by Clint Willis
It snowed that night. Dougal felt himself flotsam on the surface of something vast and deep. He drifted past mud banks and forest. John’s death was part of that dark scenery. Dougal felt a sense of urgent gratitude, almost painful in its intensity; he was alive with this task to perform. He fell asleep after a time and dreamed of himself as a man who leaped naked into a winter sea. He woke from this and drifted back into a sort of dream of John’s death. Dougal had been on the rope a half-hour before John; he knew what that was like. The spinning; pushing the metal clamp higher on the rope, stepping awkwardly to stand in the loop; pushing the second jumar higher and stepping up into the second loop; feeling each dangling lurch of the rope as a shock. Dougal knew the moment when your weight and the weight of your rucksack came onto a bit of slack in the rope. You fell with no time to configure a question; the rope came tight, arrested the fall—but you carried now this unthinking impulse to know something more than you knew.
John as his death approached saw the sky they all saw. He fell when the rope broke. He turned upside down from the weight of his rucksack and continued to turn. He tumbled breathless, his mouth open. There was briefly a muffled wild joy at the speed, no surprise but rather a dazed acceptance, a new way to move through the world. The face came up to brush him and the first contact was fantastically odd—an explosion that drove any vestige of thought from his body so that only his naked awareness remained and that only for the instant before it collapsed to a point that winked and disappeared. The body continued to fall. It careened and slid from feature to feature of the Eiger’s North Face, shedding gear and then clothing and finally flesh.
HARLIN’S EIGER DIRECT expedition had dwindled to Dougal Haston. Layton Kor had descended to Kleine Scheidegg. Chris Bonington and Mick Burke had gone up the West Ridge as planned, in hopes of photographing an eventual summit party. Don Whillans was in Leysin. John himself was dead.
Dougal felt his isolation on the face. He liked the Germans; they grieved for Harlin without falling apart or expecting anyone else to do so. But Dougal wasn’t like them—or like Chris or Layton for that matter. He could ignore the cold as well as his own spasms of grief and fear and the odd and somehow unfinished fact of John’s death. He would finish the climb whatever anyone else might choose to do.
He bivouacked at the Fly with three of the Germans. Roland Votteler descended to the Spider for the night. The weather turned while they slept. Dougal awoke in dim light to a world of fog and blowing snow and set about getting his boots on. Roland came up the fixed ropes not long after, and the five men set out for the summit.
The wind continued to rise. Their range of vision shrank to 30 feet. There was no sign of the world or even the climb—only movement that seemed almost to unfold of its own accord, as if to unknown ends.
Dougal had roped up with Jörg Lehne. The two of them carried light loads; their task was to make the new route, fixing rope as they went. The three other Germans followed with heavier loads, pulling up the ropes as they came—the party would need them for the route ahead.
Dougal and Jörg took turns in the lead, finding their way across mixed ground that required great care. The climbing was harder than Dougal had expected. He struggled to find piton placements in the ice-smeared rock. The hours melted away. The sun remained hidden, and even the half-light began to fade as Dougal stared through cloud up a ramp of iced-over rock that ran past a buttress. The storm had grown still worse, and the climbers were getting cold. They needed to find a place to spend the night.
Dougal had left his sleeping gear 400 feet lower, at the start of a difficult stretch of climbing. He descended to join Roland Votteler and Sigi Hupfauer; they had carved him a small platform in the ice. Jörg Lehne and Günther Strobel found a ledge near the new high point and cleared a space barely adequate for their tent. Dougal had no shelter apart from his bivouac sack. He wrapped himself in it and leaned back against the face; one of his legs dangled in space. He dozed occasionally, waking to bouts of violent shivering. He marveled at the force of the storm, and wondered how he and his companions would manage to climb in the morning.
Daylight came as a relief, but it was still snowing and still very cold. The climbers took hours to melt snow for tea and prepare to leave their cramped bivouacs, pulling on half-frozen gloves and gaiters. They had slept in their boots, and only Dougal had removed his crampons. He broke a crampon strap putting the things back on, and the work of repairing the strap was painfully slow in the cold. Roland and Sigi were also slow at their preparations. They fell in behind Dougal as he left camp. He set off up the fixed ropes and quickly lost feeling in his fingers.
There was no sign of Jörg or Günther at the top of the fixed ropes. They had already left their bivouac to set out for the summit. Dougal peered up into the clouds—nothing. He began climbing. Jörg and Günther had fixed ropes on some of the difficult sections, but they had neglected to leave a rope on one long pitch of thin ice was bare of rope. Dougal carried no ice axe and his jury-rigged crampons were wobbly; the newly repaired strap was too loose. He led the pitch anyway, using a single ice dagger, aware that his belay anchor probably wouldn’t hold a fall; he would go all the way to the bottom of the face, taking Roland and Sigi with him.
He moved deliberately—he couldn’t lose time in these conditions—until he drew near the bottom of the next fixed rope. It was 20 feet to his left, across very steep ground. He hammered his ice dagger an inch or so into the ice and tied a sling to it. He clipped a carabiner to the sling and clipped the rope to the carabiner. His notion was that the slight tension of the rope running through the carabiner behind him would help him stay in balance as he crossed to the fixed rope—unless the wobbly ice dagger came out.
Everything fell away. He cast off memory, ambition and any notion of loss in exchange for this. The world was white—the wind itself, the cliff, his hands raised to his task. He let go of his name; he was a being in a world of blowing snow.
He reached the fixed rope and hung from it in the wind, which rose still higher. He had trailed a rope and he tied it off for Sigi and Roland to follow. He carried on up the remaining fixed ropes, now hearing voices above him. He pulled up over the last bit of climbing and the world seemed to float up beneath him; the white sky rose to assume an ordinary shape, a familiar low dome, which he associated with the wing of some huge bird. He staggered like a voyager who steps onto a beach.
There were people here. Chris and Mick had given up on climbing the West Ridge; they had taken a helicopter up the mountain two days ago. The landing had been a precarious undertaking in the deteriorating weather. They had dug a snow hole near the summit and waited through the rising storm with growing doubts about the fate of the five climbers on the face. Members of the German expedition had meanwhile come up the West Ridge to join the greeting party or help form a rescue mission.
Jörg and Günther had already reached the summit and the others had come out to them. Dougal approaching the top of the face saw the figures of various young men; they appeared and disappeared in the blowing cloud that swathed the peak. The figures milled about pointlessly, calling to one another in their respective languages, their voices caught up and carried off by the wind even as the cold seeped into their gloves and boots and froze their fingers and toes; it was some hellish garden party.
Chris came across in the wind to greet Dougal and lead him to the snow hole, where he gave him a mug of coffee. Dougal had not seen Chris since before John’s death—exactly when he couldn’t remember. He sat shaking and staring at Chris out of a haggard, wind-burned face, his cheeks raw, his eyes red and tearing in the sudden quiet of the cave. His gaze brought to mind a wolf, a child raised by wolves.
Roland and Sigi arrived and so the five summit climbers were all off the face. Chris and Mick had dug their snow hole for four people; it now held eleven young men. They occupied it with hunched backs, limbs jumbled and shifting. The silence filled with their breathing and their shouting as they lifted their voices
in a blur of exhaustion and relief that held undertones of regret and also of fear: some of them were very worried about their partly frozen hands and feet. They spent the night in the cave; the storm made the descent via the West Ridge too dangerous. They ran short of air and poked shovels through the entrance to avoid suffocation. Some of the climbers slept.
Chris and Dougal talked. John’s family—his parents, Marilyn, the children—had buried him that morning in the cemetery in Leysin. His death made him an outsider—he was missing this—and Chris and Dougal held it against him. Their own ruthlessness shocked them. They didn’t talk about that. They exchanged stories of what they had endured and seen. Chris had been very worried that Dougal and the Germans would die in the storm. Their survival and their success made John’s death seem less like a sign; perhaps it was simply an accident.
Harlin was at any rate gone. The loss made Chris aware of the others, those who remained. It was now some fourteen years since he’d come upon Hamish in that climber’s hut in Scotland. A sort of fellowship had taken shape. Chris and Hamish were in the circle; so were Don Whillans and Ian Clough. Mick Burke and now Dougal Haston had made their way into it; the circle silently widened to encompass them, even as it closed to fill the space where John Harlin had briefly appeared. Others, acquaintances or strangers, haunted the periphery; circumstances might at any time exclude them or else enlist them in whatever work was ahead.
Chris, as he lay stormbound in the near-silence of the summit cave amid the other exhausted climbers, considered their shadowed, sleeping bodies with interest and a fierce affection, with gratitude for this moment and with longing for whatever was to come. It was as if they had arrived to pursue some purpose he cherished. The task remained invisible—it might be that these men or others like them would teach or deliver it to him.
PART TWO
Men
In the curious playgrounds of their sport, mountaineers learn what primitive people know instinctively—that mountains are the abode of the dead, and that to travel in the high country is not simply to risk death but to risk understanding it.
—ROBERT REID, Mountains of the Great Blue Dream (1991)
Everest, Southwest Face.
KEIICHI YAMADA, CHRIS BONINGTON PICTURE LIBRARY
8
CHRIS BONINGTON WENT from the Eiger to the London Hospital. Doctors there spent six weeks successfully working to save three toes that had turned black during his vigil at the Eiger’s summit. Dougal Haston was a fellow patient, recovering from frostbitten fingers.
Both men had emerged from the Eiger ordeal with enhanced reputations and prospects. The Eiger story had been widely followed in Great Britain as well as on the Continent. Dougal was now famous as the only one of the Anglo-American party to complete the Eiger Direct—now known as the Harlin Route. He received scores of letters from fans, mostly females entranced by his brooding looks and modish clothes. He was now, in fact, established as a cult figure on the climbing scene: Jim Morrison in crampons. He had taken over John’s mountaineering school in Leysin, and the publicity was good for bookings there.
Chris had received less publicity, but his work had given a strong boost to his hopes of making a career as an adventure photojournalist. The Daily Telegraph had offered him a new assignment—to explore and photograph a remote and highly active volcano in Ecuador. Bonington said good-bye to the London doctors, went home briefly to pack—and to say good-bye to Wendy and young Conrad, now a toddler—and was off again.
A month after his release from hospital, he was sorting through gear at Base Camp in Ecuador when he turned and saw an Indian enter camp at a surprisingly rapid trot. The Indian looked stricken. He had crossed the rain forest with a message for Bonington, whose first thought was that something had happened to Wendy. Chris was afraid to open the envelope; when he did, a collision occurred—his relief to discover that his wife was alive smashed, wavelike, into his horror at the news that their child was dead. He sagged and fell to his hands and knees on the muddy ground and sobbed as the messenger and the Indian porters looked on in sympathetic but alien silence. The expedition leader, an older man named Sebastian Snow, ran to Chris and held his shoulder and spoke to him. The kindness in his voice made Chris ache unbearably for home. He longed for Wendy and for the child he would never again see or touch.
He set out for home that afternoon, walking silently through the jungle alongside his Indian porters. The party hired horses at a way station, and rode on in darkness toward the nearest road. Chris understood that he would not sleep until he was with Wendy—he could not stop himself from trying to imagine her suffering during the week that had passed since the death of their child. Chris sat on his horse as the animal moved through the night; every moment brought him nearer to the world where this bewildering loss had occurred.
He reviewed the facts as he rode. The story seemed so unreal as to offer some hope that it was untrue; that this nightmare could be an elaborate mistake. Wendy and Conrad had been visiting Wendy’s friend Mary Stewart near Glasgow. The little boy—he was two and a half years old—had wandered off to play with Mary’s children near a stream. Children had played happily in the place for years; the stream was ordinarily a trickle—but on this day it was swollen from a recent rain. Conrad had fallen into the water and drowned. Wendy had been the one to find him.
She was waiting for Chris at Heathrow. They were very young, and each meant to survive their terrible loss. They understood that their salvation lay partly in how they behaved toward one another. Their family happiness—so different from what Chris had known as a child—had made them vulnerable to this great wound, but almost from the first days of their bereavement they hoped to invent and share some new version of joy. They drew upon this mutual desire for the strength to comfort one another.
Chris resumed his climbing after a time; he was drawn to it as to a balm for his unyielding pain. He thought to lose himself in movement and in the touch of rock and the smell and colors of gear and rope, the sight from some ledge or low Lake District summit of trees spread across the immediate world. He made one climb with Tom Patey that summer. Patey was a character. He was Scottish, a medical man in private life. He was the boldest of climbers—he specialized in making new winter routes under horrible conditions—and a cheerfully obnoxious companion. He was also a writer of satirical climbing ballads as well as surprisingly elegant semicomic essays for the climbing club journals. He knew as did everyone of the Boningtons’ loss, and when a decent interval had passed he called and asked Chris to come along for the first ascent of the Old Man of Hoy, a crumbling sea stack in Scotland’s Orkney Islands.
The Old Man was a spectacular feature, soaring out of the surf near the cliffs like a primitive, decaying monument to some forgotten god. Chris took pictures on the route—including a good one of Patey, cigarette dangling from cheerful, sneering lips—and led a pitch near the top, swimming smooth and fearless up a crack, the rope hanging free from his waist to the feet of his partners. His grief was still terribly new and immediate; he awoke to it not every morning but rather at each new hour. This awareness swept away certain fears. He felt not so much self-destructive as self-abandoned, as if he had left behind his identity as someone with something to fear.
The Telegraph sent him hunting with Eskimos on Baffin Island that winter. He returned home in time to be with Wendy for the birth of the couple’s second child, Daniel, on April 25, 1967. The BBC had meanwhile agreed to broadcast a new assault on the Old Man of Hoy. The network arranged an extravaganza, engaging a platoon of Scots Guards to ferry tons of equipment to the top of the cliffs overlooking the column, and hiring six climbers to climb three different routes. Chris and Tom Patey would rope up on the original route. Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis would attempt a new line up the South Face of the column. Pete Crew and Dougal Haston would try to get up the overhanging Southeast Arête. Hamish MacInnes came along, too; he would handle some of the camera work.
The broadcast, aired live in th
e summer of 1967, was a huge hit—perhaps the most widely watched climbing film since the one that documented the 1953 first ascent of Everest. Chris—with his youth, his upscale accent and his earnest desire to appeal to his audience—made an especially pleasing impression on the millions of viewers who tuned in. For the young climber, the broadcast was yet another step toward public recognition that could make it easier to attract support for further projects or expeditions. Tom Patey liked to tease Chris about his ability to attract valuable publicity; some climbers were starting to resent it.
Chris and Wendy had moved to a new home in the Lake District; the previous one held too many memories of Conrad. Chris now decided that the region itself was too remote. He needed to be closer to other climbers as well as editors and other potential clients. The couple looked in London, but they recoiled from the noise and the traffic as well as the high rents. Driving back up to the Lakes from the city after a depressing day of house hunting in early 1968, they stopped near Manchester to visit friends—a young climber named Nick Estcourt, and his wife, Carolyn. The Estcourts had recently moved up from London to the Manchester suburb of Cheshire. The neighborhood was attractive and affordable, especially compared to what Chris and Wendy had just seen in London. It wasn’t terribly far from the city, and it was within striking distance of climbing in both Wales and the Lakes as well as the nearby Peak District.
The Boningtons were intrigued. They did some looking in the area, and that summer they settled on a modest fixer-upper in the South Manchester community of Bowden. Wendy was left to oversee renovations while Chris traveled to Africa for his latest assignment; he was to report on the Great Abbai Expedition’s attempt to descend the Blue Nile.
