Dead Lucky (3 page)

When the call was over, I went down the few steps to our bedroom and onto the balcony, which overlooked the pool. My sweat had cooled me by now. Our eldest son was noisily completing twenty laps. Dylan was a naturally strong swimmer, but he disliked the idea of doing laps. Much of his non-school time was spent at his computer, managing a gaming clan on the Internet. While in Singapore, he had begun to play
Battlefield 1942,
a game that is at its most exciting when two teams of twenty or thirty players battle it out across the Internet. Dylan realized that this particular game had much more to offer than the popular shoot'em-up games. It became such a favorite that he set up a website and began to recruit a clan of gamers. There was something about Dylan's site that hit buttons around the world, and from a few dozen players he soon had hundreds. Within a year there were eight thousand members in his clan, and his site hosted forums covering half a dozen different online games. Management of the clan threatened to overwhelm his life, but at age fifteen Dylan was still young enough for us to enforce some rules—namely, that he not forsake his natural athletic skills for a life in front of his computer.

Dylan dragged himself out of the pool and headed toward the balcony. Our building was on a slope, so although I had jogged up two flights of stairs to get to our front door, the balconies at the rear were only ten feet above ground level. A change in levels between the living room and the bedroom allowed an acrobatic shortcut into our apartment, thanks to the railing beside the steps that led down to the pool. Dylan clambered onto the handrail, carefully stood up, then stretched a hand out to the wall for balance. Next he stepped across to the top railing of our balcony and hopped down beside me. It was the kind of technique you developed when you had a mountaineer as a father. The alternative was to walk around to the front entrance of our apartment and up the stairs.

“Not too bad, was it?” I asked, a reference to his reluctance to go swimming.

“Nah, it was good.”

It was classic Dylan—he enjoyed whatever he did once he got into the rhythm of it. A typical teenager, he shook his head in order to shower me with the water from his hair. He stepped into our bedroom and left a line of wet footprints across the tiles as he left the room.

I turned back to the pool and watched the water settle until it became as still as glass in the breathless tropical air. In the background I could hear the
pok-pok
of tennis being played under lights at the back of our condominium.

It was time to talk with Barbara. I found her standing in the kitchen, a cookbook open on the counter in front of her, checking the details of a recipe. I slipped my arms around her waist from behind, and being considerably taller, I was able to look over her shoulder. The book was open at a picture of stir-fried Asian greens with cubes of tofu, bright red slivers of capsicum, and slices of strange-looking mushrooms. My head was next to hers and I could smell Givenchy perfume on her neck. I had bought if for her about a year ago, choosing the largest bottle in the range because it came with a free shoulder bag. Barbara had been pleased but had asked if I wanted her to smell the same for the next three years. I didn't answer at the time—I tickled her instead—but a year down the track the bottle was a third empty; I knew this because she kept it in the fridge door, next to the sports drinks. Silently I sniffed her neck again, and it smelled as good as ever.

“That was Mike Dillon on the phone,” I said, releasing her from my arms. “In Sydney. He was telling me about a fourteen-year-old Blue Mountains boy who wants to climb Mount Everest.”

She turned around to listen, engaging me with her spectacular blue eyes, the kind of eyes that stun everyone who sees them.

“Fourteen's very young,” she said.

“Yeah, but he's climbed quite a few mountains, including Mount Cook when he was twelve, and that's no easy climb.”

“But still no comparison with Everest.”

“No.”

I hesitated. “Mike's planning to make a doco about it and wants to know whether I am interested in being the high-altitude cameraman.”

“When would this happen?”

“Next season, which is April and May next year.”

“And you'd like to go, obviously.”

“If it happens, yeah.”

I played it down, wanting to get her opinion, uncolored by any enthusiasm I might show.

Barbara said nothing for a moment, and then, “That would be okay. I know you're always careful.”

“But what do you really think?”

“That you'll make the right decisions. And I guess I'm happy to support you in achieving a dream you've had for such a long time.”

I kissed her and gave her a big hug. As I pulled away, I said, “It's only an idea at this stage, so we'll just see how it pans out.”

With a touch of a smile she held my eyes, and I could tell she knew I was not as casual about it as I pretended to be. Those extraordinary eyes—I could never escape them. Then she cut me free by turning back to her recipe book.

I walked out to the balcony that opened off our living room and leaned on the railing next to my sweat-sodden T-shirt. The view at this level was across a wide lawn with huge condominium towers silhouetted by the lights from the freeway across the canal. The blackness between the canal and the freeway signified jungle.

I thought about the richness of the life in that jungle, and it reminded me of the incredible rainforests of Borneo. A few months earlier we had enjoyed a great family holiday climbing Mount Kinabalu with Margaret Werner, one of our closest friends. Although not a technical climb, Kinabalu is one of the highlights of my thirty-year climbing career, largely because I shared it with my family. Each of them experienced the gamut of feelings that comes with a major climb—initial intimidation, growing confidence, patches of fear on the tricky sections, and the huge feeling of achievement upon reaching the summit.

Mike's phone call had triggered some of these emotions in me, so it was not surprising that I should think of my most recent climb. Then my thoughts returned to the mountain of mountains. As I had said to Barbara, the Everest expedition was no more than an idea at this stage, but I had not added that it was an idea that excited me greatly. Why had I played down my excitement and talked to her about it so casually? I had some unfinished business with Mount Everest, but I also had a wife whom I loved passionately and two amazing sons. How could I consider leaving them for two months while I returned to the dangerous, inhospitable environment of the world's highest mountain?

The answer could be found in the way that, decades ago, climbing had captured my soul.

RETURN TO EVEREST

W
ITH OUR THREE-YEAR STAY in Singapore coming to a close, decided it was the perfect time to act on a long-term dream. For years I had thought about a trek to Everest Base Camp. Now, with the possibility of a full-scale climbing expedition the following year, I was even keener to visit the region with Barbara and the boys. I wanted them to see Everest close up so they could appreciate its impossible enormity, while breathing for themselves the oxygen-starved air at Base Camp. I wanted them to understand how Mount Everest had been such a powerful force in my past, how it shaped my present, and how it might soon shape my future. But, of course, the boys were more interested to visit the world's most famous landmark, which happened to be loosely linked to my name, along with those of many other climbers.

My link to Everest came from my role in establishing only the second new route on the mountain to be climbed without the use of supplementary oxygen. The first such ascent had been accomplished by Reinhold Messner, the most influential mountaineer of modern times, who at the same time became the first person to climb the mountain solo. Our ascent had been an extraordinary team effort, achieved without Sherpa support, but because I did not reach the summit myself, I burned with disappointment immediately after the climb.

Three years later I was the first person ever to stand on the summit ridge of Mount Minto. My five friends were climbing the final steep slope, but I waited for them so that we could trudge up together to the tip of the highest peak in Antarctica's deserted Victoria Land. While I waited, I stared out over range after range of mountains, almost all of them untouched, our peak the centerpiece. Between us and the coast, the only signs of human presence were our camp on the far side of a high pass and one hundred miles of ski tracks and caches that led to our small yacht anchored against the sea ice in vast Moubray Bay. My disappointment at not reaching the summit of Everest seemed immaterial. The issue became an item of unfinished business, just a candle in the twilight. Nevertheless, Everest remained a special presence in my life. My family did not know that on any day since October 1984 I could have closed my eyes and seen the summit pyramid as clearly as if I were back in Tibet, at the spot near our Advance Base Camp where I spent hours alone with my yoga, alone with my thoughts, staring upward.

I could not expect Dylan or Dorje to grasp even a hint of what the mountain meant to me. Barbara understood at a spiritual level my connection but could not relate to my willingness to embrace such great dangers. She knew that climbing had shaped my character, and she wasn't about to undermine the catalyst that had delivered to her the man with whom she chose to spend her life.

IN LATE DECEMBER 2004 we caught an early morning taxi to Singapore's Changi Airport, en route to Nepal. The flight to Bangkok was uneventful, and we were in luck on the next leg to Kathmandu. The high peaks of the Himalaya rose above a sea of clouds. First we saw Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest peak, and its outliers. The clouds maintained a level horizon obscuring all the ranges until we approached the Everest region, where the next cluster of giant mountains broke through. There was Makalu at number five, Lhotse at number four, the mighty Everest itself, and then Cho Oyu at number six. The mountains stood proud until we dropped into the clouds, the beginning of our landing in Kathmandu.

My good friend Ang Karma Sherpa was waiting for us at the doors to the airport terminal. Eager porters wheeled our carts down the middle of the road to the carpark with taxis honking and minibuses spewing out black smoke. Chaos and confusion is a standard welcome to Kathmandu, but there was something different about the journey back to Karma's house.

“Where's all the traffic?” I asked.

“The Maoists have declared a strike,” Karma explained. “They threaten that anyone still doing business will get their shop blown up. And they bombed some stores. The only vehicles they let on the road in a strike are tourist vehicles. That is why we have the sign.”

He gestured to a large piece of paper taped to the windshield. From inside I could make out the word
Tourist.
The sign obscured some of the driver's vision, but because of the minimal traffic on the roads today it was not an issue.

We went directly to Ang Karma's house on the outskirts of Kathmandu, not far from the airport and the Tibetan Buddhist epicenter of Boudhanath. We were warmly greeted in excellent English by Karma's wife, Kunga. I cast my mind back to when Barbara and I first met Kunga. Dylan was a baby at the time, and Kunga, pregnant with their first child, was too shy to speak more than a few words of English.

In the twenty-five years since we had met, Kunga had shrugged off her shyness, and with better English had come an understanding of our Western mores and values. Meanwhile, Karma had done well for himself. His family now lived in a substantial house, which they had built in stages. When money became available, they added another story. The last of the five stories was a rooftop level with a large balcony, and from there ladderlike steps led to a vertical pole at the apex of the building. Lengths of strong cord were strung from the pole's tip across to trees growing on the slope rising behind. Stitched to each cord were Buddhist prayer flags in five bright colors, each of symbolic significance in Tibetan Buddhism. The cords were like permanent clotheslines, but with the clothes replaced by timeless prayers. As the flags flutter in the wind, Tibetan Buddhists believe, prayers are dispersed across the land and into the cosmos. Most common among Ang Karma's flags was the prayer of the wind horse, in honor of which he had named his business.

The strike imposed by the Maoists had been for only one day, so Kathmandu life returned to normal, which meant busy roads and, in the old part of town, crowded, cobbled alleyways. Karma had work to do, so I showed Barbara and the boys my favorite haunts and restaurants. Singapore was not a good place to buy clothes for winter in the Himalaya, so we wandered from one trekking store to the next in search of the few extra items of clothing that they would need to keep warm at 17,000 feet.

We were keen to get up into the mountains. The air in the deep valleys of the Everest region is more turbulent in the afternoons, and so the flights to Lukla are always timetabled for early in the day. Kathmandu's morning fog in winter often meant the cancellation of the Lukla flights, but on the day that we flew, we were blessed with clear skies. Soon enough we were sitting in the front of the eighteen-seater Twin Otter aircraft, with the propellers roaring as we taxied down the runway. The flight to Lukla is only fifty minutes, and the views of the rugged Himalayan foothills are breathtaking. The middle hills of Nepal are too rugged for roads. The steep terrain limits all agriculture either to narrow terraces covering entire hillsides or to alluvial flats on the floors of deep valleys. Tiny villages nestle in the valleys or on ridge-tops. At the highest pass, between forested mountains, the aircraft was only a few hundred feet above the ground, and we saw children walking along a narrow dirt path toward a distant school.