "If I had been fifteen would you have come to New York?"
He hesitated, then said, "Probably not. I was right in the middle of leading a group of amateur climbers to Everest."
I would have liked it a lot better if he had come to New York to save me because I was in trouble, not because he was in trouble.
"The youngest Americans to top Everest are a couple of twenty-year-olds," he explained. "So, your being fifteen might have worked, but truthfully, getting a fourteen-year-old up there has a lot more sex appeal, especially after your climb in New York.
"There are a lot of celebrities climbing this year: a couple of rockers, an actor, a football player. There are seven documentary and TV crews on this side of the mountain alone, and just as many, if not more, on the south side. So, when we tried to get the media interested in our climb there were no takers. Without publicity we're circling the drain.