The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  Joe made his way to Delhi. He found Dick in a hospital there. The standard of treatment was very poor, and Dick had resolved to fly back to England—an extravagance that betrayed the depth of his concern for his hands. That left Joe to make the drive back to England. Joe took on a passenger who could help pay for gas. The van caused endless trouble. Joe traded it for bus tickets, piling onto the bus in Kabul with the expedition’s fourteen pieces of luggage. The bus driver drove for days without sleeping. The passengers asked him to stop and rest and he refused; when they insisted, he pulled a knife and waved it at them. Another time, a passenger became hysterical, claiming to be Jesus Christ. Joe worried that border officials would take the young man for a drug user and make trouble for the other passengers.

  Joe abandoned the bus in Istanbul and bought a ticket on the Orient Express. He traveled now with an English lady, perhaps sixty years old, and an American girl. Joe slept for much of the journey, which was itself like swimming up to light from the last stages of a nightmare. Once, nearing Paris, he woke to a memory of Changabang—that enormous wall of milk-white stone.

  15

  CHANGABANG HAD BEEN an almost spectral presence during the days on Dunagiri. Joe and Dick had labored in its shadow in the early mornings. The huge white tower had loomed across the void like a ghostly witness, knowing and unknowable, its soaring contours a reminder of all they could not accomplish or understand.

  Joe after leaving those mountains spent hours trying to imagine himself on Changabang’s West Face. He tinkered at his idea at first like a child might tinker at making a bomb; it was not possible but it interested him. And after playing at this for a time he lost any sense of whether it was possible or impossible. He would go back and try to climb the face.

  He needed a partner. Dick couldn’t come; it wasn’t yet clear that he would keep all of his fingers. And so in the winter of 1976 Joe went to see young Peter Boardman, disillusioned and bored at his desk at the shabby offices of the British Mountaineering Council.

  The two young men had known each other only as acquaintances, but now their experience in the big mountains had left them scarred and needful in ways they didn’t bother to disguise from each other. They weren’t looking for friendship or love. Each man needed someone who shared this imperative that grew and pressed upon him from inside, so that he knew he must do whatever was required or this suffering would continue and grow worse.

  Joe spoke to Peter of Changabang’s West Face. Peter was at once entranced; he immediately agreed to make the attempt. This venture would be nothing like the previous year’s Everest expedition. It offered engagement with something entirely unknown. No expedition large or small had climbed a Himalayan route as technically difficult as this one looked to be. The idea that the two of them could do it had arisen seemingly from nowhere. The idea would not have attached itself even to Joe if he had not encountered Changabang in the context of his suffering on Dunagiri.

  A successful ascent of Changabang’s West Face—a wall that Bonington and his team had dismissed as impossible in 1974—would compare with any previous achievement in the world’s mountains. But the climbers felt that the nature of their engagement could have nothing to do with succeeding or failing; it must arise out of and sustain itself upon blind expectationless effort.

  Joe and Peter met at Joe’s house and studied photographs of the wall. They saw no obvious way to climb it. They consulted Doug Scott, who had studied the face at close range in 1974. He told them he thought it was probably too difficult to climb but he wanted to come with them and try.

  Joe turned him down. Doug would bring another set of ideas to the climb, another way to see the experience; his judgments and his wishes might muddy this task, this pursuit. Even now Joe could not defend the climb—not to climbers apart from Peter, not to potential sponsors or donors of gear. Joe’s notion of climbing the West Face of Changabang was an indulgence of a primitive need that had no claim on anyone but himself and now Peter. The expedition stood at odds with the needs of institutions and other climbers. Joe liked it that way. He meant to insulate the expedition from agendas that would blur his unthinking desire to engage the wall—a wish that had become a part of him, so that to turn even partly away from it would be dishonorable, a blurring of his integrity.

  Joe and eventually Peter understood the expedition as a pilgrimage, an act of faith that arose from a sense of their own emptiness. This emptiness made them light; it made them desperate yet sure of themselves.

  They raised a total of 850 pounds: from the Mount Everest Foundation; from Peter’s employers at the BMC; from the Greater Manchester Council, which wanted to support two local boys. That left about a thousand pounds to come from their own pockets. Peter continued his committee work with the BMC. Joe worked at nights in a cold storage warehouse, loading frozen food onto trucks.

  Joe lived alone; his life in some ways drew its pattern from the seminary. His motives for living this way and for this climb eluded him. He wasn’t sure why he chose to suffer as he did. He wondered if he should do something else. He was afraid of more pain, some ultimate failure, some blame or waste.

  Joe and Peter climbed together on the weekends. Joe climbed badly; he was distracted and also weary from his job at the warehouse. Peter climbed well. They were hard on each other from the beginning; they pushed and prodded each other. They were learning about one another, trying on various definitions of a partnership. They were determined not to mind things in ways that would interfere with the two of them getting up Changabang’s West Face.

  Other climbers knew Peter from his BMC work. They liked him well enough, but he stood apart from them in ways that Joe did not. Peter showed an earnest and touching interest in other climbers—as if he wanted to know what they knew and yet was half-convinced that such knowledge was beyond him. Joe decided that Peter was in some ways a careful person, something of a diplomat, someone who knew how to hang back and be tactful and end by having his way.

  Peter for his part had felt his life getting away. Changabang was a raft drifting by on a current. He set aside his memory and his possessions to gather his intention and to time his leap.

  Joe had a girlfriend but she found out about the Changabang trip—he hadn’t told her—and she left for Australia. Peter took Joe around to meet his parents as though to solicit their blessing upon the union between their son and this stranger. The couple—they were in their forties—sized Joe up and eyed him apprehensively, as if they knew him for a fanatic. Joe went alone to visit his own parents in their modest council house. He had long since ceased to notice his mother’s blindness in her presence, but her sightless eyes as he said his good-byes seemed evidence that what he sought existed—a world unknown.

  THEY WERE FLYING out; they had booked a flight to Delhi for August 22. They spent the night before their departure at the London home of Charlie Clarke. Charlie was the young doctor from Bonington’s Southwest Face expedition the previous year. His wife, Ruth Seifert, was pregnant, but she liked the two boys, and she came with Charlie to see them off at the airport. Four of Peter’s friends were there. Joe had never been on an airplane; a forlorn-looking young woman arrived to say good-bye to him.

  Pete and Joe wore their double boots and down parkas onto the plane; it saved the cost of shipping them. The good-byes left them momentarily hollow, but those feelings gave way to thoughts and images of the mountain that awaited them. The images had a simple clarity that shored up the notion that Pete and Joe had not failed at the task of making ordinary lives and connections, that on the contrary they were casting themselves loose from a world that had failed them.

  Things went smoothly in Delhi. The climbers met their liaison officer—Flight Lieutenant D. N. Palta, a pilot in the Indian Air Force—on August 26. The lieutenant found the climbers’ obvious poverty disconcerting. Joe and Peter shopped for food and saw their sixteen pieces of luggage onto a steam train; the train carried the little party to the village of Hardwar. The climbers now found
their way onto a series of buses. The first bus carried wayfarers making the pilgrimage into the mountains; other pilgrims walked the margins of the road, which wound its spectacular way along crumbling rims of vast gorges. The driver and his passengers chanted prayers and talked in tones at once matter-of-fact and hysterical of the horrible accidents that routinely occurred—eight or nine in the previous year—on this section of the journey.

  Joshimath, 2,000 meters above sea level, was blessedly cool. Joe and Peter spent several days there, sorting loads for porters. Joe found it strangely reassuring to revisit the place where he had suffered so much during his illness the previous year. The sight of the place undermined an irrational but growing sense that his expedition to Dunagiri had never occurred, that he had dreamed it, that Changabang did not exist. This time he was able to take in the stupendous scenery that surrounded the town. Jagged, mud-colored mountain walls allowed views across to distant snow peaks. One night Joe and Peter went with Lieutenant Palta to an Indian film. The three men sat near a small boy who sang along with the film’s music. The sound of his singing would stay with Peter. The two climbers bought nuts and ate them in the dark. A light came on. The bag swarmed with grubs. Some lie had been unraveled; they were finished with civilization for a time.

  They met a trekker—this one was named Hans—who for the sake of the adventure agreed to accompany them to the mountain and stay for a few days to help with camp chores. Another short bus ride took the party to the village of Lata. They hired fifteen porters and set off into the Rishi Gorge. They climbed four days, passing through meadows alive with lupine. They crossed streams swollen with monsoon rains and run-off from the high snows. They used their hands on the steeper and muddier slopes. They glimpsed Nanda Devi one day. Peter thought this brief sight of the mountain was reason enough to have come to this place.

  Four days of this, and Lieutenant Palta wanted to quit. He couldn’t eat the climber’s food. He was unhappy at the prospect of living alone at Base Camp while Joe and Peter climbed the mountain. Joe had no patience for the man. Peter felt sorry for him. The lieutenant was a distraction; the climbers told him he could go when he liked.

  They meant to reach Base Camp that day. Lieutenant Palta stayed for that. The party arrived at the Rhamini Glacier and the view up to Changabang. Joe was surprised and grateful to discover that the mountain was as he had remembered it. Peter had not seen Changabang in the flesh before. His first sight of it brought to his mind the image of a shark’s tooth.

  They arrived at the site Joe and Dick had occupied the year before, for Dunagiri. Here they said good-bye to Lieutenant Palta—there were no hard feelings, only shyness and relief on both sides. They paid the porters and said good-bye to them as well. Lieutenant Palta and the porters left; only the trekker Hans and the two climbers remained. It seemed to Peter that he was no longer in India—nothing here was strange to him; he was back in the mountains.

  Hans stayed for two more days. Joe and Peter saw him off. Now they began to ferry loads to Advance Base Camp on a tongue of glacier near the bottom of the mountain, some two thousand feet above Base Camp. It was a good walk with their thirty-five-pound loads. The walk became familiar to them, almost comfortable. They made the round-trip in the mornings, and rested in the afternoons. Peter annoyed Joe by making long diary entries. The diary seemed to Joe a witness in this place, which otherwise seemed to render him invisible.

  They made their first foray above Advance Base Camp on September 16. They hoped to establish a camp on a ridge that seemed to lead onto the West Wall. They climbed unroped on snow and then onto a sheet of ice six inches thick. The ice made sounds that frightened Peter but not Joe. It was as if they had decided that they couldn’t afford to be afraid at the same time.

  They continued higher. They were climbing now, coming to grips with the mountain. They were reminded of its size—it had lost the tame quality that it seemed to possess in photographs. The climbers were not in the sun yet. Peter’s toes were cold; he had tried a new arrangement with his socks and it didn’t work.

  They reached the ridge and now the climbers grew colder. The mountain’s North Face loomed to their right. Peter felt its darkness as menace; his dread rose in him. They would try to stay clear of that wall. They made their way up the ridge in the wind and staggered into a vision; Peter felt himself bathed in the newness of it. The glacier camp had been in a hollow that cut them off from their surroundings—from views of mountains he had dreamed of seeing. Joe seemed unmoved. He carried these peaks in his memory—had seen them from Dunagiri. He associated them with suffering.

  They dug a ledge for a tent on the ridge just where it joined the West Face. The new camp—Camp One—offered a view of mountains in all directions but one. The remaining aspect offered only the wall, rising skyward like a great Buddha, serene and unattached.

  They returned to Advance Base Camp for more supplies and a second tent. They ferried those things back up the ridge on September 17 and returned to Base Camp for the night. They rested and discussed their eventual descent route. They could go up and over the peak and descend Bonington’s East Ridge or they could follow their own route back down the West Wall. They had consulted Bonington himself. He had advised them to descend the East Ridge. Chris had changed his mind later, but Joe and Peter had decided that they would try to descend his ridge anyway.

  They made two last carries to their ridge camp—on September 19 and 20—picking their way up the ice field that creaked beneath their weight. Camp One now held enough rope and gear and food to keep them on the mountain for another fourteen days.

  THEY CLIMBED AND fixed rope every day, returning to their separate tents on the ridge each night. The weather held. They made progress sufficient to tempt them higher. The going was hard. The rock was granite, sturdy and reassuring under their hands and boots; some days it seemed to give them strength.

  Pete cooked in the mornings while Joe lay in his sleeping bag. Joe managed the cooking at night. They took turns leading. Each climber led four consecutive pitches. Some pitches took a long time. One climber might spend a full day or longer in the lead. His partner at the anchor would sit or hang in his harness and pay out rope that snaked slowly up into the fog that often sheathed the peak. The wind made it difficult or impossible for either man to hear the other’s shouts. The rope might lie motionless in the second’s hand for an hour, increasingly dubious evidence that the other climber existed. Then it would move again and the leader would finish the pitch and build an anchor and fix rope for his second to climb.

  They came to a series of overhangs after two days. Peter led into them. He made slow going. He found moments of exhilaration in peering over yet another ledge or past a corner to a new place. He reached a crack and worked a sliver of a piton into it—the piton like a table knife, an alien sliver of metal in rock. He stood on the pin and the world shrunk to this scene; all moments led to this. The rock’s past bled from it, staining Peter; he felt black with the rock’s long unknowing. He scraped snow from rock and found a hold and weighted it. He felt inside him all he had to lose—stale things in a paper bag; he could do without them. He muscled up onto a slope of snow, aware of how it fell away past him to the abyss at his back.

  Joe paid out rope in the cold. He grew angry. It seemed to him that he was always angry. Lieutenant Palta had made him angry. Peter made him angry: why should Peter climb so well and with such steadiness of mind and then fret about trivial matters—the size of the ledge where he slept, backing up an anchor that didn’t need it? Joe knew his anger would make it impossible for him to properly praise Peter’s lead into the overhangs and he felt shame at his weakness.

  Peter got two pitons in at the top of the pitch and only now noticed that it was snowing. He shouted down to Joe. The snow was heavy. Hail began to fall. It was only midafternoon, but there was nothing to do but go down to Camp One on the ridge. The descent was soon accomplished; they hadn’t climbed far in three days. The storm ended as they approached
their tents. They could speak to each other without shouting. Sun blinded them.

  The next morning they rose and climbed the fixed ropes to their high point. Peter grew warm as he jumared up a frayed yellow rope. He was getting used to the exposure, but at moments he experienced a ridiculous thrill—a sense of getting away with something. He felt this now and as he did the world seemed to give way and he fell; it was like being sucked out of a window. He fell backward past rock and saw glacier and he had time to think that the rope had snapped. Something stopped him. He hung upside down from his jumars; they would be biting into the sheath of the rope. A piton had pulled—not the anchor itself, but a subsidiary pin meant to direct the line of the rope. He knew the one; he had placed it himself the previous day. He’d fallen 20 feet but the wall was so steep that there had been nothing to hit.

  Peter made his way back up the rope past the lowest of the overhangs. He took the lead at the top of the fixed ropes, moving carefully over a huge block. He hammered a piton into a crack in a roof and clipped a sling to the piton and stood gently in the sling. When the sling held, he felt like shouting.

  Joe watched Peter climb out of sight. He held Peter’s rope and thought of sitting in the hollow of a dry river near one of their campsites during their approach to the mountain. He recalled how the trees and the hollow itself had seemed to shelter him from time. He had gone to the riverbed to think and plot but he’d lain back in the dead leaves and slept away part of an evening to awake entirely calm—but he was not calm now here on this sloping shelf of snow and rock. He was an ant on a countertop; there was no hiding. He grew cold waiting for Peter to finish.