Adventure Divas (24 page)

DAVID ROBINSON OF WAKEFIELD AND BANGOR NORTH WALES WHOSE UNTIMELY DEATH AT THE AGE OF
24
YEARS OCCURRED WHILE DESCENDING THE HöRNLI RIDE HAVING CLIMBED THE NORTH FACE OF THE MATTERHORN,
says one. Another reads simply:
TAUGWALDER FRONZISCUS “I CHOSE TO CLIMB.”

Edward Whymper was the first to summit the Matterhorn in 1865, along with six others in his team—four of whom died on the descent and are buried here. Whymper and his contemporaries were an understated lot who took to the mountains in the name of the Queen and good air; this was long before the commodification of “adventure.” No Gore-Tex, no helmets, no crampons; they roped to one another and learned through experience, some of it tough. Their hazards will be ours—falling rock, avalanche, the fatal misstep—but because they could not rely on modern equipment and cell phones, they must have been far superior mountaineers to those of us who try it today. They also had
time—
to watch the mountain, to make many attempts, to talk to one another. They did not have to dash back to the office on Monday morning. Whymper, who was a lithographic artist and illustrator by profession, had been hired by a London publisher to make sketches of Alpine peaks, a job that gave him time to conjure and do reconnaissance missions that would inform his eighth, and successful, attempt on this mountain long considered unsummitable. “Toil he must who goes mountaineering, but out of toil comes strength (not merely muscular energy—more than that), an awakening of all the faculties; and from the strength arises pleasure,” wrote Whymper in his golden years. There was a good deal of competition regarding who would first summit the Matterhorn. Those early attempts seem, through the lens of history, so pure compared to ours. A relatively few men blazing unknown trails. In a funny way, we compete against ourselves, but they . . . well . . . they looked right down the barrel of the unknown. They thought:
Can it be done?
We think:
Can I do it?

Why climb if you can die doing it? What is it that makes us intentionally tango with the Maker? The draw seems more than just getting to a beautiful place to commune with the secular power of nature. The yearn to climb has to do with mortality and vitality being inextricably wed. The delicate glacier, the narrow ledge, the capriciousness of the elements all require us to Pay Attention—to our moves and our lives. Thus, fear gets transformed, through action, into vitality. To live in that complete present is the goal, the moment of the take. To feel, for an extended period of time, that any moment may be your last (which I did every time my leg slipped off a ledge or ladder in the Via Feratta) makes you realize that you like—and want to keep—your life, and switches
vita
from black-and-white to color. Bachendri Pal calls it “the difference between being fully alive and just living” (N-U-T-G-R-A-B, sixty points).

So is it merely competitive machismo that drives mountaineers to high places with little oxygen and plenty of hazards? Or is the act—for the viscerally inclined—one of leaving entropy behind and chasing a perfect bit of prose poem, a rhapsodic bolero, the last answer in the Sunday
New York Times
crossword?

Whatever the answer, I’m sure it didn’t apply to the guys in the sub.

We hike several hours up to the Hörnli Hut, launching point for the Assault. A few relieved and giddy climbers who have already summitted sit at nearby tables, basking in their success and the sun. To the right and straight up looms the Matterhorn, in all its 14,690-feet-above-sea-level glory.

When my aunt Donna heard about my going on this trek, she banged the mountain up on the Internet and wailed from the other room,
“Haaahleee, good God, don’t do it—have you seen how pointy it is?”
Her words come to me now as I crane my neck and take in the sheer, pointy, unfathomably vertical rock before us.

Already-high tension peaks to a sour pitch. The mountain seems different to me after hearing that it claimed those six lives. We all make ourselves feel better by saying it must have been those “crazy Czechs” who never rope up, since they were so recently unleashed politically (a superficial analysis that bounces among climbers, and that we readily accept). Digger says the plan is to conquer the mountain in one day. Light packs. Stealth filming.

“Vee vill have good veather,” says sixty-four-year-old Ricky Andematten, who has met us at the Hörnli. Ricky has a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and a matching thick bunch of hair on his head. He will be my personal guide as well as the team’s lead guide. Like Pierre Giorgio, Ricky has climbing in his blood. He is a fourth-generation Swiss Matterhorn guide.

We do not all bunk in the same room in the Hörnli Hut, which is a blessing as I have lost my earplugs. Ben and I, the tension between us now at a very low simmer, are roommates for a couple of days. Aside from our potentially lethal-smelling socks, our room is a sanctuary from the stories of mountain fatalities zinging around the hut. There is no escape, however, from the periodic buzz of helicopters on rescue missions (“Those damn Czechs!”). We look out our small window and see orange sarcophagi chained below the choppers as they zoom by. One time the limbs that hang out of the sling have the limpness of death. Two times they do not.

We eat sauerkraut. We prepare ourselves mentally for the mountain. We grieve the lack of cheese. Preclimb rituals take the form of obsessively fiddling with equipment and an endless recitation of stories about climbs gone awry. I hear about losing hands to frostbite on Denali, bodies tossed down crevasses on Everest, glorious barroom brawls, and women’s fat asses. We talk about the weather. A lot.

I can relate to exactly none of the conversations. One part of me can swagger with the best of peak baggers, a frequently useful trait. Another part of me thinks it is strange to have so many conversations devoid of emotion when emotion is actually the addictive opiate of the climbing experience. I opt out and funnel my trepidation into watching the handsome young guides who take clients up the mountain. An entrepreneurial idea comes to me: a Men of the Matterhorn calendar. There are a few other women in the hut also waiting to climb, and I briefly consider asking for their nominations.

The nature of my nerves reflects my own internal dichotomy. I fear not getting up the mountain and screwing up the show as much as or more than I fear becoming a statistic. How twisted is it that I fear professional failure more than heart failure? Traditionally, professional drive has meant working to publish a book, launch a business, or film a diva, not climbing fourteen thousand vertical feet in six hours.

“Tomorrow you will suffer,” my guide, Ricky, says as he goes through my backpack, purging nonessentials on the eve of our attempt, “but later you will see the world differently. You will be a proud girl.”

“This,” he says, pulling Sky Prancer out of the inner pocket I hid her in, “stays behind. No extra weight.”

Four
A.M.
and the dark,
crisp, clear skies come as a relief—if only because they put an end to a fitful night of anxiety dreams. Though he has a climbing past, Ben shares my trepidation and charmingly confesses to scratching out a will. “Everything goes to my girlfriend and my kid, with the exception of my record collection and cameras . . . my brothers get those,” he says soberly, showing me where the will is stashed. Being devoid of assets and any significant equity, it occurs to me that this could—cosmically speaking—be an okay time for me to “go.” Nevertheless, I sneak Sky Prancer back into my pack for good luck. After all, Narishakti worked for Bachendri on her climb up Everest.

“Ben,” I ask, as we make the final cinches on our small packs and swing them from our cots onto our backs, “what do you think happened down there in the last moments? In the sub. Do you think they turned to, or against, one another?” I ask.

Ben looks down and shakes his head slowly. There is a long silence. “I don’t know,” he replies quietly. “But you gotta hope they reached some sort of peace in the end. All they had was each other.”

It’s 4:15
A.M.
and the temperature reads fourteen degrees Celsius. We scramble around in the dark clicking on our headlamps and putting on our gear. With dozens of other silent hopefuls, we toss back some tea, and set off. All of the young guides—March, September, January—are tying on to their clients and rushing out the door so they do not get stuck in an alpine traffic jam.

Ricky and I, too, are short-roped together. Since the Everest tragedy in 1996, I’ve considered short-roping a dirty word because, on Everest anyway, it can lead to a shameful situation in which one climber virtually hauls another, weaker climber up a mountain. On the Matterhorn, however, short-roping is the most common and safest method, as the density of climbers makes belaying a partner (fixing into the mountain with protection and belaying with large stretches of rope between you) far too hazardous. With short-roping, the idea is that if one partner slips, the other can dig in and prevent them both from falling. Ricky and I only have each other; there’s no protection. Worst-case scenario: If I go, he goes—and vice versa.

In the pitch black we walk in single file across a snowfield. I look up and see a trail of lights, a weaving troupe of fireflies, inching its way up the base of the mountain ahead of us. “Gently, gently,” goes Ricky’s mantra as we set out with only our headlamps, his expertise, and our combined enthusiasm to guide us. The stars wink above as if conspiring in a bit of a laugh. Zermatt slumbers below, making its leisurely living off the sweat of us naïve thrill-seekers above. Part therapist, part drill sergeant, and part Heidi’s grandfather, Ricky will be my savior.

“Left hand here, right hand there,” he says. “Good girl, zat’s my champ,” he encourages, with his kindly accent. “Steady, steady, gently, gently, watch my feet. Step where I step.”

LOVE Ricky!—despite the “good-girl” stuff and that he has me on a leash.

I feel lucky. Our pace is fast, but my body and mind harmonize and remind me that this is the kind of place and circumstance that make me most happy. My eyes sting and adrenaline rushes down legs that only knew needles of pain a few days ago. Ricky encourages me to play with the mountain and the moves, to breathe, and to synchronize my legs and arms; he teaches me a certain mountain dance, a choreography. I am not alone. He and I are a team that will succeed or fail together. Ricky does not approach this as an assault. Ricky, a guru of the Alps, is wise enough to be humble.

Dusty orange quietly
emerges in the east until, from the crux between two peaks, a blazing star of light bursts forth, turning into a new day.

“Good Holly, you do vell,” says Ricky.

The first two hours of the climb are very rigorous but—almost—enjoyable. “Liesl!” I blurt out, suddenly remembering the name of the other Von Trapp kid. Ricky looks back and nods, as if this is normal behavior. I realize that the suffering on the Dolomites paid off. That struggle made me strong. Starting the climb in the dark helped, of course, as I can develop a rhythm without the added pressure of seeing the consequences of a misstep.

Hour four. Misery gains
a toehold, though the spirit remains intact. “Gently, gently” starts to grate on my nerves; my thighs burn from overuse as I grind up the Upper Mosley Slabs. An eight-inch hunk of rock zings by my ear, having been kicked loose by a climber above. I try not to look up or else I’ll take in the massive totality of this endeavor and become overwhelmed.

I stop on sheer slope and struggle with my crampons. I spent an hour taking them on and off last night, but the fruits of my practice desert me in this critical moment. I chuck aside my ego, and let a guide who comes up behind us untangle my straps.

One step at a time,
usually a slightly jaded phrase in my lexicon, now becomes a totally earnest hold-steady loop in my mind. I care less about the view; I stop talking. I wish I could fast-forward this adventure. Whymper wrote: “We who go mountain scrambling have constantly set before us the superiority of fixed purpose or perseverance to brute force. We know that each height, each step, must be gained by patient, laborious toil, and that wishing cannot take the place of working.”

Whatever, Whymper.

Hours five and six. Mild
delirium sets in.
No WAY,
my mind and body holler as I confront the next vertical challenge on this narrow, narrow ridge. I forget the camera. I forget the crew. I look to the right, down the four-thousand-foot drop of the Matterhorn’s north face, where four of Edward Whymper’s seven-man party fell to their deaths on their descent from the summit in 1865.

Pain sends me crawling into my secret happy place.
You’re all alone . . .
but I am decidedly
not.
An endless stream of climbers is directly behind me. I look up at the vertical cliff in front of me that leads, tauntingly, to the summit. A mental ticker tape of tongue-lashings begins.
Fuck this show. Fuck this mountain. Fuck Ricky and his goddamned lulling voice and incessant confidence in me. Fuck all these
guys. I remember, in Borneo, the headman’s reluctance to sacrifice a cock for our good luck. My vision blurs with tears as my upper body screams for salvation. I look over at one of the guys. I’d do it, right now, sacrifice a cock, if it would relieve me of this mountain purgatory.

I want to quit. Ricky looks back and sees. He recognizes that his client has crossed the line. He twirls and delivers the emotional equivalent of a smack across the face. “Be a tough girl! You are a tough girl! Action! Action!” He morphs from supportive Swiss grandfather into snarling guide, determined to bring his client back from the edge. I gulp a hunk of too-thin air and begin to scramble up the cliff, crampons flailing, spitting out a considerable range of four-letter words.

Another forty-five-minute snow climb up a seventy-degree grade. “Quit stepping on your crampons:
beeeg
steps,
beeeg
steps!” says Ricky sternly when I stumble dangerously near the edge of the narrow ridge. My last reservoirs of anger and determination plow me onward.