To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  When I returned home from Antarctica I committed to a couple of things. From here on out, I would do what I could to make every expedition more pleasurable. I would participate in the camaraderie.

  The next thing I did was pick up the phone and call Gina Eppolito.

  Gina’s mother, I later learned, was born in Paganica, Italy. Gina’s father was Sicilian. And Gina was born in Brooklyn, New York. So she was a first-generation Brooklyn Italian. This meant two things.

  First, despite being only five foot four and standing lower than a lunch counter, Gina could still shoulder her way up to the front of the line, shout out her order, and walk out of the deli with her sandwich ahead of all those guys who towered over her.

  Second, she could squeeze seventy-two minutes of activity into every hour.

  Along with those two qualities came a tenderness and generosity and, of course, a desire for adventure, which is what took her to Everest in the first place.

  And there were a few more things, completely unexpected, highly unlikely similarities between her life and mine. Like me, Gina was the youngest of three siblings—her two sisters were nearly the same ages as my two brothers. She too had suffered through the loss of a close family member to cancer. She was raised by a single parent, a determined mother whose firm spine, like my father’s, was forged by the Great Depression.

  I would discover, eventually, that it wasn’t these similarities that would draw us together; it would be the differences. But for now, and for one of the first times in my life, I started a relationship that was more than just a way to fill my evenings.

  I asked her years later why she agreed to go out with me, after I had made those insulting comments about her photography while we were on Everest. She replied in a way that was so consistent with her character.

  Gina was a marathoner; on one of her training runs for Boston she ran twenty miles in a cold sleet, coming home dripping and numb. And so she saw something interesting about me, despite the thick exterior. She had stood at Everest Base Camp and seen the snow blowing furiously off the summit, thrown a half mile out into the sky. The drive that got me there appealed to her.

  But that wasn’t all. She confessed that there was one more thing that led to her seeing me again. It was something that would be a lasting difference between us. It was her notion of fate.

  Gina was in the darkroom with a friend the day she developed the picture she took of our climbing team at Base Camp. She had dropped the photo paper into the basin of chemicals and in the dim red light she watched the images begin to emerge. The climbers started taking shape, details of faces, gear, the tent slowly coming into focus on the thin white sheet.

  She pulled the paper out of the chemical solution and held it up for a closer look. Her friend leaned in and asked about the people in the picture.

  There in the bottom right corner was the climber who had made the comments about her pet photography. Without knowing why, but with complete certainty, she pointed at me.

  “I have a feeling I’ll know him for a very long time.”

  The next summer, in 2001, I traveled to Alaska with Tom Paxton to climb the highest peak in North America.

  The peak, Denali, is a native Alaskan word meaning Great One. It’s a boastful name, but entirely appropriate since it does in fact have a massive vertical rise, higher than Everest. Everest peaks at 29,029 feet, the highest point on the planet, but its base sits on the Tibetan Plateau at roughly 17,000 feet, giving it a total vertical rise of roughly 12,000 feet. The base of Denali, by contrast, sits at 2,000 feet, giving its mammoth block of granite a total rise of 18,320 feet.

  There are a variety of routes to the top of Denali. Some are isolated, require careful planning, precision, and leave one exposed to the elements. There are other routes, like the West Buttress, that are easier, populated by other climbers, and a more social scene. A year earlier, before my Antarctica experience, my pick of route would have been different, but now I chose the West Buttress.

  One of the first climbers that Pax and I met on the route was Mike McCabe. He was wearing a pair of worn college gym shorts, grinning, bare-legged in the cold bite of a breezy ten-degree day. An energetic scrappy Coloradan, he had recently sold his company, MakeTheMove.com, and was now spending his days in the mountains.

  According to Mike, his company had managed to survive the dotcom collapse of April 2000 for a good reason. Most of the dot-coms back in 2000 were speculative, thin concepts hoping to explode into an actual product. By contrast, he actually had a business plan; he provided a genuine service. If you were planning to move, you could go onto the site, type in your old address and your new address, and with a push of a button it would cancel your newspaper, phone service, and utilities, and restart them in your new location.

  I appreciated Mike’s business plan; I could relate. I had moved fourteen times over the previous twenty years. Sometimes I would move to a different state, other times across town. One time I moved forty feet down the hall just to get an apartment that had a bit more light.

  But all that was in the past, and on this expedition I was about to learn the value of community.

  A climber doesn’t spend much time actually scaling the West Buttress of Denali. Most of the time is spent hauling freight up and down the mountain performing the familiar routine of establishing camps and supply caches.

  One of the biggest one-day pushes on the route requires hauling a load of supplies about three thousand feet up the mountain. The sky was thick with clouds the morning we had planned to make that push. We knew it would storm, but if we waited for the weather to blow over we could lose three days and be behind schedule. The day’s haul wasn’t a technically demanding section of the climb, and so without any discussion we pushed on.

  Climbing has its glorious moments where the strain and labor of the day are rewarded with a sense of tremendous physical achievement or a spectacular vista. This was not one of those times.

  The next few hours were tiresome, we were little more than pack animals, trudging mindlessly up the mountain. By the time we had ascended two thousand feet, the snow was coming down hard. The weather wasn’t worrisome; all of us had climbed through far worse storms. Still, the storm was annoying, requiring more and more effort to punch through the accumulating snow.

  As the day wore on we found less to talk about, heads down, feet driving forward, all of us focused on getting the pile of supplies up to the next camp. I started thinking about the fifty pounds of gear that I was dragging up on the sled behind me, scrolling through the items one by one in my mind. Why did we bring the coffee press? Those refinements are fine at a low camp where the Twin Otter had dropped us off, but why drag it up here? And did I really need the down footwarmers? I had imagined casually sipping freshly ground coffee, enjoying the cold night air, feet in the down warmers resting on top of my pack.

  I had gone from being a stripped-down-to-the-basics climber, to loading my duffel bag with luxury items that could transform a desolate camp into a Four Seasons experience. My determination post-Antarctica to keep these climbs entertaining had gotten the better of me, starting with the French roast.

  When we finally arrived at the cache site, the snow was falling hard, visibility had dropped to a dozen feet. It was late afternoon, hours later than we had expected it would take to get to this point, and we still had to dig a four-foot-deep hole in the snow to bury and secure our supplies.

  Mike, Pax, and I dropped our packs and stared down at the snow. No one spoke; the minutes ticked by.

  It had to be done, we had to spend the next half hour in mindless digging, an inglorious mountaineering moment. We picked up our shovels and slammed them into the snow.

  I was annoyed, pure and simple. The day had deteriorated into the common drudgery of hauling and digging.

  I tossed a load of snow over my shoulder and drove the shovel back into the hole.

  Another load over the shoulder, another plunge back into the hole.

  How
could anyone ever enjoy doing this?

  Toss. Plunge.

  I’m pissed off at this hole.

  Toss. Plunge.

  “Bring it, Slake.”

  Evidently, I had been saying those thoughts out loud, and Pax was now joining in.

  “Get angry, amigos. Channel it. We can use it.”

  Toss. Plunge. We were all in a rhythm now.

  Toss. Plunge. All angry. All digging ferociously. All with a shared purpose.

  In just minutes we had dug down four feet. Within another fifteen minutes the supplies were in, the snow piled back up, a marker in place. That was one of the most productive bouts of anger I have ever had.

  And it was clear, at that moment, standing over a hole that my friends and I had dug in record time, that I was better off with them than without them.

  We arrived back in camp a couple of hours later, moving quickly, having lightened our load by the nearly two hundred pounds we had deposited in the hole. As I approached my tent, I realized something was missing. Before leaving that morning I had sunk my ice axe into the snow, right by the front flap of the tent. Now it was gone.

  I had an attachment to that axe; it had been with me for every mountain I had ever climbed. It was one of the most dependable pieces of climbing equipment I owned.

  There were a dozen other climbers at the camp and I asked around to see if anyone saw who grabbed it. I got no leads, but I did get a common response: “Drag. You’re going to need that to summit.”

  Indeed I would. There are a couple of steep sections to the climb and the ice axe is a key safety device. The axe allows for self-rescue in the event of a fall. A climber sliding down the mountainside can slam the teeth of the axe into the snow as a brake. Without it, the slide continues unabated to its inevitable conclusion, depositing the climber in a broken pile at the bottom of the mountain.

  Whoever took my axe knew that. They knew that they were pulling out of my hands a critical piece of safety equipment. They would know it would be too risky for me to continue up without it. When they pulled my axe out of its parking place near my tent that morning, they killed my chance to summit.

  Then I started to have doubts.

  This could never have happened in Antarctica, because only our team was on the mountain so there wouldn’t have been any outsiders thieving gear. And if I hadn’t picked this social route on Denali, and had instead followed the solitary path, this would never have happened. It seemed that being disconnected, detached from other climbers, provided a certain measure of security and control.

  My new, more social approach to climbing was being put to an immediate test.

  I don’t remember the name of the climber who walked by me at that moment, heading down the mountain. I should remember, after all: two weeks later I would be filling out his name and address on a FedEx package.

  “Hey, man. What’s up?”

  “Someone stole my ice axe. No one at camp knows who took it.”

  “Drag. You’re going to need that to summit.”

  Another fruitless conversation.

  “You know what, dude? Take mine. I’m on my way down the mountain. I’m done with it.”

  It says something about me that it never occurred to me to ask a descending climber if I could borrow an axe. It seems so obvious now, but it didn’t then. In fact, I might have turned and gone back down the mountain if it wasn’t for that climber, thoughtful and generous, holding out his ice axe, offering it to me.

  “Got a pen?” he asked.

  I wrote down his address and promised to ship it back to him the moment I got back home.

  “I hope you have more luck with it than I did. I didn’t summit.”

  We shook hands and he continued on down the mountain. The next day I continued up.

  A few days later Mike, Pax, and I were standing on the summit of Denali. It was nearly cloudless, only a light breeze blowing, a comfortable ten degrees in the sun. An animated world stretched out past our feet, down the crags of snow-covered granite, across a radiant glacier, and on into the lush forest that filled the valley floor a dozen miles away. There was a full palette of colors, all visible, all vibrant.

  We turned and followed our tracks back down the ridgeline to camp, fulfilled.

  It was the goodwill of that climber—his sense of shared purpose, his desire to assist in someone else’s time of need—who made that summit possible and allowed me to tick item number 6 off the To Do List.

  I would soon develop my own sense of shared purpose. In a few months’ time, I would dodge a bullet that would hit someone else in the back and forever change her life and mine.

  Chapter 6

  The AMBUSH

  Bullets from a Steyr assault rifle can tear through the side of a jeep as if the doors are made of paper. They cross the next few inches to the passenger in fractions of a second. As the lead contacts the human body, its heat vaporizes the skin, then burrows forward, splintering on the bone, breaking into a hundred pieces that penetrate the organs and then cool into hard blackened flakes.

  I would come to understand all this in the jungles of Indonesia.

  By the summer of 2002, I had only one mountain left on my surfing and climbing To Do List. But I hit a snag: there is contentious debate over where that last high point is.

  I had stood on the summit of the highest mountain in Africa, South America, Europe, Asia, Antarctica, and North America. What was the seventh continent? There are two possible answers: Australia and Oceania.

  If the correct answer is Australia, then the highest peak I had left to climb was Mount Kosciuszko, which stands at 7,310 feet. If Oceania is the answer, then I would climb Puncak Jaya in the jungles of West Papua, New Guinea, Indonesia, with an elevation of 16,024 feet.

  Which is it? Since my surfing and climbing record was dependent on the correct choice, I decided to do some research.

  The Seven Summits had become a well-established activity by this time. A few devotees maintain diligent records of the people who succeed, carefully documenting the dates and peaks. I consulted the list and found that previous climbers were no more certain than I was about the definition of the seventh continent. Three lists are maintained: climbers who summit the peak in Indonesia, climbers who summit the peak in Australia, and climbers who are so uncertain that they summit both just to be sure. Since those lists didn’t settle the matter, I searched other sources.

  Here is what you will find if you look up “continent” in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

  con•ti•nent

  Pronunciation:

  Function: noun

  1 archaic : container, confines

  2 archaic : epitome

  3 : mainland

  4 : one of the six or seven great divisions of land on the globe

  Look hard at definition #4. “Six or seven”? This is not the kind of authoritative clarification I expected from a dictionary. If I looked up “penny” would they say “a piece of copper with one or two sides”?

  With the dictionary waffling, the next natural online resource to check was Wikipedia.

  In Wikipedia you will at least learn that there is a vast area of the earth called Oceania, although, they explain, “the boundaries are defined in a number of ways.”

  “In a number of ways”? That’s no help.

  I could think of only one way to settle this.

  At one time in my life there was a source of information that I never had reason to doubt. It was always reliable and eternally authoritative. I unquestioningly accepted whatever a teacher neatly spelled out on the wide expanse of an elementary school chalkboard. So to settle the matter of whether the seventh continent is Australia or Oceania, I consulted a sixth-grade geography lesson plan.

  As it turns out, in sixth grade, or thereabouts, we were taught that the seventh continent is in fact “Oceania.” For example, from one lesson planner:

  OCEANIA, the smallest continent, is one of the most diverse and fascinating areas on the plane
t. Collectively it combines all of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, as well as the thousands of coral atolls and volcanic islands of the South Pacific Ocean, including the Melanesia and Polynesia groups and Micronesia, a widely scattered group of islands that run along the northern and southern edges of the Equator.

  That settled the matter: the seventh continent is Oceania, not Australia. I would climb Puncak Jaya, not Kosciuszko.

  I’ll admit, Puncak Jaya was the mountain I had wanted to climb in the first place because Kosciuszko seemed so unfulfilling. That peak in Australia got its name from the first European to lay eyes on it, Count Paul Edmund Strzelecki, who gave it the name because he thought it resembled the Kosciuszko Mound in his native Poland.

  After years of scaling cloud-splitting peaks I did not want to complete the list by climbing something that got its name from a mound.

  With the peak selected, I picked up the phone and called Mike McCabe to see if he would join me in an expedition into the jungles of Indonesia.

  “Sure. But how do we get to the mountain?”

  “We’ll work that out,” I said, thinking it would be trivial.

  There are drawings on a cave in China, dated to around 400 BC, which show men climbing rocks. This has been interpreted to mean that climbing is an inescapable part of the human experience. I have a slightly different view. I think it means that for the last twenty-five hundred years there have always been men who have had too much free time. And they get into trouble because of it. I certainly did.

  Traveling to Indonesia comes with a risk. Since achieving its independence from the Dutch in 1949, Indonesia has been the stage for guerrilla warfare, military assaults, and massacres. Every decade brings another disaster. There were mass killings in the 1960s, thousands killed in a street protest in the 1980s, bloody violence in East Timor throughout the 1990s. And now the U.S. government posts travel warnings highlighting the emergence of terrorist training grounds.