The thing about first ascents in the Yukon Territory is that the Yukon Territory is a fucking long way from Pittsburgh, PA. It’s a journey requiring many stops and an absurd number of changes in mode of transportation: buses, planes, cabs, helicopters. A ferry. For the first time in my life, I rode a ferry.
The thing about first ascents in general is that there’s only one reason to do something so ridiculous as to willingly put yourself hundreds of feet in the air, hanging perilously close to death, nothing more than the tip of your pick piercing the ice and a nylon rope the width of your thumb to keep you from your severely painful doom: simply put, you want to be badass.
Adventure sports are called adventure sports for a reason. If there’s no risk of life and limb, then there is no point. I find it’s near impossible to impress a woman with a badminton racquet in your hand, both feet firmly on the ground.
Yes, it’s all about the badass. Jason, Erica and I could think of no better way to prove ourselves (to whom or what I’m still not certain) than the first ascent of a potentially treacherous ice route thousands of miles from home.
This is back when being badass was important to me, of course. This is back when my story, the story of Travis Sebastian Eliot, was moving along rather swimmingly. This is back when I was waiting tables, taking people’s money with a relentless assault of charm and product knowledge, taking vacations whenever I had the money – long vacations to climb and ride the mountain trails and raft the white waters, to drink the local beer and fuck the local women.
This ice ascending adventure is back when things were simple and life was as easy as all those local broads. I am glad of that time in my life. I fully believe that every man needs, at some point in his life, to know what it feels like to be a bad motherfucker. I’m glad I got to experience it before the time of men fades forever into a fog of femininity…
This trip was when things were simple.
But the story sometimes takes an unexpected turn, I suppose. Sometimes the characters have no choice but to hold on, white-knuckled, and wait to see how they come out of it.
I came out of this shit more badassedly than I could ever have imagined. I mean, being tough is one thing, but you cross a line that most people don’t even know exists when you get into survival cannibalism. There’s a constitution there that doesn’t seem real to people. It doesn’t even seem real to you. Even when you’re in the middle of the very real act of cutting the meat from your dead friends’ bones, taking a nice big bite of that incompetent fucking pilot, it doesn’t seem real to you.
One of the things about being knee deep in such a situation is that you find out what you’re made of. I was, after the plane went down, made of broken bones and lacerations. And I was made of fear and dread and pain. And I was made of torment.
I know that this all sounds a little gothic or melodramatic or whatever, but that’s the way it was. I mean, they were all dead. My friends were dead, and I was starving. And not starving in the way we Americans throw the word around. This wasn’t I haven’t had my 3 PM McDonald’s run yet starving. This was hallucination-inducing emptiness. This was a searing-pain-in-the-innards kind of hunger.
The thing about mountains is they’re supposed to represent a challenge – this enormous mass of earth and rock, put there by whatever god you see fit, is meant to dwarf you. It’s supposed to humble you, remind you that you’re small.
Then again, maybe the mountains don’t represent a damn thing. Maybe they’re nothing more than little fits of rage thrown by our gracious Mother Earth, who doesn’t waste her time with small gestures of displeasure. She has no wooden spoon, no need to bother with time-outs or groundings. These punishments carry no weight in a house with billions of children. Instead, she has shiftings of tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and tsunamis that swallow entire cities. When that bitch is angry with you, you’re going to know it.
You might not know exactly why you deserve this punishment, but hell, sometimes it’s better not to know how much of asshole you really are.
Of course, I can’t say that Mama threw her best at me. All I had to deal with was the cold, really. And the quiet.
At least, those were the only factors she’d thrown into the equation. She certainly had nothing to do with all the months of planning, saving money, packing all that sub-zero sleeping gear and ropes and spikes. She had nothing to do with our decision to find the cheapest air-fare possible, no matter if the plane looked more like a Volkswagen than a flying craft of obvious genius, no matter if the pilot seemed a little, well, iffy. No, these were all decisions made by three reasonably bright people. Three good friends who just wanted a grand adventure and their names attached to something awesome.
This was the kind of shit that left me thinking I’d be spending the rest of my life with the arctic night sky as my only scenery, the stars and constellations the only names I’d have to call to. When you get to thinking that you’re going to die a slow, painful, lonely death, you begin to see how ancient peoples could have thought the stars were listening to them. Those stars, they’re always there. Every night, looking in on you. Why not talk to them? You’ve got all the time in the world before anyone will rescue you. Or before you die.