To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  “You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough.”

  I would follow Louis’s suggestion and keep working my life, my one shot. And in continuing to work it, I would find out, in just a few months, that things were not as settled as I had thought.

  The amulet was about to reveal its meaning.

  Chapter 10

  THE AMULET DECODED

  The sign says Ostad. Is that it?”

  I’m talking to myself, and I can’t answer my own question.

  I steer the rental car over to the side of the road, pull the sheet of paper out of my pocket, and look at it again:

  It’s in my own handwriting so I can’t be misreading it.

  “This says Ustad. Did I write it down wrong?” No one else is in the car; so another question goes unanswered.

  I look back up at the sign: Ostad.

  One thing I’ve already learned in just the forty-five minutes I’ve been on Vestvågøy Island, Norway, is that towns have similar names. This is not a familiar concept when you are from the United States.

  The piece of paper in my hand also says that the turn for Ustad is thirty minutes from the airport. I’ve been driving longer than that but in the pouring rain the driving is slow so that particular instruction isn’t helpful.

  I decide to drive ahead and give it another fifteen minutes before I pull back around and see if Ostad was actually the right place. I’ll be late. It’s already after eleven at night and Knute, the owner of the fishing shack I’m searching for, was expecting me fifteen minutes ago. Ten minutes down the road I see another sign.

  “Unnstad?”

  My concerns about the global challenges brought me to Europe. I came to attend an international conference in Switzerland on global sustainability and for three straight days I did nothing but discuss water resources and recycling.

  Now I’m taking a break from all that. I traveled to Vestvågøy Island to do something that’s been hanging out there, left undone for more than a year. Like that last pea rolling around on the dinner plate, it’s time to finish it off. I’m in Norway to surf the Arctic Ocean and complete the surfing and climbing record.

  This final item didn’t come without controversy. Geography continued to be both an ally and a pest right down to the last item on the To Do List. While the definition of “continent” created confusion years ago when I was determining what mountains I would climb, I had thought the oceans would be a settled issue. Not so.

  There was a time when mapmakers were deeply uncertain about the world. Six hundred years ago, they weren’t sure what, if anything, existed beyond the oceans. A boat that ventured out too far could drop off the edge of the flat earth, tumbling into who knows where. To convey this uncertainty and firmly establish the risks, a mapmaker penned dragons into the corners of the map, their cheeks puffed up like bellows, the fire spewing out across the mysterious edges of the ocean. This was no subliminal message, it couldn’t be more direct: beware, dragons are about.

  I assumed that mapmaking matured once we realized that the earth wasn’t flat, when we discovered that the oceans have boundaries that butt up against other continents. But no, geographers still haggle and muse. There is one elementary question that geographers still don’t all agree on: how many oceans are there in the world?

  Initially, I tried to settle the matter on my own. I first checked the Merriam-Webster dictionary and found this:

  ocean

  Pronunciation:

  Function: noun

  Usage: often attributive

  Etymology: Middle English occean, from Anglo-French, from Latin oceanus, from Greek Ōkeanos, a river thought of as encircling the earth, ocean

  Date: 14th century

  1a: the whole body of salt water that covers nearly three fourths of the surface of the earth

  b: any of the large bodies of water (as the Atlantic Ocean) into which the great ocean is divided

  2: a very large or unlimited space or quantity

  That wasn’t any help. The word “large” isn’t precise and “whole body of salt water” doesn’t tell me how many oceans there are. I was off to a bad start; I had to look elsewhere and the next two sources created even more confusion.

  Here is the definition according to YourDictionary.com:

  ocean: Four principal geographical divisions: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, or Arctic Ocean

  And here is the definition according to TheFreeDictionary.com:

  ocean: Any of the principal divisions of the ocean, including the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Antarctic oceans.

  So which is it: four or five oceans? Is there, or isn’t there, an Antarctic Ocean? I couldn’t live with the ambiguity. Settling this was critical to the surfing half of my record.

  As it turns out, the only reason that some maps show an Antarctic Ocean is that in the spring of 2000, the International Hydrographic Organization established it on a 27-to-1 vote, with 40 abstentions. That is not much of a mandate; 40 voters obviously had something better to do with their time.

  I admit I didn’t want to surf in Antarctica. I had no desire to return to that lung-freezing deprivation tank. Thankfully, the National Geographic Society made its own cartographic assessment and in the Atlas of the World, 7th Edition, there is no Antarctic Ocean. That was authoritative enough for me. I struck surfing Antarctica off the To Do List.

  With Antarctica off my list, that left me with just one last item: the Arctic Ocean. Finding a place to surf there turned out to be more manageable than expected, thanks to continental drift.

  When South America slammed into North America a few million years ago, a gulf stream was redirected northeast, eventually creating a remote beach on Vestvågøy Island, Norway, that runs about ten degrees warmer than anywhere else in the Arctic Ocean.

  I had identified that beach and had been waiting for an opportunity when I would be in Europe and could fly there. The conference in Switzerland was my chance. It took four flights to get from Geneva, Switzerland, to the small town of Leknes, on Vestvågøy, just north of the Arctic Circle. Each flight was on a smaller plane than the last; if I needed a fifth flight I would have had to ride on the back of a seagull.

  It’s nearly midnight when I pull up to Knute’s house.

  He knows I’m coming, although we’ve never met; we’ve never even talked on the phone or exchanged e-mails. I’m here on the recommendation of a Norwegian, a Vestvågøy native, who now lives in the U.S., a connection that I had stumbled upon.

  I knock on the door, try the handle, and swing it open.

  The house is comfortably modest, welcoming. The furniture is basic, and despite the thin cushions on the sofa, it still looks relaxing. The most noticeable item is the long, low freezer that sits in the middle of the living room.

  A tall, gray, bearded block of a man strides in with thick slabs of cod in his hands.

  “You are Francees,” he says, the words rolling out with a distinct Norwegian rhythm like notes from a lilting musical score.

  I’m expected. No one else would be walking into his remote house at midnight. “Yes, I am. And you are Knute?”

  “Yes. Excuse me while I put away my feesh.” He balances the mass of cod in one hand as he lifts up the freezer top.

  Knute walks me down to the fisherman’s bunkhouse. There’s no need for a flashlight, the sun still sits at about thirty degrees above the horizon throughout the night.

  I drop my bags in a room that has six plank beds, stacked in twos like the berths of a boat. At another time of the year, these bunks would be filled with cod fishermen, all resting before going back out on the water for another run.

  With one sniff of the air, I can tell the bunkhouse gets heavy use during the high season. The smell of fish penetrates into the wood of the bunk beds, through the walls, it even fills the thin flower-patterned curtains.

  Perhaps a hardy Vestvågøyan, back from a long trip to a city in the United States, would delight in filling his lungs with this
air, familiar and thick, the smell of fish welcoming him home. But to me, the smell is overwhelming, noxious.

  Once inside my bedroom, I take the ChapStick out of my bag and lay a thick smear under my nose, and fall asleep to the scent of menthol.

  I don’t waste any time the next morning. This would be the end of a ten-year journey to surf and climb my way around the world. There is no point sleeping in. I drive directly to the beach to have a look at the waves. I don’t need to stop for a cup of coffee; my eagerness to finish the journey is enough to keep me wired all day long.

  I pull the car up to the end of the road, swing my feet out onto the sand, and walk over a bluff to the beach. After a decade, this last moment had arrived, the journey finally coming to an end. I stare out at the ocean.

  The water is as flat as glass. Lake Arctic. There is no thought of turning around and going home; I would come here every day until I got it done. Two days later the waves arrive.

  If you ever find yourself surfing the Arctic Ocean, here’s a tip: don’t borrow a wet suit from a Norwegian. Those people have massive feet. The wet suit boots I borrowed are so loose that my toes feel as if they’re soaking in a bucket of ice water.

  Thinking back over the last twelve years, cold feet only ranks about a 2 on a 10-point “get me the #$!% out of here” scale. I had been through worse while I worked on the surfing and climbing record. Suffering a tongue-lashing in Estomii Molell’s dung hut registered a 6. Getting shaken down by Indonesian soldiers ranked a 7.

  Certainly the worst of it all, the level-10 moments, were those horrid gym workouts that pureed my muscles but drove my resting heart rate down to a low, but necessarily efficient, 39 beats a minute.

  There were plenty of terrific times to balance out those bad ones. Above all, there was meeting Gina on Everest. And there were so many others along the way. I even remembered that shell I had picked up off the sands of Lake Namtso in Tibet.

  I’m thinking about these experiences as I paddle out into the Arctic Ocean to ride the last wave on the To Do List.

  I wish I could say that I remember that instant when I popped up on the board and pointed the nose of it down into the trough of the wave. But it wasn’t memorable.

  Why not? Why can’t I remember that last wave? For a simple reason: surfing—and climbing—were no longer the things that mattered. Years ago this had stopped being about the board and crampons. What mattered now were all the events that surrounded the ice and snow and waves.

  So I’m not thinking about the record as I ride that last wave. Instead, I’m thinking about all the people that I have met, how all the stories of the last twelve years fit together. And I finally see the arc of it all.

  I step out of the surf and onto the Arctic sand, my feet sloshing in the borrowed boots. I didn’t feel joy at that moment, not precisely. It wasn’t satisfaction or pride either. Instead, for the first time in my life, I felt restored.

  As I unzip the wet suit I realize something that first began that moment years earlier when I turned away from the rock wall of El Cap, faced outward, and watched the broken cot float over the redwoods of Yosemite Valley. I saw the world and shared in it that day.

  Decades ago I had heard my mother tell me to be strong. But I hadn’t listened carefully enough. True strength, she was saying to me, comes through embracing others despite the loss that may follow. It was all so evident, I recognize it now, in the grace of my father’s bent arms as he carried her down the hall that day.

  We embrace. We suffer loss. We embrace again and live.

  And so it is now, as I complete the surfing and climbing record, that the purpose of the letters on the amulet finally becomes clear.

  It had started with a question: “Can you give me an insight to keep in mind as I climb the mountain?”

  The Lama had paused, staring at me. Whether he decided at that very moment, or in the hours that followed, he knew he would be handing me an amulet etched with letters that I would never be able to translate. Perhaps the Lama even knew, as he sat on his cushion in his solitary prayer room, what I just now, after ten years, have come to realize: the letters don’t matter.

  What mattered was the world of stories that would eventually surround the amulet.

  The universe is clothed in formulas, but it speaks in stories. And we need to be attentive, mindful, of the words.

  There is warmth and humor, tragedy and heroism, despair, frailty, and challenge in the stories of the world. And there is always a way to participate, restore a torn page, shape the story, and, if necessary, with enough will, turn it toward something better.

  Of course, you don’t have to take my word for any of this. As Lama Kinle observed:

  Do not believe because it is written in a book. Do not believe because it has been handed down for generations. If after observation and analysis, if it agrees with reason and can benefit one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

  The amulet has served its purpose.

  AFTERWORD

  The Rage Against the Machine album The Battle of Los Angeles is hammering in my ears, fortifying my pace, whipping up adrenaline as it has for more than a decade. I drop down off the pull-up bar, my muscles burning, much sooner than they used to.

  As I cross the gym floor to get a drink of water before the next exercise, a new band kicks in. It’s an album by the Gaslight Anthem that I had downloaded just a week earlier. It’s ideal fuel to propel me through the next half of the workout.

  The singer’s lyrics rasp through the headphones:

  Like Miles Davis

  I’ve been swayed by the cool

  That’s appropriate. Those lyrics are my tale too.

  I’ve been swayed. Every pillar has now fallen. The last one fell when my wife gave birth to our twin girls: Zaida and Kinley. No doubt the day will come when I will cut brownies with Zaida, my mother’s namesake, or perhaps spin a prayer wheel with Kinley, the Lama’s namesake.

  As I bend over the water fountain I feel a tap on my shoulder. I pull out the earphones and turn around to see a friend.

  “Slake, what are you training for now?”

  My answer is immediate:

  “For whatever comes next.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Rob Weisbach showed me that I had a story to tell, Priscilla Painton helped me to tell it, and Gina Eppolito ensured that it would eventually have a respectable ending. Throughout my journey, I benefited from Jim Williams’s valor and Mike McCabe’s humor. And I am forever grateful to Patsy Spier for sharing that first cup of coffee and the many more that followed.

  My life was reshaped by dozens of people on the rocks of seven continents and the shores of four oceans. Thanks to them, I found my way home.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Francis Slakey is the Upjohn Lecturer on Physics and Public Policy at Georgetown University and the Associate Director of Public Affairs for the American Physical Society. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Gina, and their twin daughters, Zaida and Kinley.

  My mom, Zaida Sojos-Vela, in the early 1950s, before she left Ecuador for the United States. She died when I was eleven. “Be strong” was her final message to me, but it took me thirty-five years to understand what that meant.

  The Slakey boys. Rog (standing on Dad’s right) and Joe (on Dad’s left) say it was my competition with them that made me want to climb and surf the world.

  On the way up Mount Everest, our climbing team visited the remote monastery of Thyangboche to receive a good-luck blessing from the Most Holy Rinpoche. This was where my climbing and surfing journey took its first unexpected turn.

  Every pile of stones in this remote plain is a memorial to a fallen climber and a reminder that the decisions made on mountains are significant and irreversible. Do I push through the storm or turn home? Facing those decisions is why I climb. Photo by Mike Farris

  The Rinpoche gave me this amulet, etched with letters that the Sherpas said conveyed “life’s meaning.” I would neglect it for years b
efore becoming determined to decode its message. Photo by Matthew Girard

  Jim Williams (foreground) and me at an Everest Base Camp blessing. The other climbers were attentive, but I tuned out, entirely disinterested in the spiritual ceremonies.

  I’m peeling off gear after summiting Everest in a blizzard in 2000. Just below the summit I encountered a Sherpa who had decided to sit down in the snow and die. His decision didn’t square with my worldview: push on and climb to the last breath.

  Our team is dug in, awaiting an oncoming blizzard in Antarctica. The sensory deprivation of that wasteland led me to consider why so many people found me cold and detached. Photo by Jim Williams

  After a quiet epiphany in Antarctica, I took a more leisurely approach to my next climb, the West Buttress of Denali, where beach umbrellas populate one of the high camps. Photo by Mike Farris

  Relaxing with Gina after a day of surfing in Bali, Indonesia. Within hours I would pick up a local paper and read about the ambush of Americans on a road through the Freeport-McMoRan mine. I had dodged a bullet: I had been on that road days earlier, traveling through the mine under cover of night to climb Puncak Jaya.

  Our mutt, Pemba, is named after the Sherpa word for Saturday, the day I got her from the shelter. She cleaned up nicely; eventually, I did too. The dog was a turning point with Gina. Photo by Gina Eppolito

  Gina and I return to the Thyangboche monastery for our wedding day.

  Our twin girls, Kinley (left), the Lama’s namesake, and Zaida (right), my mother’s namesake. Photo by Gina Eppolito