The day Laurie, Dwayne and I carry to Camp Four together marks close to the halfway point of our time on Everest. We climb a rope-span apart with Dwayne in the lead, Laurie second and me last. Although we speak little on carries because of the distance between us, we read one another by the way we move. The wind increases in intensity through the day, making Dwayne and Laurie look as though they are pinned to a clothesline. Dwayne sways in the wind but stays on his feet, pausing for the stronger gusts to pass before he continues. In contrast, Laurie, who is usually solid and steady, stumbles and falls to his knees when the stronger gusts hit us. The length of time he remains down, or hanging from his ascenders to recover, grows longer.
I wonder if we are pushing too hard and if conditions are nearing the point of unreasonable. Laurie and Dwayne slip in and out of view through clouds of spindrift. One gust blows all three of us over with a fierceness that feels like rage, as if it is trying to tear us off. This is it, I think, this may be the first day I will have to turn around. There is only one thing I can be certain about: worse is to come. Someday soon we will be higher and it will be harder. I wait to see what Laurie and Dwayne do. Laurie looks down at me and shakes his head. He has given up. Then he turns to look up at Dwayne, who staggers to a stand and punches his ascenders up the rope. Laurie shakes his head again and then gets to his feet and does the same. We complete our carry that day with our mentor sandwiched between us.
Mute light presses through cracks in the snow-encased walls of our tent the next morning. Malaise ambushed me sometime in the night. Storm days are difficult for anyone, but they tend to be a little worse for me. I know I’m cursed with bouts of depression and have learned to rise out of them with a good run or climb—an activity that alters my brain chemistry and gives me a sense of progress. But I can’t escape it here, pinned down for the day or longer with nowhere to go, and nothing to do but wait. When I’m under depression’s spell, I feel like I’ve always been this way and always will be.
I find Jane in the cook shelter reading by headlamp. Drifting snow covers the tarp overhead, dimming the light and muffling the maelstrom outside. I had hoped for a mood lift when I see her but I know I’m in trouble when I don’t feel anything.
Jane fills me in on the news from the morning radio call, which I missed because I was trying to sleep. “Jim’s back in Camp One already.” He’d been in Zegar, a half day’s travel from Basecamp by jeep, to extend our climbing permit for another week, to May 25. “Said he got worried when no one answered his call at seven this morning. Then, when I came on at eight, he asked why I was an hour late.” She explained to him that we’d switched the radio call times to eight o’clock in order to make best use of the daylight hours. “I didn’t get a chance to say anything more before he started yelling, saying how dangerous it is to make random decisions without group consensus. And since he wasn’t here, it wasn’t a consensus decision.” Exasperated, she asks, “What’s his problem anyway?”
“Ghosts is what,” I say. “He attributes the three deaths on their ’82 Everest expedition to their leader switching a radio time without notice so he could sleep in. But I’m not the one to tell you that story. You ask him sometime.”
“Well, Jim and his ghosts are on their way up here today and he’s hopping mad. Says he wants to go to Four tomorrow to replace Chris, who’s coming down sometime today. Sounds like Chris’s ribs are giving him grief. He thinks they may be broken because it’s really painful on every intake of breath, and he wants Dr. Bob to check him out. They say they’re not getting much done up there in this weather except home improvements. James wants to stay up at Four and wait it out.” Jane pauses until I look up at her and she catches my eye. She tilts her head and asks, “What’s with you this morning? You seem kind of depressed.”
“Yeah, a little.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not really—I know it’ll just get worse if I try right now. I just need to move.”
That afternoon, Kevin and Chris arrive after retreating from Camp Four. They tell us the wind was too strong to fix rope on the ridge. We are all in the cook shelter finishing up dinner when Jim arrives. He tosses an envelope of mail on the floor and says, “What the hell were you guys thinking when you decided to change the call times?”
Kevin starts to explain that the Chinese time zone we’re working in doesn’t coincide with our work schedule. Seven in the morning feels like we could use another hour of sleep, and seven in the evening feels like late afternoon.
“Fuck! Thanks for telling me! Where’s an empty tent?” He snatches up a silver surprise and I lead him out to a vacant tent, where he keeps to himself through to the next day.
The weather, Jim’s mood and my state of mind are no better the next morning. But Jim is determined to carry to Camp Four and asks me to join him. I would bolt out of here if I could. Usually when I am under this black cloud, friends don’t hear from me for days. And when I can’t hide, I suddenly transform from a vibrant force into a pathetic trickle, which is humiliating and, I fear, another reason Jim hesitated to invite me onto the team. I don’t want him to see me like this on a day when he will be relying on me.
At the bottom of the ropes, I load my player with a cassette of Handel’s Messiah that my erudite university professor client–turned-friend, Dixon, has sent me in the latest mail delivery. In his letter, he explained the three parts that the work expresses—the prophecy of salvation, the redemptive sacrifice and the promise of resurrection. He told me not to try following it too closely and to let the music convey the transitions. Dixon instructed me to wait for a difficult day to play it, promising elevation and bliss. The music soothes me and carries me up the headwall to the spur. Then the rising “Hallelujah” chorus begins as I step into the full force of the storm—the music renders it into a celestial tempest.
Again I position myself on the windward side and allow the wind to help me. I look below to see Jim struggling on the leeward side of the rope, and I realize I have learned something from all the time spent in these gales. Fresh off a long rest, Jim is keeping up. But he is less accustomed to the force of the wind, and he fights it.
When we reach our halfway point at Camp Three, I tuck in behind a snow wall to wait for Jim and pull my watch out to check the time. I sag when I see it has taken an hour longer than usual to get to this point. When Jim arrives, I shoot him a look suggesting we drop our loads and return on a better day to finish the carry. He answers by transferring his ascenders to the next rope and pointing upward.
A few rope spans higher, I look down to see he has switched to the windward side of the rope and is gaining on me. When he goes to pass me at the next anchor, a rogue gust hurls him against me, and we topple together. Once we untangle ourselves and clamber to our feet, Jim squints at me through ice-encrusted eyelashes and yells over the howl of the wind, “Ya gotta want it!”
Those words echo through my memory, taking me back to a dismal day in Toronto. The whole team was attending a press conference shortly before we left for Everest. Jim cajoled me into joining him on his regular training regimen of running—three times—up the CN Tower, then the tallest free-standing structure in the world. On that grey, brittle February day, I attempted to follow him up the 1,776 steps. Broken glass grated under my feet as I ran up those stairs littered with cigarette butts, used condoms, syringes and tampons. By the third lap, my legs had turned leaden and I slowed to a plod. I could hear the patter of Jim’s feet on the metal treads many flights above me. How could he do this day after day? Just then, he yelled, “Ya gotta want it!”
We have come a long way from that depressing day in Toronto. Riding on that same memory perhaps, Jim shoots me a wry smile and steps into the lead. Still on my knees, I watch him stagger the first few steps upward as the refrain of “Hallelujah” comes around again. Clouds roil and part, revealing patches of deep blue space. Soon I am blinded to all but my feet and the rope in front me.
Ten hours after we began, Jim and I pull into Camp Four. The boys have carved out a tent platform on the steep snow face just below the West Ridge and built a fortress of snow blocks around it. But the storm kept burying the tent, and over the course of several days of poor weather the boys tunnelled into the ridge and built a snow cave.
James has been watching for us and pops his head out of the cave entrance to greet us. He shouts over the wind’s roar, “Welcome home, kids! Wow, good job getting up here in this today.” He waits at the entrance as we unload our packs, then pulls them into the cave ahead of us.
I feel like I can’t breathe as I slither up through a body-width tunnel, and only once my head is inside a surprisingly spacious cavern do I gasp for air. The cave feels like a sanctuary from the violence just a few feet away rather than the tomb I feared it would be.
“I’ve been fixing up the place, doing a little interior designing in my spare time,” James tells us. The cave floor is higher than the entrance to allow cold air and off gasses to drop, and heat to rise and warm the dome-shaped space above, which is now much bigger than when I first checked it out. I can stand hunched over but Jim has to stay on his knees as we look around. James sits on a snow bench that is big enough to sleep four and about a metre higher than the floor. A stove and a couple of candles warm the cave and light it well enough that we can see one another. A small deep hole in the floor is the urinal, lined with the telling dark yellow signs of dehydration.
James gives me a hug and wraps a sleeping bag around me. “Have a seat,” he says, pointing to the foam pad on the platform, “and make yourselves at home while I serve up the drinks and hors d’oeuvres.” Steam billows from the pot and we dig out our cups from our packs. He pours in some hot water, stirs in a few tablespoons of powdered milk and hot chocolate crystals and hands us our drinks. Then he scoops some snow out of a stuff sack and into the pot to make more water.
Stunned from our ordeal, Jim and I sit together under the sleeping bag with our backs against the ice wall and our boots sticking out in front of us. In the vacuum-like silence of the cave, my ears still ring from the din outside; otherwise all I can hear is the occasional muffled boom of a gust and the hiss of the stove.
James hands us a package of Fig Newtons. “How’d it go out there?”
Jim wraps his hands around the hot cup and tells James about the day. James lets out a throaty chuckle that I’ve come to know and that somehow diminishes any crisis. As they talk, I sip my hot chocolate and nestle into the warm sleeping bag and the reassuring presence of James. I look around at the neatly stocked shelves he has carved and the stitching on his homemade overboots and I rest, contented. High altitude can cut a person down to the basest level of coping. James has a way of making the environment work for him rather than him working to fit it; he has a knack for rendering comfort from the inhospitable.
Between coughing fits, James updates us on the progress they’ve made up high over the last few days while Jim has been away. But he looks thin and drawn from working too high too long. Even James is wearing out.
I call Jane on the radio for a check-in and to let her know I’ll be on my way down soon.
“You with Jim and James now?”
“I’m sitting here with them in the snow cave.”
“How is everyone up there?”
“It looks like James has been on a diet and I’m probably looking a little wasted from a hard day.” I keep my fingers on the transmit button and glance over at Jim, then say, “And it looks like the boss is the only one better for it.”
Jim holds his hand out for the radio. “Jane, this is a day I will not forget. Woody is understating the worst day we’ve had on this mountain yet. At one point the wind picked me right up off the ground and threw me against her. I know, I know,” he laughs, “you think guys are always falling for her.” I marvel at the change in Jim as he chats and jokes with Jane, when earlier he had been so broody. And me too. The thousands of breaths we drew to the bottom of our lungs, and the firing on all cylinders to get here today, were a sure cure for what plagued us both.
In her standard sign-off, Jane drawls, “Remember, darlings, it’s not how you feel; it’s how you look that’s important—and you look marvellous.” I smile over how hard days like this bring out the best in us. Why else would we do this?