A Million Years with You (28 page)

Able-bodied people can be like that when it comes to disability. To avoid the perceived stigma, some paraplegics are encouraged to walk with braces and crutches rather than to use a wheelchair, just as many hearing-impaired people are encouraged to lip-read rather than to use sign language. The idea is to keep them looking like Colony A—the able-bodied, hearing population. But the practice is reminiscent of left-handed children forced to use their right hands, as if being left-handed were wrong, or gay people coerced into acting straight, as if being gay were wrong. Needless to say, a wheelchair is faster and more convenient than braces and crutches, just as signing is more comprehensive than lip-reading, but even so, the negative view of disability prevails in Colony A, particularly when little is known about the useful and productive lives of the people in Colony B.

 

A mindset can be laughed off. The built environment is the greater problem. On the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the ADA, ADAPT of Texas gave a party at a restaurant with games, food, and margaritas. The celebration was a great success, said my daughter, but the work wasn't done. A bit later, ADAPT people gathered at a loading area where tourists boarded vehicles known as Ducks, which give scenic tours on land and water. In some cities, disabled people could get on the Ducks, but not in Austin. There, in violation of the ADA, the only way to get on a Duck was by climbing a ladder.

The ADAPT people couldn't climb a ladder. They massed at the loading area to point this out. Someone had alerted the media, who were there taking photos and asking questions. One of the reporters asked a woman in a wheelchair why she wanted to get on a Duck anyway. She said she had a seven-year-old son. He wanted to get on a Duck. The reporter looked at her askance, as if wondering how a woman such as she could have a son.

The captain of the Duck, if that's what you call him, said there was no issue and no problem. Disabled people were welcome on the Ducks. Someone asked how a disabled person could get on. The captain said the person would be carried on. Some of the disabled people laughed. A power wheelchair, which many people use, can weigh two or three hundred pounds with no one in it. No way could something so unwieldy be carried up a ladder. Then what did the captain have in mind? Dragging its occupant onto the Duck and laying him on the deck? That didn't sound like fun to me, and I doubt that it did to the ADAPT people.

Back in her house in Austin, Stephanie called to tell me about the party and the Duck. ADAPT members were going to sue the Duck company, the twentieth such lawsuit of 2010, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the ADA. ADAPT of Texas was following its star. They did this for every ADA anniversary, said Stephanie. Each year they added a lawsuit and also an action to correspond with the year of the anniversary. Thus in 2009, nineteen years after the signing, they had nineteen actions and filed nineteen lawsuits, and for 2011 they planned for twenty-one.

Stephanie said she'd been going around the city, enjoying what their work had accomplished. Formerly inaccessible stores and restaurants targeted by ADAPT had installed ramps. Disabled people could patronize these businesses. Years ago in Austin, there were few if any curb cuts. Someone in a wheelchair couldn't get on a sidewalk from the street, and despite the danger had to roll along among the speeding cars. With my heart in my mouth, I'd often watched my daughter do this. But after ADAPT had made its point, thousands of curb cuts appeared in Austin. Stephanie said it made her happy to see people use them—not just people in wheelchairs but also people with canes and walkers, tricycles and roller skates, shopping carts and strollers.

But best of all, she said, was the change in public transportation. When she first went to Austin, the disabled people had next to none. They more or less stayed home unless they had their own vehicles and somehow could drive them. They couldn't take taxis, as these were inaccessible, so if they didn't have cars with hand controls (very expensive), their only option was to request transportation by medi-vans booked far in advance. Then along came ADAPT and We Will Ride. Now they're riding.

 

On the night my daughter was born, the night we stood in the hospital window looking at the city, I wondered what was in her future—not just the boy in the Bronx but also her career and her adventures. I thought she'd get an education, which she did, and get married, which she did, but never in a thousand years would I have guessed what her work might be, or what kind of experiences would matter to her. Never did I think she'd be in a prison, naked except for a tablecloth, talking on a phone through a thick glass window. Never did I think she'd go to jail more times than Al Capone. And if I had tried to guess what sights would give her pleasure, I might have said the Grand Canyon or the Acropolis or a grizzly catching salmon. I'd like to see those sights and so would she. But her favorite? That's to see a disabled person—not someone she knows, just any disabled person—get on a bus.

12

T
HE ICE MAIDEN IS
a mummified twelve-year-old Inca girl from the Andes, and the name applies to other things too because it's catchy. But these names derive from a spirit who lives among the peaks of the Alps, a cold-climate siren who inspires men to risk their lives by climbing up to find her. My second child, our son, whose name at first was John but now is Ramsay—the two-year-old who on all fours respectfully approached the widows of the late kabaka in Uganda, the six-year-old who navigated like a cougar in his escape from the school in Nigeria—heard this Ice Maiden's call and became a climber. Thanks to him I learned about a whole new part of the natural world—the upper part, the snow-covered part, the part with the glaciers and the avalanches.

Perhaps I also learned something about myself. Although I'm as far from being a climber as it's possible to be, his love of those breathtaking spaces above the tree line seemed something like my own love of the woods and the savannah. Perhaps the Ice Maiden is Gaia's second cousin once removed. They would seem to be related.

His fearlessness, however, must have come from his father, because it certainly didn't come from me. I sensed this when Ramsay was four and we were in a small plane on our way to Nantucket. Just as we were landing, we hit clear-air turbulence that hurled the plane around like a roller coaster gone wild. It was terrifying. The five passengers, including myself, lost all color and gripped the armrests. Then we heard joyous laughter. It came from Ramsay, who was sitting on my lap. “Don't you get it? We're going to die,” I wanted to shout, holding him tight, preparing for the crash. But he was having the time of his life. When we landed, he was the only one smiling.

At first the Ice Maiden sent him rock climbing in the Quincy Quarries in Massachusetts, but he soon progressed to more difficult climbs in the White Mountains and the Colorado Rockies, then on to mountaineering and off-trail skiing in the Canadian Rockies, the Andes, the Alps, the Dolomites, the Alaska Range, and the Himalayas. He became an American Mountain Guide, then an International Mountain Guide, which was considerably more demanding, and then a French guide, or Guide de Haute Montagne, perhaps the most respected of all guiding communities. To be near his work he moved to France, to the Alps and the Chamonix Valley. He had found a way to make a living by doing what he liked best.

But it's not a profession a mother would choose. Why couldn't he just have been an architect or something? A number of his friends and colleagues have been killed in mountaineering accidents. One night after guiding a client, Ramsay came home to his apartment in Chamonix to find a man and a woman sitting on his couch in the dark. They were his friends, a married couple, both guides, and they began to cry. A terrible thing had happened to them and they needed to tell him about it.

They had been skiing in the Bernese Oberland when the wife looked back and couldn't see her husband. A crevasse had opened and swallowed him. She went to rescue him, but as she was readying her equipment, another crevasse opened and swallowed her. She shouted to her husband, but he couldn't hear her. Cell phones don't work under such circumstances. The crevasses were hundreds of feet deep, both people were wedged in such a way that they couldn't help themselves, and both would have stayed there, frozen forever like the Inca girl, if another skier, far away on the slope of another mountain, hadn't seen them. He had noticed them in the distance, but when a few minutes later he looked again, both had vanished. He guessed what had happened and he called the rescue helicopter.

They were very lucky. By 2008, so many guides had been killed in mountaineering accidents that the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations held a conference in Geneva to see if they could sort out the reasons for this. Climate change was one—the formerly safe ice bridges weakened, the glaciers cracked, the steep slopes avalanched, and the melting ice on the upper peaks released stones and seracs to fall on whoever was below them.

Guiding agencies were also part of the problem. A guide would have a client who wanted to climb on days determined by his vacation and had hired the guide through an agency. But if, when the client arrived to begin his adventure, avalanches were likely or the weather was dangerous, the guide might decide that they shouldn't go up there. The client would be disappointed and might get angry. Having a limited time, he might insist on going anyway. The guide could then oblige the client and hope for the best, or he could refuse, in which case the client might complain about him to the agency and the agency would not call on him again. Sometimes, even in dangerous conditions, a guide would decide to please the client because his livelihood depended on it. This had led to several deaths.

 

Needless to say, I used to ask myself why my son decided to become
un guide de haute montagne
. At least he was a good, sensible climber. I was heartened to learn that on one occasion he had aborted a climb in the Andes because of dangerous weather, much to the disappointment of his client, who had wanted to summit. I don't know if the client hired him again, but even if he didn't, he was still alive and Ramsay had other clients. He found them himself, or they found him, so he didn't depend on an agency.

Even so, danger was always present, and I felt I was to blame. This was because when Ramsay was little, I read aloud to him an article from
The New Yorker
entitled “On Vous Cherche.” It was about mountaineering. I thought the article might be too grown-up for him, and after reading a few paragraphs I asked if he'd rather hear something else. But no. He was enthralled. He was sitting up straight with his eyes wide open, listening with all his attention. He insisted that I keep reading, so I did. After that, he was fascinated with mountains. He had posters of them in his room. And as soon as he could, he began to climb them.

Years later I discussed this with a friend named Peter Schweitzer, who was also a climber. I told him I had lured Ramsay into danger with “On Vous Cherche” and thus was worse than the Ice Maiden, who at least didn't lure her own children. But Peter didn't agree. He said that Ramsay was already a climber when he heard the story. The story didn't persuade him to climb, it just woke the desire.

I thought that could be true. I have no idea how one can have a desire but not know it until one responds to it for the first time, but I do know what it feels like. I knew I'd always had the desire when I climbed the Needle of M, which I could see from Ramsay's house in the Chamonix Valley. When visiting him there, I would look at the Needle and the memory of the climb would come back to me. I had never felt anything like it.

Thus I could understand why Ramsay wanted to be a climber. I had done a little more climbing after climbing the Needle and loved every minute of it, so his climbing reawakened my own desire. And so, when he was about seventeen and had been climbing for a while, I asked to climb with him.

Ramsay had better climbing partners than his mother, but being an agreeable person like his father, he said he'd go with me. We lived in Virginia in those days, so we went to Seneca Rocks. There we began a three-pitch climb called Skyline Traverse. It was a Class 5 climb, rated at 5.3, the 5 for the class of climb and the 3 for the degree of difficulty. All Class 5 climbs require climbing equipment, but since at the time 5.13 was considered to be the most difficult category, a 5.3 climb did not present serious problems for an experienced rock climber.

Ramsay warned me that there might be some exposure, but never having encountered real exposure, I anticipated no trouble. I belayed him while he led the first pitch, but on the second pitch, I began to have doubts. We were up fairly high by then, the rope between us was twenty feet long, and I saw that if Ramsay fell, he'd fall twenty feet down to me, then twenty feet again when he went past me. I also saw that it was one thing to climb the Needle of M as an oblivious teenager with a professional guide and quite another thing to climb a towering Seneca Rock as an anxious, inexperienced mother belaying her youngest child. However, Ramsay was doing 5.10 climbs by that time, if not with his mother, so I'm sure he was doing what climbers usually do, which was to put in his own protection where he needed it.

The second pitch went well, although I was nervous. But on the third pitch, in a section of cliff that bulged out, we began to cross a narrow ledge that gradually became smaller. Soon we were on a little shred of rock, up in the sky above a valley stretching away for miles and miles with no help in sight. Hundreds of feet below us, the trees looked like toothpicks. I felt as if I'd been pushed out of a high-flying airplane with no parachute. My teeth were chattering. I thought my hair would turn white. My knees got weak so I sat down.

Ramsay didn't quite know what to do about this. He had been climbing with all the skill and grace of his primate forebears who lived in the trees. He looked as if he had been born on a rock face, as if he had never done anything else but climb. Now his mother was causing a problem. He sat down too.