Peak

by Roland Smith

  As we waited for the water to boil we watched Zopa set up Holly's tent, which she crawled into as soon as it was up. He then put up his own tent and started making their dinner.

  "I was talking to one of the other climbers," Sun-jo said. "He told me that tomorrow will be a big test. He's been up to ABC and has spent one night up at Camp Four. He said if we make it that far we should be able to make it to the summit..."

  I should have been paying more attention to what Sun-jo was saying, but at that moment I was having a minor crisis that had nothing to do with my sore throat. What was causing the meltdown was the fact that it had been a relatively easy day but I was a complete wreck.

  You can never tell who the mountain will allow and who it will not. Zopa's words had been echoing in my brain all day—and I was betting that Peak Marcello was in the "not" crowd, right beside George with the clogged heart and Francis of the Gamow bag.

  Dr. Woo had been wrong about my conditioning or else I had screwed myself up by getting dehydrated. But if that was the case, why wasn't Sun-jo suffering? I looked over at him. He was stirring the pot, chattering away like we were camped on a beach.

  THE NEXT MORNING ZOPA dragged us out of our tent before dawn. There was about a foot of new snow on the ground, but it had stopped falling.

  "Hard climb today," he said. "And we need to get up fast, or there won't be a place to pitch out tents. How's your throat?"

  I shook my head. My voice was still gone, but I didn't feel any worse than I had the night before, which I considered a victory.

  OUTSIDE CAMP we started up the Trough, a depression that sits between two rows of jagged ice pinnacles that looked like giant canine teeth. The main path was well worn and clearly marked by the yaks. Zopa warned us to stay on the path.

  "If you wander off it, even to take a pee, you could be lost forever in the ice maze."

  (I promise this is the last time I'm going to talk about high-altitude bodily functions. Answering a call of nature on the mountain is a huge ordeal because at that altitude you can't do anything fast and you have to take off layer after layer of clothing. It can delay your climb by a half hour or more, which can ruin your chances of getting higher because bad weather moves in so quickly. This is why you try to take care of all this before you leave camp.)

  About noon we ran into the porters, yaks, and herders heading back down to Base Camp. They were still whistling and singing and I was tempted to get in line with them. I think the only thing that stopped me was that Holly had been in front of me all day long, and I wasn't about to let her get any higher up the mountain than me.

  Two hours later we got our first look at ABC. Sun-jo pointed out the tiny colored tents in the distance, but the camp wasn't as close as it looked. It was three more torturous hours away. The only bright spot was that Sun-jo and I managed to pass Holly and Zopa about a hundred yards before they reached the camp.

  ABC: 21,161 feet. Higher than Kilimanjaro and Mount McKinley. And I felt it. The crude camp made every other place we had stayed seem like paradise. It was situated on a pile of rubble between a glacier (that looked like it had been formed by frozen sewage) and a rotten rock wall. The ground was littered with ankle-breaking rocks and life-ending crevasses.

  JR filmed our triumphant arrival. I barely had the strength even to look at the camera as I trudged by it.

  There were only about six tents set up, so there was plenty of room for us to stake out an area for the team. Unlike at Base Camp, people weren't wandering around socializing. They were either too pooped to move or terrified about twisting something this close to the top.

  By the time Zopa and Holly arrived, we had our tents set up and a fire going from the wood the porters had left.

  "How's your throat?" Holly asked.

  Sun-jo and I nearly fell off the rocks we were sitting on. This was the first full sentence she had put together since we left Base Camp, and her voice almost sounded normal. We had passed her, but she seemed in better shape than we were.

  "It's ... still ... sore," I said with difficulty.

  "I think there's a doctor up here," she said. "I'll go find him."

  By the time we had her tent up she was back with the doctor in tow. He looked like he needed a doctor himself, but he examined my throat, then called Leah Krieger down at Base Camp. They decided to put me on antibiotics.

  Josh came on the radio and asked me how it was going. I couldn't answer, so I turned over the radio to Holly, who gave a glowing report. Josh said they were heading up to ABC, then to Camp Four for a night and would no doubt see us on our way down.

  (I should mention something about the radios here. The frequencies were wide open, and people had nothing better to do than sit in their tents and monitor the chatter. This included Captain Shek and the soldiers. As a result, everyone was careful about what they talked about, especially expedition leaders like Josh.)

  The next day was basically spent lying in our tents trying to breathe, hoping that our red blood cells were doing what they were supposed to be doing. When we moved it was in slow motion, like we were on the moon. You'd get a plate of food and stare at it, thinking a couple minutes had passed, and tell yourself you should try to eat before it cooled off....

  Fork to mouth.

  Ice cold.

  Huh?

  Look at watch.

  Half an hour?

  How?

  By the morning we left, the antibiotics had kicked in and my throat was better. I even managed to croak out a couple of understandable sentences.

  Sun-jo, on the other hand, wasn't feeling good. He had spent a good deal of the night vomiting outside our tent door. Every time he puked, Zopa would come over and make him drink, worried about dehydration. I felt bad for him, but to be honest, his getting sick perked me up a little. (Terrible, I know.) I felt better knowing that I wasn't the only one having a difficult time.

  The three-day trip up took us nine hours to complete on the way down. We ran into Josh between the first and second camps. He asked how my throat was, then continued toward ABC, shouting down to us that he would see us in a few days.

  Holly not only carried her own backpack on the way down, she beat us to Base Camp by half an hour. You can never tell who the mountain will allow and who it will not.

  LETTERS FROM HOME

  THAT FIRST NIGHT BACK in Base Camp I slept for fifteen hours.

  When I finally woke up I felt as good as I had ever felt in my entire life. I could have easily gone out for an 18,044-foot jog, but instead I walked to the mess tent and ate about nine pounds of food.

  Dr. Krieger came in and watched me wolf down my last plate, then took me over to the Aid tent to look at my throat. She said that it was better, but I needed to keep taking the antibiotics for the next week to make sure it went away.

  My next stop was HQ, where they congratulated me on making it to ABC and gave me a packet of letters from home. There was a card from Rolf, two letters from Mom, and five thick letters from Paula and Patrice. The envelopes were crumpled and smeared with dirt and grease. I looked at the postmarks. The mail had been sent to Josh's office in Chiang Mai, forwarded to Kathmandu, and from there, no doubt, thrown into a truck headed to the mountain.

  Thin-air mail.

  Getting the letters caused my good mood to tank. I hadn't spent one minute thinking about my family since I'd arrived at Base Camp, and I felt a little guilty. But what really bothered me was that the letters had arrived at Base Camp in the first place. This meant that some of those letters I had sent to my father when I was a kid probably had arrived, too.

  He had gone into a tent at some high-altitude camp just like this, and come out with a stack of letters, which included a letter from his son.

  I was so mad I wanted to run up to ABC and punch him in the goggles. Instead, I decided to finish Moleskine #1 (which you are reading) and send it to my mom. Kind of like a long letter. I was not going to ignore my family the same way that Josh had ignored me. And it would fulfill my
requirement for Vincent at GSS.

  The next morning I went to the mess tent to get something to eat before getting back to the Moleskine. Sun-jo wasn't there.

  "Boy very sick," the cook told me

  I took a thermos of hot tea over to Sun-jo's tent. He was cocooned in his sleeping bag like a caterpillar larva with only his stocking-capped head sticking out.

  "You shouldn't be here," he croaked, but I could tell he was happy to see me.

  His eyes were sunken and bloodshot. And maybe it was the dim light coming through the blue nylon tent, but he looked like he had lost ten pounds since I last saw him.

  I poured him a cup of tea.

  "You shouldn't be here," he repeated.

  "Forget it," I said. "You and I have been swapping germs for weeks. I'm immune." I put the cup to his lips, hoping I was right.

  "I will be better in a few days."

  Looking at him, that was hard to believe, but I said I was sure he was right.

  I stopped by the Aid tent. I wasn't sure if Dr. Krieger's duties included treating kitchen help, but if they didn't I was going to talk her into it.

  She was tapping away on her laptop, but stopped when I came in.

  "How are you feeling today?"

  "Fine, but I'm worried about Sun-jo."

  She made me open my mouth and shone a light down my throat.

  "Inflammation is almost gone," she said, clicking off the light. "But you need to keep taking those antibiotics, especially if you insist on visiting sick people in their tents."

  "So you've seen him?" I said.

  "Last night and this morning."

  "And?"

  "And he's sick, but he'll live."

  I spent the next two days writing and managed to finish the first Moleskine on the day Josh was to return from ABC and Camp Four. When I got to the end of the notebook I wrote letters to Paula and Patrice thanking them for the artwork they had sent and telling them how I had pinned it up in my tent so it was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night. I told them that I missed them so bad, I was thinking about rustling a yak and riding it back to New York.

  Last, I wrote to Rolf. He had sent me a card with a photo of King Kong clinging to the Empire State Building. Inside were three one-hundred-dollar bills and a handwritten note:

  Hang in there, Peak.

  I miss you.

  I want you home.

  Love, Rolf

  Not "we." I miss you. I want you home. With these two sentences he had done more for me than Josh had ever done, or could ever do.

  I went over to HQ and addressed the envelopes. Sparky told me the mail would go out the following morning.

  When Josh arrived late that afternoon, I didn't tell him about the Moleskine or the letters. He didn't deserve to know.

  MOLES KINE #2

  SECRETS

  THE MEETING WAS SECRET, held at HQ after the other climbers had all gone to sleep.

  By invitation only: Josh, the film crew, Sparky, Dr. Krieger, Thaddeus Bowen, and Zopa, who had brought Sun-jo with him. (Sun-jo looked a little better, but not much.) Josh glared at him, and I thought for a moment he was going to ask him to leave, but he let it go.

  "Where's Holly?"

  No one seemed to know.

  "We're not waiting," Josh said. He turned to Dr. Krieger.

  "How's Peak's health?"

  "I think we might have gotten the infection with the antibiotics. As long as it doesn't migrate to his lungs he should be fine. There were three new cases of pneumonia reported in camp today. I suspect it's a secondary infection from the virus. William Blade is one of them. Everyone in his team is sick. They left this afternoon and we quarantined everything they left at their campsite."

  The news about William Blade and her former entourage was going to please Holly to no end.

  Josh turned to Zopa. "Can Peak make it to the top?"

  I was still seriously annoyed with Josh over the letters and this was not helping. I hate it when people talk about me as if I'm not there.

  Zopa shrugged. "We will have to see how he does at Camp Four. He was fine at ABC."

  I wasn't "fine" at ABC, but I appreciated him saying so.

  "Thanks for getting him up to ABC," Josh said. "I suppose you'll be heading back to Kathmandu."

  Zopa gave him another shrug.

  "What about Holly?" Josh asked.

  "She's strong," Zopa said.

  Josh looked a little surprised. I was, too. She was fine when she finally got to ABC, and on the way down, but I wouldn't have characterized her climb as strong. What was Zopa up to?

  "It won't hurt us to get Holly to the summit," Thaddeus said. "She'll talk and write about it for the rest of her life. Good PR for Peak Experience."

  "I suppose you're right," Josh reluctantly agreed. He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and flipped through the pages.

  "Okay. We have ten people to get to the top, counting Peak and Holly. Out of those, six or seven have a decent chance if they hit the weather window right." He looked at Sparky. "Do you have some dates for me yet?"

  "I'm looking at the week of May twenty-fifth through June fourth." Sparky looked over at Zopa. "But astrology might give us a better idea than meteorology."

  "Any ideas, Zopa?" Josh asked.

  Zopa shook his head. "I just look up at the sky."

  This got a laugh from everyone, but I don't think Zopa meant it to be funny.

  "If your weather prediction is right," Josh said to Sparky, "that doesn't give us much time." He walked to the calendar on the wall. "Peak's birthday is six weeks from today. That gives us about five weeks to get him into position for a summit attempt. And I'd like to get him up there earlier than that."

  "I agree," Thaddeus said. "If something happens and Peak can't get to the summit, we might have a chance for a second try."

  "Thaddeus, there won't be a second chance," Josh said. "Peak either makes it on the first try or he doesn't."

  Josh was right. Second tries were virtually unheard of on Everest. If you fail you have to return to Base Camp. There's not enough oxygen at the other camps to get your strength back and recover. It takes three days to get back to Base Camp with a night at Camp Six and a night at ABC. Five days at Base Camp (longer if you're really hammered), then back up, which can take eight or nine days—all together nearly three weeks. It would be mid-June before I could make another attempt, long after my fifteenth birthday. Climbers have been stopped one hundred yards from the summit (by weather, exhaustion, or time) and have never made another attempt as long as they lived.

  "Here's what I'm thinking," Josh continued. "There's a couple signed up to go to Camp Four, but they're strong enough to go a lot higher. In fact, they have a better chance of getting to the summit than most of the others on the team. If we put them on the two scratched permits it would increase our summit percentage by at least twenty percent."

  "Did you talk to them?" Thaddeus asked.

  "Yeah, but no promises. I wanted to discuss our options first."

  "I think you should send Sun-jo to the summit," Holly said, startling all of us. Uncharacteristically, she had slipped into the tent quietly.

  "Who?" Josh asked, annoyed.

  "Zopa's grandson," Holly answered.

  This sure got everyone's attention. We stared at Sun-jo and Zopa with our mouths hanging open. I think my mouth was open a little more than the others. Josh looked like he had been slapped in the face. Why hadn't Sun-jo told me that Zopa was his grandfather?

  Sun-jo sat with his chin cupped in his hands, seemingly oblivious to our shock.

  "What's your father's name?" Josh asked him.

  "His name was Ki-tar Sherpa," Sun-jo answered.

  "I knew him," Josh said quietly. "I didn't know he had a son." He looked over at Zopa and gave him his trademark grin. "What are you up to?"

  Zopa answered with a shrug. None of us believed him. There was a lot more to this than Josh, Sun-jo, and Zopa were letting on.r />
  Josh looked back at Sun-jo. "How old are you?"

  "I'm fourteen years old," he answered.

  I think we had just gotten to the main reason Zopa had agreed to leave the Indrayani temple and take me to Base Camp.

  Josh was no longer grinning, nor was anyone else, especially me. I considered Sun-jo a friend. He must have known about a summit attempt back in Kathmandu. He certainly knew that Zopa was his grandfather. I should have guessed something was up when Zopa outfitted him in my climbing gear. Holly clearly had been let in on the secret, which might explain why Zopa had all but carried her up to ABC.

  "When is your birthday?" Josh asked.

  Sun-jo looked at Zopa, who gave him a nod.

  "May thirty-first."

  Six days before my birthday.

  Josh was visibly relieved, but only for a second.

  "How do we know that?"Thaddeus asked.

  Sun-jo reached into the pocket of his (my) parka and produced a tattered piece of paper sealed in a Ziploc plastic bag. He pulled out the paper and handed it to Thaddeus.

  "This is in Nepalese,"Thaddeus said.

  Josh took it from him and read it over. "No, it's Tibetan," he corrected, then looked back at Sun-jo. "You were born in Tibet?"

  "Yes, sir," Sun-jo answered. "I was five when my father managed to get my mother and me across the border into Nepal. I am a free Tibetan."

  "There is no such thing," Josh said. "How did you get back into Tibet? You certainly didn't use this." He handed the piece of paper back.

  "Forged documents," Zopa said.

  Josh swore. "Well, your grandson isn't going to be a free Tibetan for long if Captain Shek finds out about the bogus papers," Josh said. "They'll arrest him. You'll probably be hauled away, too."