The Edge

by Roland Smith

  Ethan joined me back at the window. The helicopter descended and began following a wide river a hundred feet above the churning surface.

  “Glacial melt,” Ethan said. “Glad I brought my two-person inflatable kayak.”

  “What else did you bring?”

  “Snowboard and paraglider.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I like to come prepared.”

  I’d wondered about all of the equipment stuffed into the helicopter. Now I knew.

  “Wanna do a little kayaking?”

  “I’ve never been kayaking,” I said. “In fact, I can’t swim.”

  “Are you joking?”

  I shook my head. “My family didn’t tread water. We climbed.”

  “I met your dad once. Cool dude. Can he swim?”

  “I don’t know.” There was a lot I didn’t know about my dad. Most of what I knew of him was from reading his books, or articles about him.

  The helicopter went into a hover over a small flat spot fifty feet from the north side of the river and a hundred yards from what I guessed was the edge of base camp. The reason I guessed it was the edge of camp was that there were only four tents in view. There were a couple of people standing near a campfire, which was odd because it had to be at least ninety degrees outside.

  The helicopter landed with a jarring thump. We stayed in our seats until the rotors stopped spinning. The pilot jumped out and slid our door open. I was the last one out.

  Mom, JR, Will, Jack, and Ethan were staring at the campsite.

  “Maybe this is just a staging area,” Jack said. “Base camp must be farther upriver. This is probably the only good landing site.”

  He said this because all we could see were eight brightly colored tents, twice as many as I saw when we landed, but far short of two hundred plus. Tied up outside one of the tents was a donkey and a camel. The donkey was braying.

  One of the men at the campfire started walking slowly in our direction. The pilot hurriedly unloaded our gear by spilling it out to the ground.

  “Hey! That’s our camera gear! It’s expensive!”

  “That’s my kayak! You trying to punch a hole in it?”

  The pilot ignored the protests and, long before the man from the campfire reached us, finished yanking the remaining gear out. He climbed back into the helicopter and, without a goodbye in any language, fired it up. We backed away, and a minute later, it was in the air.

  The man from the campfire joined us just in time to watch the helicopter swing around and disappear downriver. He was wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, a camouflage camera vest with a thousand pockets, matching camouflage pants with more pockets, and hiking boots. Everything looked expensive and brand-new, which could be a problem, especially the boots. Bad idea to drop into the middle of nowhere with untested boots. He pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead. His white teeth and blue eyes stood out in sharp contrast against his meticulously trimmed black beard. He was sweating.

  “Phillip Stockwell.” He put his hand out. There didn’t appear to be a callus on it. His fingernails were perfectly manicured. And clean. He was not a climber. “You must be my cinematographers.”

  JR shook Phillip’s hand and looked uncomfortable. They were videographers. Documentary makers, not movie guys. I was betting that this was the first time in his life he’d been called a cinematographer.

  “I’m sure you’ve seen my films,” Phillip said.

  JR looked even more uncomfortable. So maybe it wasn’t the cinematographer thing. He glanced at his crew for help. Jack, Ethan, and Will gave him completely blank looks. It was obvious they had no idea who Phillip Stockwell was either.

  “Great to meet you,” JR said feebly.

  Phillip looked at me. “And you must be our final climber, Pete Marcello.”

  I shook his hand without bothering to correct him. His hand was soft.

  Phillip looked at Mom. “And you are?”

  “Teri. Peak’s mom.”

  He didn’t seem to catch the name correction. “All the other climbers came solo. No parents.”

  It was hard to believe that two hundred parents let their underage climbing offspring come to Afghanistan solo. I wasn’t sure why Mom had decided to tag along, but I wasn’t embarrassed about it. She’d been pretty cool, treating me like a fellow climber, not like her firstborn. No nagging. No did you remember to bring, did you forget to, don’t do that. I think she was happy to be heading up to a mountain to reconnect with her former self.

  “But it’s fabulous you’re here,” Phillip continued. “Cindy will have someone to hang out with here at base camp.”

  “Cindy?” Mom asked.

  “Yes, my um . . .” Phillip turned around. “Ah, here she comes. My PA.”

  His PA, a.k.a. personal assistant, a.k.a. girlfriend (I guessed), was going to be disappointed if she thought Mom was going to be her base camp BFF. Cindy was wearing python-patterned pants as tight as snakeskin, knee-high red leather boots, and a long-sleeve pink spandex shirt as tight as her pants. She wasn’t wearing a hat. She didn’t need one with the pile of perfectly coiffed hair on her head. Her makeup was perfect. I wondered if she had a makeover PA in her tent.

  “Cindy,” Phillip said, “this is our final young climber, Pete Marcello, and his mother, Teri.”

  “I can’t imagine why the United States, or anyone else, ever wanted this country,” Cindy said. “It’s absolutely prehistoric. Do your cell phones work?”

  I hadn’t brought my cell phone, of course, and I wasn’t sure if Mom had hers either. But the newly crowned cinematographers all fumbled their phones out of their pockets, looked at the screens, and shook their heads.

  “I think there are satellite phones in the gear Plank gave us,” JR said.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Cindy said. “There’s still no signal. And the batteries are going dead because there’s no electricity, or bathrooms, or running water, but we do have a camel and a donkey. All we’re missing is the Virgin Mother and a manger.”

  “The batteries would last a lot longer if you’d stop constantly scanning for sat signals,” Phillip told her.

  Cindy fixed him with a bright smile that wasn’t really a smile. “How do we know there’s a signal if we aren’t scanning for a signal, love?”

  Definitely boyfriend/girlfriend, I thought, and the relationship is on the Wakhan Corridor rocks.

  Mom changed the subject. “Where’s base camp?”

  Phillip looked confused and pointed at the eight tents. “That’s base camp.”

  “We were told there were two hundred climbers,” I said.

  Phillip laughed. “Here we go again. You obviously didn’t get the memo, but don’t feel bad—none of the other climbers did either. Plank played this one close to his chest, like he always does, to avoid petty bickering. The two hundred climbers are climbing all over the world in groups of five or six. We will all complete our climbs on the same day, roughly at the same time. You . . . we . . . drew the Pamirs. It was totally random.”

  “That’s not what his people told us,” JR said, his face reddening.

  Phillip smiled. “Really? What did they say? Exactly.”

  “That this was a Peace Climb with two hundred young climbers, all under eighteen, from almost every country in the world. The location would not be revealed until we got here.”

  “Carefully scripted,” Phillip said. “That’s exactly what the other climbers and film crews were told. Plank did it so people wouldn’t start wheeling and dealing. Asking to climb here rather than there, or with this team or that team, this director or that director. You assumed everyone was climbing together, but they didn’t tell you that. You filled in the blanks.”

  JR looked at Mom and me. “I’m sorry.”

  Mom shrugged. “I guess we all got a Planking. It’s no big deal. And Plank is right about the bickering over who climbs where. It would have been a mess if he’d been upfront about it.”

  So, Rolf was right a
fter all. I was actually relieved there were only a few climbers. I hadn’t been looking forward to climbing with two hundred people. Five or six was okay with me. In fact, it was great.

  “But you knew about this, Phillip.” Cindy said, sharply. “All the directors knew where they were going. You could have insisted we climb somewhere besides this godforsaken place.”

  Phillip slipped his sunglasses back over his now angry blue eyes. “We’ve been through this. It was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. In or out. And you didn’t have to come with me.”

  He walked back toward the tents.

  Awkward moment.

  Cindy kept the fake smile on her face.

  I wanted to tell her that mountains are not godforsaken places. They are where humans go to find God, which is kind of the whole point of humans climbing mountains. But of course I didn’t.

  Mom tried to break the tension with a cheerful question. “So, where is everybody?”

  “I have no idea,” Cindy said. “The climbing guru, or whatever they call him, took all the kids for a hike several hours ago. He said he wanted to see what kind of shape they were in, which was ridiculous, because the only one that looks out of shape is him. I bet the guy is a hundred years old. The camel and the donkey are his. Apparently he rode them here instead of taking a helicopter. So there’s a good chance that he is a nutcase.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “He was here when we got here,” Cindy said. “I didn’t catch his name. Short, bald dude with a funny accent. Not very friendly.” She looked at Mom. “Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. It will be fun to have someone to talk to for the next ten days. About the only thing to do around here is skip rocks in the river. I didn’t know what I was going to do when everyone was off climbing. To be honest, our so-called Afghan guards creep me out. All they do is stare at me, or leer, and I’m pretty sure they’re making snide remarks, but I don’t know what they’re saying.”

  I looked at her snakeskin pants and had a pretty good idea what they were saying. Women in Muslim countries don’t dress like Cindy.

  “Well,” JR began, “Teri here is a world-class—”

  Mom cut him off. “I guess we should grab our gear and set up our tents before it gets dark.”

  Cindy pointed at the campsite. “Phillip’s and my tent is the big blue one over there. The Afghan guards will clear the rocks away. Well, most of the rocks. I swear they left some under our tent intentionally to make us uncomfortable. I better catch up with Phillip before his pout gets out of hand. You know how artists are.”

  We watched her walk away.

  “I am so sorry,” JR said.

  “No worries,” Mom said.

  This made me smile because “no worries” is one of my dad’s favorite sayings (usually when there is nothing but worries, like right then). I wondered if Josh had picked the phrase up from her when they were together or if she had picked it up from him.

  “What’s so funny?” Mom asked.

  “Nothing. Guess we better set up our tents.”

  She looked up at the other tents. “I’m setting mine up as far away from the artist and his PA as I can get.”

  “I’m completely with you on that.”

  There were two large duffels with our names on them. I offered to take Mom’s.

  “You’re my son, not my Sherpa.”

  She shouldered her bag, and after a short search (and a little mom/son debate, a.k.a. argument) we found a semiflat spot to pitch our tents, closer to the river and about fifty feet from the other tents.

  The two Afghans in camp carried assault rifles slung over their shoulders. It was hard to say how old they were, because both of them had clearly been baked by the sun and dried by the wind for decades. They gave Mom a small bow and shook my hand. Ebadullah and Elham. Unlike Phillip’s, their hands were as hard as obsidian. Ebadullah had a black scraggly beard. Elham had a red beard, which had obviously been dyed. I remembered reading that village elders dyed their beards red. I wondered what village they were from. The closest village I’d seen was at least a hundred miles away. A three- or four-day walk.

  Both men were wearing traditional Pashtun clothing. Leather sandals, baggy linen pants, kurtas, which were long shirts that hung almost to the knee, and turban caps. They squatted down and watched us unpack the duffels. Our domed tents, one green, one red, popped into place with a single jerk of the main support pole.

  Mom laughed in delight. “We didn’t have these when I was climbing.”

  “We still have to pound in the tent pegs the old-fashioned way.” I used an ice ax to set the pegs.

  With that taken care of, it was climbing gear time. As promised, the gear was the best that Plank’s considerable money could buy. And there was plenty of it. The duffels were stuffed with everything anyone would ever need to climb any mountain in the world, including a portaledge, which I had only seen in photographs. A portaledge is essentially a tent that hangs on a cliff wall. If you get stuck by bad weather, or the dark, you attach the ledge to the wall and sleep, or rest, hanging there. I pulled it out of the carrying bag and asked Mom if she had ever used one.

  “In my youth, but it wasn’t nearly as fancy as this. Your dad and I got stuck on walls several times when we first started climbing, before we learned how to speed climb. We invented our own portaledge, but it was more like a sling than a tent. We once spent forty hours in one of our contraptions, after which we were barely able to move. I think one of the reasons we shattered all of those climbing records was our fear of hanging on walls.”

  Some of those shattered records still stand.

  “Do you miss it?” I asked.

  “I just told you I didn’t like hanging on—”

  “You know what I mean. Do you miss climbing?”

  Mom looked at me a moment. “Sometimes. But what I have now, what I do now, raising the twins and you, is so much more important.”

  “So why did you come?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. At first I told myself it was because of you. That I wasn’t about to let you go off to Afghanistan by yourself. But that didn’t ring true. By the time I was your age, I was completely on my own, climbing every day all over the country. My parents had no idea where I was or what I was doing. They knew that if they objected, I would have climbed anyway. So they essentially kicked me out of the nest, which is what I did to you when you went to Everest. I think my motivation in tagging along here was spontaneity. That’s something I haven’t had in years. Responsibility trumps spontaneity. This was a good time to go, and it might be my last chance for a while. As the twins get older, they are going to need more of my time. And I am getting older. Climbing is a young person’s sport. Younger than me, anyway.”

  I was a little shocked to hear this. Mom rarely talked about how she actually felt, except when I was doing something wrong. “You’re going to climb?”

  She smiled. “I have all this cool gear. Why wouldn’t I climb? I mean, I won’t be climbing officially with you for the documentary, but I’m sure there are some pitches an old lady like me might be able to struggle up. And I know what you’re thinking. Mom hasn’t climbed in years. She isn’t in climbing shape. Blah, blah, blah . . .”

  That was exactly what I was thinking.

  “But for your information, I’ve been hitting the climbing gym almost every day for the past six months, while you were at school, or while you were sleeping in. I’m in pretty good shape. I don’t think you’ll be embarrassed.”

  “More like inhibited,” I said.

  “Liar. But thanks.”

  Before I came along, Mom was considered one of the best climbers in the world. There were many who said she was a better climber than my dad, although I doubted Josh would have agreed, or if he did agree, ever admit it to anyone. Climbers are competitive. We can’t help ourselves. Now that she mentioned it, I saw that she did look leaner and more cut than she was a few months earlier, which went to show that I didn’t pay much atte
ntion to how she looked. I wondered if all kids did this. If she were a friend of mine, and not my mom, I would have noticed and said something.

  “Wanna go for a hike?” I asked. “See if we can find the others and the climb master?”

  “Maybe we should take some gear just in case we see something we want to climb.”

  “I like how you think.”

  We stuffed small packs with rope, carabiners, quick draws, harnesses, chalk, belay gloves, flashlights, knives, helmets, tricams, camming devices, hexes, nuts (not the kind you eat), water, and energy bars. Gotta love gear.

  Ebadullah and Elham had a short conversation with each other as we slipped into our heavy packs. Ebadullah wandered over to the film crew, fifty feet away, and squatted down to watch their gear sort, which was probably more interesting than our sort because they had camera and sound equipment in addition to the climbing gear. Elham said something to me in what I guessed was Pashtun.

  “I think he’s offering to lead us to the others,” Mom said.

  TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH ELHAM was like trying to keep up with someone riding a dirt bike. He moved upriver over the loose rocks, or scree, effortlessly, with his hands locked behind his back, like he was floating instead of walking. We almost had to jog to keep him in sight.

  “His backpack is tiny,” Mom pointed out.

  “I don’t think it would make any difference. He’d still walk the pants off of us.”

  Elham took a sharp left onto a narrow, twisting animal trail and headed straight uphill. His rapid pace didn’t alter, and soon he disappeared. We stopped to drink water. I don’t think Elham was even carrying water.

  “Bet you a dollar that when we get to the trailhead, Elham is napping in the shade of a tree,” Mom said.