by Sharon Wood
The footing back across the snowfield is better than I feared. With my axe in hand now, and pushing it against the uphill side, I pull ahead of Dwayne. It is all I can do to hold back from scrabbling. Threat propels me: we’ve been too high too long, we’re going to run out of oxygen and it is going to get dark. That clock is ticking louder and louder inside my head.
We turn our headlamps on halfway across the traverse. The arc of light limits my focus to one step at a time. Easier. I stop frequently to wait for Dwayne. Is he going slower or am I speeding up? Each time I wait for him to catch up, he reassures me with a nod and a wave. He’s stronger than I am. This is good. Use his pace to slow yourself down. My faith in him is my only comfort.
I imagine our teammates watching and willing us down safely, just as I did for Dwayne and Carlos two years ago. Here I am now, behind one of those faint and twinkling lights, living out the premonition that has stalked me ever since. It isn’t as terrifying as I feared it would be—at least when I am moving and focused.
I arrive first at the top of the Yellow Band and the fixed rope. Dwayne pulls up a few minutes behind. I study him again, and he reassures me that he is doing fine. It seems he is shepherding me ahead.
We need to descend the rope one at a time. Will the single strand of thin cord sever when loaded? Will the anchor fail? Relief follows when the first rope and anchor hold. As it does each time, resignation precedes surrender through a half dozen or more anchor transfers until I reach the end of the ropes.
The desire to sit and to sleep pulls at me as I wait for Dwayne at the bottom of the ropes. I know that if I fall asleep in the open in these sub-zero temperatures above eight thousand metres, I may never wake up again. Or that if I do, hypothermia or a paralyzing apathy will kill me. This threat keeps me standing, leaning against the cliff.
Fatigue overcomes me and I doze. The next thing I know, I am peering into the dark at Dwayne’s headlamp. His light streaks and swirls then disappears. Am I hallucinating, am I dreaming or am I awake? My mind slips and jerks between dreaming and lucidity. Cold seeps into my body. I swing my arms and legs, urging warm blood to reach my fingers and toes, but they stay cold.
I tell myself, I have descended climbs in the dark, been very cold, pushed past exhaustion, gone without food and drink for days at altitude. And I’ve survived acid trips gone bad. I have experienced all of this before—just not all at once.
Where is Dwayne? How much time has passed? Has he passed me? How could he have without my knowing—that is impossible.
I can’t trust what I see or think: I must have run out of oxygen some time ago. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock! goes the clock, and then its old-fashioned alarm clangs and my thoughts clamour: I better go down and get the stove on and the place ready for when Dwayne comes home. He may be in trouble up there. How can he be? He was so strong, so in control. I can’t climb up there. What if he’s on the rope? I am running on empty and losing my hold on reality. I hear Jim’s voice in my head: “You have to want it more than it wants you!” If I wait here any longer, I am going to be here for good. I start down.
I descend the couloir facing in, as if inside a bubble, until a silvery wash of moonlight jolts me out of my trance. I have no sense of how much time has passed and I panic. Have I passed our tent? I pan the beam of my headlamp across the widening expanse of the couloir for any sign of it. Should I start going back up? I can’t. I’m too tired. I continue down, stopping every few steps to look. The harder I stare, the more my vision blurs. Then I catch a glint of an oxygen bottle. It is all I can see of Camp Six.
My heart thuds when I open the tent and find it empty. Impossibly, I hoped Dwayne would be here. The tent looks long deserted—a home with its contents draped in white sheets. Spindrift has all but buried the tent. I start to dig, spooked by the way the mountain is erasing us and reclaiming itself. When I finally climb inside the tent, an overwhelming fatigue pulls me down onto my sleeping bag. My mouth feels as though it is lined with cotton wool. I fire up the stove and begin to feed the pot with snow. I lie back and fall asleep.
Later, our teammates will tell me it was around midnight when they saw our lights separate as I descended into the Hornbein Couloir. They locked their attention on the light stalled at the top. They knew one of us was in trouble and willed that person down for the longest time. It was 2 a.m. when they saw the first headlamp reach Camp Six. And another ninety minutes before they saw the second light get there too.
The crunch of Dwayne’s crampons outside the tent rouses me. It is the best sound I will ever hear, but my relief ebbs at the sight of his waxen face and glazed eyes.
He looks through me and speaks in a monotone. “Will you take my crampons off? My fingers are frozen.” As I guide him into the tent and sit him down, he says, “I ran out of oxygen and my mask was clogged with frost—suffocating me. It took me a long time to figure out what to do with my bottle. I couldn’t find anywhere flat enough to leave it so it wouldn’t fall down the couloir and maybe hit you.” Later he tells me that he sat down—gave up—didn’t care. Then something woke him and pushed him on.
No sooner do we settle in than the stove flame sputters and dies. I thread the last fuel canister onto the burner. It takes several flicks to get the lighter to spark, and when it does, the tent lights up in a sudden blinding flash. The walls suck inward then blast outward. I watch this happen, and our reaction, as if from a great distance. We unzip the doors and jettison the stove, pot, hats, gloves—everything that is on fire and then some. I am amazed at how fast we respond despite our exhaustion and hypoxic sluggishness. With the same degree of dispassion, I think. What irony—we’ve made it to the top and all the way back down to die, now, in a fire. I wonder what this spectacle looks like from below: the flaming stove streaking through the dark like a comet’s tail. Do they think it is one of us? Is anyone still watching?
Chapter 19
Coming Down
Light presses through my eyelids. When I open them, I can’t understand why I see the couloir until I realize that I am looking through a basketball-sized hole in the ceiling of the tent. My sleeping bag is half open and I am fully dressed. Both ends of the tent are open, and Dwayne and I are covered in spindrift.
Dwayne is staring up at the ceiling when he feels my eyes on him. He takes a long time to clear his throat before he says, “What?”
I unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth. I cough.
“What, is right.”
“Nice skylight feature we’ve got here,” he says.
“Yeah, the place has an airy feel to it.”
He moves to prop himself up on one elbow, and the stiff coating of spindrift cracks and slides off his sleeping bag. He glances back up at the hole in the ceiling, “How’d you do that, anyway?”
“Best I can figure is I must have cross-threaded the new canister onto the stove and the fuel leaked out.”
With no food, water, fuel or oxygen, we have nothing more to do before we leave other than dig through the ruins to find replacements for the hats and gloves we lost in the fire. The radio, left for dead, surfaces in the search. We both look at it for a long moment, recalling that it went silent after our last transmission to the team, just below what we thought was the summit. The aerial is missing. Then Dwayne reaches into his pocket and plucks from it the aerial; a rabbit from a hat. He holds it between his thumb and forefinger and says, “I thought we could use this. I found it lying on top of the snow on my way down.” He goes to hand it to me and then draws back, pauses. “Don’t lose it again, eh?”
I thread the aerial onto the radio, turn it on, push the transmit button and croak, “Hello. Is anyone out there?”
Nothing seems to amaze us anymore—until Jim answers. “Sharon! Where are you? Is Dwayne with you?” It’s a miracle to hear Jim’s voice—light years away. Dwayne and I grin at each other. I feel elation, but then I realize that Jim may as well a
s be on another planet and somehow we’ve got to get there.
“We’re together at Camp Six, or what’s left of it.” I say.
“What do you mean by what’s left of it?”
“The stove blew up last night.”
“You guys okay?”
“Alive, it seems.”
“Let me talk to Dwayne.”
As I pass the radio to Dwayne I notice that his face is still swollen—all the hollows filled in. “Hi, Jim,” he says.
“Oh my God,” Jim’s voice cracks, “we’re so relieved to hear from you guys! How are you?”
“Glad to be alive.” Dwayne glances at me. “But not looking so good. Woody lost her eyebrows and eyelashes in the fire and she’s got soot on her face.” He hands me the radio and falls back, exhausted.
“Yeah, I’m a real doll,” I say.
“Why didn’t we hear from you guys last night?”
“We lost the aerial but found it again this morning,” I say.
“Think you can make it down?”
Good question, I think, and hand the radio to Dwayne.
“We’re pretty wrecked but we’re going to give it a try,” he says.
I don’t even know if I can stand up yet, let alone climb down. A piercing ache thrums in my head. Each pulse killing another brain cell.
“Help is on its way,” Jim says. “Laurie left Camp Five about an hour ago to see if he could get up there.” I feel my heart jump. We couldn’t have hoped for a better person to meet us.
“That’s great news. We’re going to need it.” Dwayne holds his hand up to examine. “I frostbit my fingers and we’re out of O’s.”
Barry says, “I think there’s a full bottle where the ropes end.”
“Okay,” Jim says, “save your energy to get down safe. Let us know when you’re leaving Five.”
We move slowly as we pull ourselves together for one more push. We find neck tubes for our heads and mismatched spare mitts and gloves. First, exhaustion lays us back down and shuts our eyes, then hope prods us to sit back up again. Hours evaporate as we ready ourselves to descend.
I sit bent over my legs, panting and spent from tightening my crampons.
Dwayne stands at the door of the tent looking down at me and says, “You up for this?”
My head drops to rest on my knees. After a few deep empty breaths, I look up at him again and he offers his hand and pulls me to my feet. Stars fill my vision. I sway and teeter. “What’s our choice?” I say as I exhale. “Let’s do this.”
Dwayne moves in slow motion as if floating. He turns around, daggers his axe in and steps down. I think to myself, This is going to happen. Just a thousand more moves like this and we’ll be with Laurie. As I turn to start down, I say to myself, Don’t blow it now, not after we’ve come this far.
Two days before, it was as if the mountain was enraged and trying to shake us off, but it now feels like it is releasing us. I am relieved to find I can still move, focus and function well enough to climb down. It is only when we reach the base of the couloir, where it fans out onto the wind-strafed North Face, that I stop to bring my head up and look for any sign of Laurie. I squint through scratched goggles. There! A patch of yellow wavers against the black of the cliff band like a mirage, then disappears behind sheets of spindrift. I wonder if I’m hallucinating again. I rest my head on the top of my ice axe and look down through my feet, watching the distance grow between Dwayne and me. Then he stops, looks across the face and his pace quickens. He must see it too. This time, I see the yellow patch wave. Hope hurries me to where Laurie stands waiting, laughing and crying.
“Oh my God, I’m so happy to see you guys!” he says, wrapping his arms around both of us. We linger in his embrace for a long minute. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of you. You pulled it off. You really did it!”
I am too tired to feel any emotion.
“You’re going to be okay now,” Laurie says as he helps us clip into a cluster of old ropes. We shrug out of our packs, lean against the rock wall and slide down to sit. Tied to the same point is our rope, which stretches down and across the face toward the west shoulder, leading the way home. Laurie pulls out a big thermos and pours a cup of tea for us to share. “I won’t make you talk now. Keep drinking and rest while I get Jim on the radio.”
When Jim answers, Laurie keeps his eyes on us and tilts his head like a proud father.
“I’ve got Dwayne and Sharon with me now.”
“Wonderful! How are they?”
Laurie hands us the radio. “I’ll let them tell you.” He films us with his video camera as we talk to Jim. We perk up by the minute as we sip on tea, talk to Jim and draw deep breaths of oxygen from the tank we share.
Soon, Laurie presses us to get moving. We slide an oxygen bottle each into our packs, slip on masks and saddle up. Dwayne starts down first, facing away from us, his skeletal form halting momentarily between each step as he wobbles, leans against his inside pole and then recovers enough to take another step.
When we reach Camp Five a couple of hours later, Dan is waiting for us. He ushers Dwayne, Laurie and me into the tent and tends to us, making sure we drink and fuel up for the next leg. Both Dwayne and I fall asleep and have to be woken by Laurie, who urges us to get up and keep moving.
We thought we would get as far as Camp Four today, but when we reach it Dwayne keeps going. As we lose altitude, bit by bit my balance improves and my vision and my mind grow sharper. We move faster. I have no idea how long our day has been, but by the time we meet Albi, Kevin and Barry at the bottom of the ropes at Camp Two, we have descended close to three thousand metres in the past twenty-four hours.
The boys push us into a tent lined with layers of insulated mats and extra sleeping bags, where they bring us food and drinks. We are more tired than anything and sleep into the next day.
* * *
The sound of a zipper wakes us. Albi’s face appears in our tent door. “Wakey, wakey! How are you children feeling this morning?” I blink and look at him dumbly. “You’re looking better but you’ve still got a dirty face, Woody. Better clean up for those photos.”
I sit up and rub my face. “Ouch,” I cry.
“Hmmm, methinks you’ve got a bit of frostbite on the side of both cheeks, old girl, or war paint perhaps. Maybe there was a gap between your balaclava and goggles?”
“Let me see,” says Dwayne. I turn my face to him. “Yep, but it’s nothing cosmetic surgery can’t fix.”
Albi laughs. “Good to hear you’re back with us on the same planet, Dwayno. If you let me come in, I’ll give you these cups of tea. Think you’ve got enough brain cells left for a chat?”
He wriggles in and lies down between us while we sip our tea. I snuggle up to him and rest my head on his shoulder while he strokes my head. So warm and kind, I think, and now we’ve paved the way for his turn. He plies us with questions about what to expect from Camp Five to the summit. Dwayne and I doze off and when we wake again, Albi is on his way up to Camp Four with Kevin, James and Chris in support.
A few hours later, we see Barry off. As I hold him, I whisper into his ear, “Thank you. It’s a much gentler world up there now. Everything’s in place for you to pull this off.”
Dwayne hugs Barry, then pushes him back to grip his shoulders and says, “Thanks for everything, brother. You’ve got this one in the bag, man. And you deserve it.”
As Albi and Barry head up the mountain, Dwayne and I continue our descent. When we reach the edge of the glacier, Colleen stands waiting for us with tears in her eyes. My heart lifts as I see her—a teeny thing with wiry springs of black curly hair pushing out from beneath her toque. I have been waiting for this moment, the first of our homecoming, to feel relief and joy, finally safe.
As Colleen and Dwayne linger in quiet embrace, I realize our mission is over and I feel a strange sense of loss.
When Colleen hugs me, tells me how proud she is of us and weeps, I don’t—can’t. What’s wrong with me? Colleen and I are friends and have shared many chapters. We held vigil on Makalu for Dwayne and Carlos and greeted them on their return just like this. I know I should feel something. But I’ve shut down my emotions to get through, get up and get down. I’ve been in overdrive for days now, and I’m still on guard. Am I just tired?
Partway down, the radio crackles. We stop and sit down to listen. First Chris, and then James and Kevin, too spent to go on, turn back from their way to Camp Four, which leaves Barry and Albi unsupported. Then the radio conversation between Jim, Barry and Albi begins.
“You know the agreement we made,” Jim says to Albi. “It’s off.”
“But everything is in place, Jim,” he says. “The weather is perfect. The camp is there. All we’ll need to carry is our personal gear, a tent, oxygen and a stove.”
Jim says, “If no one but you and Barry can get to Five, then you’ll have no one to back you up if something happens. Having backup is what we all agreed upon as a team.”
Barry comes on. “Hey, Jim. It’s a completely different world up here than it was three days ago. It’s as calm as it can be. Albi and I are feeling strong and we’re ready to go for the top.”
“That’s not the deal we made. There’s no one to support you. Don’t you get it? Dwayne and Woody barely got off alive.” Jim’s voice cracks. “I’m sorry, man.”
“Yeah, I know, Jim, but right now it’s about the safest mountain I’ve ever been on! We’ve got fixed ropes most of the way up it, and camps in place. You’ve gotta let us go for it!”
