by Sharon Wood
It was noon by the time the slope’s angle eased and there was snow instead of ice beneath my feet. Knowing that a fall wouldn’t kill me now, I ran down the rest of the slope whooping and hollering, “I’m down. I’m down! Thank the gods!” I snatched up my jacket and an hour later, I stepped off the glacier onto the moraine and kissed the ground.
A few hours before, at the top of the mountain, I had said my vows and prayers: If I make it off this mountain, I will be satisfied and never need to do this again. I will appreciate everything and every day of life I have from this day on. Once I was safely down, I thought of what Laurie once said in a presentation I attended: “Climbing shows us that we are more than we know. We purposely climb ourselves into trouble—to a place where the only way out is through. It’s then, in the fight, that we discover more in ourselves.”
I now felt like I was more than I knew. But how long would that last before I needed to remind myself again? Not long, I discovered: I would solo the North Face of Ranrapalca two days later and then Carlos and I would do our last climb together and a new route on the Northeast Face of Huascarán Sur. I arrived home to a formal invitation to join the Everest Light team.
Chapter 10
Mentors and Muses
Blessedly, Jane is in the mess tent when I burst in panting from my sprint to escape Carlos.
“Whoa, girl!” she says, looking up from sorting a heaping pile of mail. She hands me my share of packages and letters. It feels like Christmas.
The first package I open is an early birthday present from Marni, who has sent me seven pairs of underwear, each one labelled with a different day of the week—the perfect gift. More than anyone else, she is the girlfriend who would know that laundry in a place like this gets done at best once every couple of weeks, and then only my underwear and socks in a bowl of warm water. I miss her as soon as I start reading her letter: “I hope, no matter how hard it may feel up there at times, that you remember how far you’ve come since you first told me you wanted to go to Everest with the guys.”
Marni was the first person I dared tell that I wanted to join the Everest Light team. “So, why don’t you ask?” she’d said.
“They might say no.”
“It sounds like you’re already prepared for the worst. So what have you got to lose by asking?”
Marni has been pushing me out of my comfort zone since we met in 1976 as co-instructors for a three-week mountaineering program. Marni, with her social work background, was good at talking, and I, with my climbing background, had stronger technical skills, so we stuck with our strengths for the first session we taught together. But then during the second three weeks she insisted we switch roles, and we coached each other through, becoming fast friends.
Another package contains a couple of cassette tapes with recorded letters and playlists from my boyfriend, Chris. We’d first met on that avalanche safety course in 1979. He was a wicked womanizer and full of himself, and I didn’t like him much then.
But late last fall, we’d met again by chance in an airport waiting for the same flight. Carlos and I had just broken up, and I was on my way to Vancouver to visit my folks. Chris had recently spent three weeks in the hospital learning about insulin use and getting stabilized after being diagnosed with late-onset juvenile diabetes. We found seats together on the plane and, by the time we stepped off, we’d planned the first of many romantic dates. Over the past winter, I’ve fallen for this now humbler man, and I store away these cassettes for the long carries up high when I will most need them. I will listen to them again and again.
In addition to personal letters and parcels, the courier has also brought a bunch of press clippings that Jane Sharpe of the Continental Bank has bundled together for us. After dinner that evening, we lounge around the mess tent table reading the articles about ourselves on Everest. It’s fascinating, but I’m not sure I like it. Over the past years, I’ve tried to escape all expectations except my own.
On the radio that evening, Laurie reports the day’s activity from Camp Two. It took Barry and Dwayne all day to reclaim the fixed ropes from beneath drifted snow and reach Camp Three. Then, after several hours of digging, they found our tent, buried behind two and a half metres of densely packed snow, destroyed. Exhausted by the effort, they retreated to Camp Two in darkness.
I am relieved to hear Laurie’s voice so strong and present on the radio that evening. He tells us he’ll put in another day with James carrying up to Camp Three, then take his rest at Camp Two and wait for my return. The boys have finished building the kitchen at Camp Two and claim it is ready for Jane to move up and turn it into our Advance Basecamp. From all the news, I assume I won’t be making another trip down to Basecamp until near the end of our time on the mountain.
Two days later, I head up to join Laurie and Dan at Camp Two. As I start out for the long day ahead, I insert the first of Chris’s cassette tapes into my player. His warm, gravelly voice greets me with, “Good morning, it’s a beautiful bluebird day here at Worlebury Lodge,” and I am transported to his log cabin above Alta Lake in Whistler. He describes his world after an overnight snowfall, the snow-laden peaks above, the rippling waters below. I can hear the crackling fire in his wood stove as he opens it to put in another log. I feel as though I am waking up with him. I can see the nameless resident cat lying in the sunbeam streaming through the window, smell the woodsmoke, feel Chris’s breath on the back of my neck. I had tried to expect nothing, steeled myself for him to move on, but I am relieved by the way he has come through for me. Chris gives me a life to look forward to once I return home.
He announces the playlist of the day: Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms. The first song up is “So Far Away.” This playlist and the one on his next tape, the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You, will help me more than I can know on many hard days ahead.
By the time I reach the cache I’m engulfed in Everest’s shadow. The upper mountain glows in a golden wash and the wind has eased to a light breath. I head up the glacier in the now well-beaten trough. Halfway along, I look toward Camp Two and see a lone figure standing on the rise above it. Laurie knows I am coming and has promised to watch to make sure I cross the glacier safely.
As I draw closer, Laurie announces in a commentator’s baritone voice, “Here she comes, ladies and gentlemen, the first woman from the western hemisphere to climb Mount Everest!” He takes my pack and drops it, exclaiming, “Jesus, what have you got in here, your cosmetics bag? I guess when you’re famous you never know when you’ll have to put your face on for those photo ops, eh?” He pulls me hard into his chest for a hug. And as the air expels from my lungs, I tell him that I’ve picked up another spool of rope at the cache on my way by.
We walk toward the cook shelter and I see half a dozen tents where there were just two on my last stay. The kitchen is now a pit hollowed out of the glacier and covered by a large orange tarp strung over a ridgepole, guyed out taut and anchored down with snow stakes and blocks of snow. A Canadian flag, waving lazily from two avalanche probes bound together, marks one side of the entrance. The other side is marked with the teddy bear skewered on a ski pole jabbed into the snow. I follow Laurie down five carved-out steps into the hole in the glacier.
Dan is sitting on one of the snow benches that line three sides of the pit. He looks up from the stoves he is tending and says, “Welcome to our humble abode. Pull up a seat and stay a while.” I smile when I notice for the first time that the motif of frolicking reindeer on his toque has them humping each another in a merry ring around his head. Two stoves that we had adapted to hang from the ceiling of our tents extend down from the rafters. Dan scoops a cup of snow from a nylon stuff bag he’s filled and dumps it into a steaming pot. “Nice place, eh? What do you think?”
I look up at the network of rafters and ridgepole rigged from skis lashed together with wire, rope and duct tape, and say, “Ingenious. Nice work, guys.” I add, “Jane will be delighted w
hen she moves up for the long haul.”
Dan holds a foil package. “That’s good cuz all we’ve got to eat up here right now is ‘silver surprise.’” Whenever he speaks, his overgrown moustache wriggles as if he has a furry animal on his lip. “I don’t know what you guys were thinking when you stripped all the packaging off these things. You can’t tell what you’re going to get until it’s too late.”
I smile to myself, pick up an unlabelled package and dangle it between us. “You see, Dan, seven months ago Dwayne and I imagined that we might all be getting a little bored with prepackaged meals about now. So, by removing the labels, every one we opened would be a surprise. Good idea, don’t you think?”
Laurie grins. I’m not usually so quick on the return, but Dan’s complaint seems trifling, given how Dwayne and I had scrambled to meet the Chinese authorities’ requirement to send our supplies for inspection six months ahead of the date we were to arrive. The two of us were in charge of packing and shipping, while other expedition members were responsible for ensuring various parts of those supplies were accounted for and sent to us at a warehouse in Calgary by the shipping deadline. However, the goods hadn’t been arriving fast enough—or at all.
One night, during a daily progress update by phone with Jim, who is in Toronto, I finally had to tell him that some of the guys were dragging their feet thinking the expedition wouldn’t happen because we didn’t have the money to get to China yet. They couldn’t see the point in getting the goods because they didn’t think we’d ever see our stuff again. I too had been considering other plans for the spring but hadn’t dared tell him.
“What?” Jim said. “You can’t be serious! I’ve been working my ass off and you say the guys are making other plans. Who are these guys?” He told me he would fly out the next day and directed me to get everyone together for a meeting the next evening. He said to tell anyone who couldn’t make it that they were off the team.
The next night Jim stood before us at James’s house and said he’d “been pounding the streets” looking for one more key sponsor to give us enough money to get to Everest. One sponsor! That it could happen any day now, but only if we believed it would. “I have promised anyone who will listen that we will climb Everest by a new route and in a style that will make them proud to be Canadians. So tell me now. Right now! Are you in or are you out? Those who’re in, get with the program because we’re going to Everest in the spring!”
The room fell quiet enough to hear a cat jump off the bed upstairs. If I’d ever had any doubts about Jim, I knew then we had the leader we needed.
After that meeting, everyone got on the phone to follow up with sponsors on their designated items. In the course of a few days the remaining supplies poured into that warehouse, along with volunteers to help sort, label, pack and ship five tonnes of supplies in the few days we had left to meet the deadline. We’d been in such a hurry then, ripping those silver packages out of their excess packaging and stuffing them into barrels.
“Yeah,” Dan says. “Well, so far we’ve figured out the smaller ones here are the desserts. Tonight, mine was peaches and Laurie’s was pears. They’re pretty good warmed up. These bigger ones are dinners. Laurie got the Hawaiian pineapple chicken and I got beef stew. What else have we got to choose from, do you know?”
I squish each of the four dinner packets he has handed me, trying to guess the contents. I recall selecting our menu very carefully. “We ordered twelve dinners, each some international dish. We also picked some blander ones for Camp Four and above. But we sealed those in a clearly marked bag. Don’t worry, though—they’ll still be a surprise.”
I drop one of the foil packages into a pot of boiling water and stretch out on a snow bench with my feet up while I wait for the meal to heat. And as Laurie resumes his explanation to Dan about firearm suppressors, I feel as content as that cat in the sunbeam at Chris’s Worlebury Lodge.
A few minutes later, I fish out my dinner, rip off the top and say, “Ah, what a surprise, it’s Szechuan for me tonight. See, isn’t this fun?” I squeeze out the ginger beef and noodles into a measuring cup and scoop a spoonful into my mouth. “Thank you so much, gentlemen, for toiling over a hot stove all day to prepare this for me.”
“Ha,” Laurie says. “Jim was right about the civilizing effect women have on a group of louts like us. Did you see how Sharon plated that meal instead of eating it out of the package? And did you hear what she called us—gentlemen? Dan, you’d never even think of thanking me, let alone call me anything other than dumb-ass.” He sits kitty-corner to Dan on the bench and looks at me. “All we do when you or Jane aren’t around is complain. You women notice things differently. Stick around and keep doing what you’re doing.”
When I finish, I scrape my plastic cup with my spoon and rinse it with a bit of hot water to clean it out. When I look around to dump the wash water, Dan points to the waste hole behind a bench.
Laurie passes me a bag of smaller silver packets. I pull one out and guess by feel that it’s cherries, and plop it into the pot.
Dan tells me, “Camp Three is a lot bigger than when you last saw it. I don’t know how long Laurie and James spent fixing it up, but they rigged a tarp over the cave to lie flush with the incline of the slope. You can seal it completely from inside or out.”
“See what I mean? I would never have heard Dan speak so nicely about the work James and I did if a woman wasn’t here.” Laurie nods at my cup, spoons the packet out of the boiling water and flops it into my cup like a fish into a boat.
Dan lets out a sniff of a laugh. “Yeah, and Laurie would never serve me like that.”
They watch me rip open the packet and squeeze the contents into my cup. “Well, what do you know, it’s a bowl of cherries.”
“Wait,” says Dan, rummaging through the mess of cans and food packets on the bench. He produces a can of sweetened condensed milk. “Try this on those cherries. You could stand to pack some more calories on that skinny ass of yours.” I dip the can into the hot water, empty the contents into my cup and dig in.
I drift off to sleep that night with a full belly and gratitude for my teammates. In anticipation of my arrival, Laurie tidied a tent up for me, airing out a sleeping bag and laying it on top of two sleeping pads. When I thanked him for the second pad, he joked, “I tried to find a third, you know, so I could put a pea underneath to see if you’re really the princess they say you are.” Dan may be imposing and gruff, but now and then he passes out a little veiled tenderness, as he did with the thick sweet cream for my cherries.
We know that our bodies, minds and spirits will dwindle with each day we spend at high altitude—that our ability to perform is finite—and we estimate that we are limited to another month, at best. By then we will have burned through any fat reserves and muscle, and the tedium of shouldering another load, day after day, will wear our resolve to nil. Although no one might admit it in such a way, we serve ourselves when we nurture each other. Our success depends on the good health and welfare of every one of our teammates, and our lives depend on each of us being alert enough to notice a fraying rope or fortify a weakening anchor. I sleep deeply that night, well cared for and fuelled with sugar and spice.
* * *
For the first time since we arrived, Team C is set to lead in the rotation. Dan, however, makes the difficult decision to descend to Basecamp in the hope of ridding himself of his persistent cough. So Laurie and I set out for Camp Three on our own. I move with more ease and balance that day, and we pull into Camp Three together a half hour ahead our previous best time.
We establish a routine, where each morning Laurie gets up first and passes me a loaf of Christmas fruitcake and a length of sausage to put in my sleeping bag to start thawing. While I remain snug in my sleeping bag, Laurie piles everything from his side of the tent on top of me. Then with a whisk broom he sweeps the frozen layer of condensation off the walls and ceiling onto the floor o
n the empty side of the tent and out the door. I then roll over to the cleared area, and he does the same on my side of the tent. Once the tent is clear of frost, he’ll lie back while I start the stoves and prepare breakfast.
I start one stove outside in the vestibule, and another one that hangs from the roof of the tent. Both stoves melt snow for the first hour. As soon as the pot inside the tent starts steaming, I transfer its contents to the one outside and shovel more snow into the one inside the tent. It will take over three hours, repeating this process, to melt enough snow to hydrate us. Once the sausage and fruitcake have thawed a little in my bag, I pass them out to Laurie to slice. In between rounds of boiling water, we place the slices in another pot that I’ve heated with a few sizzling dollops of butter. We eat as much fruitcake and fried sausage as we can stomach, and drink perhaps four cups of tea and a full litre of warm water, and then fill our water bottles for the day. All the while we move carefully around each other and the stoves, as if in a choreographed routine.
During the day, we work together fixing ropes ever upward. The sky is cloudless and calm, and our crampons bite easily into wind-blasted snow on the thirty-five-degree slope. I lead out as far as sixty metres, where I build an anchor by driving in snow stakes or threading screws into the ice to secure the rope to. Then Laurie packs up what remains of the spool of rope he has been paying out and ascends the rope I’ve just set to the top anchor where I wait. When he arrives, we switch positions, and I belay him while he leads the next span. We continue to leapfrog one another through the day and return to the routine of melting snow and boiling water into the night to get hydrated and refuel.
