Depot Kurt

Good relations with Himalayan spirits continued beyond this mountain.

This was the name given to me by Pierre – Pierre Mazeaud, the one-time Sports Minister of France who led the 1978 French Everest Expedition, on which I took part as mountaineer and cameraman. We were sitting having breakfast one radiant morning in the Valley of Silence, in the spacious communal tent of Camp 2 at about 6,500 metres. Suddenly, the Sports Minister wrinkled his nose. ‘Dieu, quelle odeur de fromage!’ he exclaimed. ‘My God, Kurt, what is that terrible cheesy smell?’ He sniffed the air around him. ‘Ça ne vient pas de la France. It’s certainly not a French one!’ And he threw a sharp glance in my direction. ‘Impossible! It seems to be coming from these boxes. Kurt … ?’ I retreated into deep silence, for he did have a point: the cheese in question was mine.

By rights, it ought not to have been up here at all: these boxes were supposed to contain only my official film equipment. One, however, was highly unofficial, and anything but FRAGILE, as it boldly maintained. Even back in Base Camp the French had been funny about the Nepalese yak-milk cheese (as big as a waggon wheel) which I had bought at the Takshindu dairy, refusing to allow it to enter the Valley of Silence. ‘We can’t waste Sherpa power carrying it. If you want it you can roll it up the glacier!’ Jean Afanassieff had been quite sarcastic, and the whole expedition was quick to point out, ‘We have our own cheese, Kurt – French cheese!’ at which they all nodded emphatically. But these dainty French cheeses were such minuscule mouthfuls that you could easily juggle several in one hand: nothing like enough for an Austrian appetite! (Otherwise, I had no complaints about their excellent food. Only in the upper camps were you aware of the relentless modern tendency towards ‘ever lighter, ever faster’ ... An excess of superlight freeze-dried packets certainly kept you running, converting the slogan into drastic reality ... by way of tummy ache ... ‘ever lighter, ever faster!’) As I am a champion of genuine, natural provisions on the mountain, I agonised long over my gigantic cheese wheel. Eureka! Wasn’t I entitled to a film Sherpa? A film box was emptied out … and half the waggon wheel stowed inside; a second film box accommodated the second half of the nutritious round ... then the Sherpa marched towards Camp 2. He carried the valuable load with the utmost care (valuable, that is, to me, even if not as fragile as he was led to believe). I couldn’t prevent Mazeaud’s nephew, our doctor (anxious to declare his goodwill for the film) from carrying the other box up into the Valley of Silence, but I hoped he would never discover what he had done. All these thoughts passed through my mind, while Pierre Mazeaud, head down like a bloodhound, snuffled his way round the tent, remarking as he did so, ‘That smells (sniff, sniff) like Nepalese cheese. Kurt, what do you know about this?’

I remain mum. To crown it all, he’s a lawyer, I thought. What will I say? Because one thing was clear: the moment of truth was very close now …

‘Halte-là! It’s coming from this box!’ Pierre was triumphant. ‘One of your film boxes, Kurt!’ And he skewered me to the tent wall with a glance, as only a lawyer can who has just driven his victim into a blind corner. I made a clean breast of it, opened the box, cut off a slice of yak cheese for Pierre, saw with satisfaction how he munched into it, even with a short laugh – so then, it was not that bad an idea ... was it?

But suddenly his expression is back as it was. He pontificates: ‘Kurt, you have more gear than anyone else on this expedition. Look around you! Boxes everywhere. Wherever we sit, wherever we stand: everywhere, it says KURT DIEMBERGER – FRAGILE ... ou pas!’ And he pointed to the clearly far from delicate cheese.

‘Oh, come, steady on,’ I tried to calm my explosive Gallic friend. ‘You know I have to make the film.’ But I knew that bringing in the film was only part of the story; really, I did have a lot of things.

Unfortunately, here in Camp 2, this was becoming so evident because my well-proven ‘depot system’ had not had a real chance to get going. (I can’t tell you if I invented it, but the idea is always and everywhere to have personal depots – on Everest that means a box in Camp 1, another in Camp 2, a bag in Camp 3 ... so that wherever you arrive, your gear is waiting; but, as I said, for the moment it had all bottlenecked in Camp 2.) Pierre Mazeaud – with a wide move of his hand, as if delivering a great speech to parliament – affected not to have heard my justification. ‘Kurt,’ he said, ‘you cannot deny that it is true … You need the Place de la Concorde for all your paraphernalia ... and even that wouldn’t be big enough.’ He took a deep breath (no wonder, for such a tirade at 6,500 metres of altitude). ‘I mean,’ he continued, ‘that besides my logistics for this expedition, which is to put France on the summit of Everest, I need a separate logistical plan for the depots of Kurt Diemberger …’

I was contrite. It is true that I like to have a down jacket waiting for me in Camp 3 and, let us say, another one in Camp 1 or 2, and – of course – one in Base Camp as well; moreover, if possible, a sleeping – no, two sleeping-bags in Base Camp, a further one in Camp 1 and then one that stays in Camp 4 – because I hate to be running uphill and downhill all the time, overloaded with gear, sleeping-bags, mattresses! Anybody can see that mine is a good system! Let me just add, for all those who might be saying, ‘We never would have thought that Diemberger is so lazy,’ that when you’re making a mountain film, you are already quite loaded – simply having to carry the movie camera – and, far more than any other expedition member, you are obliged to keep clambering up and down, to and fro.

So, please excuse my depot habits ... (apparently, I have not fully digested Pierre’s parliamentary preaching). But I also want to toss another positive aspect on to the balance. I had already initiated this system of depots long before I ever dared to dream of getting to the Himalaya. I was even using it back when I was a crystal hunter and needed to shoulder the weight of hammers and chisels and of course the heavy burden of rock samples and crystals which I found high up on the mountain.

To save always having to carry the heavy tools up to the same parts of the massif, I told myself the best thing would be to simply squirrel them away up there. Thus was my system born on Mont Blanc. (There are several good crystal sites and almost all of them high up; between guiding trips or when the weather was too bad for a big climb, I used to like going up there. Crystal-hunting is something marvellous!)

But we are only at the beginning: enter the marmots! (Or, more precisely, their burrows.) Because there is no better place to hide a hammer than a marmot hole – safe from avalanches, out of sight, and moreover no effort involved. Hammer and chisel into one burrow, the stove into the next, a bottle of whisky into a third and ... no problem, there are enough of these holes! The first time I went back, not long afterwards, I ran into a problem: I found the right place easily enough, but then I had to search like a dachshund – there were almost a hundred holes in the slope, and everything, everywhere looked very similar. Remedy: I carved a mark into a rock above the hammer hole when I eventually found it, and bore in mind that the whisky hole was five steps to the left, and the stove was stuffed into the tube of another dwelling eight steps to the right, while obliquely below... It is clear that every system must first be developed, it doesn’t simply fall from the sky.

Ever since then the depot system has worked brilliantly. I was so convinced of it (and still am) that eventually I applied it to my everyday life as well. However, as this became more extensive and complicated, the more years that passed, I have to confess that the system also had its drawbacks: either you are lucky enough to find a wife who is au fait with everything, or you conscientiously feed every move into a computer – otherwise it can happen that you don’t always know where is what or what is where.

F or example, I am still searching – two years on – for one of my Leica cameras. No small thing, really, but it has been two years already ... And it is not the only thing I’m after. Such a search can be full of emotions – and the pleasure, if you strike the motherlode, is great. I enter now into the ‘thoughtful’ part of this chapter – it reveals all the pros and cons of the depot method, which I still favour – even if I haven’t yet located the Leica. I recommend it to the reader who wants to follow me in my search for something lost, to rope up with me – we will range worldwide …

To begin with, I think: Now where is it likely to be (whatever it is)?

But it doesn’t come to mind. Which, as we all know, is destined to step up the pulse rate.

So again, more heatedly, the age-old question, such as was demanded no doubt by a Stone Age ancestor hunting for his flint axe: Where on earth can the bally thing be? (Variations like ‘In heaven’s name … ’, or ‘Where the bloody hell is it … ’ may be of more recent vintage, but are nevertheless equally ineffective.)

Now, there is only one remedy: to calm down, and think.

So, I make a start and work through the most probable places where the thing could be. That is – at home, naturally, which means in Salzburg, or Bologna, or Portomaggiore.

In Salzburg is my father.

In Bologna is my wife.

In Portomaggiore is my mother-in-law.

As the year passes, all these places are in turn my home. Therefore, if I’m searching for something, I know that books and slides and mountaineering equipment are most probably in Salzburg. In Bologna, where my wife lives, things do not usually go astray. And in Portomaggiore, at Mother-in-law’s place, I have to look around if it’s a case of missing garments or things to be mended. (My wife loves decentralisation of work; basically, her own depot system, in a wider sense.)

If I don’t find what I’m looking for in any of these three places, then it gets more complicated. The thing may then lie anywhere in the world between Kathmandu and Hawaii. And if I want to dig it out of my subconscious memory, I must take to a couch (psychologists work to the same method), and ponder for some hours …

This business of order, or should I say, the instinct for order, is inherent to our family. My father and I are fanatics for order. This may be the very reason we mislay so much. It is why my father passes hours engineering new systems for locating items more easily. I, for one, think he’s a genius – he is always dreaming up some new and logical system, but mostly in my absence. When I return home, he proudly shows off his latest scheme – and I groan, for I couldn’t find things before. My father knows that – and therefore he attempts somehow to work universal principles into the programme: last time I came home I found the contents of two wardrobes carefully distributed according to the specific gravity of each item! What have I been looking for since then? Everything. But that’s by the way.

While I am floating on my couch across countries and continents, I visit many friends; and thus can now introduce the reader to the surprises in store for a depot-being.

The system, as I’ve already hinted, does have its weak points: when, after two years of exploring the recesses of my mind, I went to fetch my suit from Herbert Tichy’s house in Vienna, he said to me: ‘I’ve given it to the postman.’ How come? ‘I racked my brains for quite a while about this mysterious suit. It didn’t fit me. But the postman looks brilliant in it.’

You do have to be careful with writers: they are always so lost in their own stories …

Vienna, one way or another, has not proved the most satisfactory location for me: recently some mountaineering gear, a couple of books, and other personal items arrived from there in a cardboard box. Inge had got married. Yes – time doesn’t stand still! (Everybody will understand the practicality of keeping a climbing rope elsewhere – not always having to fetch it from Italy.) Oh yes, another rope is sitting at José Manuel Anglada’s pad in Barcelona, my Spanish depot. By the way, recently I brought him a key, a very big key, two feet long! I bought it at a flea market in Bologna because I knew that Jose collects keys. However, after a short glance at the antique piece, he said to me, it was a beautiful key, very fine craftsmanship, but, well … from Italy ... not genuine; even so, he was pleased to have it. I wonder perhaps when I brought him the fake artefact, whether I put the real Leica in the bottom of his wardrobe? Perhaps it sleeps snugly there, as if in a marmot’s tunnel? You see, in Barcelona, you hide everything. It is like a Spanish Naples. The fact that Anglada still has his valuable key collection is certainly due to the three special locks on his door. What lies there, lies safely; so if that’s where my Leica is, it will be all right.

By the way: you can also get pleasant surprises with this system.

Not long ago, I was ‘presented’ with a pair of skis out of the blue; Orazio and Annie from the Squirrel Albergo in Courmayeur had dug them out of their cellar, and discovered ‘KURT’ written on them. Now I remember: those were the skis with which I descended the Tirich glacier in the Hindu Kush thirteen years ago ... My God, where things end up!

Another reliable place is the Black Forest. Even if I don’t know precisely what I have deposited there. That is where Trudy lives; she is sixty-nine and comes from Berlin ... she always transforms my loose-knit Austrian soul into military shape ... for days I sit there framing and cleaning my slides. Moreover, she knows everything as far as the natural sciences are concerned; I can listen to her for hours. Thirty years ago we stood on top of the Gross Venediger in the Austrian Alps ... It is true, when you stay at her place you have to get up as early as at the Kürsinger mountain hut – every day an alpine start!

But let us get closer to home: Munich ... a traffic-node in all my journeyings. There, at Uli’s, resides my film gear, thus saving me from fastidiously declaring it to our brave Austrian Customs officials every time I make a frontier crossing. (Perhaps the big business conglomerates with their multinational branches have also learned from the marmots?) Yes, and a projector and God knows what else is stashed near a Bavarian lake with Gerda and Volkmar. There I was recently shown the ‘yellow card’ because their lobby door could hardly be made to close any more – so a part of my gear is lying now over the road with my artist friend Herbert Finster. In the near future, I shall carry some miniature paintings up Everest for him (as a sort of a ‘pennant’ for art) – so that he can know his is the highest art of all, even if the exhibition attracts the least number of visitors.

Further to the north, into the Pfalz: there in Kaiserslautern in Klaus and Brigitte’s cellar I have, besides a trunk of amethysts and agates from the nearby volcanic area, a whole row of boxes filled with copies of my book Summits and Secrets. From there, it is not far to Luxembourg with its cheap flights to America ... my next depot is in New Jersey at my cousin Elke’s. The depot in London, however, at Ken Wilson’s, had to be dispersed. When his wife had their second baby, he needed the space himself.

Back across the ocean – Hawaii! A box of slides, forgotten after a lecture to the former King’s family, the Kawananakoas. Auf Wiedersehen, Carol and Dudie, Phil and Fran, Elelule ... I need the slides again – and not by post! See you next year …

Estes Park, Colorado: a pair of mountain boots – but I’m not quite sure. Are they still with Michael Covington and Steve Komito? (With Steve, who sold and soled boots for all the mountaineers in the west?) Or did I leave them with Gordon-the-millionaire in Nevada? I’ll have to write a card.

Canada, Banff: a box of dinosaur bones in Evelyn’s bedroom. They’ll be all right there a bit longer.

Los Angeles: different things at different places.

Not to forget! Kathmandu: aluminium cases full of Himalayan gear with Miss Hawley and duffel bags at Mr Kalikote’s. I can start a small expedition at any time at short notice. Before heading off I would then sit again with the ‘living archive’, Miss Hawley. This charming lady, who you would be justified in calling a landmark of Kathmandu, and who knows really everything that’s happened in the Himalaya, having painstakingly recorded it over many years – such as the ‘horse race’, as I called the legendary page from her archives which we have discussed from time to time. She keeps a table of all the mountaineers who have climbed 8,000-metre peaks. You can see quite clearly how they are proceeding from year to year – this one has two, that in the meantime has three, one has four ... And then there were two who had five each: Reinhold Messner and myself. We have been running neck and neck for some time …

This will certainly have changed again by next year, because at this moment Reinhold is on his way to Mount Everest, and for my part, it’s only two weeks till I go as well – I don’t know why destiny requires us to be stumbling over each other’s legs all the time. It’s not intentional, although we have always been on good terms and in the past have enjoyed talking about mountaineering. I even think that for a while I once had a suitcase at his home in Villnoss.

(from my Diary, 1980)

But on to other places. In Warsaw, this wonderful, vital town – artists; museums; courageous lovely people, full of ideas – there, sadly, I have no depot. When I was lecturing and travelling around the country, I wanted to leave various bits and pieces behind, but my wife, who was with me, meticulously packed everything away, down to the last sock ... Now my Leica flashes into my mind again, which I am still hunting for – before this book appears in Italian, I must run through my list of depots carefully, otherwise my wife won’t be asking where I left the Leica, but: Why did he leave it there?

Düsseldorf: high camps 3 and 5 – if you’re overweight I recommend the latter, rather than the glorified jogging through the woods adopted by my colleagues – since the brave Amazonian Erica, in her fifth-floor apartment, has no elevator. At Wolfgang’s (Camp 3), however, I have been working for two years already on a non-urgent soundtrack. Every time the wind blows me into town. (I’ve got two boxes there: perhaps the Leica is in Düsseldorf?)

Mon Dieu! How could I forget France in my round-the-world couch trip? I have not yet conjured up the Petit Bateau, the little boat in Cazères! Louis Audoubert, Marc Galy, the two Pyrenean specialists, are now more often travelling in the big mountains of the world. Louis, small, compact, blue-eyed, always laughing, a bundle of energy, soloing the Brouillard ridge to the top of Mont Blanc in six hours; twice up the entire Peuterey ridge, once even in winter – the ‘wildest priest of the Alps’! In the end, he was left with only one crampon on the Peuterey ridge – and his faith. It is true he had held a mass on the summit of Aiguille Noire just before. Now he is not allowed to do that anymore – he got married. He has a lovely wife, and still his faith, this Louis! When he was a priest, I became godfather to his sister’s baby son – and left my copy of good old Dyhrenfurth’s book Baltoro there. It is said to have journeyed into Spain where mountaineers are preparing a new expedition with it. Yes, in the Pyrenees at the time I picked up French and Spanish, and puffed Gauloises for three months – although I was a non-smoker. (But that is a different story.) Altogether, it’s incredible how useful this depot system proves to be – fantastically so, despite several flaws. I want to thank all my depot-managers – and manageresses.

Back to Italy: I haven’t been in Trieste for a long time, even though I’m a member of the local Club Alpino. Bianca, my agile rope mate on several climbs, is unfortunately now always on the road herself, never there. In Treviso, however, where a kind elderly lady lives, Telene, who makes really outstanding spaghetti, there I stop quite often before I visit Gianni in his shoe factory, who has equipped my expeditions from the very beginning with mountain boots – there are always boots of mine at his place.

And so, I get to Varese once more, to Tona and the children, take a pair of skis and mountain equipment for Mont Blanc because I’ve got some tourists to guide; we are having a pizza in the garden, looking through the trees at our dear Monte Rosa. Arrivederci, darlings …

When the Mont Blanc trip is over, I want to take another look at my marmot holes up there on the mountain, before returning home to Bologna!

To Teresa, my patient wife.

Apropos Mont Blanc: I was there again recently, back where I learned the crystal hunter’s wisdom, the principle of the depots, right at the place of its discovery. By the marmot holes below the Aiguille de Triolet. I found the mark on the rock without difficulty. And the hole with the hammer, too. It had grown quite rusty, but – I mean – two years had passed since the last time. Immediately, I start looking for the stove, the chisel and the whisky bottle ... Nothing. Have I got it wrong? Impossible. Then it dawns on me: these diligent marmots! The wretches have dug so many new holes in two years. I am wandering over the slope, to and fro, up and down ... where is the whisky, where is the chisel, where is the stove? How many metres to the left and right have I got to go? Surely the whisky will have matured nicely in the meantime? In vain: I didn’t find it. If you come across it, remember to toast me. The stove didn’t show up, either. Perhaps a marmot with a flair for invention has incorporated it into the architecture of his larder. So, well, I’m sipping cold water from the stream. At least I found the rusty hammer.

But something else besides I haven’t yet found. What was it? Something else in the marmot holes? What was the reason for this voyage down memory lane? Oh yes ... if anybody knows where my Leica is – I haven’t yet given up hope!

PS: I would ask all my friends who read this book, please don’t start digging in your wardrobes and cellars and then send me an avalanche of parcels!

Already one has told me on the phone he found some old mountain trousers at his place, and might they perhaps be mine? I told him, please, see if they fit the postman first!

(from my Diary)