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March 30, 2004 A story in 3 parts. Parts 1 and 2 are submitted for your approval, Part 3 to follow
Part One I climbed a snowy mountain today. It was no mt. everest... but it was 6088 meters high nonetheless and it was hard as hell. it was without a doubt the hardest thing i've ever made myself do in the space of 24 hours.
i blame julian. it's the damn german mountain climbing blood in
him. in fact, here's a picture of him making out with the
mannequin at the tour agency just to prove that there must be something
seriously wrong with this man. so anyway, julian gets this great idea
to climb this local peak, called huanay potosi. its in the 6000 club.
it sounds very so anyway, after we get back to la paz from spending 2 days at 1600 meters of altitude at coroico, and are prepared to go up the mountain the next day, i find i have a touch of altitude-induced headache. (la paz is at about 3600 meters... highest capital city in the world). our cheerful guide rodolfo says, better to wait one more day than to risk getting even sicker higher up. but 'ol julian doesn't have time in his schedule... every second of the next two weeks of his trip has been accounted for and logged on a piece of paper. so julian, who feels fine, decides to go the next day anyway. all of a sudden, i am doing this climb alone, and now we both have to pay $100 anyway. no discount. hmm. rodolfo is to go up the mountain with julian and our young bolivian cook, johnny, to the first camp at 5000 meters and then do the climb early the next morning with julian. they will descend back to the camp later that day, and rodolfo will hang out there, rest, and await my arrival. i will pass julian somewhere on the last bit of trail at the bottom no doubt, as i am making my way up. rodolfo and i will then summit the next day. this puts rodolfo in the super stud billy goat club seeing as how he will be doing the mountain 2x in 2 days. so yesterday, i take an hour-long bumpy taxi ride out to the base of the mountain... which looks pretty fucking imposing. i find julian and johnny resting at the bottom. julian is beat. he only got 1/2 way up the mountain. it was snowing too hard and blowing like the dickens... conditions were miserable. another spent gringo from some other tour lays sprawled a short distance away as well. he rolls is eyes up to meet mine... "that was the worst, most stupid thing i have ever done in my life." he does not appear to be joking. however, my fate is sealed. i've paid my money, and what's more, rodolfo is waiting in a tent for me at 5000 meters, a 3 hour climb away. after all, conditions can change at any minute, and what happened to julian might very well... perhaps even likely... not happen tomorrow. it would not be good form to bail out right now... i must stiffen my lip, and play the part. johnny the cook cheerfully pulls out my gear, and i start to put on my plastic boots and neon bunny suit while julian gets ready to relax in the comfy warm taxi for the ride back to la paz. he looks positively gleeful. suited up and ready to go, i pop a sarojche (altitude sickness) pill for good measure and shoulder my pack ... just the bare essentials that i actually have to carry up, johnny and rodolfo have already done all the heavy lifting of the kitchen and the tent and everything for the three of us. julian smiles weakly at me and gives me a big bear hug. this is to be the last time perhaps that we see each other, and its been a fun week and a half since we met in copacabana. at least he doesn't feel the need to say anything silly like: "i'm sure you'll do fine or something." we simply say goodbye and he gets in the taxi, and off he goes. from the place the road leaves you, near a hydroelectric dam where the snow melt of huanay potosi helps to power la paz, the trail climbs up through mixed rock and snow, winding past the huanay potosi glacier. even at the base, just over 4000 meters, the going is slow for me. i can walk for a minute, maybe 50 paces, before i have to stop and rest--stopped midstep--standing, but kind of hunched down on one elbow supported by my forward knee. johnny waits patiently for me. he's obviously waited for plenty of gringos before. you see, when people are born at altitude, like these bolivians from la paz, or the sherpas in nepal, their bodies actually become physically different from ours. from the day children are born here, and begin to breathe the outside air, till the age of five or six, their lungs physically and permanently adapt to the reduced amount of oxygen available in the air. especially at the highest altitudes, like around potosi, bolivia--the highest city in the world at 4,000+ meters-- where people traditionally do difficult work like mining, their bodies actually are noted for being 'barrel-shaped' to accomodate their larger--and most importantly, more efficient--lung capacity. people who do not go through their developing years at altitude can never enjoy these benefits.
so when johnny waits for me its not just the wait of a person who is in good shape, it is more the wait of a sort of superbeing who accommodates a lesser organism out of benevolent stewardship. i could be in much better condition than i am now, and i could get very close in capability, but he will always have the edge. nothing is ever said to this effect, it is simply understood--and never more so than right now, with me hunched over and wheezing, and him standing just ahead, elegantly poised in the trail, half-turned back... calm and respiring normally. in one of these stops he gives me a pinch of coca leaves to put between my cheek and teeth, the ancient, natural altitude performance enhancer of the incas. he takes none himself. the coca leaves help... i can feel a little more spring in my step. my sprits are brighter. we continue in this fashion for several hours, stopping now and again to sit on a rock for a bit longer so i can rest more fully. in these interludes, johnny tells me a little bit about himself. he is 18 years old, and an orphan. his mother and father split when he was quite young, and both remarried--to a step-mother and father who already had kids of their own. sadly, neither step-parent cared to take johnny into their new home, and no effort was made to find accommodation with relatives or friends. he was simply left to his own devices, and eventually was fortunate enough to find a home for boys that took him in. rodolfo, who is in his 30s with a wife and children, was an orphan too when he was a child. when johnny was in his teens, they met and rodolfo took him under his wing and eventually got him the job working as cook. sitting on that rock high in the andes, listening to johnny talk, i realized a little more fully how much more brutal life can be. it seemed inconceivable that this athletic, self-assured, beautiful young man might not be wanted--especially by the two people biologically intertwined with him. in a flash, against the cold crisp setting of the mountains... beautiful but stark and utterly lonely... i realized how appropriate the work that johnny and rodolfo found was to their histories. another hour goes by, and i believe i can almost feel the change in oxygen as we climb. the wheezing stops get more frequent--i am stopping after only little short spurts of 25 paces or so. suddenly we summit a small ridge and look down into a small niche where the little tent lays... somehow very lonely looking so far up here away from any sort of connection with any kind of humanity at all. its odd to think that there is a human curled up in there that has depended on our return to this precise spot. as we approach, rodolfo peers out at us with a warm smiling face. he has been resting all day... since about 6am this morning when he and julian returned after about 5 hours, only having made it about a third of the way up the mountain. the day has cleared quite a bit since the morning... there is a bit of sun peering through and the air is still. he is encouraged, and thinks it a good omen for our efforts the next day. it is 4pm. we are to rest a bit, eat dinner and then sleep-- till 11pm or so--when we will get up in the middle of the night to begin the climb. i pull my down north face bag out and toss it into the 3-man tent. its the first time i've used it on my whole trip... but i'm glad i brought it now... its high-tech gear and its fucking warm. hail to the gringos. i also brought the la paz daily spanish newspaper, much to rodolfo's delight. the three of us lay comfortably in the tent... johnny reading the football section, which is easily half the paper, and rodolfo and i reading the days news. rodolfo used to be a professor of economics before giving it up for the life of a guide, and is well-informed and passionate about bolivia's current situation-- its reserves of natural gas and how best it should use them. he agrees with me that the current situation is completely ludicrous on many levels--that gas is being sold way too cheaply and that the transnational corporations have a death grip on the bolivian future made tighter with each new back-room deal that gets cut. we laugh about the energy minister's statement that 'not one molecule' of bolivian natural gas is to be re-sold to chile. after all, if bolivia sells gas to argentina and argentina sells gas to chile, then what's the difference? the sale of bolivian gas enables in some way or another the production of electricity in chile. one begins to see how thorough the corruption is throughout the system, and how the leaders, mostly educated and raised in western cities, come home to manipulate the perhaps not so well educated locals to their purposes. rodolfo and johnny speak nearly no english, and our conversations are purely in spanish. it feels wonderful to be able to carry on like this. we dine on chicken sandwiches and cream of asparagus soup prepared on the small kerosene stove. snow is melted for warm mate tea-- simply hot water with coca leaves sprinkled and stirred in it. it is becoming a familiar taste, and i find it soothing. around 7 we turn in. i peer out of the tent into the darkness, the stars are bright and twinkling outside. i might get my crystal clear summit after all. snuggled back in my bag i imagine endless vistas of snowy peaks from the top of the world, none quite as tall as the one i'm standing on. lake titicaca glistens in the distance like a showy turquoise trinket. the blinding snow under our feet illuminates our ruddy and grizzled faces--we are mountain climbers behind our impenetrable black glacier glasses! i snap my pictures--swinging around for the panorama shot of all panorama shots. with these visions of sugar plums dancing in my head i try to drift off to sleep, but my heart is racing. too much coca for the gringo i think. i make up a silly little nursery rhyme in my head in the hopes of tricking myself to sleep:
the altitude makes it harder for the ticker rodolfo is restless to my left as well, but johnny is quickly sawing llamas to my right. its a new place, and a weird situation wedged tightly in between these two strangers who speak no english. though i know it will be best to be fresh for this epic, its pointless--my catchy rhyme notwithstanding--and i pass the next 4 hours in a fitful kind of half-rest. we get up with rodolfo's alarm at 11:30. it is dark outside, though the moon is still up a bit and casts a low blue bit of light at the snowfield in front of us. it seems like such a dumb idea to be getting up and doing this now, when we can hardly see a damn thing. but this is how they do it: the snow is firmer and easier to walk on, the avalanche danger is smaller, the winds tend to be lower, and you tend to get the best views at the top--if you get them at all--when the day is just breaking and the clouds haven't had a chance to set in yet. they say there's nothing like a perfect sunrise at the top of the world. the wind has picked up a bit, and it is much much colder outside, probably near zero. putting on my boots and gear outside, i must quickly first don my thin but quite warm alpaca gloves which i will wear inside my mountaineering mittens. without them my hands quickly chill. within minutes i would begin to lose feeling at these temperatures. rodolfo helps me set the crampons for my boots, and i make sure every thing else is right. i take a good healthy swig of water before we go. the water has been inside the tent with us to keep it from freezing, but its still ice-cold and difficult to drink. dehydration becomes a big problem for climbers because frequently either their water freezes, even when close to their bodies, or its so cold that its impossible to drink... their systems reject it. digestion happens much differently at altitude, and nausea and vomiting are frequent companions. one begins to realize how incredibly crucial it is that everything is done exactly right. a crampon that is incorrectly sized or fitted, just off by a bit, might come loose just when most depended on for purchase in steep ice. higher up, adjustments can not always easily be made. an inner glove liner that is removed for just a second to perform a detailed task, but which is suddenly dropped or blown away can spell frostbite or worse. the outer mittens, though insulated themselves are simply not enough. the camp is at the bottom of the first real permanent snowfield--it glistens and twinkles in the soft moonlight in front of us. it is beautiful and haunting--completely silent, and yet deafening in its implicit threat. go ahead, make my day--puny earthling. it seems to say. somehow this doesn't seem like such a good idea. the mountain is simply enormous in front of us, and yet i know that mountains are like icebergs-- what you can see is only a teeny tiny bit of what's there. whatever lies ahead is easily 10 times bigger. but we click on our little LED headlamps and start climbing anyway--or maybe trudging would be a better way to describe it. the funny thing about excursions like this is that they have such an enormous amount of momentum and inertia behind them, that you simply don't change your mind and decide not to do them. its probably the only reason anyone actually ever makes it to the top of these damn things-- shame, guilt, and the sense of a lot of money and time down the drain if you give it up. in fact, come to think of it these may be the prime motivators behind many of mankind's greatest achievements.
rodolfo and i are both wearing climbing harnesses over our suits, and he
has taken a bit of climbing rope and tied it off between the two of us.
we have about 5 meters of slack between us. because he is obviously
faster, and i have already resumed my wheezing routine--gasping like a
choked chicken--before we have hardly left the camp and turned up the
steep snowy face in front of us... because of this, i feel somewhat like
a dog on a leash being dragged up this big snowy sandbox while digging in
on all fours. rodolfo is breathing heavily, and obviously needs
rest as well... but my stops come abruptly, and usually last a minute or
so. he seems ready to go after only a brief pause, and yet he
always waits patiently for me... never saying a word. in fact, the
whole time we are climbing that day, he never once utters a single
syllable of urging or reminding about the remaining climbing that needs
doing, never harps on the limited time remaining, never chides or pesters
me in any way. only sometimes after the longer stops, where i
need more like five minutes to fully regain my
how can i possibly describe the endless endless endless time that it took to climb this huanay potosi? i am no stranger to physical challenge... i have ridden my bicycle solo across the united states, sometimes screaming and sobbing in frustration when the headwinds blew 60 mph for days and my forward progress came literally inches at a time. and yet, i have never faced anything like this. each second was a contorted and grueling physical trial, like being suffocated by some sick hannibal lector whose idea of fun is to tie a plastic bag around your head--letting barely enough air in to keep you alive--while he, dagger in hand, gently encourages you to run up a hill. in 7 hours of climbing i only really fully caught my breath for a few short minutes in total. everything that relies on oxygen to function--like legs and head and heart--throbs and burns with lactic acid and deprivation the whole way. and my heart... i had to rely on the knowledge that many people had succeeded or tried this many times before, and that few if any had died of heart failure, because i have never before seriously had the feeling--and for such a prolonged period of time--that my ticker might actually fail me like i did on the mountain. it was beyond fear or anxiety and simply a feeling that if it gave out--then it gave out--and i would die up here on this mountain. it pounded and pounded and pounded away as fast and hard as it could beat, and when i couldn't take it anymore, and the effort from gulping for oxygen that simply wasn't there finally overwhelmed me, i would stop in my tracks and the rope would go tight, and rodolfo thankfully would stop. and wait for me. stopping was such sweet bliss--like finally being able to piss after having to hold it for way too long, or collapsing after an exhausting ordeal into your soft, comfortable bed. and i stopped all the time, though i shouldn't really call it stopping. honestly to tell the truth most times, especially as we got higher, i collapsed with exhaustion--falling on one knee, or completely crumbling all the way to the snow--chest heaving and eyes closed. ascending to camp the day before i had managed 25 paces at a time before stopping. but that was lower, walking on solid ground, when it was warmer and i was fresh. here, in the snowfields i was lucky to link 10 paces together in a row, and even that monumental progress was because i was following in rodolfo's tracks, where he had already compacted the snow for me and laid my pacing out plain as day, making it so much easier and thoughtless to put one foot in front of the other. up and up and up we went, and though it seemed like the process of taking ten steps and resting for a minute or two was painfully slow, occasionally i would look back and what i could make out of the shape of the landscape was totally different. different angles, a different sense of place on the mountain, the milkyway still spread out in the heavens above us. thinking back, the thing that probably defines the difficulty of this sort of alpine climbing is that as you go up it gets harder and harder. you continually adjust your assessment of how hard the thing is that you're doing, and whether or not you can continue to handle it, and continue to force yourself to it--and then it gets harder still. the extraordinary effort that you are making to climb higher is only cinching the plastic bag tighter around your neck, making it harder and harder to breath. after what seemed like an eternity, many hours for sure, we finally stopped and rodolfo dug a candy bar out which we split. it was cold, and it was hard to keep down, my stomach didn't want food even though i knew i was quite hungry for energy--but i was thankful for it, and it plus the rest gave me a renewed kind of strength. thinking about how far we had come, it seemed like we must have climbed many times the distance that i could first see from the camp. i had been using the same mental tricks that i learned on my bike trip, and other times during my life to keep myself motivated, and one of them was to avoid reminders of the remaining work to be done--like for instance looking at my watch. better not to know what time it was and to let time simply stretch out without demarcation than to continually draw attention to it--to multiply it by chopping it up into little pieces. but then rodolfo dropped the bombshell. without color or prejudice he calmly announced that from here it was five hours more to the top. till then i had avoided facing the enormity of the task simply by remaining in the moment, and letting the moment continue on. the moment was simply about existing, breathing and putting one foot in front of the other. the moment had nothing to do with comparisons about what had been done and what remained to be done. the concept that we had twice more what we had come was somehow a surprise... and it meant to me as best i could imagine that i would simply not be able to finish the climb. Part Two what began to shape in my head was a sort of unsolvable equation, a play in three parts each with different outcomes--and me observing as the confused audience, unsure what conclusion to draw. act one was a long preamble... a vignette, summarizing the painful ascent so far. it elicited a slow and growing realization that i was facing a larger kind of physical hurdle than i ever had before. i had thrown my body against this mountain for two hours, two hours that seemed like ten. i had done what seemed like easily a mountain's worth of effort, only to find there were two more mountains to climb. i was physically exhausted, but what was worse was that the challenge was getting harder and harder the higher i got. the mountain was steeper here, and the air even thinner. the effort that got me ten paces before a rest an hour or two ago now only got me three paces. only three paces... before i collapsed in shame -- now not even making the pretense of a one-kneed graceful rest, but usually just letting both knees buckle forward and simultaneously crunch through the crusty upper snow, not even caring to glance up for rodolfo's reaction. i tried more games... i made my self promise that i would try to do 25% more than i thought i physically could. instead of three paces, i would conserve my precious momentum and try for one or two more... kind of half lunging in the last one for the finish line where i could sink back to the lovely soft snow again. watching this silly amateurish show, i couldn't imagine that anyone who ever successfully climbed the mountain ever looked as pitiful as me at any time... certainly not from a position only 1/3 to the top! i felt ridiculous, and i was sure that rodolfo only kept quiet because he'd seen it so many times before, and what the hell... if i didn't make it to the top, all the better for him-- he would get to punch out and go home early to wife and kids. act two of this macabre production was a kind of mosaic of all the mountain climbing movies and books i had ever read before. it mixed in a bit of maurice herzog's epic 'annapurna', where he manages the climb but ends up losing all his fingers and toes to frostbite-- but oh, how, he pushes himself... right to the limit of human capability. i added a sprinkle of reinhold messner's majesty, where he summits all the 8000 meters peaks without oxygen. also featured was a fictitious sepia newsreel of sir edmund hillary and tenzing norgay on the summit of everest in ?? a triumph of two truly giant men seemingly at the dawn of time--a feat so disproportionately larger than my own two hour sniveling session so far, that it stretches the limits of taste and my credibility to refer to them both as mountain climbing. this collage of grizzled faces, darkened and windswept mountain faces, and staggering human achievements was kind of an interlude... a reminder in stark contrast of who had gone before, of what was possible when one truly dug deep. after all i asked myself, what did i think this was going to be like? a walk up the picturesque slopes of the tyrol at the end of the 'sound of music' perhaps with a bit more of a snow cap at the top? was i hombre or cucaracha? act three was kind of a ghost of my dead future... a flash of an image of me having decided to go to far, and then--completely exhausted--unable whatsoever to descend. face down, permanently prone on the snow... no life whatsoever left in my body. rodolfo kneels over my still form, wondering how to drag my overfed gringo carcass down the treacherous slope--perhaps he should simply leave me as they do on everest... a grim reminder to all future climbers of the reality of the danger? these three shorts kept cycling in and out of the projector of my mind. i could not quit now, i still had life in me and i had not even gone halfway. surely i was more fit. and yet i knew i could not finish this... there was simply too much, i was over my head, and i could get myself in big trouble. i desperately wanted an outside opinion, an unbiased 3rd party who could see all things to give me some good advice, but i was too proud to ask rodolfo--or maybe it was that the nuances of asking casually without seeming to be doubting my own ability felt beyond my spanish. i munched more on the chocolate bar and said nothing. i would go on, just a little bit. but i would be smart-- a proud climber was a dead climber. we started off again. i felt refreshed after our longer break. almost immediately the going turned much steeper. whereas before steeper meant a slower plodding, an uphill grind of maybe 30 degrees, here the angles were tilted drastically more--as if the gods were taunting my silly mind games. 'you didn't seriously think that it was just going to get a *little* bit harder did you?' i could see rodolfo began to swing his ice axe, placing the longer thin blade deep in to the icy crust, and half-pulling with the axe hand, half-stabilizing himself with the other as he much more carefully moved one foot up and reinserted it into the snow. as usual, he didn't say a word. there had been no training session here, and i was both surprised at the lack of explanation and grateful. i didn't need to be babied here, it was obvious what to do. i expected to fatigue even more quickly here, but the going seemed strangely smooth. i could use both my hands and my feet to propel my self, and i was always resting in a way. there were no more jolly green giant double-knee falls that shook the mountainside, wasting precious energy and requiring enormous effort to recover from. here, when i was tired, i simply loosened my grip on the ice axe handle a bit, its wrist-strap supporting my weight and let my chest rest against the slope, which was always reassuringly there. we continued on like this, scuttling up the featureless expanse like namibian sand spiders, halfway between crawling and climbing. since the climb began i had been looking up regularly, checking the sky. my one point of contentment so far had been that the sky was clear, and however far i did make it, if i could simply hold on till daybreak i was guaranteed a wonderful show. but now, sometime in between this glance and the last, a blanket had suddenly been drawn over the stars. almost at the same time, i noticed little swirly specks in my headlamp... snow. but maybe it was just a scheduling snafu ... an intermission between two parts of a classicly clear night on the mountain. i hoped so. not only was the trip in a sense worth less than half price without the national geographic cover shot to hang on my wall, but the flight of the stars and the ominous swirling around me seemed to spell a kind of doom. at least with a clear sky over my head it should be harder to get into trouble, no? rodolfo seemed to reach a crest and turned back for a rare word of encouragement. 'solo cinco mas,' he said. just five steps more, before the next rest. and this would be a good one, a chance to catch a longer breath. i tried to make it in one go, but fell short... needing a full 30 seconds or more, just two strokes from the top, to regain my composure. at the top, i took a short rest, but forced myself to get up before i felt fully ready and push on at least a few more paces--trying to keep myself out of a pattern of overly long rests. the top flattened out for a bit, but then began to steepen again. once again, we were in a kind of half-crawl up the mountain, swinging our single axes and ambulating with hands and feet. and then the steep mountain turned into a wall--well perhaps more like a vertical shaft, with walls on three sides. a climber would call it a chimney. i saw rodolfo begin to kick his toes in a little more deliberately. as i paused and looked up at him, he peered down at me and offered a rare word. "cuidado," he said. careful his oratory stopped there as quickly as it began. he offered not a single additional word of education or advice. i was really surprised this time. i knew his word of caution was meant not just to remind me to look out for myself, but to focus me on the reality that if i slipped off here, i would yank him right off the face with me--but did everyone come built-in with this kind of awareness? i found it impossible that a significantly large number of climbers could do this without any education, and wondered if somehow i had demonstrated some significant enough facility with things thus far that he had appraised me as being capable of handling this new task on my own. again, though surprised, i was glad to be left alone, glad to have had some sort of positive impression early on. more than anything i enjoyed this new form of interaction where in a sense the less that was said, the more that was understood. a simple 'cuidado', was all that was needed to call attention to the the fact that we were on a different sort of terrain with different implications than what had come before. in a climbing partnership of longer history than rodolfo's and mine, even that one word would have been ridiculous overstatement. everything else in our communication was implied, not stated. if i was over my head, or needed instruction, i would ask for it--my silence implied i was confident with these maneuvers. of course, that itself was a leap of faith on his part... but he had done this for at least several years now, and it seemed no clumsy neophyte had yanked him off the wall yet. of course, i had never actually done this before--though i thought i had a pretty good idea of what to do. i thought back to when my good friend chris purnell had sat with me in a simple little candlelit room in kathmandu nearly nearly ten years ago now. he had a pair of used crampons, newly purchased, and he was sharpening their tips with a rusty file while he explained the basic mechanics of ice climbing to me. when you climb ice, you let your crampons do the work. kick the front tips straight in, and then weight your foot. the next two tips right underneath will dig in. you should be able to stand up on them, and then have the time to place your axe well. he explained the use of the ice axe too, showing how the wrist strap connects the arm mechanically to the axe. allowing one to literally hang off the tool without using muscle power. everything in climbing was always about techniques to use mechanical advantage to save your strength and preserve it for when you really need it.
from those humble beginnings, through our year together in nepal with the wisconsin program--endlessly prankstering around kathmandu and trekking up to everest base camp together--and through the 8 years that i knew him, i watched as chris became one of the finest climbers in the world. when i was just barely ready to attempt the nose in yosemite national park, he had already done most of the routes in valley, and was getting ready to contribute his own new climb: an insanely difficult, A5 first ascent--a climbing rating that means essentially that the route is fundamentally unprotectable... and that any fall is sure to be fatal. later he climbed denali, and finally polished off the sea of vapors-- often acknowledged as the hardest ice climb in the world. his girlfriend in corvallis notified me of his death by email. chris and i had both talked about death so many times--it has to come sometime... it might as well happen doing what you love. but then there's the awful reality of reading those words. ... and the awful reality of the loss of the gentle, awkward soul that was my best friend. it happened on new years eve in 1996 when a section of waterfall he was going to attempt broke loose and fell on him. it was on a lesser route in banff national park, only two days after nailing the sea of vapors. to know chris is to know how disappointed he probably was that his death was not more spectacular, or at least recorded on camera. these memories trickled through my mind as i began kicking and stepping in my crampons and swinging my single tool. with a strong silent pulse of emotion, i pictured the spirit of my departed friend telling rodolfo that no instruction was necessary--that he had already explained the fundamentals to me 10 years ago, and i should bloody well remember them. a quiet smile formed deep inside my hooded parka as i knew that the first comment he would in turn make to me, was how ridiculously short this little ice climb was. "you're not actually going to claim you've been ice climbing after this little thing are you?" he would cackle, and then almost certainly follow it up with a heavy sigh. "35 years old and getting your ass dragged up this little molehill like a goddamned dog... and to think i once had hopes for you daniel..." regardless of its abbreviated length, i felt much better when rodolfo and i were safely at the top of the 20 meter section of ice wall, both panting heavily, our breath mingling with what had now become a blowing snow framed in the beams of our headlamps. my perfect picture at the summit now surely just a vision in my head y nada mas. end of Part 2... |
impressive.
then, over dinner, he suggests that maybe i might like to go as well.
the rationale? julian tells me that there's a discount if he
gets a friend to go. instead of him paying $100, we can both pay
$90. he reassured me that the climb should be no problem.
sure, it's a 6000 meter climb, but its an 'easy walk up' for a mountain
like this. later i find that its probably pushing the envelope for a gringo with no previous
experience that's been sitting on his ass in a truck for the better part of
a year. hmm. but somehow, i find my lips wrapped around a 'yeah, sure' before i
can clamp my hand over my mouth.
composure
does my end of the cord twitch ever so lightly, less of an insistent
reminder than simply a gentle lulling motion that tugs me out of my
reverie. in the whole 9 hours of climbing and descending back to
camp, we probably say less than 10 sentences to each other.
chris
purnell was a climbing nut. there wasn't a day that went by during
our friendship that he wasn't talking, dreaming or sketching something to
do with climbing. his love of the sport was infectious and soon
after we met in the summer of 1998, during our first day of tibetan
language class at the university of wisconsin, he had me bouldering with
him on the walls of a university building next to lake mendota. i
would borrow his stinky, slightly slimy, two-sizes-too-small climbing
shoes and jam my bare feet in them too. then chris would critique
me as i fumbled with my hands and feet and tried to move over stone like
he did. afterwards we would point our schwinn cruisers back towards
his apartment. if it was hot we might first ride off the end of the
pier in front of the UW union building, each trying to do a slightly more
complete back flip off the end before we hit the water... and endlessly
debating about who had actually gotten further around. diving back
down to the bottom of the lake with him to retrieve our bikes, each
wondering whose cycle would end up with, is a memory i will cherish
forever.