The Last Step

by Rick Ridgeway

  Unlike Jim, the expedition for Dianne was less a reaffirmation of a previously formed creed than the maturation of new ideals and, consequently, an increased confidence. It had been a quantum leap from Calgary to Hyannis-port and Dianne was now a little less “the wife of Jim Whittaker” and a little more the woman who fought storm and delivered a load to 25,300 feet. The experience was fodder for her growing self-confidence, something she had struggled for years to develop.

  In a letter written in August to her friend Susanne, Dianne mentioned other insights:

  A long climbing expedition is one of the few situations in modern life when you have the opportunity of really living on the edge, of pushing to your physical and mental limits. Most of the time we are not required to come anywhere near those limits, and even if we want to, there are so many comforts and temptations forcing us into an easier style, so we never really learn where they are. There is value in knowing your limits, I mean really knowing from actual experience. For one thing, it eliminates a lot of guesswork. I know I can survive in conditions that are marginal. I may never have to after this expedition, but having done it once, I know I can probably do it again. That knowledge eliminates a lot of low-level anxiety. If someone dumped me in the street in the clothes I’m wearing, I could somehow survive.

  It also makes normal life easier. Relative to laying your life on the line getting down a mountain in a snowstorm, a case of the flu is pretty insignificant. After melting snow for water over dirty kerosene stoves that won’t work half the time, turning a faucet is a damn miracle.

  I think most people’s limits are a lot farther on than they believe. Consequently, they live life holding themselves back for fear of sailing off the earth. Once you realize this—that you have more reserves than you’d imagined—you’re free to explore and experiment, to take risks—emotional, mental, and physical—that you’d never dreamed of taking before. You’re free to laugh at yourself when you fail (because in most of life, failure is not life-threatening, merely a learning experience) and relish the simplest of pleasures.

  I don’t advocate everybody packing off to the Himalaya, but I think it is good to do something that involves risk—preferably mental as well as physical—to push yourself beyond what is comfortable. To hell with the mentality that would build fences around every cliff, outlaw hang-gliding, put a hard-hat on every cyclist. Life itself is less precious than the ability and freedom to live life to its fullest.

  Dianne caught up to Jim.

  “Hello, luv,” he said in a voice mushy with romance.

  “Hello, luv,” she replied. They put their arms around each other, and gazed across the valley, and down to the line of porters zigzagging up the steep trail.

  “It’s such a beautiful place,” she said to Jim, “I kind of hate to leave it.” Pausing, she added, “Well, maybe not that beautiful.”

  They both laughed, and holding hands, walked up the trail.

  Diane Jagersky and I sat alone on a rock beside the trail, about a mile from the village of Askole. The weather was again clear. After so many months in the high mountains there was glory in beholding flowers in the sun, or walking along shady lanes of tall Lombardy poplar and listening to irrigation water purl in canals beside the trail.

  It had been necessary for me to rest several times that day, and during our stops Diana and I had reminisced about the expedition. Now we talked of the arguments and fights we had suffered.

  “They were inevitable,” I said. “You can’t have a group this size in a confined place for that long under so much stress without arguing.”

  Diana agreed, and then expanded the idea: “On a climb like this there are none of the distractions people usually have in their environment. They normally have to interact with telephones and traffic, they are constantly bombarded with TV advertisement—it’s a complex and distracting culture. But up here there’s none of that. Just us—forced to face each other every day. I don’t think people were used to that.”

  I said, “But even in the old days before TV or telephones there were plenty of fights on the long expeditions. They just never wrote about them; to read their accounts those trips sounded like perfect Victorian picnics. Look at the 1902 K2 Expedition, the first attempt to climb the mountain. The arguments got so heated Aleister Crowley pulled a gun at twenty thousand feet and threatened to blow the head off another climber.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t compare anybody to Crowley,” Diana said. Then she added, “Although we did have some pretty offbeat characters on this climb. I guess this sport never has attracted too many regular people.”

  We both laughed. We lay back on the rock, staring at the valley walls and clear sky, desert brown against cobalt blue.

  “We’ll soon forget all the bad stuff, anyway,” Diana said, “and there will only be the good memories.”

  “I already feel good about it overall. There’s a lot of satisfaction knowing we stuck it out to the end, held on until we made it. It looked pretty grim there several times.”

  I continued, “But it’s easy for me to say—I got to the top. I know how frustrating it is for the others. I felt the same way on Everest when I didn’t make it. You work so somebody else gets up, and then after the climb, when you’re back in the city, you stand around in a corner at the celebration parties while the summit guys answer everybody’s questions. You tell yourself you don’t climb mountains just so you get your back slapped, but you still feel bad when nobody realizes what a collaborative effort these things are. Especially this one. We came so close to failing that without support of even one of the team, we probably wouldn’t have made it.”

  “I think everybody knows that,” Diana said.

  “There are still a few people disappointed.”

  “Or homesick,” she said. “Like Bill, Craig, and Skip.”

  While it is neither possible nor fair to say Bill, Craig, and Skip felt the separation from their wives and children more than the others, they did seem outwardly more affected, more homesick. Perhaps it was because they realized earlier than most there was little chance that they personally would reach the summit. For Lou, Wick, John, and me, the goal of the summit was our carrot on a stick to carry us forward. And Jim and Dianne, and Terry and Cherie, had the companionship of their spouses. But for Bill, Craig, and Skip, the last days of the expedition as they marked time in Camp I, despite the excitement of the final push to the summit, were a trial of waiting. What mattered most to them was to reunite, as soon as possible, with those they loved the most.

  There is something consummately lonely in long mountain climbs in the Himalaya. It is no doubt the long waiting out of storms in small tents, the attrition of high altitude, the trial of constant danger, that causes one to think often of those left behind, and to wait expectantly for the mail runner with the satchel of letters stamped with months-old postmarks. Much of one’s journal entries are devoted to love letters promising never again to go away for such long times, entries claiming to be able to see, from the rarefied atmosphere of twenty thousand feet, new dimensions in relationships.

  Skip was lucky. His wife, Sandy, had flown to Pakistan and was at that moment hiking in to rendezvous with him, and the only desire left in him was to be back with her. For Skip, the expedition had been an emotional strain. He is not the type of person given to competition, especially among friends. At the beginning of the expedition he had a notion that anybody who wanted to might get a chance to try for the top, but as the weeks wore on he realized that expectation was naive, based on not knowing the nature of big expeditions and big mountains. When he realized he had no chance of making it, the principal reason for being there evaporated, and it had taken all his patience to remain those last days in Camp I.

  For Craig, the expedition had also been too long, but nevertheless, he felt it had been very much a worthwhile experience. Even before leaving the United States, he had had doubts whether he could reach the summit, and he had even decided it would probably be too risky—and n
ot fair to his wife and children to attempt the final climb to the summit. The most rewarding aspect of the trip was the three or four new friendships, especially his bond to Skip and Bill. Of lesser importance, but nevertheless of personal satisfaction, was knowing he had pushed the limits of his climbing ability. While he thought he never again wanted to participate in a big expedition to the Himalaya, with all the attending hassles, he had no regrets.

  It was more difficult to decipher the inner feelings of Bill Sumner. He was so quiet, so introspective. He seemed, though, in his passive manner, disappointed.

  Initially one of the expedition’s big attractions for Bill was the chance to accompany his good friend Dusan. At about the same time Dusan died, Bill was married, and these two events caused him to seriously consider dropping out. After our first team meeting in Seattle, a year before the trip, Bill decided to stay on. He had been impressed by our commitment to work together, “to get somebody to the top of K2.”

  By the end of the expedition that commitment seemed to Bill to belong to mythology. He felt the expedition was, strictly speaking, a success; he considered the near alpine-style ascent to the summit from Camp IV an impressive feat. But as an experience of people working together—or as Bill called it, a “family experience”—he felt we had been a failure. “K2 was the distillation,” he would later say, “of life in a crowded society.”

  Part of his feeling was no doubt from the severe dysentery he had suffered the last part of the expedition: On the march out he had had the worst stomach cramps—the worst pain—he had ever endured. But even with illness and all the other disappointments, Bill could still count some memorable experiences. He left the trip with several new friends—especially Craig, whom he had not known before; he had gazed on the most impressive mountain scenery on earth; he had learned much from the Hunzas and the Balti porters. Nevertheless, now Bill wanted only to return to his cabin in the mountains, and like Skip and Craig, he had no further desire for big expeditions.

  “I suppose the ones most disappointed are Terry, Chris, and Cherie,” I said to Diana.

  “I still can’t figure them out,” she said.

  “I’m not sure I can either. I feel bad about it. I think they still blame John and me for most of what happened.”

  “Cherie really wanted to get to the top.”

  “I know. She admits, though, she ran out of gas just above Camp Five. I’ll never forget that day she turned back after the last storm when we left for the top, and for a long time she just stood there, watching us walk away. She was such a lonely figure.”

  “Terry really wanted her to get to the top, too,” Diana said. “It was the most important thing to him, more important than whether he made it.”

  “There’s still something bothering him. Even more than just being disappointed.”

  “He’s really on edge lately. That scene at the river crossing, for example.”

  The Dumordo River, which on the approach march we had rigged with a Tyrolean rope bridge, and for two days had ferried across porters and supplies, was low enough on the trek out to force our way across it. It was nevertheless risky, and we had crossed in groups of four to six, arms locked, to prevent being swept downstream in swift, chest-deep water. It was wide and glacial cold. One porter broke from his companion’s grip and swept down, eyes wide with panic, fifty yards before one of our Hunzas waded from the far bank and rescued him. On the far side, the porters built fires over which to warm, and to brew tea.

  Most of us, weak from the climb, before crossing had divided our loads among the stronger porters. Terry, however, had tried to cross with a pack weighing over fifty pounds, and halfway he was in trouble. Unable to maintain footing, he partially submerged and the porters with him struggled to keep a grip on his arm. Another Hunza rushed into the water and rescued him. His legs were bruised and bleeding and he was blue with cold.

  He tried to warm over a porter’s fire, but he chose one used for heating tea water and cooking chapatties, and the porters asked meekly if he could move to a fire used for warming. Terry flushed with rage, eyes wild and brimstony. He hurled a string of abuse at the porters, who cowered, surprised and uncertain what to do.

  “Something is bothering him,” I said to Diana, still sitting with me on the rock. “He normally wouldn’t have blown up. I asked Cherie about it, but she said she didn’t know, or she wouldn’t tell me.”

  None of us knew, at the time, the extent of Terry’s frustration. It had increased even on the march out, to the point he no longer wanted to see anyone, even Cherie. He was emotionally as taut as the strings on his viola. He had been so utterly disappointed, and he felt used. He seemed, more than any of us, the victim of misconstrued intentions, and he felt victimized by what he saw as a conspiracy to prevent Chris and Cherie—and by association, himself—from reaching the summit. Even the last days of the climb, when he had helped Lou and Wick reach Camp VI, had been a bitter letdown based on yet another misunderstanding. Terry had thought both Lou and Wick understood his desire to accompany them as high as he could on the morning they left for the summit; it had been their understanding, however, that Terry wanted to return to Camp V. When Terry realized the mistake, as Lou and Wick were preparing in the blackness to leave, he was too exhausted, too drained, to say anything. It was only another in a long string of disappointments. By the march out, his frustrations had exceeded all his patience, even for the porters.

  “How are you getting along with Chris?” Diana asked.

  “I still feel strange around him. We never have talked like we should. There’s this distance; I feel it most when he’s with Cherie. He thinks I betrayed him.”

  We sat in silence, tossing small stones. Nearby the pink flowers of wild rose added color to the otherwise drab desert. Overhead a large griffon (or was it the lammergeier?) turned in widening gyres, carried aloft on morning updraft.

  “It’s too bad he quit,” Diana said. “All he did was go to Base Camp and wait until the end of the expedition. He could have made it to the top, you know.”

  “I have mixed feelings,” I said. “I feel satisfied getting to the top—that’s what I came for—but it was at a cost. It was a trade-off. I don’t know, maybe these big climbs are like that. Only room for a few at the top, and you’ve got to elbow your way up.”

  I leaned back, staring at the sky, and thought about it. It seemed that each of the people who began with many doubts or hesitations failed to fulfill his ambitions. I went down the list: Craig had been skeptical of his own ability at the outset; Skip had been the last person invited to join the team, and considered himself in a weak position; Bill had made a hard decision whether to come at all. Chris was looking for an escape, for a vacation from his personal problems, more than for the trial of a difficult ascent.

  Because there was limited space on the summit team, the jockeying for position had left those with any doubts, any hesitations, behind. It had left Cherie, whose will exceeded her strength, behind. Bill was right—the expedition was a microcosm of life in a crowded society.

  I felt the regrets from my failure to live up to my friendship with Chris. I had made several mistakes; I had suffered several shortcomings. But we all had. Each of us was weakened by stress, danger, long exposure to altitude. At one time or another we had all been stripped naked, we had all stood exposed, our human foibles bared.

  I asked myself if on this expedition there were any heroes, and I realized the answer was no. We had no gallant knights conquering new worlds. Instead we had fourteen people overcoming their all-too-human frailties to achieve a goal. In that sense maybe we were heroes—modern-day ones—anti-heroes. Not larger than life, but ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses.

  We were quiet again, and staring up I watched the griffon sailing higher on uplifts. After several minutes Diana said, “Wick should be getting close to Seattle by now. I was relieved to see him choppered out. It was about as much as I could take seeing him in pain, coughing and wheezing and not abl
e to talk. It was hard to believe he was the same guy who hiked in here three months ago. He was so skinny, his eyes so sunken.”

  I said, “They still had the sparkle, though. If he had lost that, I would have worried.”

  We watched the griffon in a growing gyre.

  “You and Wick seemed to have stayed close.”

  “We’re good buddies. He was Dusan’s best friend.”

  Another silence, then, “You know, Diana, Wick said he could feel Dusan up there, near the summit. I wish he had had a radio on top. He could have called down and told you he knew Dusan’s spirit was up there.”

  We watched the griffon.

  “Dusan probably would have been pleased you came on this trip,” I said.

  “No doubt about it. The trip gave me something to strive for, to fill the time—more than that. I guess that’s why I worked so hard, cooking meals and carrying loads. I felt closer to him that way.”

  She hesitated. The griffon carried higher, smaller and smaller, wheeling in widening gyres.

  Then I said, “Thank God we all came back. There were so many places something could have gone wrong. We’re lucky.”

  “There was that time, though, we didn’t seem so lucky, when Wick disappeared on the summit. I guess you and John didn’t know about it at Camp Six, but at Camp One we feared the worst. It seemed certain that something had happened to Wick.”

  Diana told me about the forty minutes during which Wick had disappeared, and about the thoughts that flashed before her: the breakfast with Wick in Glacier Bay after the accident, the late summer climb before Dusan left for Alaska, the image of him falling.

  “After Wick showed up, and we realized he had only stayed up longer—we didn’t know then it was to change film—I still felt hollow, like there was nothing left of me but skin; I felt like there was a vacuum inside. When we thought he might have died, it was like an incredible déjà vu, a feeling the whole nightmare was repeating, that now Dusan’s best friend had also died in the exact same way. I was completely defeated. It just ran over me, left me blank.”