The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  The next call was Lord Hunt, who wanted to know if she’d had a call about Mick. She said yes but that it was all right, that she didn’t believe it. Lord Hunt said that he was afraid that it was true. Wendy Bonington reached her a half-hour later.

  And even now Beth wasn’t convinced, but she turned on the television. Mick had been sending film back to the BBC and now they were telling what had happened to him. He’d walked into the clouds and hadn’t come back. Beth had the thought that it must be true; it was on the television.

  She went through a strange period after that. She wouldn’t answer the phone and she wouldn’t call anyone because if the person on the other end of the line didn’t answer it felt like another loss. She got up every morning and went to the bathroom and threw up. She believed that Sara was all right, but she looked at pictures later and saw that the little girl looked haunted.

  Beth meanwhile moved in a straight line or thought she did but sometimes she saw—with a dazed amazement—how badly it hurt her feelings that he wasn’t coming back. It was like he’d left them for somebody better—like they hadn’t meant that much to him. Once, two months after she’d had the news, a police car pulled up across the street. She saw them through a window and knew at once that they’d come to tell her they’d found him, that Mick was alive.

  AND MICK, HE moves up the ridge toward this summit of dreams. The mist obliterates the view but not really; he knows what is around him. It begins with the features of this mountain, the snow he walks upon, massed strangely here at this odd borderland. He walks carefully. He can’t hear much either; his breath echoes in his mask.

  It doesn’t matter. He knows what’s out there: more of the same, more of the beauty he has known elsewhere, at home and in the mountains and in the faces of his companions—how he loves them. He thinks of Peter and Pertemba waiting for him down at the South Summit. They are representatives, appointed escorts for the return trip he must make when this is done.

  He is glad to be alone now. He knows that underneath the snow he walks upon is sky; the blue he’s enjoyed only in dreams and in the mountains. And this mist is merely a curtain; he can lift a corner to peek at infinity, and what a joy it is—what fun—to know that this invisible blue is the blue of God.

  Mick keeps taking steps. He is bloody tired. Chris was right about that. Mick is touched to think of Chris and his concern for the rest of them. But look at this. Mick’s on top.

  He still can’t see and now he is afraid. There’s nothing to film except the flag that he can’t even find. His feet are cold and his fingers have gone numb. Frostbite is a worry at this point and so is finding the ridge again; it won’t be easy in this white wind. This place is empty. There is no arrangement to make and nothing to negotiate or witness. He needs to leave.

  He finds the ridge—very careful here—and sets off down, aware of the several things that can happen. He can step through the cornice and fall all the way to Tibet. He won’t hit anything for a while; it’s just a near-vertical sheet of snow. He wonders, thinking of it—he can’t feel his feet now—how does the snow stick to the face at such angles?

  If he falls he’ll pick up speed, no time to figure out anything. He thinks of Beth and the child but he can’t be a child himself now. He squints again, looking for the cornices. It wouldn’t have to be a cornice, either. He’s walking on wind slab that could give way and carry him off. Or he might just fall. He can’t change the snow conditions and he can’t stop here. He carries on carefully down the ridge until his figure blurs and disappears.

  A bit later he dreams that he opens his eyes; he doesn’t know where. His grief packs his mouth and his throat and freezes his face and neck. He struggles for breath, for coherence. He made a mistake and he is ready to forgive it, but there is no apparent need. He’s grateful for that but he is distracted. He is swimming in a blue, blue light—it reminds him of something—and the snow keeps falling; the flakes touch the ocean and vanish.

  PART THREE

  Legends

  He goes because he must, as Galahad went toward the Grail, knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life.

  —EVELYN UNDERHILL,

  MYSTICISM (1911)

  K2, Abruzzi Ridge.

  CHRIS BONINGTON, CHRIS BONINGTON PICTURE LIBRARY

  14

  A YOUNG CLIMBER named Joe Tasker stopped by the Manchester offices of the British Mountaineering Council one day in the winter of 1976. He was looking for Peter Boardman.

  The two young men knew each other, though not well. They’d met in 1971 when they were both in school. The recent ascent of Annapurna’s South Face had delivered thrilling evidence that the British were once again at the forefront of international mountaineering. Thus inspired, Peter had gone out to the Alps that summer with Martin Wragg, his best mate and regular climbing partner. They had knocked off the North Face of the Matterhorn and gone on to Chamonix to tackle another test piece, the Northeast Spur of Les Droites.

  Peter and Martin had camped on a little rock in the middle of the glacier that led up to the base of the spur, and from that vantage point they’d watched another pair cross the glacier late in the day. Those other two had started up the route itself to bivouac on the climb. Peter and Martin had risen early the next morning and passed them around dawn, hearing voices through the flimsy walls of the bivouac tent.

  The route was heavily iced. The conditions had forced Peter and Martin out onto the mountain’s North Face. They had made a miserable hanging bivouac that night, and had turned back the next day, a thousand feet below the top. It was a terrifying descent, chopping holes in the ice for rappel anchors, the exposure tremendous.

  They had come upon the other two climbers—Joe Tasker with his regular partner Dick Renshaw—on a ledge. Those two also were descending and the two parties agreed to join forces. The encounter cheered the four young men. They stood chatting idly, relieved at having company, until a huge block detached from the face and swept past them—it actually brushed Joe’s pack—frightening them and bringing their attention back to the job at hand.

  They’d finished the retreat. Joe and Peter hadn’t seen much of each other since then. The two young men were from very different worlds, and climbing had led them down different paths—but those paths were about to converge once more.

  PETER WAS A middle-class boy, the younger of two sons. His father was an engineer, and his mother taught school. His mother also was a writer of sorts; she kept a detailed journal of her life, including Peter’s childhood. He’d grown up near Stockport, a small town near Manchester, attending the local grammar school. He had done his first climbs on a school trip to Corsica when he was fourteen years old. That was 1964. He joined a Stockport climbing club two years later, a few months after Dougal Haston and the Germans climbed the Eiger Direct.

  Peter was a natural rock climber. By the time he enrolled at the University of Nottingham in 1968 he was one of several candidates for the unofficial title of England’s best young rock climber. Peter teamed up with a slightly older Nottingham student—Martin Wragg—and the two of them made several trips to the Alps, where they put up a few new routes.

  They put together a four-man expedition to Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush in the summer of 1972. They had hopes of climbing Koh-i-Khoaik, a remote and—as it proved—formidable objective. The four climbers left Base Camp with two days food. They were gone for five days. There were opportunities to turn back, but Peter wasn’t having it. The others were led on in part by his stamina and his unwavering confidence that they would finish the route. They’d flirted with starvation, and they had come close to drowning during a river crossing on their way back to Base Camp—but they’d managed to get up the peak. They’d also climbed the North Face of Koh-i-Mondi, an even tougher route that impressed climbers back home.

  Peter was ambitious as well as determined, but his drive was partly hidden. He was quiet; he had a literary bent—he read widely and like his mother he kept a journal. He enrolled in an
outdoors training course in Wales, where he also studied Welsh for a time. He received his diploma in 1973, and went to work as a climbing instructor in Scotland, in the Cairngorms. He had landed his job at the British Mountaineering Council in 1975—just when Chris was choosing the members of his second Everest expedition. Peter was good at his work, meeting with climbers to sort out issues such as training and safety and access. The other climbers liked him; he was articulate and tactful, and he had an easy confidence with a hint of reserve.

  And now Peter was famous. He had shared in the publicity that had engulfed the Everest climbers upon their return from the peak several months before. Chris had cemented his own position with the public as British mountaineering’s leading figure; he’d launched a series of lectures and slide shows and in between his travels he would retreat to the Lakes to grind away at another expedition book. Dougal Haston and Doug Scott were doing the lecture circuit as well. The two had become close on Everest, and they continued to climb together in Alaska and elsewhere.

  There were lingering questions about the Everest climb among the expedition’s survivors and in wider mountaineering circles. There was talk—some of it jealous—that the huge logistical effort had made the climb at once too easy and too dangerous. The more cynical critics maintained—not entirely fairly—that much of the route was a plod up fixed ropes, dragging gear up the mountain in service of Bonington’s career; that there was nothing much in it for Nick or Martin or most of the rest of the climbers—not the summit, not even much real climbing. Some of the critics added that the format of the expedition put too many bodies at risk in any given moment. Perhaps it was no wonder that two men—young Mingma and then Mick Burke—had died. The toll might have been still worse.

  That was one way to see it. Others dimly saw the expedition for what it was—at once a crowning achievement and the end of an era. Each climber had his notions. Peter’s own views troubled him. He was not comfortable profiting from his part in the climb. This was partly because of Mick’s death, and also because Nick Estcourt and Tut Braithwaite and Martin Boysen—let alone Pertemba—were largely excluded from the fuss that surrounded Dougal and Doug and Peter himself.

  Peter’s discomfort also reflected his knowledge that his own generation was inventing new ways to climb. They were beginning to climb difficult routes on big mountains in groups of three or four—or even one or two. These were climbers who had grown up with images of Bonington; they had wanted to be that young man in the photos, up there on a ledge on the Eiger eating tuna with a piton for a spoon. Now their own achievements made Bonington’s Everest venture seem outmoded.

  The public ignored the new generation’s accomplishments. It didn’t begin to understand them. But Peter knew what his most accomplished peers must think of the fanfare that surrounded the Southwest Face expedition and its central figures. He agreed with them. The crowds at Peter’s own Everest lectures distressed him. The people who paid to hear him speak did not understand. They thought he was something he was not.

  He returned to his job at the British Mountaineering Council to sit on committees and negotiate climbing access and certification standards. He was bored and unhappy. Occasionally, he would find himself back on the South Summit. He’d look up and see Mick’s gray form fade into white and he would wonder if that was for nothing.

  AND NOW YOUNG Joe Tasker stood there in front of Peter’s scarred and cluttered desk looking like what he was—an emissary from climbing’s cutting edge. Joe was quick-witted and sharp-tongued. He could be friendly enough but he was guarded; he meant to be nobody’s fool. Some of the other climbers didn’t much like him; he had a way of keeping you at a distance even when he was pressing you for information about a climb he wanted to do. His ambition was a bit too evident for some tastes; he didn’t always bother to hide or modulate it.

  He’d been born in 1948 during the lean years that followed the war, the second of ten children—each named for a Catholic saint—in Hull on England’s Northeast coast. The mother of this brood, a birdlike but strong-willed and deeply religious woman named Betty, was losing her eyesight by the time Joe arrived. She soon lost it entirely. Tom Tasker, the children’s father, also was very devout. He was a former merchant seaman. He supported the family by working as a painter and decorator, but he couldn’t always find sufficient work. The Taskers sent Joe and one of his brothers to live in an orphanage for several months when Joe was seven—an episode that marked them both and remained for many years a source of distress for the family.

  Joe went away again when he was thirteen. This time he went to study for the priesthood. He had liked being an altar boy, the solemnity, the sense of theater, and so he’d volunteered for the seminary, delighting his parents. The discipline there was very strict. There was a coldness to it that was hard to bear; you had to go a bit cold yourself to tolerate it. Joe wasn’t the best behaved of the boys, but he did what was required to get along. It was easier or at least more interesting than home in some ways. The teachers at the seminary would read aloud to the boys during meals. One of the teachers read from a book about a rescue on the Eiger. Joe and his fellow seminarians were riveted. Already another teacher—a rough-spoken but good-natured young priest named Tony Barker—had begun taking a group of them climbing at a nearby quarry and later in the Peak District. Early on, there was a walking trip to the Alps, but no climbing. Back in England, Father Barker would give the keener boys rides in his car to see climbers like Tom Patey and Ian Clough lecture in neighboring cities. It wasn’t official. Father Barker would just tell the boys he was going, and he would indicate that he wasn’t averse to picking up hitchhikers. He would drive out of the seminary and there they’d be, usually Joe and his special mate, a fellow climber by the name of Stefan; they’d stand there grinning at him. The boys would go their own way at the lecture. Father Barker would ignore them until afterward, when he’d pick them up again on the road.

  One time they were driving back and passed another teacher—a stricter man—walking in the rain. They had to pick him up; he’d know the car and ask questions and then Father Barker would have to tell the truth. And so they stopped for the man, who piled in soaking wet and saw the boys and wanted to know what was going on. And Father Barker looked at him and said: You want to walk, do you? And the fellow got such a look on him that the boys couldn’t help themselves; they burst out laughing, and then the teacher laughed as well. And Father Barker began laughing in his turn and sped on, driving them back through the rain in the dark, all of them carrying on fit to split.

  Joe was among the bolder climbers at seminary. He was soon soloing routes in the quarries and further afield, in the Lakes. He followed reports of John Harlin’s Eiger expedition in 1966, including the dramatic and shocking news of Harlin’s death. He stayed at seminary for seven years, and left in 1968, when he was twenty. His parents were bitterly disappointed; their Joe had been the oldest, the golden boy. A priest for a son: that was the blessing of blessings; now it was lost to them. But Joe later told more than one friend that he’d lost his faith—it was partly all the reading they made the boys do—and with it any interest in a life of celibacy: One day I looked down and I said, “Mate, I’m getting you out of here.”

  He spent a year or so working as a dustman—a garbage collector—to the distress of his parents. He also worked in a quarry—many of the local boys did that—but by then he was ready for more school so he enrolled at Manchester University. He brought to college his classical education and a determination to climb. He studied sociology. He had an interest in the lower orders of society. He remembered his blind mother doling out food to beggars when they came to the door of the Tasker’s modest council house. Joe spent some of his time at school taking pictures of homeless men. He frightened some of his family by making friends with a newly released prisoner.

  He had an intense, almost brittle manner at times; it put off some people and interested others. He said what came to his mind, and his intelligence gave forc
e to his comments. His own eyesight was poor, even with glasses; he sometimes strained to see, and it gave him a serious, even humorless, air that would make him seem more unhappy, less generous, than he was. People said Peter Boardman would make a good politician—they meant it kindly. No one said that of Joe.

  He would go to parties and drink and do hash or even acid and pick up girls; he liked having that kind of fun. But he combined such appetites with an impressive work ethic. He took pictures; he read and wrote—he was proud of the education the priests had given him. He was loyal to his family and friends, who knew him to be a kind person, considerate of others and hard on himself; he always came home for Christmas, and when he did he’d make the rounds of old schoolmates and their parents.

  He continued to rock climb. He was good at it—not as gifted as Peter Boardman, but as driven. He made a trip to the Alps in 1971 and had his first encounter with Dick Renshaw; they met at a campsite and did a few climbs together. Joe wasn’t much of a talker, but even he was impressed by Dick’s self-containment—the way he would sit for hours on a bivouac without speaking—and by Dick’s ability to deny himself even the smallest comforts. It seemed to Joe that his friend would have made an ideal seminarian. The two young men ended up sharing a ratty house in a Manchester suburb, subsisting on odd jobs and part-time teaching. They climbed difficult routes in Great Britain, and made a modest splash by getting up five of the Alps’ six classic North Faces during the 1973 season. They turned a few more heads when they made a winter ascent of the Eiger’s North Face in 1975.

  Peter knew—every serious climber knew—what Joe and Dick had done next. The two young men had traveled alone to India in the fall of 1975—while Peter was with Chris and the others on the Southwest Face of Everest—to make a spectacularly bold attempt on Dunagiri (7,066 meters; 23,184 feet).