Sam, my Phoenix climbing partner, and I were climbing a craggy volcanic peak which jutted sharply from the smooth desert floor. When near the top, Sam said dreamily, “Hey, what do you say we go try something a little bigger?”
“Like what?” I asked cautiously.
“How about Mount McKinley?”
“Don’t you think there’s a slight difference between one-pitch rock climbs in the desert and the tallest peak in North America?” I thought Sam was a lunatic. The treks I had done with my family hardly compared to the severity of McKinley. I didn’t know about the gaping crevasses that lurked inches beneath the surface of the snow waiting to swallow climbers in their bottomless depths, or about the punishing cold that ripped through even a down jacket, or about the intense wind and sun that changed the human face into that of a reptile. And I certainly didn’t know that when climbers approached the summit they only had one third of the oxygen at sea level to breathe. Covered with snow, McKinley rises to 20,320 feet. The people of Alaska call it by its Athabascan name, Denali, or The Big One. If I were magically able to fly straight up into the sky, I’d have to rocket up almost four straight miles to reach the summit. Despite my sketchy knowledge and questionable skill, over the next few weeks Sam’s idea became like a greedy little tapeworm, burrowing into my brain and growing fat off my thoughts. Sam’s unshattering optimism was contagious. It picked me up and carried me along. He believed so strongly that climbing McKinley was possible for us, soon I found myself believing it too. The whole radical plan was a huge untested leap of faith. I didn’t yet know how I would pull it off, but I felt that, with the right preparation, ingenuity, team support, and mental toughness, there had to be a way.
In another sense, Denali was a perfect big peak with which to start. Much of a team’s success would rely on a blessing from the mountain gods. With good weather, success was possible; without it, the strongest team didn’t have a chance. This theory had been played out by relatively inexperienced teams who, by possessing strong legs and hearts and plenty of patience, reached the top; while elite, world-class teams have been sent scurrying back to base camp by a storm. With good weather rarely lasting more than a few days at a time and arctic storms commonly producing wind velocities of 150 miles per hour, shredding tents like paper bags, the key to reaching the top was to simply get lucky.
One night sitting at my kitchen table, Sam and I discussed how we could make this climb more than the dream of two climbers. Two years before, I had been contacted by the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), a nonprofit advocacy and service group for the blind. They were putting together a major public-education campaign to inform America about the capabilities of blind people and wanted to dramatize those capabilities in a powerful way. Sam and I thought that a climb of Denali would fit perfectly with this message and could help open doors of opportunity for blind people in schools and in the workplace. After presenting the idea to AFB, they were ecstatic and supported us one hundred percent.
Sam and I had met while he was substituting at the Phoenix Country Day School. Sam was a rock climber, and we had quickly become friends, working out together at the Phoenix Rock Gym a few nights a week. Our partnership, however, had not begun smoothly. Sam admitted to me on our first climbing outing at the rock gym that he suffered from ADD, attention-deficit disorder. That’s great, I thought sarcastically, a guy who can’t see and a guy who can’t concentrate, teaming up to climb North America’s highest and most dangerous peak. As we belayed each other up the walls, Sam and I talked about what inspired us to climb. Sam confessed that he didn’t really enjoy school, sitting in the back of class, trying to concentrate on what the teachers were saying. Most kids seemed to be able to tune out everything but the teacher’s voice, but he’d see and hear everything: the clock ticking on the wall, the kids laughing outside at recess, a fly crawling up the windowpane. He told me that if his mind were a radio, instead of hearing just one station, he’d hear all the stations at once. Sam had turned to climbing after a teacher proposed that climbing a rock face would help Sam develop focus. “He was dead-on,” Sam admitted. “I was one hundred feet up, dangling from a crimper hold by my fingers, and you know something? For the first time in my life, I could totally concentrate. I wasn’t thinking about how I hadn’t studied for that algebra test; I wasn’t thinking about my detention yesterday; I wasn’t thinking about all the times I had screwed up. I was just thinking about getting to that next hold.” Sam and I ended the night with a difficult overhanging route called The Monster. “Sam, this one’s a little above my level,” I admitted. “If I get into trouble and can’t find the next hold on my own, bail me out with a little communication.” Halfway up, as the face lunged out at a forty-five-degree angle, the holds got thin and my two fingers, which were jammed into a small pocket, were slowly slipping out. My other hand desperately slapped around for a positive hold, but I was losing energy, on the verge of falling. “Sam,” I yelled, “what do I have?” Sam immediately screamed back, “Left hand, up two feet, left a foot.” As I lunged up, my left hand slapping out for the hold, my feet losing contact with the rock, I heard Sam mutter apologetically, “Oh . . . sorry . . . I meant right hand.” I dangled from the rope fuming under my labored breaths.
Sam’s life always seemed a little discombobulated. For our first training session, we debated whether to go running or hiking, finally settling on running. But when Sam showed up at my apartment clunking around in hiking boots, I asked, “How you gonna run in those things?”
“Oh, I’ll be fine,” he said, and the angle at which his voice projected told me he was looking down at his boots, as if he was only then discovering his blunder. He hesitated and then said, “Umm, running doesn’t really get climbers in shape. Let’s go hiking.”
If Sam was a little unorganized, I was a little pigheaded. After our hike, I said, “Tomorrow let’s do a run in the desert.”
“Will you be able to navigate through all those rocks and cactus?” Sam asked.
I gave Sam an annoyed look, as if to say, you just bring your running shoes. I’ll take care of the rest. On the run, Sam was in the lead, with Wiz and I trotting along right behind. Wiz was doing a good job weaving me around cactuses and boulders and pausing for a moment to indicate small rocks to be jumped over. I was just starting to feel confident and stable on the uneven trail when I tripped over a cactus, soared through the air, and landed hard with my palm against a sharp rock. I took off my shirt and wrapped my hand as it pulsated with blood. I was hot, dripping with sweat, and angry with myself. The hand needed several stitches, so for the rest of the evening, Sam and I sat glumly in the emergency room. The next day, my fifth-grade class saw my bandaged hand and I told them what had happened. One very brave and precocious little girl stood up and asked, “Mr. W., if you fell down in the desert, how do you expect to climb that big mountain?” What worried me more than her question was that I didn’t yet have a complete answer.
Over the weeks, we began to work the kinks out of our training. Neither Sam nor I could get to the mountains every day, so we got permission to run the back stairway of the tallest building in downtown Phoenix: fifty floors and about five hundred feet of elevation gain. Sam and I would meet every evening at the building with our seventy-pound packs to plod up the stairway. Soon we turned it into a competition, racing each other to the top. When one of us was feeling lazy or tired from a long day of teaching, the other would push him. It gave me extra energy when I’d hear Sam’s feet thundering up behind me and Sam yelling, “You’re slow tonight, Super Blind Guy. I’m going to shame you.” That would give me enough energy to speed up, just enough to keep Sam at my heels. When I was feeling strong, there was nothing better than to race past Sam in the last ten flights, Sam laughing and grabbing the back of my heavy pack. Halfway up the stairway, we’d always stop to do twenty-five sit-ups and push-ups, but on our first night, after our first set, Sam yelled out as he hoisted his pack up, “Oh by the way—I did twenty-six. That would be one more than you did.” So after that, the game was on. The next set, I did twenty-seven and then Sam twenty-eight, me twenty-nine, and Sam thirty. A month later, we were close to three digits.
When Sam couldn’t join me, I found a way to compete against myself. I’d set my talking watch for twenty minutes and play a cruel little game. I’d say to myself, if you don’t make it to the top before the alarm goes off, you won’t summit. With that terrifying pressure, I’d never slacken my pace, no matter how tired I was. Sometimes, I’d push my watch halfway up and it would call back, “Six minutes remaining.” I’d run with abandonment, ignoring my heavy leaden legs and my chest cavity suffocating, and touch the top landing only seconds before the alarm rang out. Countless times, I’d flop against the top railing, coughing and sputtering and gasping for air, with barely the energy remaining to lift my head. “OK,” I’d say to myself. “You only squeaked by, but you deserve to summit.” My training regimen wasn’t very scientific; each night I only allowed myself to quit when, after four or five times to the top, I felt so nauseous and dehydrated I thought I was going to throw up.
Besides humping a heavy pack to the top of a building, I knew nothing could beat the physical benefits of pure running, but Wizard’s and my desert running experience had been a disaster. Plus, Wiz had definite pacing issues; he’d drag me the first half mile and I’d wind up dragging him the next five and a half. Ellie wasn’t a long-distance runner, but liked to ride her bike. I thought there might be a way to utilize Ellie’s bike riding to help me run. Soon, an idea came to me, and I had a friend at the local hardware store help me realize it. The design consisted of two long wooden dowels, connected by a two-inch piece of bungee cord that wrapped around Ellie’s bike seat. I held two loops of rope connected at the other end of the dowels, enabling me to jog comfortably behind Ellie’s bike. The principle was similar to Wizard’s harness. Through the two stiff dowels, I could feel Ellie turning left or right, slowing down or speeding up along the hard-packed dirt trail that stretched for miles just outside our house. Because the pace had to be maintained for a runner, Ellie often grew bored going so slowly on her bike. To entertain herself along the tedious miles, Ellie jammed to fast-paced rock ‘n’ roll with pounding drum solos on her Walkman. Inadvertently, she increased the pace until I was sprinting behind her. With her music blaring in her ears, she couldn’t hear me sputtering and coughing out, “Ellie, slow down. Please slow down!” Eventually, when she felt the reverse tug of my body weight behind her, she got the idea and throttled back just enough to keep my lungs from exploding. Admittedly, dragging a blind guy mile after endless mile was very boring, so, a little frustrated, Ellie nicknamed my invention exactly that, The Blind Dragger.
Throughout the months I also poured through books in Braille and on tape about Denali. One book analyzed each of Denali’s one hundred climbing fatalities: caught in a storm with no bivy gear, tripped on a crampon strap or a loop hanging from an ice ax, falling unroped through a snow bridge into a hidden crevasse. I didn’t want to wind up a statistic in a book on climbing fatalities and figured a good way to learn what to do on Denali was to first become an expert on what not to do on Denali.
Sam had two friends in mind for our team whom he had met at an emergency medical technician class in Colorado. The first was Ryan Ludwig, a husky young climber from Wyoming, who had lived in the mountains all his life. The second was, as Sam described, a “free-wheeling, fair-haired pretty boy” who was as comfortable on an overhanging rock face as he was at a Grateful Dead concert or a Rainbow Gathering.
In the winter, Sam and I drove out to Joshua Tree, a vast high desert full of spectacular cliffs and crags, to meet the team. Late at night, when we reached the edge of J Tree, we pulled off the road and slept on our foam pads in the cold rocky scrub. Lying back under the stars, while anticipating meeting Jeff and Ryan, I listened to the massive openness of the sky, so sweeping and infinite, it was hard to conceptualize. Wizard was uneasy too, but for different reasons. He whimpered softly and snuggled closer to me as we both heard packs of coyotes yelping in the near distance.
In the morning, we met Ryan and Jeff and began a day of rock climbing. Moving up the steep slippery trails to the base of the climbs, I practiced my new and not-yet-perfected hiking system. Months before, Sam and I had gone to an outdoor retailers’ show in Reno, Nevada, to beg free gear. Passing a booth, Sam stopped. “Check this out,” he said casually and placed two long poles in my hand. At the time, neither of us fully imagined their implications. Just as Wizard had opened up worlds of opportunity traveling independently through city streets, subway stations, and airports, these two poles would revolutionize my ability to navigate in the mountains. They were LEKI trekking poles, amazingly light and so sturdy, that even by leaning my full weight on them and violently bouncing up and down, they wouldn’t snap. They also gave me better balance; instead of only having two legs, now I had four. While hiking up the approach trail in J Tree, I thrust out a pole, scanning for a good foot placement. When I found one, I jabbed the sharp metal point in the ground, just past the placement, and leaning forward with all my weight on the pole, lowered my foot slowly down until it touched the trail. Often, the location was very uneven, which before would have caused me to twist my ankle, but now, with my full weight on the pole, I could reposition the foot onto flatter ground. I imagine all this scanning, jabbing, positioning, and frantic repositioning looked to a sighted person like a barely-under-control stumble and I can understand the panic that must have filled Ryan and Jeff when they watched me lurch up the trail beside a hundred-foot drop-off.
When scrambling up a steep rocky ramp to the base of the climb, Ryan kept his hands protectively around my ankles. I didn’t know whether to drag Ryan’s arms behind me or wait until his hands pushed my ankles forward. When I reached the flat section at the base, I had to tell him, nicely of course, “You can let go of my ankles now.” I didn’t worry too much about the extra help. I had been through this a thousand times when meeting new people. They don’t know what to do, so they do everything. Ryan and Jeff would learn soon enough what help I needed and what help I did not.
That evening we built a campfire and sat around trading stories. Ryan had just completed a first winter ascent of a jagged thirteen-thousand-foot peak called Black Tooth situated in the Big Horn mountain range of Wyoming. Just hearing the feat made my hands go clammy, even in the cold desert night. With a partner, he had snowmobiled in for two days and then fought through chest-deep snow for five hours, just to reach the base of the rock. Near evening they found themselves on a five-hundred-foot steep rock face leading to the summit, but didn’t have enough daylight to stay roped together and belay each other up each pitch. So the two had free-soloed to the top, with no safety line to stop a potential four-thousand-foot ride down into the valley. Ryan trained by taking long mountain runs over a thirteen-thousand-foot pass near his home. I had only been to thirteen thousand feet a few times in my life and once was in a car. I certainly couldn’t imagine running at that altitude.
Jeff, although as hard-core as Ryan, chose to downplay his adventures. He was at home in the Rocky Mountains where he lived, so comfortable in fact, that he told us he made a yearly habit out of climbing Boulder’s Third Flat Iron under the light of the moon, wearing nothing but his harness. “The harness actually chafed certain sensitive areas,” Jeff admitted sheepishly, “so I had to put on a pair of boxers under the harness.” Mountains were more important to Jeff than a home, a job, or security. He took jobs to be close to the mountains. Girlfriends had to be able to keep up with his high-altitude adventures. Although none of them could, a very large number had tried.
“I’ve never done a first ascent or gone climbing in the buff,” Sam said, “but I’ll bet ya I’ve been somewhere none of you have.” Then Sam told us the story of his last summer’s job, hanging off cliffs outside of Edgemont, South Dakota, drilling rock samples for the Bureau of Economic Geology. “I had nothing to do with geology or oil. I was just a hippie rock climber who found a paying job working with ropes way up off the ground.” Sam had jumped at the opportunity, thinking it would be a good way to get out of Phoenix for the summer. Also, he was nursing a broken heart from a recent breakup with a girlfriend and thought the change would give him time to reassess his relationship, his life, his future, all of which felt transitory.
The new job and setting, however, didn’t seem conducive to deep reflection on life. The town’s only two businesses were its ramshackle bar and the county dump, and he slept on a cot in a garage that was constantly flooding in the violent thunderstorms of the northern plains. For ten hours a day, Sam hung from loose sandstone cliffs drilling thousands of core samples, amidst clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies. It was common for van-sized blocks of stone to come loose and tumble the hundreds of feet to the canyon floor, nearly taking Sam with them. As he hung, he listened to the only radio station on his Walkman—Lakota Indian death chants—and looked out over the vast empty prairie which, for Sam, held the ghosts of millions of buffalo and the Indians who hunted them. “I found myself wondering, what exactly was I being punished for?” Sam said, throwing another log on the fire. “Was it for some shameful act I had performed or a heartless thing I said or just for one of the many bad decisions I had made over the years?”
After a late night drinking binge, when Sam was particularly hung-over, he found himself working alone on a distant mesa. Nothing was going right. In order to sample the cliff, he had to haul a few hundred pounds of equipment through the canyon bottom, over mud flats and boulder fields, and up a steep goat path to the top of the mesa. As soon as he would get his equipment organized and was prepared to rappel over the side of the cliff, he’d realize he forgot some vital piece of gear and have to descend back to his starting point. When he finally got suspended, inevitably he’d drop a wrench or screwdriver or drill bit and have to go all the way down again. In addition, his drill constantly needed to be filled with gas, causing him to go back up top again. This pattern kept up throughout the morning as the sun grew hotter, the insects thirstier and his hangover more fierce. The last straw was when the five-gallon water bag he had hauled up to the top of the cliff broke loose from its connections and emptied itself all over a cactus patch far below.
The story was vintage Sammy, I thought, as I reminisced on our first days training together. The fire had calmed now to just a sizzle as Sam continued, “After the water bag busted, I sank to my knees and began screaming and pounding the muddy ground with my fists. My vision went totally red and then I blacked out for a minute. When I opened my eyes, I sensed some movement, and after I found my glasses, which I’d thrown down and nearly stomped on in rage, I saw that two dung beetles were pushing a ball of shit up the hill, past me. The sight of it gave me a feeling of pure envy. Those two shit-bugs were succeeding where I had failed. Even worse than that, I was all alone. At least they had each other.” Ryan, Jeff, and I could no longer hold back our laughter. It sputtered out and then exploded into convulsions, in spite of Sam’s tragedy. He concluded, “I knew then that if the biggest thing I ever accomplished in life was pushing a huge wad of bullshit up a hill, I’d be satisfied, as long as I did it well.”
“In a few months,” I said, “you’ll get your wish.”
“Hold on there, home chicken,” Jeff said. “Which of us is the pile of shit he’s gonna be pushing?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Sam chuckled, poking me in the shoulder.
* * *
Over the winter and spring, we gained cohesiveness and skill as a team, meeting periodically for climbs of Mount Rainier in Washington and Long’s Peak in Colorado. On Rainier, we worked on crevasse rescues, by lowering team members deep into open cavernous slots and having them climb the vertical ice walls to the top, using their mountaineering axes and the front points of their crampons. The bottoms of crevasses narrowed to only a foot wide in places, and I understood grimly how a real fall would inescapably wedge a climber between its icy jaws. No warming sunlight reached the frigid, dank bottom, so I always climbed fast and furiously until I felt its welcomed glow on my face. In case the victim was incapacitated, we also practiced pulling up team members by a complex rope system of ice ax anchors, ascenders, and pulleys.
On Long’s Peak, we got our bodies used to pulling heavy sleds behind our equally heavy backpacks. After only an hour, the muscles in my hips were useless and patches of skin under my hip belt were rubbed raw. As we moved up the steepest sections, we practiced roping up, forming two rope teams of two, each of us connected to our partner by thirty feet. We practiced the technique of tying the back of our sleds to the climbers’ rope with a Prusik hitch, which would tighten and lock off with any sudden movement. Many mountaineers have survived a crevasse fall, only to be killed by their fifty-pound sleds crashing down on top of them. With a Prusik rig, however, the team members above the crevasse would self-arrest, throwing themselves down on their ice axes, which would anchor the climbers’ rope; the Prusik hitch would lock off against the taught climbers’ rope, preventing the sled from following the victim into the slot. Moving up a steep forty-five-degree snow slope, Jeff said, “Super Blind, I’m not gonna tell you when it’s comin’, but at some point, I’m gonna hurl my body down this slope, and you’re gonna save my ass.” Jeff was only emphasizing half the equation, since we were roped together. Climbing upward, I felt like I was marching into battle, every muscle in my body waiting for the enemy to strike. Then I felt the harsh jerk of the rope ripping me over backwards. I hit the slope on my back, head downward, with my large pack weighing me down like a turtle’s shell. As I slid, I writhed and twisted my body onto my stomach and slammed my chest against the blunt side of my ax, which drove the sharp pick side into the glazed snow. With Jeff’s heavy weight pulling us downward, at first the pick only sliced through the flimsy snow like a sharp knife through birthday cake. I kept my body stiff, also pushing my bent knees into the snow. I knew at this speed not to dig the front points of my crampons into the snow; the added pressure of these points combined with the powerful downward momentum would flip me over backwards again. Eventually, we came to a stop and without a word, started up again, only to have Jeff, a few minutes later, hurl himself down once more. By the end of the afternoon, my body ached from the dozens of falls and the sliding had pushed piles of snow under my Gore-Tex shell, soaking me through. That night as I slept in the tent, my body twitched and wriggled as the fierce pull of the rope and the vibrating motion of my ax cutting through snow crept into every dream. In a real rope fall, I knew my self-arrest had to be automatic. The action needed to be drilled into the involuntary circuitry of my muscle fibers. If I had to think about what to do during a fall, it would be too late.
Not all of my time leading up to the climb was spent on the mountain; as part of their public-education campaign, the AFB asked me to do some TV interviews. One was a cheesy daytime talk show, on which I was showcased among a group of blind people deemed “amazing and inspirational.” All the blind people were led onto the stage, canes tapping and dogs’ tails wagging, and seated in a row in front of the crowd. I was featured first, and the host opened with, “A blind mountain climber. Isn’t that incredible? Even I, who can see just fine, wouldn’t think of climbing a mountain.” This wasn’t the first time I had heard the “Even I” statement. It was always meant as a compliment, but it never failed to annoy me. There might be a dozen other factors that prevented the host from excelling in the sport of mountain climbing. She might be fifty pounds overweight, wheezing with every breath, and might never have even set foot on a mountain, but in her mind, success or failure was automatically attributed to one factor: sight or no sight.
The second panelist had “heroically saved another’s life” during the recent San Francisco earthquake, but when the story was fleshed out, it seemed far less than heroic. Staying in a hotel during the earthquake and knowing a woman in a wheelchair roomed next door, the blind woman had yelled out her window for help. Two sturdy construction workers heard her yells, rushed in, and carried the wheelchair-bound woman to safety. I wondered why the construction workers weren’t on this show. Next a blind comedian stood up and performed his act. He pointed to the audience and said, “Don’t you all look lovely this afternoon.” The audience erupted in laughter. “I’ve heard our host is a hot number,” he said. “I’d like to feel her face. Hubba hubba.” The audience erupted again. He told one blind joke after another, the kind I had told in middle school to gain acceptance, and even then, I had known the jokes weren’t funny.
Throughout the rest of the segment, I squirmed in my seat. I should have been proud to be picked out as being “amazing and inspirational,” but strangely, I felt more embarrassed and even a little sick. I was no more accomplished than the others. I was simply a blind person who planned to climb a mountain and nothing more. But people sensationalize the lives of blind people when, often, all they did was exhibit a semblance of normalcy. I had been receiving these accolades my whole life: give someone directions to my house—incredible. Make eye contact in a conversation—amazing. Pour a glass of milk without spilling it all over the table—inspiring. Each of us on the panel was being honored for our heroic tales, but the recognition spoke more loudly of low expectations than of accomplishment. My heart burned with the memory of my heroes, people like Helen Keller, who took the world’s perceptions about the disabled and shattered them into a million pieces, people whose stories made me hunger for the courage to live in their image. For those who I exalted with the label of hero, their stories had to be truly heroic and not hollow.
The host ended the show with a demonstration of “beeper baseball,” a game similar to baseball developed for blind people. With a dozen inspirational heroes on stage, I have no idea why I was selected as the representative batter. An audience member pitched me the beeping whiffle ball. I missed the first pitch, and the second. The third pitch was thrown with only a few seconds of air time left; the show’s snappy theme song was starting to play, and the host had begun her ending monologue about how amazing and inspiring we all were, when I connected with the beep. I heard her monologue trail off as she spotted the ball rocketing toward her, then the clunk of the ball as it bounced off her head. Vindication, I thought later, when the amused pitcher told me what had happened. As I headed back to the airport to catch my plane home, I began to realize that when blind people could become stand-up comedians, organize an earthquake rescue, and plan to climb a mountain without being singled out as inspirational, that is when the world would be a perfect place.