To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  Over the next two years I would summit Mount Elbrus in Europe and Cerro Aconcagua in South America. I was moving through the list with efficiency, this time not forming ties with the local communities that could produce nothing but distractions.

  I thought I knew who I was: confident in my attitude and foundation.

  Then everything changed.

  Chapter 4

  THE AMULET

  Most people probably expect the meaning of life to be housed in a remote monastery in the Himalayas, protected by an assembly of chanting monks. That’s a reasonable expectation. After all, I’m told that’s where I found it.

  When I was on my way to the Base Camp of Everest, our expedition passed the monastery of Thyangboche, the home of the Most Holy Rinpoche of the Khumbu.

  The monastery is the stuff of legend. The monks believe that when the Buddha was circling the earth looking for a place to make his home, he saw a mountaintop that offered a view of the most majestic peaks on the planet. The site was irresistible and the Buddha came in for a landing. Like an inexperienced pilot, he came in too fast, heels hitting the granite mountaintop and bouncing him off the ground and down the mountainside. He rolled to a stop thousands of feet below on the valley floor. Rather than taking flight and trying again, this time with a better approach, he simply accepted his fate and made his home at the mountain’s base.

  Centuries later, monks claimed to find the very piece of granite where the Buddha’s heels hit the mountaintop and they built the monastery of Thyangboche on that spot. As we walked up the ancient stone steps into the sanctuary, there in front of us was a bulge of granite with two deep six-inch-wide depressions, the imprints, the monks explained, of the Buddha’s heels, his faulty landing gear.

  We entered the private prayer room and, draped in a red robe, a counselor by his side, the Rinpoche sat cross-legged. With a face like soft brown Play-Doh, his heavy eyes staring out through large round glasses, he waved us in.

  The Rinpoche has staying power. According to his followers’ best estimates, he has had at least six reincarnations spanning three centuries, and he’s been living at Thyangboche for most of the last one hundred years. As far as I can tell, he’s spent most of that time sitting on a cushion.

  We were there for a blessing, a ceremony that the locals, the Sherpas who were supporting our expedition, insisted must be done to insure the best possible outcome on the climb. We respectfully bowed our heads and the Rinpoche placed a silk scarf around each team member’s neck.

  It’s not every day that you get to meet someone who’s been meditating for three hundred years, and I realized I wanted to make the most of the opportunity. This was a chance to ask him the big question: what is the meaning of life? I didn’t want to ask it so crudely, not in a hackneyed way that might make him roll his eyes and think I was clowning. So as the ceremony came to a close, I popped the question this way: “Can you give me an insight to keep in mind as I climb the mountain?”

  Evidently, I breached protocol. In the century that the Rinpoche had been sitting on the cushion, no one had asked him a question. The Sherpas were stunned, embarrassed by me, the thickheaded Westerner.

  The translator whispered my question to the Rinpoche, who paused in deliberation. Finally, he leaned into the ear of the translator and whispered a phrase. I prepared for an epiphany. The translator cleared his throat.

  “He’ll get back to you on that.”

  Three hundred years of deep reflection and I get a brush-off? There must have been some insight he could have offered. I would have settled for “buy low, sell high.”

  That evening, I heard rustling outside my tent. I pulled up the flap to find a young monk with a scarf-wrapped bundle from the Rinpoche. When I unfolded the scarf, I found an amulet, with the following letters freshly etched by the Rinpoche:

  I stared down at the letters, for how long I don’t know, but when I looked back up, the monk was gone and I sat alone in the tent.

  The next morning I went around camp searching for someone who could translate it for me. Our expedition was populated by Sherpas, any one of whom could read it, I thought.

  News of the amulet had spread across the camp and every Sherpa I walked up to would inexplicably cover his eyes and turn away.

  I asked my Sherpa friend Pemba what was going on.

  “This amulet is meant for you. It contains a powerful message, life meaning, and you must read it and keep it to yourself.”

  “That’s fine, Pemba, but there’s just one problem. I can’t read it.”

  He stared back at me expressionless; he didn’t see that as a problem. I tried again.

  “The Rinpoche gave this to me and wanted me to read it. So, by helping me translate it, you would be fulfilling the wishes of the Rinpoche. Right?”

  I doubt that Pemba was persuaded by my logic, more likely he was simply overcome with curiosity.

  I unrolled my fingers, exposing the amulet in my palm, and Pemba dropped his chin down for a look.

  “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know,” Pemba responded.

  “Who does?”

  “Nobody. It is written in old language.”

  “What do you mean, ‘nobody’? Obviously, the Rinpoche knows what it says. He wrote it.”

  “It is very, very old writing from scrolls,” Pemba explained. “We can recite, but we don’t know what it means.”

  The next day, Pemba took my amulet and sewed it up tight in a pouch woven from the fabric of a blessed scarf. He explained that I should wear it around my neck and not take it off, even if it itched. I obliged.

  And so I arrived at the Base Camp of Mount Everest with an unreadable message hanging around my neck.

  Everest is an expensive mountain to climb.

  When I was planning to climb the mountain, in January of 2000, the cost of a permit to climb the south side—the Nepali side as opposed to the Tibetan side—was $10,000. On top of that expense was the cost of two months of food, additional high altitude gear, and bottled oxygen. There were also the considerable logistics of getting all of that gear where it needs to be: Base Camp, at an elevation of eighteen thousand feet, reachable only by foot.

  Fortunately, I fell in with a team of climbers who had all the logistics worked out. Their expedition would not only climb the mountain but they had an associated mission to clean off the trash that had been accumulating ever since the first attempt to summit the peak more than a half century earlier. The high camps of Everest are inhospitable places and the last thing a climber worries about in a dicey situation is packing up the trash. Stoves, gas canisters, wind-torn tents, oxygen bottles, all of that litters the camps above twenty thousand feet.

  In order to accomplish the cleanup mission, the expedition was vast, bigger than any expedition in the previous fifty years: thirteen Western climbers, twenty-five Sherpas assigned to the cleanup, and another twelve Sherpas assigned to the climb. An additional fifty porters and one hundred yaks would get the gear to Base Camp.

  Despite its enormous size, the expedition team decided that they could accommodate a few more climbers and my friend and climbing partner Jim Williams was invited to join and he in turn invited me. And so, in early April of 2000, Jim and I flew to Nepal.

  The team came up with several methods for covering the expenses of the effort. They advertised the “unique opportunity” that, for a modest price, an aspiring adventurer could trek “to Base Camp with real Everest climbers.” Of course, that’s as far as any trekker would be allowed to go. Once we got to Base Camp, we would turn the trekkers around and send them home where they belonged while we continued on with the climb.

  Who would go for that? I thought. Why would someone want to trek along with climbers? I assumed no one would sign up. I was wrong. The team signed on fifty-three trekkers.

  I didn’t care much about the trekkers. I thought they were probably suckers for having fallen for the “unique opportunity” gimmick; they could have done the trek on their
own and saved money. So I didn’t want to be bothered by them; and I was sure they didn’t want to be bothered by me. I didn’t mingle; I had the mountain on my mind.

  Fewer than half of the fifty-three trekkers managed to make it to Base Camp. Exhaustion or altitude sickness sidelined the rest of them on the way up. They were left at lower camps and villages, to be collected by the trek leader on her way back down the mountain.

  When I walked into the mess tent the day we arrived at Base Camp, one of the trekkers, Gina Eppolito, was trying to corral our entire climbing team into circling up for a photo.

  I hated the idea.

  I don’t own a camera, and never plan on owning one. Photographs break the moment; they interrupt the flow. Besides, I am not one of those people who look forward to the day that I can sit back in a rocking chair and flip through a photo album, the faded yellowing pictures warming my heart. Instead, I want to be planning my next adventure, even if, in my later years, it’s nothing more than a card game.

  Earlier on the trek I had overheard Gina talking about her hobby: pet photography. There were a half dozen other trekkers sitting around her, laughing with her at the story of a dog owner who demanded to pose beside his poodle.

  “I told him the dog didn’t want him in the shot,” said Gina.

  I interrupt the laughing with a question. “Why do you take pictures of dogs?”

  “Why do you care?” she says.

  I thought I was the one asking the question. “So the dog is still alive, right?”

  No one is laughing now, they’re all looking back and forth at Gina and me.

  “Of course the dog is alive.” She can’t believe I just asked that. “Who asks for a picture with a dead dog?”

  Just as I thought. “Well if the dog is alive, why does the guy need a picture? There’s no point in looking at the picture; he can just look at the dog instead.”

  This was the first time I had spoken to any of the trekkers on the expedition. A minute ago they were laughing, now it’s dead silent. I let the quiet settle in. I had made my point. No doubt, I thought, they now all see how silly pet photography is. As I walked away, the conversation started back up, too hushed for me to hear a clear word.

  On the day she was corralling the climbers at Base Camp, I sat down for the photo. I remember being surly, annoyed, waiting to get it over with, simply accommodating her out of some sense of recognition that her check helped cover Base Camp expenses. I knew that after the photo was taken I would never see Gina Eppolito, or any of the trekkers, again.

  It’s a big world and what would be the odds of us ever bumping into each other again: one in a million? It wouldn’t happen.

  For the next few weeks we established our camps and acclimatized to the thin air, adhering to the mantra: “climb high, sleep low.”

  The best way to get accustomed to the lack of oxygen is to climb up a few thousand feet, sit, and breathe. Then, before nightfall, come back down to Base Camp and sleep in thicker air.

  Days would begin before sunrise. Strapping on crampons, packs bursting with gear, the sky heavy with clouds, we would exit our tents and climb a few thousand feet to establish a higher camp.

  By early May, the camps were all established, four of them, strung along the mountainside each one a few thousand feet higher in elevation than the last, loaded with the necessary provisions to allow one shot at the summit.

  With the camps established, the waiting began.

  Typically, the jet stream sits over the summit of Everest. You can actually see the stream, visible because of the snow it hurls from the summit, like smoke billowing off a chimney.

  It’s impossible to summit in the full force of the two-hundred-mile-per-hour jet stream. Instead, climbers wait for a weather window to open.

  Every year, typically in mid-May, the monsoons will start building in the Indian Ocean and start moving northward. That motion pushes the jet stream off the mountain. The wind dies down then and the summit becomes accessible. But that window of opportunity is open only briefly because as the monsoon continues moving northward toward the Himalayas it turns into a blizzard and starts dumping heavy snows that are impossible to climb through.

  That weather window—after the jet stream moves off the mountain, but before the blizzards settle in—typically lasts only a few days. So timing is crucial.

  If climbers attempt the summit too soon, then they have to turn around because the jet stream hasn’t completely moved off the mountain and the winds are still too strong. A climber on the fully exposed summit ridge would get blown off the mountain in the two-hundred-mile-per-hour gale. If climbers attempt the summit too late, then they will get hammered by a blizzard, pinned down in a half dozen feet of snow.

  Weather predictions are no more certain in the Himalayas than they are anywhere else in the world. While our expedition had the most advanced communication tent on the mountain, we were still left guessing as to when was the best time to go for the summit.

  Complicating the decision is a time lag. If everything goes smoothly, it typically takes three days to go from Base Camp to the summit. So weather forecasts have to be read with an eye toward the future, three days ahead. A forecast that may seem promising today may be a disaster at 10 P.M. two days later when you are strapping on your boots at Camp IV readying yourself for the summit.

  Despite all our advanced technology at Base Camp, despite getting updated weather printouts every few hours, in the end we would simply be making a guess.

  And so we waited, looking for things to do to fill the time.

  One of the climbers had brought a copy of the 1999 version of The Mummy. One evening we had a movie night for all the climbers and Sherpas on the team.

  The Sherpas had never seen a movie before. They also didn’t have any idea of what a mummy was, or a desert, or a camel.

  The Sherpas had spent their lives in the pastoral setting of the Himalayas, never having seen TV. On one cold night in May they took a seat in a tent and on a screen in front of them they witnessed skeletons emerging from walls, a gargantuan head of sand swept up from a desert floor, explosions, swarming beetles, a collapsing pyramid. And then, suddenly, it all came to an abrupt end with the two survivors kissing each other in the setting sun.

  There was complete silence in the tent as the movie ended and the credits rolled up the screen. No clapping, no cheers. The Sherpas were in a state of shock.

  One by one, the Sherpas stood up and quietly left the tent. The Sirdar, the head Sherpa, was the last to stand and before leaving the tent he turned to us and gave us his assessment.

  “This is very strange love story.” He shook his head and strolled out the tent into the crisp night air.

  That was the only cultural exchange I would have with the Sherpas over the entire five weeks I was at Base Camp. I didn’t ask about their educational system or consider ways they could improve their condition. I had been down that road and I was holding to the lesson I’d learned from that article I had written about Tanzania, Estomii, and Johnson: minimal interaction, focus on the climb.

  By mid-May nearly all the teams on the mountain had already made their attempts to summit. So far, no one had been successful. No one had hit the weather window at the right time, and everyone was returning exhausted. They were packing up and going home. The mountain was emptying out.

  At some point, you just have to take your shot, whether or not the weather appears to be cooperating. And so it was with our team. We folded up the forecast data, it no longer mattered. We had waited long enough; it was time to go for the summit. In the back of our minds, though it was left unsaid, we all knew that we would be climbing up into a storm.

  You can smell in the morning air when a team begins its summit attempt. To bring luck to the climb, the Sherpas will burn branches of juniper trees on the morning a team leaves Base Camp for its three-day summit run. I’ve been smelling the morning pyre of other teams for the last two weeks. Now it is our time to burn some juniper.
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br />   As we pass the branches smoking in the makeshift altar I fill my lungs with the sweet-smelling smoke. This is often a spiritual moment for climbers who pause, perhaps bend a knee, say a prayer to invoke whatever blessings they can muster to ward off tragedy and bring safety and good luck to them and their team for the next forty-eight hours of hardship and toil.

  It isn’t a spiritual moment for me. As I pass the altar, I put on my headphones and spin up “Calm Like a Bomb” by Rage Against the Machine:

  What ya say? What ya say? What ya say? What?

  Calm like a bomb

  Within a few minutes I’m out of camp and approaching the Khumbu Ice Fall. This will be the last time I will be going up the Ice Fall, thankfully.

  Even though it sits far below the summit, the Ice Fall is the deadliest place on Everest. More than on any other spot on the mountain, climbers have died here, among the towering blocks of ice scattered like a thousand refrigerators air-dropped by a passing cargo plane.

  A glacier isn’t a static slab of ice. It is in motion, a river of ice slowly, very slowly, sliding down the side of the mountain. The glacier on the side of Everest is more than a quarter mile thick in spots and it is estimated to move a few millimeters a day.

  The glacier descends smoothly from the summit until it reaches 22,000 feet, where there is a dramatic one-thousand-foot ledge. When the glacier reaches that point, as the massive sheet of ice slides forward, the ice hangs out over the ledge until it snaps from its own weight. Like a broken branch exposing shards of wood, the broken glacier leaves sharp, enormous, lethal slabs of ice scattered about the ledge, creating the Ice Fall.

  The climber enters into the Ice Fall, surrounded by the towering multi-ton blocks of ice that have split off the glacier as it bends over the ledge. The blocks sway, tilt, tumble, and can crush a climber. Over a period of a week, the route up the Fall will change dramatically, shifting around newly formed walls and blocks. There is only one good way to manage the risk: move quickly. The less time spent in the Ice Fall the better.