The Ledge (28 page)

I shake uncontrollably, and they help me remove my drenched jacket and wiggle into a dry one they carried with them. They force candy bars on me, and water, and make plans for the leader to descend into the crevasse to check on Mike. Then they set up an anchor system in the snow. Someone asks me if I need to be taken off the mountain right now.

“No,” I say. “I can wait.”

The lead ranger—in my shaken state, I’m taken aback to hear the others call him “Mike”—prepares to rappel into the depths, and worry overcomes me. Rattling off potential dangers in the crevasse, I spit out everything I can think to tell him. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.

Finally, he backs over the edge and disappears into the hole that opened beneath my feet almost seven hours ago. There is nothing to do but sit and wait for him to return.

The guy tending to me introduces himself as John. He strikes up a gentle, distracting conversation, asking me where I’m from, what I do, that sort of thing. At one point, my tears return.

“My God, my friend’s gone,” I sob. “He’s dead, man. He’s down in the hole and he’s dead.”

“Yeah, man,” John says sympathetically, “that’s terrible, but we’ve got you and that’s a good thing.”

I don’t feel very good, but I nod my head in agreement. John puts an arm around my shoulders and gently pats my back.

“It would have been even worse if you were still down there with him,” he says.

Finally, the lead ranger emerges from the crevasse.

“There’s nothing we can do for your partner tonight,” he says. “He’s buried under a lot of snow, and it’s going to take a big effort to get him out.”

Someone asks me if I can walk.

“You’ll have to put me in the middle and I’ll be pretty shaky,” I say, “but I think I can do it.”

We spend the next few minutes roping up, then set out with me in the middle position, just in front of a guide named Uwe. Fear seizes me as I approach the indistinct edge of the snow bridge spanning the crevasse, and I suck in a deep breath.

“Watch me,” I say to Uwe.

After one big step, I am across. It seems too easy. The snow is soft, my legs are like jelly, but I am walking and stumbling down the mountain. We reach the rangers’ hut in about thirty minutes. My spirits sink as I realize Mike and I were just half an hour from Camp Schurman and the safety of solid ground.

In the park service hut I learn that the two rangers are Mike Gauthier and Deb Read and the volunteers are Uwe Schneider and John Norberg. I keep thanking them as they feed me hot soup and tea. I feel like a stranger in a strange world now—all eyes on me. Someone puts me through a light medical exam and pronounces me basically okay—bumped and bruised all over, cuts and scrapes across my face, but seemingly not seriously hurt. It dawns on me how I stink after five days without a shower, but no one says anything.

Read sits down next to me, gently rubs my back, and says, “I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.”

“Thank you,” I say. “So am I.”

I feel like crying but fight it, afraid that if I start I won’t stop.

No one wants to ask, but everyone wants to know what happened. In bits and pieces, I relive parts of the climb.

“How much ice climbing have you done?” Gauthier asks.

“Well,” I say tentatively, “I’ve been ice climbing for about ten years, but I’m pretty much an intermediate climber. I can lead seventy-degree stuff when I’m bold, but I’ve never been able to lead long stretches of vertical ice.”

“Well,” he remarks, “I believe you, because you say so, but I went down that crevasse and I saw that ice wall. That was an incredible ice lead. That wall was vertical to overhanging. You made a lot of aid placements, your anchors were good, and your rope work was good. I can’t believe that you consider yourself an intermediate climber.”

“Yeah, I don’t understand how I did it either,” I say somberly. “I’ve never done anything like it.”

Schneider joins the conversation. “It’s simple,” he says. “You had the ultimate motivation.”

“To survive,” I say.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“I feel proud of what I did, but I feel ashamed, too,” I say. “My friend’s not here and I’m afraid there’s something we did wrong, or something I could have done differently.”

But one by one, they reassure me. We registered our route; we brought the right gear; we wore our helmets. We were skilled enough to climb the Liberty under icy conditions; we simply ran into bad luck. I appreciate their analysis and support, but already I feel survivor’s guilt swelling in me.

My pack and gear are still in the crevasse, part of the ledge holding up Mike. In the upstairs loft I crawl into a dank, Korean War–era sleeping bag the rangers loan me and lie awake as long as I can—frightened of sleep and the nightmares I figure it will bring, frightened
that I will scream out in the night. Drenched with sweat, the rank smell of the sleeping bag mixing with my own, I finally drift off.

I SNAP AWAKE
. For a few moments, I’m not sure where I am. The blackness and the fuzzy gray light confuse me, and my heart races at the thought that I may still be in the crevasse. But the clank of an aluminum pan downstairs sets me straight. Quickly enough, it all comes back.

I get up, occupying myself with the preparations for leaving. I ask that someone in the park service call Gloria and Mike’s family—and a little later, over the radio, I think I hear scratchy confirmation that the notifications have been made. I walk out into the sunshine with some of my soggy outer clothes and lay them out to dry, weighing them down with volcanic rocks. Someone has music playing in the hut, and Don Henley’s song “The Boys of Summer” comes on.

The refrain echoes in my head. It’s June 22. Summer is here and Mike is gone. I move around the back corner of the cabin, make sure I’m out of the other climbers’ view, then let myself cry.

Finally, I gather myself and my gear and get ready to go. I’m vaguely aware of the radio chatter as the rangers plan their effort to retrieve Mike’s body, and I know that more rangers with gear are coming in by helicopter.

“We plan to send you out on a chopper, but there’s no guarantee,” Gauthier says. “You might have to walk out.”

I visualize the 5,000-foot descent and dread the thought of hobbling all those miles on my throbbing, battered legs. Not wanting to complain, I just mutter, “I understand.”

A little later, a copter lands nearby, and it’s time to go. I’m apprehensive—my legs are like noodles, and even the ten-minute
walk uphill to the landing zone sounds daunting. I put on a helmet, step stiffly into my harness again, and notice my gashed gear, wet gloves, ripped clothing. It seems as though everything I look at reminds me of the crevasse, reminds me of the gripping terror.

I tie a rope to my harness. Deb Read has the other end, and we trudge to the waiting helicopter. Just before I climb in, she leans in close to my ear to tell me something, but the roar of the idling chopper takes it away. I gesture confusion and point at my ear. She leans in closer and says it again, this time with her hand on my shoulder. I still can’t hear it, but when we back a foot away from each other, I see compassion on her face, and I know it was something important, and touching. I force a half smile and nod; then we exchange a quick hug.

The chopper lifts off, and through the bubble I see the immense glaciers of Rainier stretch out below me, slit again and again with crevasses. Flying over the Winthrop and Carbon Glaciers, I spy thousands of slots, some covered with sagging snow bridges, some open. Through the window between my feet, I can see straight down their black throats.

A few minutes later, we land in a green field, surrounded by trees on a warm summer day. After five days of ice, cold, and rock, this new world shocks me. I step out to a throng of waiting rangers.

And thus begins the inquisition
, I think.

One of the rangers steps out from the others, shaking my hand. His name is John Madden.

“Just relax,” he says. “I’m here to take care of you. If you need anything, just ask. I’m also here to get whatever information we can out of you so we can help other climbers and learn from this incident. There’s no pressure, so you take your time, you do what you need to do, and we’ll get through it.”

“I think I can do it now.”

For two hours in a park service office, I spill it all into his tape
recorder. My background and Mike’s. Our route. The joy on the summit. The disaster on the descent. The climb out.

Finally, he tells me that they want me to get some lunch, get checked out by a doctor, and then retrieve our rental car from the other side of the mountain.

HOLDING THE HEAVY
black receiver to my ear, I dial home. It’s about noon in Colorado, and Gloria picks up the phone.

“Hi, Glo,” I say tentatively.

“Oh, good, I’m glad it’s you,” she answers, utterly normally. “I was worried when I didn’t hear from you last night. How did it go?”

My heart sinks. It’s obvious no one has called her.

“The climb up went well and we made the summit yesterday.”

“Oh, good,” she says.

“But there’s bad news.”

“What?” she asks. I can hear the apprehension in her voice.

“On the way down, we had an accident. We had a bad accident, Glo.”

“Oh, no.”

“We fell in a crevasse. We fell about eighty feet into a crevasse on the way down.”

“Oh my God, are you all right?”

“I’m beat up, but basically, I’m okay. But not Mike.”

“Oh my God, what happened?”

“Mike didn’t make it, Gloria.”

“What?” she says, her voice barely a whisper.

“He didn’t make it,” I cry. “I tried to give him CPR and mouth-to-mouth, but I couldn’t save him.”

“Oh my God, Jim.”

Through tears I say, “I made it, Glo. I’m alive. I kept thinking about how I just had to get out for you and Dad.”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON
, I sit in the sun, talking with Ranger Madden, wondering aloud whether I could have done something differently.

He says, “Sounds like you just had bad luck. There are ten thousand things you could have done differently. Maybe none of them would have made a difference. There
is
something you could have done so that this never would have happened: You could have taken up sailing instead of climbing. But then, of course, you might have gotten run down by a Panamanian freighter somewhere in the Caribbean.”

As a law enforcement ranger, Madden has seen a lot of survivors. By way of advice he says, “You might feel the urge to turn in on yourself and not face the world. It’s going to be hard, but anybody who survives what you did has to be a fighter. Giving in is definitely not what you’re about. I’m sure it’s not what Mike was about, either. You have been given a great gift: life. You didn’t get that gift handed to you, you earned it. Use it.”

Later, Madden drives me around The Mountain to the town of Enumclaw to get checked out.

As I sit in the emergency room, I reek of blood, sweat, urine, and the dank clothes that have been on my body for five days. Dr. Savage checks me over, worrying at first that my wrinkled white feet are frostbitten. After my feet dry, he can tell that I just have mild trench foot from being wet for so long.

An hour later the doctor returns with paperwork and says, “Some of these numbers in your lab work seem impossible for the fit young man I see in front of me. My guess is that you’ve been running on pure adrenaline for a long time now.”

Following X-rays and tests and a lot of pushing and poking, the conclusion is simple: I am terribly beat up, but I suffered no life-threatening
injuries, no broken bones, nothing that will require surgery. All that blood I spit up in the crevasse seems to have been from getting smacked in the face, not internal bleeding.

After we leave the hospital, Madden tells me that the crew up on the mountain retrieved Mike’s body from the crevasse.

I drop my head backward, close my eyes, and say, “Thank God.”

Madden drives to the White River Campground, and we pull in next to the rental car Mike and I left five days ago. I reach into my parka’s chest pocket and pull out the car keys I carried up from the crevasse and think:
I guess I get to actually go home
.

In the car, I see Mike’s travel clothes, his books. Everything I look at overwhelms me with memories of him.

Then I get behind the wheel and follow Madden on a meandering drive around the east flank of the mountain to the Paradise Inn, on the south side.

I check in, but it’s too late for dinner. I buy a bag of Fritos from a vending machine and pick up a bottle of milk and a slice of cherry pie, then wander out onto the deck to eat.

Afterward, I hobble back into the main lobby, feeling eyes on me, and find a pay phone.

It’s nine when I call Mom and Dad, midnight in Concord. Dad picks up after one ring. Gloria had told them earlier, so he’s been waiting for my call. I picture him sitting at our brown kitchen table. For ninety minutes, I replay the movie in my head, detailing the climb and the disaster for him. At some point, we turn to the future—to what this will mean for me. We talk about my gear; I don’t even know where it is. In the crevasse, gone forever? On its way to me?