Into Thin Air (8 page)

Beyond the bridge, the dirt path abandoned the banks of the Dudh Kosi and zigzagged up the steep canyon wall, ascending through aromatic stands of pine. The spectacularly fluted ice pinnacles of Thamserku and Kusum Kangru pierced the sky more than two vertical miles above. It was magnificent country, as topographically imposing as any landscape on earth, but it wasn’t wilderness, and hadn’t been for hundreds of years.

Every scrap of arable land had been terraced and planted with barley, bitter buckwheat, or potatoes. Strings of prayer flags were strung across the hill-sides, and ancient Buddhist
chortens
^*
and walls of exquisitely carved
mani
^†
stones stood sentinel over even the highest passes. As I made my way up from the river, the trail was clogged with trekkers, yak
^‡
trains, red-robed monks, and barefoot Sherpas straining beneath back-wrenching loads of firewood and kerosene and soda pop.

Ninety minutes above the river, I crested a broad ridge, passed a matrix of rock-walled yak corrals, and abruptly found myself in downtown Namche Bazaar, the social and commercial hub of Sherpa society. Situated 11,300 feet above sea level, Namche occupies a huge, tilting bowl proportioned like a giant satellite television dish, midway up a precipitous mountainside. More than a hundred buildings nestled dramatically on the rocky slope, linked by a maze of narrow paths and catwalks. Near the lower edge of town I located the Khumbu Lodge, pushed aside the blanket that functioned as a front door, and found my teammates drinking lemon tea around a table in the corner.

When I approached, Rob Hall introduced me to Mike Groom, the expedition’s third guide. A thirty-three-year-old Australian with carrot-colored hair and the lean build of a marathon runner, Groom was a Brisbane plumber who worked as a guide only occasionally. In 1987, forced to spend a night in the open while descending from the 28,169-foot summit of Kanchenjunga, he froze his feet and had to have all his toes amputated. This setback had not put a damper on his Himalayan career, however: he’d gone on to climb K2, Lhotse, Cho Oyu, Ama Dablam, and, in 1993, Everest without supplementary oxygen. An exceedingly calm, circumspect man, Groom was pleasant company but seldom spoke unless spoken to and replied to questions tersely, in a barely audible voice.

Dinner conversation was dominated by the three clients who were doctors—Stuart, John, and especially Beck, a pattern that would be repeated for much of the expedition. Fortunately, both John and Beck were wickedly funny and had the group in stitches. Beck, however, was in the habit of turning his monologues into scathing, Limbaughesque rants against bed-wetting liberals, and at one point that evening I made the mistake of disagreeing with him: in response to one of his comments I suggested that raising the minimum wage seemed like a wise and necessary policy. Well informed and a very skilled debater, Beck made hash out of my fumbling avowal, and I lacked the where withal to rebut him. All I could do was to sit on my hands, tongue-tied and steaming.

As he continued to hold forth in his swampy East Texas drawl about the numerous follies of the welfare state, I got up and left the table to avoid humiliating myself further. When I returned to the dining room, I approached the proprietress, Ngawang Doka, to ask for a beer. A small, graceful Sherpani, she was in the midst of taking an order from a group of American trekkers. “We hungry,” a ruddy-cheeked man announced to her in overly loud pidgin, miming the act of eating. “Want eat po-ta-toes. Yak burger. Co-ca Co-la. You have?”

“Would you like to see the menu?” Ngawang Doka replied in clear, sparkling English that carried a hint of a Canadian accent. “Our selection is actually quite large. And I believe there is still some freshly baked apple pie available, if that interests you, for dessert.”

The American trekker, unable to comprehend that this brown-skinned woman of the hills was addressing him in perfectly enunciated King’s English, continued to employ his comical pidgin argot: “Men-u. Good, good. Yes, yes, we like see men-u.”

Sherpas remain an enigma to most foreigners, who tend to regard them through a romantic scrim. People unfamiliar with the demography of the Himalaya often assume that all Nepalese are Sherpas, when in fact there are no more than 20,000 Sherpas in all of Nepal, a nation the size of North Carolina that has some 20 million residents and more than fifty distinct ethnic groups. Sherpas are a mountain people, devoutly Buddhist, whose forebears migrated south from Tibet four or five centuries ago. There are Sherpa villages scattered throughout the Himalaya of eastern Nepal, and sizable Sherpa communities can be found in Sikkim and Darjeeling, India, but the heart of Sherpa country is the Khumbu, a handful of valleys draining the southern slopes of Mount Everest—a small, astonishingly rugged region completely devoid of roads, cars, or wheeled vehicles of any kind.

Farming is difficult in the high, cold, steep-walled valleys, so the traditional Sherpa economy revolved around trading between Tibet and India, and herding yaks. Then, in 1921, the British embarked on their first expedition to Everest, and their decision to engage Sherpas as helpers sparked a transformation of Sherpa culture.

Because the Kingdom of Nepal kept its borders closed until 1949, the initial Everest reconnaissance, and the next eight expeditions to follow, were forced to approach the mountain from the north, through Tibet, and never passed anywhere near the Khumbu. But those first nine expeditions embarked for Tibet from Darjeeling, where many Sherpas had emigrated, and where they had developed a reputation among the resident colonialists for being hardworking, affable, and intelligent. Additionally, because most Sherpas had lived for generations in villages situated between 9,000 and 14,000 feet, they were physiologically adapted to the rigors of high altitude. Upon the recommendation of A. M. Kellas, a Scottish physician who’d climbed and traveled extensively with Sherpas, the 1921 Everest expedition hired a large corps of them as load bearers and camp helpers, a practice that’s been followed by all but a smattering of expeditions in the seventy-five years since.

For better and worse, over the past two decades the economy and culture of the Khumbu has become increasingly and irrevocably tied to the seasonal influx of trekkers and climbers, some 15,000 of whom visit the region annually. Sherpas who learn technical climbing skills and work high on the peaks—especially those who have summitted Everest—enjoy great esteem in their communities. Those who become climbing stars, alas, also stand a fair chance of losing their lives: ever since 1922, when seven Sherpas were killed in an avalanche during the second British expedition, a disproportionate number of Sherpas have died on Everest—fifty-three all told. Indeed, they account for more than a third of all Everest fatalities.

Despite the hazards, there is stiff competition among Sherpas for the twelve to eighteen staff positions on the typical Everest expedition. The most sought-after jobs are the half dozen openings for skilled climbing Sherpas, who can expect to earn $1,400 to $2,500 for two months of hazardous work—attractive pay in a nation mired in grinding poverty and with an annual per capita income of around $160.

To handle the growing traffic from Western climbers and trekkers, new lodges and teahouses are springing up across the Khumbu region, but the new construction is especially evident in Namche Bazaar. On the trail to Namche I passed countless porters headed up from the lowland forests, carrying freshly cut wood beams that weighed in excess of one hundred pounds—crushing physical toil, for which they were paid about three dollars a day.

Longtime visitors to the Khumbu are saddened by the boom in tourism and the change it has wrought on what early Western climbers regarded as an earthly paradise, a real-life Shangri-La. Entire valleys have been denuded of trees to meet the increased demand for firewood. Teens hanging out in Namche
carrom
parlors are more likely to be wearing jeans and Chicago Bulls T-shirts than quaint traditional robes. Families are apt to spend their evenings huddled around video players viewing the latest Schwarzenegger opus.

The transformation of the Khumbu culture is certainly not all for the best, but I didn’t hear many Sherpas bemoaning the changes. Hard currency from trekkers and climbers, as well as grants from international relief organizations supported by trekkers and climbers, have funded schools and medical clinics, reduced infant mortality, built footbridges, and brought hydroelectric power to Namche and other villages. It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.

A strong walker, pre-acclimatized to the altitude, could cover the distance from the Lukla airstrip to Everest Base Camp in two or three long days. Because most of us had just arrived from sea level, however, Hall was careful to keep us to a more indolent pace that gave our bodies time to adapt to the increasingly thin air. Seldom did we walk more than three or four hours on any given day. On several days, when Hall’s itinerary called for additional acclimatization, we walked nowhere at all.

On April 3, after an acclimatization day in Namche, we resumed the trek toward Base Camp. Twenty minutes beyond the village I rounded a bend and arrived at a breathtaking overlook. Two thousand feet below, slicing a deep crease through the surrounding bedrock, the Dudh Kosi appeared as a crooked strand of silver glinting from the shadows. Ten thousand feet above, the huge backlit spike of Ama Dablam hovered over the head of the valley like an apparition. And seven thousand feet higher still, dwarfing Ama Dablam, was the icy thrust of Everest itself, all but hidden behind Nuptse. As always seemed to be the case, a horizontal plume of condensation streamed from the summit like frozen smoke, betraying the violence of the jet-stream winds.

I stared at the peak for perhaps thirty minutes, trying to apprehend what it would be like to be standing on that gale-swept vertex. Although I’d ascended hundreds of mountains, Everest was so different from anything I’d previously climbed that my powers of imagination were insufficient for the task. The summit looked so cold, so high, so impossibly far away. I felt as though I might as well be on an expedition to the moon. As I turned away to continue walking up the trail, my emotions oscillated between nervous anticipation and a nearly overwhelming sense of dread.

Late that afternoon I arrived at Tengboche,
^*
the largest, most important Buddhist monastery in the Khumbu. Chhongba Sherpa, a wry, thoughtful man who had joined our expedition as Base Camp cook, offered to arrange a meeting with the
rimpoche
—“the head lama of all Nepal,” Chhongba explained, “a very holy man. Just yesterday he has finished a long period of silent meditation—for the past three months he has not spoken. We will be his first visitors. This is most auspicious.” Doug, Lou, and I each gave Chhongba one hundred rupees (approximately two dollars) to buy ceremonial
katas
—white silk scarves to be presented to the rimpoche—and then we removed our shoes and Chhongba led us to a small, drafty chamber behind the main temple.

Seated cross-legged on a brocade pillow, wrapped in burgundy robes, was a short, rotund man with a shiny pate. He looked very old and very tired. Chhongba bowed reverently, spoke briefly to him in the Sherpa tongue, and indicated for us to come forward. The rimpoche then blessed each of us in turn, placing the katas we had purchased around our necks as he did so. Afterward he smiled beatifically and offered us tea. “This kata you should wear to the top of Everest,”
^*
Chhongba instructed me in a solemn voice. “It will please God and keep you from harm.”

Unsure how to act in the company of a divine presence, this living reincarnation of an ancient and illustrious lama, I was terrified of unwittingly giving offense or committing some irredeemable faux pas. As I sipped sweet tea and fidgeted, his Holiness rooted around in an adjacent cabinet, brought out a large, ornately decorated book, and handed it to me. I wiped my dirty hands on my pants and opened it nervously. It was a photo album. The rimpoche, it turned out, had recently traveled to America for the first time, and the book held snapshots from this trip: his Holiness in Washington standing before the Lincoln Memorial and the Air and Space Museum; his Holiness in California on the Santa Monica Pier. Grinning broadly, he excitedly pointed out his two favorite photos in the entire album: his Holiness posing beside Richard Gere, and another shot of him with Steven Seagal.