The Ledge (32 page)

Gloria hands me the camera and takes some blessed rice, tossing it into the air as the wind gently flutters the flags. Tears pour from my eyes, and I can’t see through the viewfinder. Prem Lakpa encourages
us to save some blessed rice, to “bring it home and put on your altar.” I resist; I have no altar at home, and this
puja
is for Mike, not me, so I intend to expend all the blessings and goodness here. I am determined not to take anything physical away from this ceremonial place. This is good-bye.

A pained look creases Prem Lakpa’s face, and he hugs me, saying, “I am so sorry, sir.”

Gloria joins us, and we three huddle together, saying nothing, letting the tears seep down our cheeks.

“GLO,” I ASK
, “can I have a few minutes alone here?”

Gloria and Prem Lakpa descend a hundred yards down Kala Patthar and tuck in behind a black boulder, just out of sight.

I breathe out long and slow, and then begin speaking impromptu and aloud.

“We’re here to do a
puja
for you, Mike. Couldn’t pick a better place, eh? I have to leave you up here, Mike. You have to be where you are, and I have to live my life. I’m going to miss you, Mike—you were a good man, a good partner, and a great friend. We had a lot of fun, didn’t we?”

I reach to the right chest pocket of my purple parka, the same one I wore on Rainier, tug open the zipper, and fish out a carabiner I have carried halfway around the world. Mike’s carabiner. The one I cut from his harness.

Though I have tinkered with it over the months, the locking gate is still seized shut. It takes a lot of force to permanently jam a locking carabiner, so it serves as stark physical proof of how hard I fell and how hard Mike fought to stop me. Our combined energies from the moment of the crevasse fall are bound up in this stuck biner.

“Look,” I continue, “I brought your biner. I was alone when I took it from you, and I’m alone when I’m giving it back to you. It’s
your biner, Mike. I was only holding on to it for you, and now I’m giving it back.”

I thrust it skyward to show him, teary-eyed but smiling, then extend the locking biner up toward the same alpine landmarks at which I tossed rice. I present his biner toward Everest’s summit last of all.

Then I look around for the deepest bedrock crack I can locate near the summit. I crouch over the fissure and let go of the biner. It slithers down out of sight, clattering against the black rock as it settles in deep. I do not want anyone to find it. I scrape my hands across the hardscrabble ground, scooping up sand and rock dust. I carefully pour it into the crack, burying Mike’s carabiner, and with it a tiny part of the raw pain from the crevasse.

In my mind, I speak to Mike again, telling him that we do not need to talk directly anymore, at least not too often, that we both need to do well with where we are now. A sense of peace—almost happiness—settles on me.

I descend a few paces down the ridge, then turn back toward the summit, trying to imagine where Mike might be now. I can picture him sitting on the top, looking west at the mountains, facing away from me. I sense him smiling, but he doesn’t turn toward me.

“
Namaste
,” I mutter aloud, grinning. I feel Mike answering me—“
Namaste
, Jim”—in a rising, happy tone.

I turn away from the summit and begin my journey home.

THE GRAY GRANITE
is warm under my fingertips, each handhold rough and secure. We are six pitches up the Twin Owls formation at Lumpy Ridge on a perfect first day of summer. Each time the rope moves, a biner above me clanks against bedrock. Wiggling the wired nut gently, I get it to pop loose; then I push it up and out of the crack, reversing the pattern Rodney used to place it half an hour ago. Rodney, my partner and friend, is just a little bit above me now. He had been Mike’s close friend, too—the three of us had climbed together just before Rainier—and he was there as I struggled to deal with all that had happened in that crevasse.

With 450 feet of rock behind us and just ten feet to go, I pause to soak in the joy of climbing and the satisfaction that the route is nearly complete.

Coming back to Lumpy with Rodney today has been the right thing to do.

It is June 21, the anniversary of Mike’s death.

During the first few years after the accident, the twenty-first day of June was torturous. On each one, I hiked alone, checking my watch often as I thought about exactly where Mike and I were on
Rainier at precisely what time. Even though I tried to make the summits of those memorial hikes happy, they never were.

But now seven years have passed, and I’m marking June 21 by climbing with a good buddy. Rodney and I are reclimbing a route I had been on twice before with Mike. Today feels like an upbeat honoring of Mike and the rewarding pastimes he cherished, ones we still embrace. Being here has spurred me to tell old stories about Mike, about our previous successful ascent of this climb, and about how we had fun the other time even though we got rained off. As Mike’s old friend, Rodney is happy to listen to the tales and tosses in a few doozies of his own, like the story of the night he and Mike passed a bottle of whiskey back and forth while Mike recited some of his original cowboy poetry.

Rodney and I have swapped the lead back and forth today—three pitches for him, three for me. We’re moving well. I look up and see his rock shoe–clad feet dangling off the final belay ledge just ahead.

“Hey, I’m almost there. You got a cold beer ready for me?” I joke.

“Not quite,” he replies. “You gotta carry my pack to the truck first. Then maybe I’ll give you one.”

It feels good to be up here again. The mountains, the movement, the impromptu teasing with my climbing friend. There will be some somber moments tonight, perhaps when I check in with the Prices to see how they are doing. But even so, I sense the balance tipping toward a more joyful heart. Instinct tells me that it’s going to be better now.

FOR FIVE YEARS
after the Rainier accident, the mountains were just a small part of my world. Life had taken a new direction: Gloria and I became parents with the arrival of our daughter, Jessica, and then, two years later, our son, Nick.

Working as an environmental consultant and helping raise our young family meant that I had to put climbing off to the side. I still ventured into the mountains during those years, doing some hiking, backcountry skiing, even a little rock climbing, but no serious alpine climbs. Still, I would look at old climbing slides and feel the mountains’ tug. The sight of an elegant snow ridge would raise familiar emotions: excitement and anxiety, joy and fear.

During those years, I couldn’t decide whether to embrace mountaineering again. Climbing had brought me the worst experience of my life in that crevasse. And at the same time, it had compelled me to be my best on the most difficult day I have ever endured.

Just as I’d postponed my decision on whether to resume climbing, I hadn’t established a definitive place in my life for my memories of Rainier, and Mike. The slides, tapes, maps, ice screws, and tattered gear from that fateful trip still sat in a cardboard box, waiting.

Then one day, five years after the disaster, Rodney asked me a question that forced me to finally decide whether I was still a climber: “Are you interested in helping me lead an expedition to Nepal?”

After much soul searching, Gloria and I considered what it could mean. We both recognized that climbing was my chosen pathway to growth and self-refinement—my calling, based on passion, not logic. One night, after tucking the kids into bed, we returned to the discussion.

“Glo,” I said, “I know it’ll be tough on you, and a little risky, but I really want to go. You know how big this is.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I’m not thrilled about it, but I understand.”

She paused, then asked, “What if something happens, though?”

“I can’t promise one hundred percent that nothing’ll happen,” I said softly.

“I know. That’s the problem.”

In the end, I was swayed by the huge opportunity it represented, not just for that one trip but for an unknowable spectrum of possibilities, and for the chance to reclaim a core part of who I am. And so I soon found myself coleader of an expedition to Nepal.

Thus it was that six years after Rainier, I once again hiked up the Khumbu Valley. The roaring waters of the Dudh Kosi and the pungent smell of rhododendrons seemed the same, yet I had changed. Last time I had been scared and scarred as we trekked toward the
puja
. Now I was composed and confident, using my experience to help teach, guide, and protect ten young climbers. I still carried the pain of losing Mike, but from it I had extracted the motivation to live a bigger life, to wrap my arms around adventure, to challenge myself by returning to Nepal as an expedition leader instead of remaining fearfully shackled to my desk, plodding through my middle years. Nearly losing my life gave me the courage to strive for a richer existence and the determination to pursue it with vigor.

People sometimes say of the recently deceased, “He died doing what he loved.” I heard that a few times about Mike. I thought it far better, and much more important, that Mike
lived
doing what he loved.

Ultimately, I heeded the lesson, determined to live doing what I love. That meant climbing mountains. Yes, I had to strike a balance between my passion and my responsibility to care for my family, but shutting out that ardor in fear of the possible risks seems a dishonor to the gifts of health and life I still possess. Returning to Nepal seemed especially appropriate: I honored Mike there on the first trip with a
puja
, and on the second one I honored him, and me, by passionately embracing this life-affirming pursuit.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the never-ending cycle of birth, life, and death is symbolized by the endless knot. Rodney and I saw the symbol frequently as we trekked and climbed across Nepal for a month. The endless knot has many interpretations, and one that speaks
powerfully to me is the interweaving of the spiritual path with the flow of time and movement. I feel that Mike and I are connected threads in some endless knot.

I THINK MIKE
would be pleased that helping people grow through invigorating mountain experiences is part of my life’s purpose now. I teach some climbing classes for Rodney at CSU’s outdoor program and lead an expedition every other year; these pursuits have added new dimensions to my climbing and my life. Passing on my hard-won knowledge feels right. For these groups I sometimes present slide shows to share climbing stories and provide some insight into what all these adventures have taught me. My most intense experience, Rainier, might be a compelling tale to relate, but I am not confident that I will be able to tell it, and not sure if I should.

Nevertheless, I feel the urge to share what happened on Rainier, who Mike was, and how I survived. As the years go by, I also feel a growing obligation to pass on what I learned through those struggles in the hope that it might help someone else face and overcome their own harsh challenges. While I was in the crevasse, Joe Simpson’s survival tale convinced me there was a remote chance to escape, and that belief helped spur me to action. Perhaps I have an obligation to share my story, so that others who hear me might one day tell themselves: “If he did that, I can do this.”

In a cosmic way, I wonder if sharing the lessons from surviving Rainier is part of the reason that I am still alive. Having already spoken at hundreds of science conferences, I wonder if I can tell the Rainier story publicly in a way that might offer strength or inspiration. I ask myself: Should I share this? Can I do this? Is it right? If I pursue it, can I properly honor Mike?

I see Mike’s parents a few times each year, and it feels like we are old family friends now. I feel an obligation to check with them before
I speak or write about that terrible time in the crevasse. Over lunch one day, I nervously ask for their thoughts about me possibly sharing what happened to Mike and me.

“If you’re asking for our blessing, you have it,” Don says.

One night in 2003, a frenetic kind of energy overtakes me, and soon I am in front of a computer screen, searching for an appropriate place to share the Rainier story. Staring at a webpage, I find the Rainier Mountain Festival—a gathering that celebrates the mountain, bringing in climbers who relate their stories and show pictures and answer questions. I feel certain that I must go there and tell this story.

That September, I’m in Ashford, Washington, on the southwestern flank of The Mountain, standing in a stuffy garage-sized tent in the shadow of the very peak that took Mike’s life and changed mine forever. I steel myself to speak publicly for the first time about what happened in the crevasse.

I have no idea whether I can do it. A good friend, Scott Yetman, stands by, ready to escort me off the stage if I falter, if my emotions choke the words from my throat.

It takes all the courage I can muster to stand on that volcanic soil and tell the tale. I fight my way through it and see the audience stare back wide-eyed. After I finish, I am wrung out emotionally. I stand outside the tent door and shake hands with some of those who listened. One middle-aged woman approaches me with her two adolescent girls. After prompting the kids to thank me, she says, “I’m so glad my daughters were here to hear this.”