Snowblind (10 page)

Basecamp was a city complete with neighborhoods, block parties, crime. There was the Italian village, the French Quarter, the Serbian ghetto, a gated community of thousand-dollar Japanese mansions up on a step in the moraine. Everyone was there, and we were all converging on the same route. It was a bleak, cold place. No shelter. The mountain staring down all the time. Big black ridgelines cutting through the ice. An enormous, ugly icefall crawled toward us, crevasses open wide. We were running around in a slow-motion scene from a monster movie, the mountain coming at us.

We sent the last of the porters—except for a guy named Dho, who would cook and watch basecamp for us—home with their rupees and
cigarettes. They dumped their loads in a big pile that would become our camp, then raced down laughing and shouting, glad to get away. Part of me wanted to join them, but another part reveled in it, watching them. I'd gotten to a place that normal people ran away from, but I was staying.

We hardly had a choice spot. All of those were already taken. What was left was shit and sharp rocks. Toilet paper blowing around and fungating out from under stones. Bill was pissed. There were more climbers than he had expected, and some were already established to Camp 2. And more were on the way. Captain assured him that several teams were coming up the Braldu, and maybe more coming over from the Chinese side, even as we unpacked our loads in the shit fields.

Bill took it out on Wind. He finally caught up to him in the Italian camp, where Wind was pantomiming to a couple of insulted-looking guys with dark faces and hair who seemed totally uninterested in trying to understand what this crazy American caveman was saying. It was a train wreck. Wind had his back to us and was trying to make himself understood. He kept gesturing at the mountain. Bill came up behind him. I could have yelled something. It would have been easy. All he had to do was turn around. But I didn't. Captain was standing right next to me, eyes glowing. And what was he to me, anyway? Bill grabbed him by the dreads with one hand and threw a half nelson around his shoulder with the other and dragged him back. The Italians slapped each other's shoulders and laughed. Wind could have fought back—he was just as big as Bill and probably broader. But he just flopped around and pedaled his feet while Bill yanked him around and presented him to Captain like a recovered prisoner.

The Captain puffed up to twice his size. I thought he was going to burst buttons and blood vessels. He harangued and spat and switched Wind's legs with his stick. Half of Wind's hair was in Bill's fist, and the other half was in his face, and he twisted around when the stick hit him but did nothing to get loose. Bill grinned huge, veins popping in his neck and forearms. I was sick. From the ugliness of it and the rest of us standing around spectating while the Italians called their buddies over to watch. And also from a feeling that Wind wasn't afraid enough of this place, and he should be. Eventually Captain began to run out of steam, and I think we all wanted to know what was going to happen then. What was he going to do? Call in air support to deport a fleabag hobo? Handcuff him to his own wrist and wait for some corporal to hike up and retrieve him? Turn right around and march him back down the glacier? He grabbed Wind by the collar, hauled him to the edge of camp—which looked ridiculous, like a golden Lab collaring a rottweiler—then put his foot against the seat of Wind's pants and kicked hard, as if he could punt him all the way back to Askole. Wind tumbled down through the snow-covered moraine rocks. Bill and the Captain stood side by side and watched as Wind picked himself up and walked away down toward Concordia. They watched him ten, fifteen minutes, till he disappeared.

There was something a little spooky about how the first storm came up then. The mountain had suffered us to look at it all day, and maybe looking back, it didn't like what it saw. The moment Wind was out of sight, the real wind came up—like Bill had traded one for the other—and black clouds started foaming up out of the clear sky. The Italians vanished into their tents. First we had hail, then snow,
falling practically sideways. We ran around throwing tents up, moving rocks, scraping shit away and only unearthing more, getting tarps over the food and the gear.

Bill was manic, wild. He was laughing and throwing rocks around to make tent platforms but not bothering to look where the rocks were going. It wasn't safe to go anywhere near him. The snow collected in his hair until he was wooly with it. He didn't need gloves—later I saw him barehand gear at twenty-three thousand feet without flinching and no frostbite.

By the time we were all inside, we were soaking wet and stuff was strewn all over in random tents and piles under tarps. None of us knew where anything was. I was in a tent with Gregor. He told me a story about an expedition to Nanda Devi where they spent the first eight days in the tents arguing about Bruce Springsteen lyrics while a monster storm dropped nine feet of snow on them. They didn't even see the mountain during the first month they were there. And then he went to sleep. I lay there on my back staring at the roof of the tent, which was rocking and popping in the storm. I had my own sleeping bag, but a bag of someone else's clothes was shoved down by my feet, and a wad of soggy down suits fought me for space. I felt wrung out. The altitude was making me fuzzy in the head, and being sick had sucked something out of me. I'm used to feeling sharp, you know, jagged, ready to bite down on the mountain and not let go. But I just felt weak and unplugged. It was no good, the state I was in. And I hadn't even done anything yet.

The storms hit us on and off for the next two weeks. You could practically watch the pressure ridges come and go. We'd get thirty-six
hours of heavy weather and then twelve or twenty-four hours of clear. We'd try to work in the gaps, but someone was always getting caught and pitching into a tent half frozen in the middle of a whiteout. Sometimes visibility was so bad it was hard to make out which tents were which. You'd get yourself in and try to bring yourself back to life and check and see if your toes were all there and then notice that the colors inside were all pink and green and the paperbacks in Italian. And sometimes you'd just stay, then, because they were probably somewhere else on the mountain and it was raging outside. Which was all well and good until you got back to your own tent and found that the chocolate-chip cookies had been cleaned out by some unknown foreign national. Luther kept petitioning the Captain for the right to carry a gun, said the mountain was infested with bandits.

I spent most of those first two weeks shuttling loads to our advanced basecamp and up to Camp 1. From ABC to Camp 1 was the worst kind of work. A vertical scree field covered in melting slush from the storms. Rocks falling down all the time, either from people moving around above or the mountain tossing stuff down. Impossible to move fast with sixty pounds of food, gas, ropes, hardware on your back. The whole time waiting for a rock to choose you for its bull's-eye. Camp 1 was pretty safe from avalanche, but it was exposed and was our first taste of big wind up high, up on a narrow shoulder with big drops on both sides, tents sunk down in the snow. The middle was already crowded, so the two tents we put there were perched right on the edge.

Gregor and I worked as a pair. He was a beast. He could haul ten pounds more than me and still leave me behind. But Bill knew that,
and just before we'd get going, he'd say, “Hey, Stump, can you take this rope, too?” Or this last stove and fuel bottle. Or Nick's down pants because he's up there and forgot them. And what could Gregor say? No? I'm not that strong? I need to pace myself? That wasn't in his personality. So he'd end up with eighty pounds on his back, and by the end of the day, he'd be beat or struggling through the beginning of the next storm.

I didn't like getting caught in storms, and I was a miserable donkey. I started leaving things out of my pack. I'd “forget” a bag of soup packets or a fuel bottle—hide them away somewhere they wouldn't be noticed. I felt like such an asshole when Gregor would come stumbling into the tent an hour after me. I'd make him dinner, keep the stove going for water. But I wasn't dumb. Bill gave us our jobs. At first we were all ferrying stuff to Camp 1. Then he and Nick, then Frank and Luther, pushed us higher while Gregor and I kept hauling loads. Pretty soon, it'd be my turn at the front, and I wasn't going to get there spent. I wanted to be ready.

It was a circus up there. People going up, people going down, people going back and forth between the camps. Getting in each other's way and knocking rocks on each other. Half the time, I couldn't understand anyone around me. We were all attached to this mountain together, and we couldn't even talk to each other. And every other day, the weather would explode, and we'd all go underground in one tent hole or another dug by someone we might not even have known. And the next day, we'd be back on the surface, crawling all over each other and the mountain.

Everything I'd done in Alaska had been about speed. Get yourself acclimatized, catch your weather window, and
go
. Tag the summit, descend, no stopping. Up and done in thirty, forty hours. This was something totally different, and all of my instincts resisted the grind. But it was
different
there—Frank had told me that. You can't just step into the ring and be the warrior the way you can with a hard pitch in Yosemite or a mixed route in the Rockies. The mountain was too big and high for that. It felt alien, like something thrown from a star.

Weird stuff started happening. The Italians went to war with the Serbs over a pair of ascenders that went missing. There were so many people up on the mountain at any given time—headed up, headed down, carrying loads, fixing more rope. It was impossible to tell who was who. But there was a feeling that there were more people than there should have been. You'd tally up the people you'd seen in a day and the number never quite made sense. And bodies started coming up out of the glacier. You know, people die up there, and who's going to carry them out? Most of the bodies end up getting put down crevasses. But now bodies were coming back out. You'd see a new dark spot way away somewhere, and sure enough, it would turn out to be an ejected corpse. And it was disturbing, sure, but we were all pushing hard on half oxygen and there was only so much we could think about. The Germans had held onto some high-altitude porters—the local version of Sherpas—and those guys were telling Yeti stories. Said they'd seen something shaggy in a storm and found tracks and fur.

My turn finally came. Luther and Frank had gotten us to Camp 2. Gregor had gone down with pain under his kneecap. I told him he'd be fine in a day, be right back up, and I put an arm around him, but he only shrugged at me—those big shoulders of his rolled me right off—and I couldn't tell where he was pointing his disappointment. What could I say? I'd only known the guy a month. He wasn't my brother. Hubert helped him down to basecamp and tended to him. Luther and Frank were on their way down, too, and Alan and Nick were at basecamp already, so Bill and I took the front. “Ready, boy?” he said, and I just gave him the finger, which wasn't very meaningful since I had on mittens.

Luther and Frank had fixed ropes most of the way from Camp 1 to Camp 2. But then, so had the Germans, the Serbs, the Japanese, everyone who was up there. And it seemed that every expedition for the past thirty years had left its ropes in place, bleached white cords all tangled together. “Look at this rat-work,” Bill said, like he was personally offended. “Someone's going to die in this—don't let it be you.” As if that was going to really screw up his efforts, here, if he had to disentangle my corpse from the cobwebs of expeditions passed.

It was ugly, no doubt. I could hardly even see House's Chimney behind the ropes matted in front if it. We're at twenty-one thousand feet, nothing but razor lines all around, rock and ice. Past your crampons, you could look straight down four thousand feet of the South Face to the Godwin Austen Glacier. But up on the ridge, we were bushwhacking through vines—it was a jungle. One of those ropes was ours, but which one? And what did it matter? The anchors were all mixed up together anyway, nests of pitons and slings, some new,
some old, the Germans' and the Japanese's interconnected with ours because there were only so many places to put them. And we all had different ideas about how cozy we were. The Italians would jump on the first rope they saw: new, old, theirs, ours, it didn't seem to matter to them. The Germans were hyper-possessive and would scream at anyone who even looked at theirs. The Serbs were practically inviting people onto their ropes, but we figured out that they wanted to use ours in return. Theirs looked like something you'd find on a sunken ship.

Bill and I took a day to move up to Camp 2 with a little extra food and gas. An Italian with a shredded nose—a falling brick of ice and the wrong moment to look up, as best I could understand—was being photographed grinning and bloody by his partners, and we passed them. We were caterpillars on the fixed lines, bobbing up and down on our ascenders. And everywhere below us was white and black with a little ice-blue. But up close it was the nylon web we'd made, with us caterpillaring up our strand of it, chunks of rock and ice banging down, a medium blizzard cranking away, the wind shaking the web, and Serbians coming up behind us and Japanese sliding down past us. We'd greet them and ask for news, and they must have known exactly what we were saying (Because what else would we be saying?), and they'd reply as if it were the most normal conversation in the world except they were panting for breath (just like us) and speaking Japanese.

Above Camp 2 was the Black Pyramid, and that's where the real climbing began. Steep black rock, curtains of ice pouring out between fracture planes. I don't know how hard the climbing would have
been at eleven thousand feet in Canada, but up there, I got pumped just unclipping gear from my harness. Testy, friable gneiss that flaked off under my axe tips. Ice like stone—something about the wind and the altitude and the alien star-ness of the mountain turned the ice into granite, and my tools dulled fast.