Jane has slipped out of the tent before I wake. After several days up high, I have slept soundly in the relatively thick air of Basecamp. I take my resting pulse as I do most mornings, as a means of monitoring my acclimatization. Fifty-two beats per minute; it is down from seventy-two since the last time I was here. At home it is thirty-nine.
It is eerily still, and the light is different—soft, yet bright—making it hard to guess the time. When I unzip the door, a wafer of snow slides off the roof of the tent onto my head. In a rare absence of the wind, Basecamp lies under a blanket of undisturbed new snow, which muffles sound and light.
I find Jane in the cook tent with Mr. Leo, who is the Chinese cook and her helper. The slight man, a head shorter than her, stands with his arms crossed and a blank look on his face.
“I’m getting sick and tired of trying to get this guy to help out around here,” she says. “I just asked him to get some water and he won’t. This morning, his excuse is he doesn’t have the right shoes for the snow. I don’t speak Chinese but that’s the gist of it. There’s only a dusting of snow on the ground, for God’s sake!”
The spring where we fetch our water is just a couple of minutes away, and the chore seems a minor one. I glance down at his flimsy canvas running shoes. Then his eyes briefly meet mine and he turns to leave. I touch his arm and he spins away as if I’ve hit him with an electric cattle prod. “Here.” I smile as I thrust two buckets into his hands and give him a little shove toward the door.
Mr. Leo accepts the buckets, then drops them and shouts for help. Mr. Yu arrives and a rapid exchange passes between them, which ends with Mr. Leo thrusting a pointed finger down at his feet. All eyes drop to his shoes. “Forget it,” Jane says, sighing, and reaches for the pails.
“Please wait!” I say to Mr. Leo. “I’ve got something you may like.” I run to our tent and return with a pair of winter boots that a sponsor has donated to each of us. I offer him the boots and say, “Here’s a present for you.”
Mr. Yu says, “They have no laces.”
“Well.” I mime the action of pulling the laces out of my shoes and threading them into the new boots, and speak very slowly. “Take the laces from your shoes and put them in these.”
Jane stirs a pot of porridge, bearing down hard on the wooden spoon. “I was told Mr. Leo was paid to help us. How has that changed?”
Mr. Yu speaks as if reciting an old Chinese proverb. “The laces,” he says, “there are none. You see, then he will not have laces for his shoes.”
I huff, “Oh, come on, he’s done fuck all since we’ve been here!”
They both stagger backwards. Mr. Yu says, “Mr. Leo says he won’t take orders from womans.”
“That’s it, I’ve had enough!” Jane stomps to the door, throws back the flaps and yells for Jim. Moments later, he dips deep to clear the threshold of the cook tent door and I stand back to watch everyone talk at once: Mr. Yu in English, Mr. Leo in Chinese and Jane in an escalating pitch.
Jim asks us all to step outside and we all wait to see what he will do next.
“Well,” he says, “it sounds to me like Jane needs a little help.” Jim bends down, picks up the buckets and hands them to Mr. Leo.
Mr. Leo spans his fingers wide open, palms down, in refusal. Then he picks up a rock, the size of volleyball, and hefts it above his head. Red-faced and with arms trembling, he looks straight at us. While Jane and I back away, Jim stands firm, snatches the rock from Mr. Leo and turns to Jane. A sly smile ripples and he rasps in his best Clint Eastwood imitation, “Jane. I’m going to go ahead and make your day.” In one smooth motion, Jim drops the rock, grasps Mr. Leo’s waist between his big hands, picks him up and holds him with his toes just skimming the ground. Mr. Leo kicks and squirms. Jim sets him back down gently. As we watch Mr. Leo scoot off, Jim says to Jane, “I think it’s time for us all to move to Camp Two.”
Jim can’t know how much his defending Jane means to her. Their relationship will shift to a better place as of today.
The next morning the wind pats and tugs at our tent, waking me before my watch alarm goes off for the 7 a.m. radio call. I bundle up and go fetch the radio from Jim’s tent. Keeping my head tucked deep inside my hood as I talk into the radio, I say, “Hello, anyone awake?”
Albi responds, “Ah, it’s so nice to hear a melodious feminine voice through this noise box. I’m the only one up so far, but once Chris, Dave and Dan rise from their beauty sleep, we’ll be heading your way today. Any gossip to report from down there?”
I tell him about the showdown with the Chinese yesterday and Kevin and Barry eating an eighteen-egg omelette between them. They plan to head up to Camp One today, and Kevin claims they might feel good enough to make it all the way to Camp Two.
“Dwayne here at Camp Two. Good to know someone’s sticking up for Jane. There’s been no new snow since yesterday, so Dave, James and I decided it hasn’t amounted to enough to worry about. We’re going to try to make it to Camp Three today. Then I’ll probably head to Camp One for a couple of days of rest.”
It is too cold and windy to relax in the tent that day so I go for a walk up to the memorial cairns. On my way back I see someone in the distance, bundled in a down parka, striding toward me. As we draw closer to one another, I realize it is Annie. What to do? Before I can decide on a course of action, she looks up and beams me a warm smile.
“Hi,” she says. “Sharon, right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” I say. “Hi, Annie.” Her soft and placid expression puts me at ease.
“You and Jane look alike. I wasn’t sure.”
“Lucky me,” I reply. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“How’s it going?” she asks. “You guys on the route yet?”
“Yep,” I say. “The boys are hoping to make Camp Three today. How about you?”
Annie says, “We’re heading up tomorrow, and the next day we’ll wander up to the base of our route to see where to put our Camp Two. Pretty big face to get much sleep below, huh?”
We turn to face the mountain, standing side by side with our insulated parkas zipped to our noses and our hands jammed into our pockets. “What route did you try when you were here before?” I ask.
“The West Ridge from Nepal. Longer story, but we got up high into the Hornbein Couloir and then my teammates made a route-finding mistake in the Yellow Band and lost too much time. Doesn’t take much. Turned around and that was it. I frostbit my fingers and we were too wasted to go back up for another try.”
I am reading Everest: The West Ridge, a book by American climber Tom Hornbein, who was part of the first American expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1963. Tom and his teammate Willi Unsoeld were the first climbers to find a line up through the North Face. I tell her the Hornbein will be our Plan B if we run out of time or steam to climb the ridge direct.
Annie says, “The problem with the West Ridge is it’s like climbing two separate mountains, with that mile-long ridge between the summit pyramid and the top of the spur where you first gain the west shoulder. Crossing that ridge isn’t hard, but it takes an extra camp and a whole lot of extra pain and time to go from twenty-four to twenty-five thousand feet.” She offers to tell us what she knows about the Hornbein, if we need to go there.
We talk a little about our teams. Theirs has ten members, plus the expedition leader who has raised the money, got them to Basecamp and has gone home already. Annie prefers her team’s lean and laissez-faire approach compared to the large-scale Everest expedition she was on three years ago.
Annie surprises me when she asks casually, “How do you and Carlos know one another? You climb together?”
Carlos hasn’t told her anything about us. Strange. I say, “We were on Makalu a couple of years back and then on the South Face of Aconcagua and in the Peruvian Andes more recently.”
I don’t give away much, and I am even more impressed when she doesn’t press me for details. She listens with innocent interest as I talk, and speaks with ease, with no rush to fill in the spaces. She is as easy to talk to as any other climber I might happen upon, but I hold fast in that neutral space of simple exchange. We will see each other in passing a few times more. And now, I want to.
“Good luck,” she says as she turns to leave. “Dig in. It’s a bit breezy up there.”
“Thanks,” I say. “You too.”
On my third and last day of rest at Basecamp I spend the afternoon reading in the tent and basking in the warmth of the sun. I am stripped down to my base-layer and lying semi-reclined on two bunched-up sleeping bags like a chaise longue when Jane comes by.
“Hey, Woody, I found us a little treat.” Her use of my nickname hints of something new. She flips open one side of her jacket, like a hawker, to reveal a shiny gold-and-red package of Dunham cigarettes. “I found these in the stash that Jim bought for the Chinese liaison officer in Chengdu. I didn’t think they would notice one pack was missing.”
I bolt upright. “Whoa!” I flash back two months to Canmore. Jim chose Jane as our cook over Colleen, who is Dwayne’s partner and a good friend of mine. Colleen played a major role in food planning and packing for Everest, and had supported and accompanied us on the last part of our Makalu expedition. But Jim was adamant about leaving romantic partners behind to protect and build the solidarity of our team. Jane had experience cooking for large groups but she had never been on an expedition, nor did she have any high-altitude experience. I couldn’t understand why she was recruited onto our team at the last minute, in part, perhaps, because of how hard I had to fight to win the confidence of some team members before I was invited to join. While the rest of my teammates voted Jane in, I held out.
Jim told Jane that I was her only obstacle to getting on the team, which is why she came to my house one cold February day a month before we were to leave for Everest. She sat across from me at my kitchen table, running her hands over its surface as if she was smoothing out the wrinkles. “Let’s get right to it,” she said. “What’s your issue with me?”
I pushed my chair back and leaned forward, laying my hands on the table’s edge. I asked, “What’s in it for you to serve a group of self-absorbed prima donnas while they try to climb a mountain?”
She sat tall, pressed her palms into the table, leaned forward and looked straight at me. “I’m serving something much bigger than just you and the boys, and I want to play a part in making that something happen. Helping people is what I do, and I’m good at it. That’s enough for me. What’s in it for you?”
I pulled my shoulders back and said, “I want to be a part of this team, run with the best and get to the top. And I’m good at it.”
“Well, then, I guess we’ll make a good team,” she said. “I can help you do that. So let’s get it out. Anything else?”
“What about the men?” I said. “They’ll be after you. Married or not, three months is a long time.” I knew this factor had made some of my teammates reluctant to invite me. I was hurt when I discovered that. As if I was a temptress. But there had been romances on American expeditions that had caused conflict.
“Come on, if you don’t think I’ve fought off my share of lonely randy mountain guides. You too, I imagine! So, where are we at?”
It was then that she reached into one of the two identical team-issue briefcases beside her. She’d reached into mine and soon realized her mistake, but not before she discovered a package of rolling tobacco. “Is this yours?” she asked, perplexed. “You mean to tell me that a hard-ass woman like you smokes?”
“Yes, I love the occasional puff—especially at times like this.”
“Does anyone else smoke on this team?” she asked.
“Of course not!”
Jane drew in a breath and then laughed. “I have a package of the very same tobacco in my briefcase, for times like this. Let’s have one, shall we?” she said, and we settled.
Now, Jane stands at the door of our tent. “What do you think?”
I whisper, “You’re a star, Jane.”
Her face lights up. “Well, get dressed and let’s go for a stroll!”
With the bulk of our high-altitude supplies now at Camp One, and Camp Three nearly in place, it is time to move up. We will only return to Basecamp on our rest cycles, which will work out to be about every ten days. With most of the climbers working at Camp One and above, Jane will move to Camp Two to help out. I relish the idea of her company as we start working our way up the mountain.
Jane and I pay our first visit to the Spaniards on our way out of Basecamp. The five climbers who are down on a day off all stand up to welcome us into their small wall tent, which is furnished with a real table and chairs. A map and some pictures of their route lie on the table, which give us a better starting point than just gawking at the handsome men. The chickens scratch and dive for crumbs as we nibble on European pâté, hard bread and strong cheeses. At first sight, their expedition appears the most spartan of those in Basecamp, yet it is the most richly supplied with the comforts that matter here. They speak little English, and we, little Spanish, leaving us to laugh more and say less, but we luxuriate in the velvety texture of their voices and their attentions. They all stand up again when we push back our chairs to leave. When we go to shake their hands, they gently touch our shoulders and air-kiss us goodbye.
Once out of earshot, Jane says, “Well, doesn’t that little visit make you think about what we’re missing?”
“Yeah, and then some.”
“So tell me something about your new guy, not the old one. I’ve had enough of him already.” She laughs. “Do you miss him?” she asks.
“Yes and no,” I say. “I can’t afford to miss him; it would drain me. I’m pretty focused on the here and now—on the climbing. It’s a better bet than men.”
Jane asks slyly, “Okay, but which Spaniard would you go for, if he was the last man on earth?”
“Jerónimo,” I say.
“Ha, you didn’t even hesitate!”
“You?”
“Tote,” she sighs. “Right, then! From now on, whenever you bring up Carlos, we’re going to talk about our fantasy guys. Deal?”
Our walk back up to Camp One that day takes just three and a half hours instead of the original five. This, and the fact that we chat non-stop is a sure sign we are acclimatizing well.
As we arrive, I recognize Dan’s tall form silhouetted on the edge of the moraine. He must have heard our laughter and caught sight of us because he gives us a wave.
Jane holds her arms up high. “We can still dream, can’t we? It’s good to feel alive!”
Indeed!