Ascent

by Roland Smith

  “They’re trying to rebuild it,” I said. “We might be able to raise what’s left with our gear. That would save them a lot of time.”

  Ethan nodded. “While we’re alone, I have something else I want to talk to you about.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Alessia told me this morning that she thinks the reason I want to climb Hkakabo Razi is so I’ll get fired. Did she talk to you about that?”

  “Actually, I talked to her about that. I don’t know if her mother would fire you or not. I told her that you were probably getting restless.”

  “Am I that transparent?”

  “Like aquarium glass.”

  Ethan grinned. “I gotta work on that. And you’re right. I am getting a little antsy. Even if I don’t get canned, I’m planning to move on. Alessia is perfectly safe in Yangon. I like hanging with her, but she doesn’t need a full-time bodyguard. I’ve been teaching her mixed martial arts, and—​don’t tell her this—​she’s really good at it. So watch yourself. Don’t cross her. She can kick your ass.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Where are you going after this?”

  “I was thinking about tagging along with you when you go to catch up with your dad.”

  “Love to have you, but by the time we finish, Josh’s climb will be over. Getting back to Yangon might take us as long as it did to get here. We still have another bridge after this one. It might be out too.”

  “I’ve taken care of that. What I was doing this morning was looking for a hole in the canopy big enough to make a sat call. I talked to Chin for a couple of minutes. He said he’d be happy to give us a lift back to Yangon after we finish with Hkakabo Razi. We’ve already had our jungle experience. We don’t need a repeat on the way back to make this climb legit. His chopper only holds four, but he thought he could squeeze in the three of us if we leave some gear behind.”

  “You’d leave your gear?”

  “To forgo the jungle? In a minute. We’ll get Thuta or someone to ship our gear back to the embassy. Alessia can ship it to wherever we end up.”

  “That means we have plenty of time to help them raise this bridge,” I said.

  “And the next bridge if the runner decides to take that one out too,” Ethan added.

  I can’t describe the sense of relief and renewed energy I felt knowing we were not going to have to retrace our steps back through the tangle. Thanks to Nick, I had a better understanding and appreciation for the rainforest, but it still wasn’t my favorite place.

  We had plenty of rope to raise the bridge, but not enough to leave it behind, anchored to the tree. We explained this to Yaza. He passed it on to the others, who jumped into action by forming a rope assembly line. No one was idle. Even Yaza’s girls were helping by carrying as much stripped bark as they could over their tiny shoulders.

  Ethan had brought over not one, but two, continuous rope pulleys, or come-alongs. They are bulky and heavy. No alpine climber on earth carries a come-along, or two, in their gear bag. If I had seen them when we were desperately trying to lighten our load, I would have insisted that he leave them behind.

  “Okay. I give up. Why did you bring these?”

  “Ziplines,” Ethan answered.

  And that’s what we used them for, to the amazement and amusement of the stranded travelers. We set up two ziplines, one on each side of the downed bridge. Once they were tight, we were able to zip across the ravine in a matter of seconds. We could lower ourselves down to the fallen bridge wherever we wanted without having to clamber across the slippery slats. I’m certain that, to the people watching us, we looked like spiders dangling from strands.

  We were talking to each other about how best to raise the bridge, hanging maybe a foot above the water, when something hit Ethan’s climbing helmet with a pop loud enough to be heard above the roaring river.

  “Whoa!” Ethan said.

  “Are you hurt?” Alessia asked.

  “Just startled. That rock was moving.”

  I swung over and grabbed on to his harness to take a closer look at his helmet. There was a small crack in the yellow carbon shell.

  “You’re lucky it hit your helmet and not your head.”

  Ethan ran his finger over the crack. “I guess that’s why we wear them.”

  I looked up. The only people watching us now were Yaza’s girls. It was possible that they threw the rock, like kids do, and got lucky. Or unlucky. I waved at them. They waved back, then ran away.

  “We need to get back to the problem at hand,” Ethan said. “How are we going to raise this bridge?”

  “I think the angle is too great to pull it up,” Alessia said. “Perhaps we can salvage the planks and rope, then rebuild the bridge.”

  I was still looking up, thinking the girls might come back, when an idea for lifting the bridge came to me. “Or maybe we can change the angle of the pull,” I said.

  When we got back on top with my grand idea, we found that the stranded travelers had already figured out that the only way to raise the bridge was to change the angle. One of them had drawn a crude diagram in the dirt, which looked pretty much like what I had in mind. It was a heavy-duty platform made from trees sticking out from the rim. I had to smile. These people were far from helpless. This was not their first downed bridge, nor would it be their last. We might be able to save them a day or two with our gear, but no more than that. I sketched their plan into my notebook as they gave me advice over my shoulder. By the time I had it drawn to their satisfaction, it was dark.

  Alessia and Ethan came into camp carrying our gear, having zipped back and forth with it while I sketched.

  “Where’s Nick?” The plan had been to bring him across on the zip.

  “He decided to stay with the porters,” Alessia said.

  “More like he didn’t want to jump into the dark abyss on a shoestring, as he called it,” Ethan said. “Can’t say I blame him. It was a little intense.” He squatted down, looked at the sketch, and pointed at the pulleys. “I don’t have any of those in my bag of tricks.”

  I showed him three wooden pulleys.

  “Somebody had these?”

  I shook my head. “They made them with their pangas and a dull chisel. They used a bent nail for the axle. They’ll have three more ready by morning, which means we’ll have three block and tackles. With your come-alongs and the scaffold, we can lift anything we want out of the ravine.”

  Yaza came over and invited us to dinner. We were given bowls of rice, dried fish, and chopsticks. I was about to ask the girls if they happened to toss a rock into the river earlier, but I didn’t get a chance.

  “My spoon!” Ethan said.

  We only used spoons in camp among ourselves. When we ate with locals, we used chopsticks like they did.

  “I thought you lost your—”

  “The girl,” Ethan said. “She’s using my spoon.”

  I looked over at the girls. One of them was using a spoon to eat her rice. The other was using chopsticks. The camp was lit by a single lantern hanging from a tree. I didn’t know how Ethan could say that it was his spoon. It was barely light enough to see that she was holding a spoon.

  “She found it here last night near a campfire,”  Yaza said. “You were on this side last night?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Ethan said. “May I see it?”

  Reluctantly, the girl handed the spoon to him. Ethan turned it over. Scratched into the underside were the initials ET.

  “The last time I remember using the spoon is the night before the donkey died. I usually zip it in the right side pocket of my pack after I use it, so I don’t lose it. It’s possible I could have set it down on the log I was sitting on and someone came through camp while we slept and swiped it. But I’m pretty careful with my spoon.”

  He held the spoon out to the girl. She grabbed it.

  Eleven

  “I’m getting my magic spoon back before we leave,” Ethan said. “I have some stuff I’m sure the girl will trade for. When I le
ave the French embassy, the only thing I’m taking with me is my magic spoon.”

  Alessia came out of her tent. “What is this talk about a magic spoon?”

  “The spoon is magic,” Ethan insisted. “How else could it have crossed the river on its own?”

  “It was stolen,” Alessia said. “Why is this spoon so important to you?”

  Ethan’s normally cheerful face turned serious. “My mother gave me the spoon the day I left for the corps. I know, kind of a weird gift, but it had belonged to a set passed down from my great grandmother. Sterling silver, mahogany box, red velvet interior. A complete set. Nothing missing. Mom didn’t have much, but she had the silver. Just before I drove off for boot camp, she gave me the spoon and said, “Bring this back, son. Don’t break up my silver set.”

  “Why did you not give it back to her?” Alessia asked.

  “She died. Brain aneurysm while doing CrossFit. I was deployed overseas at the time.”

  “I am so sorry,” Alessia said.

  I felt really bad for him. I couldn’t imagine losing my mom. This was the first time he had opened up to me. When we talked, it was always gear, mountains, and climbing. I’d never given a thought to his family. He had never mentioned them.

  “I’m sorry too,” I said, which seemed totally inadequate, as it always does.

  “It’s fine,” Ethan said, waving us off. “It was a long time ago. I’m just trying to explain why I’m freaked out over the spoon.”

  “What about your father? Did you not want to bring the spoon back to him?” Alessia asked.

  “By the time I got back from the Mideast, my dad had remarried. His new wife decided to get rid of my mom’s stuff. The set was sold at a garage sale. I have a sister, two years younger than me. She said that the silver set sold for cheap because a spoon was missing.”

  “Where does your sister live?” I asked.

  “DC. Works for a senator.”

  “Does she climb?”

  “She’s afraid of heights, and a lot of other things. She got my dad’s genes. I got my mom’s—​she always pushed herself to her personal limits, which I guess is what got her in the end. She couldn’t sit still.”

  On cue, Ethan got up and started pacing as he drank his tea. When he finished, he dumped the dregs out and said, “I better find the girl before she trades my spoon to someone else. I bet there are fifty people here now. They’re always swapping stuff.”

  I got up too. “Alessia and I will check on the rope makers.”

  “No,” Alessia said. “I will talk to the girl. I doubt you have anything she will trade for your precious spoon.”

  Ethan and I walked up to where they were making rope. They must have worked through the night because there were dozens of yards of thick rope coiled on the ground like enormous pythons. Another group of men had cut down a couple of giant trees and were trimming and sizing them for the platform.

  “I want to get my hands on one of those axes and see what that feels like.”

  While Ethan played lumberjack, I wandered around until I found Alessia. She was leaning against a tree near the ravine, holding Ethan’s spoon in her hand.

  “A necklace for the older girl,” she said. “A bracelet for the younger girl.”

  “I think they got the better end of the deal.”

  “I think not. I have three sets of identical baubles, which I brought as gifts. All I had to do to make them look valuable was to wear them when I negotiated for the spoon.”

  Ethan walked up to us. “My spoon!”

  Our job was to loosen the planks snagged on the river rocks and make what repairs we could to the ropes holding the bridge together. It was hard and tedious work, made harder by being in harness, but the water running over the jagged boulder cooled the air to a tolerable temperature.

  High above us, the men had already skidded two gigantic logs to the rim, positioned them so they were jutting out thirty feet over the river, and gotten busy lashing them together. Their next step was to brace the logs by building a scaffolding underneath.

  “I’m going up to give them a hand!” I shouted above the roar of the rapids.

  Alessia and Ethan gave me a wave. They were in the process of dislodging a very stubborn set of planks. I started jugging myself up to the zip with mechanical ascenders, or Jumars. The temperature seemed to rise every foot I gained. I had to rest and catch my breath every twenty feet. I was taking my final rest twenty feet from the zip when a rock hit me on the shoulder. It felt like a bullet. If I hadn’t been in harness, it would have knocked me from the rope. My right arm went completely numb. My hand dropped from the ascender. Instinctively I hooked the rope with my foot to relieve the strain on my left hand. I was in no danger of falling onto the sharp river rocks, but I was risking a fall the length of my safety rope—​jarring and painful, to say nothing about dangling upside down trying to regrab my ascenders. Below, Alessia and Ethan were shifting rocks. Above, men were roping together the bamboo scaffold. No one was paying the slightest attention to me. I could have shouted out, but I wasn’t in enough trouble to warrant that kind of panic. Yet.

  More debris fell from where they were building the scaffold, but none of it rained down as hard as the rock that had hit me. I tried to flex my right hand. I wasn’t able to make a fist, but could move it, which was a good sign. I hoped it would get better after a little more rest. The foot I had wrapped around the rope started to tingle. I was going to have to readjust before it fell asleep. I managed to pull myself up just enough to switch feet. I was getting more feeling in my arm. I was able to make a loose fist. Five more minutes, and I’ll be fine, I thought confidently, and that’s when a man above dropped a load of bamboo. The load missed me by an inch, but it was hurtling down like spears aimed directly at the unsuspecting Alessia and Ethan.

  “Above!” I shouted. “Above!”

  Ethan and Alessia swung out of the way half a second before the bamboo shafts splintered on the rocks where they’d been standing. They waved. I waved back, forgetting that my right arm was injured. I don’t think I screamed, but Alessia swears that I did. She was up her rope and next to me a full minute before Ethan, who may not have been the best climber I’d ever seen, but he was the fastest. I told Alessia about my shoulder. She told me I was a fool. When Ethan reached us, he said all three of us were fools for working directly beneath what amounted to the construction zone on an unstable wall. He climbed up to the zipline, clipped a rope to it, and with some effort, ratcheted me up.

  Alessia scolded me the entire time she patched me up back at camp. I wasn’t sure what she was saying, because she was speaking in rapid French, but her tone was clear.

  Ethan walked up. “How’s the wing?”

  “Not broken, but it hurts.”

  “He will not let me put it into a sling,” Alessia complained.

  “Because he doesn’t want it to stiffen up,” Ethan said. “He’s going to need two arms when we get to the mountain, which is going to be sooner than we thought. They’re about ready to raise the bridge.”

  “I won’t be much help with my bum arm.”

  “As it turns out, neither will I,” Ethan said. “Come on.”

  We followed him to the ravine. Everyone was lined up along the edge, including Yaza, his wife, and their little girls, proudly wearing their new bling. I looked across the ravine and saw that there were almost as many watching on the other side as there were on this side, including Nick, who was easy to spot, being a foot taller than everyone else.

  I looked downriver, expecting to see a dozen men manning ropes, but there were only two men standing some distance away from the bridges and the ropes they had set to raise it. The log platform jutting out over the edge was jammed with men tying rope around two gargantuan logs. It took me a while to figure out that they had no intention of pulling the bridge up. They were going to use gravity to lift it. This was not in the plans I had copied for them.

  As soon as they had the ropes around the logs secure
d, all but two men left the platform and grabbed the ropes wrapped around the anchor trees. The two men on the platform positioned themselves next to the logs and, roughly at the same time, levered them over the edge. As the huge logs fell, the bridge snapped up from the river with planks clattering louder than the rapids. The anchor men quickly took up the slack around the trees and tied the ropes off.

  The bridge was up.

  Twelve

  Nick and his porters and donkeys were the last to cross the bridge from the south early the next afternoon.

  “How’s your shoulder?” he asked.

  “Stiff, but better.” The shoulder was only marginally better. I had spent most of the day confined to camp, wandering over to check on the bridge construction, catching up on my journal, and swatting insects.

  “Are you ready to travel?”

  “I’ll be good tomorrow morning.”

  “I meant now,” Nick said.

  I looked up through the trees. There were only a few hours of daylight left. Nick liked setting up camp long before dark.

  “We still have the animals packed,” he continued. “They’re well rested, and so am I, for that matter, but if your shoulder—”

  “No, I’m good,” I said. “All I have to do is pack my gear.”

  “Alessia and Ethan are retrieving the climbing ropes and will be along soon. There’s another reason for us to be pushing on. I hesitate to mention it, because it’s just a rumor, but Major Thakin might be back in the picture. The word is he’s been asking about us. As far as I can determine, he’s a day behind us.”

  “What does he want with us?”

  Nick laughed. “I suspect he’s found another irregularity in your travel permit and needs more cash to fix it. We have only one more bridge to cross before we reach the foothills of Hkakabo Razi. It will save you money if you start your climb before he arrives with his soldiers. They are not equipped for scaling a mountain. I’ve sent the porters ahead. I’ll haul your pack to them.”

  “I can carry my own pack.”

  Nick shook his head. “That’s already been decided. You have been outvoted three to one.”