Camp Two has become our Advance Basecamp and the cook shelter is bustling when Laurie and I arrive, less than an hour after leaving Camp Four. Jane has moved up, and half a dozen of us gather on snow benches chatting while she prepares dinner. Pots and pans hang from rafters. Cans of food, bags of drinks, noodles, soups and cups fill shelves that have been carved into the snow walls. With what Jane has brought up from Basecamp and dug out of the food stores beneath the tarp, she makes a spectacular dinner.
“Linguine alla lobster is the entree for tonight,” she says as she drains the pot and dishes out the noodles. We hold out our plastic measuring cups in a web of outstretched arms while she spoons over the sauce. Cozied up together, savouring the concoction as if it is a four-star meal, we look like a large happy family. It’s a sight I couldn’t have imagined before this trip, and it feels like home. I love that the boys have started calling Jane “Fearless,” not just as a play on her last name, Fearing, but aptly for her spunk and mostly as a signal that she belongs to this family.
I am also grateful to be sitting upright with my feet on terra firma and with nothing more to do than indulge a hearty appetite. It is a relief not to be in that crevasse at Camp Three where, folded up in the dim light of the cramped space, Laurie and I fought for the same oxygen as the stoves. And where anytime we were outside, we had to stay alert to avoid a fatal mistake by failing to clip just one carabiner or taking one misstep untethered.
Now that Jane has moved up from Basecamp, we share a tent again and I can’t wait to debrief our time apart. As we chat she gives me a back massage, working the knots out of sore muscles earned from carrying heavy loads. She says, “You should see what happens to these guys when they come down for a rest; they get all scrubbed up and then strut around all fluffed up and frisky!” She grinds her elbow into a tender spot just below my shoulder blades. “I did this for Jim one night down in Basecamp, and whoa, it started to get a little too cozy. I shot out of there!”
“All these guys are the same. Well, not quite all of them,” I say. “Get them far away enough from home and they start behaving like you’re the last woman on earth. It’s perfectly natural, of course, and it’s why our species is still around. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, just as long as you don’t believe the story. That’s the problem, though: What woman doesn’t want to feel special?”
“Yeah, well, it sure puts me in an awkward position,” she says. “Crikey! I can’t believe what a tiny little back you’ve got.” She grabs the points of my shoulder blades and pinches them. “Would you look at these little things!” I feel her probe my back for the muscle between my shoulder blades. “This scrawny chicken’s back should belong to the cook.”
“Ouch! Have you ever got strong fingers!”
“That’s my point: my broad shoulders and strong fingers should belong to the climber.”
“Hey!” Kevin shouts from an adjacent tent. “Jane, Woody! It sounds like you’ve got a party going on over there. Can Bubba and I come over?”
“No,” we sing out.
“Well, then,” Barry says, “keep it down. Some of us are trying to sleep.”
Jane lowers her voice. “I didn’t realize they were that close. I hope they didn’t hear us earlier.”
“Every word,” Kevin says.
“Haven’t you guys got anything better to do than eavesdrop?”
“Not when the gossip is that juicy,” Barry replies.
I had intended to take a couple of days of rest at Camp Two. But after lying around, reading and eating for a day, I grow restless. That night Jim relays news from Barry and Kevin, now at Camp Four, saying they need more rope and supplies to start fixing toward Camp Five. He urges anyone who feels well enough rested to work while the weather is good, which is a good reason to cut my rest short.
The next morning we are just waking up when Jane says, “What time is it?” Her sleeping bag is cinched tight, exposing half her face and one eye.
I pull my watch string out from around my neck. “Eight,” I yawn.
Jane unzips her bag. “God, I’m hot.” She sits up, rips off her hat and runs her fingers through her hair. She strikes a mock pose. “How do I look?”
Her shoulder-length straight blond hair is plastered flat from sleeping in her hat, and when she tries to fluff it, it sticks up like straw. I laugh. “As good as me, no doubt.”
“Oh God, how long has it been since we’ve had a shower?” she sighs.
“Going on five weeks, I think.”
“Hurry up and get to the top of this damned mountain, will you? We’re about due for a shower.” She hugs herself and reaches for a thought. “No, a nice hot bubble bath would be better.”
“Holy shit!” we hear Albi shout, then the sound of snow crunching under boots, which stops beside our tent.
Dan asks, “You girls been out to the shitter this morning?”
“No. Why?”
“Because it isn’t there anymore,” Albi laughs. “Didn’t you hear that big crash in the night and feel our tents move?”
We look at one another, and say, “No.”
“No kidding?” Dan says. “I’m amazed you slept through. There’s a big crevasse where the shitter was. If you happen to be looking for it this morning, you’ll have a long climb down.” He adds, “Guess I know what I’ll be doing on my day off.”
Jane holds up her near-full pee bottle and says, “Thank God for this. That would have been a rude surprise to be sitting on the pot when it crashed into the abyss in the middle of the night. I wonder if the Nalgene bottle sponsors ever imagined they’d be saving lives?”
We clamber out of our tent to join Albi, Dan and Chris at the edge of a hole big enough to swallow a bus. A jumble of freshly sheared ice blocks covers the steps Dwayne carved, and the toilet seat is nowhere to be seen.
Jane’s eyes grow wide. “How could we have slept through that!”
“Pretty messy remodelling job if you ask me,” Albi says. The boys laugh and joke as if they are watching a comedy on TV.
Jane says, “And I say it’s pretty terrifying to think this happened so close to us. You guys are all acting like this is just another day—on Mount Everest.”
“It is just another day on Everest, if you haven’t noticed,” Dan replies.
Jane takes a step back. “Look at us standing here in our identical long underwear looking like a bunch of big babies with our sleepers on.” She grabs the sagging material from the backside, “And with a diaper full. And you,” she says to Chris, “with your surgical mask and a bloody wad of toilet paper sticking out of your nostrils. What a sight we all are!” Then she points over at the crevasse. “And sometime in the middle of the night this crevasse cracked wide open, no more than a few metres from where were sleeping. Do you not think that is even a little unusual?”
Albi says, “How about we put our new shitter somewhere different for starters?”
“Is it safe to even camp here is what I want to know,” Jane says.
Dan says, “I’ll probe around after breakfast and make sure there aren’t any other crevasses that have opened beneath us, and I’ll dig a new hole on the other side of camp.”
“That’s a good start,” Jane replies. “And I’m going to move our tent today.” She turns toward the shelter. “Now, how about breakfast?”
Albi puts on his best upper-crust British accent. “If it’s eggs Benedict on the menu, I’d like my eggs medium-soft, please.”
Soon after, we are all assembled underneath the orange tarp, which casts a jaundiced tint on our faces. Jane slides a pancake out of the pan and into my empty cup and looks for another taker. She passes me a cup of syrup, homemade from butter and brown sugar.
“Who’s going back up today?” Dan asks.
“I am,” I say. “Anyone interested in getting this over with sooner by going all the way to Camp Four in one go—two days in one?”
“I’m in,” Albi says. “Chris and I are due to move into Three today. But anything’s better than sleeping in that refrigerator. Let’s give it a go!”
Thirteen hundred metres is a big day in the Rockies, let alone on Everest. But we’re all roused by the prospect of trying something new and raising the bar, which is more invigorating than a good day’s rest. We talk about the strategy, our loads and how long it might take us. Fuelled by dopamine, I feel as though I’m under some strange spell of mania on this day.
I saddle up, load my cassette player, clamp an ascender on the rope and start up with a piqued sense of wonder. After multiple trips over this ground and the ground before this, I begin again an elegant dance, practised and lived into, of weight shifts, cross-steps, back steps and toe-ins, all in what seems a concert of pistons, pulleys, levers, pumps and bellows. I am certain that all these moves will alter my movement on steep ground for the rest of my life.
I pull up over the headwall in half the time it used to take. I look back down to see all three boys making their way up the ropes. Now, at the beginning of the hardest day yet, I load up Tattoo You, slip on my headphones and turn my player on. The first few bars of electric guitar twang loud in a world-altering riff. Mick Jagger snarls the initial lines of “Start Me Up” as I punch my ascender up the rope. Fuelled with these lusty lyrics imbued with grit and testosterone, I start up the spur of the highest mountain in the world.
The tempo of “Tops” lulls me into a rhythm, which pulls me through the rest of the day. Long after the batteries in the player die, I am still accompanying Mick.
Albi, Chris and I set a new standard by stringing the two carries together. None of us will ever stay at Camp Three again.
A few days later, Camp Two is empty but for Dan, Laurie and me. Jane left earlier that morning to pick up a load of supplies from Camp One, and I wake to a calm, sunny morning. The frost on the tent has melted into rivulets and trickles down the walls into pools on the floor. I put our sleeping bags out to air and remove everything else but a sleeping pad and zip the tent up tight. Dressed in my one-piece base-layer, I pad over to the cook tent. I step down into a layer of knee-high cold air. There must be a twenty-degree temperature difference between the upper air of the shelter, warmed by the sunshine through the tarp, and the floor.
Pots of water sit on both the stoves with a half-kilogram can of bacon thawing in one of them. I stew it up and eat a third of it, saving the rest for Laurie and Dan. I make tea in Laurie’s measuring cup and take it over to his tent.
“Hey, Laurie, time to rise and shine. You still up for another carry today?” I tell him that I have water on to boil and breakfast waiting.
“Lots?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m off to the baths.”
I return to my tent, which is warm enough now to strip off my clothes for a complete scrub down and a shampoo. With about six litres of hot water, I work from visible to less visible parts. First I wash my face and then I immerse my head into the full pot of warm water and lather up. I rinse my hair with cups of clean water, which drain into an empty pot. Then I combine the clean water and the rinse water and dip my underwear in to wipe down the rest of my body. Finally, I squat over the pot and wash my nether regions. I wring out my underwear and hang it to dry on the cords strung across the ceiling of the tent. I wrap my small towel around my head and lie naked atop my sleeping pad to air-dry in the sauna-like luxury of my tent.
Rarely naked, I survey my new physical landscape of angles and hollows. I run my gaze down over my atrophied breasts, lamenting how they are always the first to go when I lose weight. When I lift my head to look below my ribcage, a six-pack of well-defined stomach muscles ripples. Smudges of purple and yellow bruising from my pack’s hipbelt colour my hipbones. I caliper the skin on the inside of my thighs with forefinger and thumb, gauging how much is left to burn. A pair of long, sinewy muscles parallels my thighs, running from my groin to my knees. I admire my toes and pink nailbeds. These small feet, despite the minus-fifty-degree days of Denali and the many sub-zero days spent bashing them into frozen waterfall ice, are still all here. I wonder if Everest will exact a toll, as it did with Willi Unsoeld when he was benighted near the summit and subsequently lost nine of his toes to frostbite. I examine my fingers, thick as sausages from years of gripping ropes and holds. Thick, maroon-coloured blood oozes from my cracked cuticles, which I think is a sure sign of anemia. Red puffy skin around cuts that never seem to heal tell of malnutrition.
Once dry, I sprinkle baby powder all over my body. I sniff the layers I have been wearing for the last several weeks. Despite all this time, they have little to no odour. Cursed with a good nose, I can usually detect the scent of others and myself. But in the high-altitude semi-arid desert air, it seems I sweat less. We lose our fluids through breathing and evaporation, leaving little to cling on our clothes. Or is it that bacteria can’t survive this high?
I remember the leg of goat that hung from the rafters in the cook tent of our Makalu Advance Basecamp at 5,500 metres. Despite the warm daytime temperatures, bacteria didn’t seem to grow in the dry and rarified atmosphere and the desiccated goat leg only emitted a mild gamey smell. Over the course of a month or more, our Sherpa cook sliced off slabs to put in stews and we never suffered any intestinal problems. I might be wrong in that theory, but it worked for us.
However, bacteria still thrive within our wasting bodies. This high, where vital functions work at fractional capacity, it is nearly impossible to heal once broken. As if in testament, I hear Dan hacking.
I slip my base layer back on and step out to see Dan rooting through the stores under the tarp.
“You seen any cough drops?” he asks. “This fucking cough kept me up all night.”
“I’ve got half a box here.”
“Thanks. Think I’ll put a little more work in around here before I leave for Camp One,” he says. He clears his throat, turns and spits a gob of thick yellow phlegm on the snow. “Be careful, eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t burn yourself out. We’ve still got a long way to go. And I’d say, you’ve got one of the best chances of reaching the summit out of any of us.”
I step back. “Me?” It seems like a long time ago when Laurie and I mused about my standing on the summit. Since then I had slipped into a comfortable routine, put my head down and carried my loads just like everyone else.
“I haven’t been thinking that way,” I say.
He snorts. “Well, you might want to start. Isn’t it obvious? You haven’t been sick once and you’re going strong.”
Dan’s view startles me and snaps my head up. I watch him trudge off to his tent. Back in the Rockies, I saw Dan, a burly six-foot-five mountain guide, as a sure bet for the summit. At the first expedition meeting I attended, I remember rocking onto my toes beside him and Dave and Jim, trying to be taller, to believe that I measured up to the others on this team. I had thought and felt smaller then.
In need of a talk, and wondering what is taking Laurie so long to get ready, I go over to his tent to find him sitting in the vestibule with a pot of hot water in front him.
“Hey, Sharon, got a towel I can borrow? I haven’t shaved or washed for at least a couple of days and I forgot mine down at One.”
I return with my only towel, which is still damp.
“Thanks,” he says, then hesitates. “This been anywhere I don’t want to know about?”
“Nope.” I’m disappointed that it isn’t the right time to talk to him and turn to leave.
“So, what does that mean?” he asks. He is sitting cross-legged and naked from the waist up, holding out my towel pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
I can’t help but smile. “It means it hasn’t been anywhere on a woman’s body that you aren’t familiar with.”
He laughs. “There you go again, Sharon. I know, I know, you’re just trying to get the upper hand by embarrassing me.”
“Hurry up so we can get back before dark,” I say. “Whether you’re ready or not, I’m out of here by eleven!”
“Hey, since I’m working with just you today, could I use some of that baby powder you’ve got that makes you smell so nice? I can smell it from here.”
My chat with Laurie will have to wait for another day.