We are on our way home at last. I am looking forward to getting back to Canada, but we first spend a night in Shanghai before catching our flight. The phone is ringing when Jane and I reach our room—and it doesn’t stop. One of the first callers is Jane Sharpe from the Continental Bank. She lists off a string of calls to expect from national networks and radio stations requesting interviews.
I try to sound gracious with each caller, but it isn’t until I get off the phone each time and take great gasps that I realize I am holding my breath. I think of the letter I wrote to Chris just before our summit bid: “I’m yearning to return to you and a normal life back home, but I fear it will be completely different if I make the summit.” I only have to look at the stack of messages for interviews, public appearances and presentations I was handed at the hotel’s check-in to know that “completely different” is beginning to unfold.
One of the last messages I read is from John Amatt, the business manager of the Everest ’82 expedition and now the owner of a speakers’ bureau in Canmore. He told me before I left for Everest that a lucrative speaking career awaited me if I summited, and that he’d be glad to help. For a girl with no fixed address and whose entire belongings fit into a duffle bag, “lucrative” sounds appealing, and help fielding requests now sounds even better. I call him and sign on. I’m terrified of public speaking, but that fear fades to make way for a new one—one that niggles at me. Who am I to be personally rewarded for our team effort? Am I becoming an opportunist?
Chatter and laughter echo off the walls as we stride down the arrivals corridor at Vancouver International Airport toward our families, lovers and friends. After three months away, all we can talk about is the first things we’ll do when we get home. Most of us are dreaming of food because we all weigh eight to ten kilograms less than when we left.
I am daydreaming about soaking in a steaming bubble bath and sipping on a cold glass of Chardonnay, when ahead, the exit doors slide open. I stall, causing the other travellers to eddy around me. Jim bumps up against me and leans in. “It’s show time, Woody.” I catch a whiff of shaving lotion and notice he has changed into a clean white t-shirt and his Everest Light team jacket for the occasion. Jim is bringing everyone home alive, and it dawns on me that this is his summit day.
As our team steps across the threshold, the clapping begins. Flashbulbs pop. A woman reaches out, clutches Jane’s arm, thrusts a microphone in her face and asks, “Are you the woman?”
Jane looks back at me. “No, she’s the one.” She shoots me a raised eyebrow as if to say, “Are you ready for this?”
From all directions camera-ready reporters shout questions at me:
“How does it feel to be the first woman from the western hemisphere to climb Mount Everest?”
“Did you ever think you were going to die up there?”
“When did you know you were going to reach the top?”
“Did you see any dead bodies?”
The arrivals lobby clamours with media teams and I am pulled from one interview set to another. “Jim, will you hold a corner of this flag? Hold the other end, would you, Dwayne? Sharon, would you please get in the middle? Don’t look into the camera, just pretend you’re having a conversation with Monica.” I look beyond this sphere of frenzied hubbub and lights and see my teammates reuniting with friends and family.
A hand grasps my bicep and a man says, “Hello, Sharon, I’m Michael with the CBC.” Keeping his grip on me, he says, “Congratulations. There’s someone who has been waiting to welcome you home.” He steers me to where my mom, my dad and stepmom are waiting. The camera is rolling as my dad steps forward and we embrace.
It seems no more than seconds before I feel a hand on my shoulder, pulling me toward another set. “Can we get you over here beside Dwayne; he’s the one that went to the top with you, isn’t he?”
I catch sight of Chris standing at the edge of it all, dressed in a suit and holding a bouquet of red roses. He gives me a nod as if to say, “Keep doing what you’re doing. I’ve waited this long.”
Later, I will regret how these first days unfolded: I will wish that I had paused to look into my mom’s tearful eyes and lingered to hear what my father whispered after he said, “Welcome home, Mouse.” I will wish that I had greeted Chris. But, wide-eyed and stunned, I comply with the media’s requests, swept up in their urgency to show and tell.
From the airport, the entire team and our families are taken to a four-star hotel to spend the night before attending a welcome-home party the following day. My parents, who live in Vancouver, return to their own homes for the night.
Chris and I are treated to an extravagant suite. We open the door into a main room filled with bouquets of flowers, a stack of cards, a fruit basket, a bottle of champagne and a separate bedroom with a king-sized bed. Chris closes the door behind us, reaches for me and kisses me deeply. I slip out of his embrace.
This is what I’ve been waiting for—dreaming of. What’s wrong with me? I look at this prince of a man who stands by the door, gazing at me in adoration. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I think I’m just a little rattled by it all.” I can’t explain then that I’ve just spent the last couple of months in a secluded world of rock, ice and snow, lived intimately—intensely—with twelve people, and moved only as fast as we could walk. From that to this is too much.
What I do know is that Chris feels like a stranger to me. For weeks, I have been looking forward to the feel of soft satiny sheets and of him. But I shut my emotions down at the airport to manage the onslaught of media attention. I yearn to debrief this day with Jane as we have over the past few months. Instead, I lie awake churning over the week-long blitz of appearances, events and interviews ahead of me.
The next morning I sit with Chris, watching my teammates trickle into breakfast with their partners and families and sit at their own tables. They are drifting away and I miss them. I know they would rather be with their friends and families than the media—so would I. Never has normal looked so good, and I envy them.
It’s been a long time since I’ve spent any time in this city I once couldn’t wait to leave. Vancouver is at its best on this June day, saturated with sun and oxygen, dripping with blossoms—and so verdant the place feels like it breathes life and moisture into me. We make our way to Vancouver Harbour where the Continental Bank is hosting our welcome-home party on a luxury yacht. They invite our full entourage, as well as our sponsors, and prominent business and community members, including the mayor. My sister, Barb, is dressed in a diaphanous pastel-pink silk pantsuit, which in its entirety could fit into the palm of my hand. I marvel at how she kibitzes and sidles up to the men and flirts her face off. Chris and my parents beam as we chat with the guests. My parents adore the notion of Chris and me as a couple. Jim is beaming too, and comes over now and then, resting his hand lightly on the small of my back to escort me to meet another guest. The expectations make me swallow hard and step back.
Meeting those expectations starts at five the next morning, when Dwayne and I are crammed together in a small padded cubicle. We are talking to a camera for a remote interview. We nudge each other with our knees as we take turns answering questions volleyed at us through our headsets by an interviewer in Toronto. I cherish this last bit of teamwork with Dwayne—this last link to our expedition. Afterward, we climb into separate taxis. I ache for the life he is returning to. His car turns toward the airport and disappears, while mine takes me to the next interview. I sink back into my seat and remind myself to breathe. What have I done? I’ve long accepted myself as an introvert and I struggle to embrace the emerging expectations of this public persona.
A short while later, I’m seated in another padded room with the host of a local radio morning show. The man operating the switches on the other side of a picture window counts down from five. The host begins, “Today, I have with me in the studio an amazing woman who has just made history. Her name is Sharon Wood, and she is the first woman from the western hemisphere to climb Mount Everest! And people, Sharon is a Canadian, and she’s from our city! Sharon, you must be over the moon about your conquest. Tell us what it was like to step onto the highest point on earth.”
I want to bolt. Try as I might to remember Laurie’s advice, the channel between my brain and my mouth shuts down. I stutter, “It felt like a privilege. When I reached the top, I mean when my partner Dwayne Congdon and I reached the top, we were together. Well, ours was a fraction of the team effort that went into climbing that mountain…” And I blather on.
Every interviewer, it seems, has already written my story—one about me being “over the moon” that I have “conquered” Everest. But I’m wondering if it has conquered me, leaving me bewildered. I hadn’t expected all this attention, and for people to put words in my mouth. But why wouldn’t they when I can’t find my own words? As another cab whisks me off to the next engagement, I wish it would keep going all the way to Canmore.
I call John Amatt. “Please remind me why I’m putting myself through this?”
“For your team, for your country and for your business!” he tells me. “Fame is fleeting and you’ve got to capture it while you can. You should feel proud!”
Later, when I ask Laurie the same question, he says, “Snap out of it! Make it your goal to become as comfortable and articulate with this new world as you are with the mountains.”
The cab pulls up at the Expo 86 entrance and I am escorted to stage. There I stand in front of thousands of people while the whistling champion of the world warbles “Climb Every Mountain” to me. I’d thought the simple off-white short-sleeved blouse purchased in China would be appropriate—classy, in fact. Now I wilt in the wrinkled travel clothes, two sizes too big. My eyes dart between the audience and the whistler as I wonder how to stand, what to do with my arms, and whether I appear as terribly awkward as I feel. I can see the organizers of this special event standing off to the side. And the look on their faces tells me they suddenly realize this idea of matching the whistler and me is a bad idea, but it is too late now.
The most fun I have that week in Vancouver is when I go shopping with Mom. Usually I buy clothes from thrift shops, which reflect my budget and my priorities, but occasionally Mom and I share a ritual of going shopping where she buys me a thing or two. So she is delighted when I tell her I need something to wear to presentations and ask her to come shopping with me. After three months without a mirror, it is still a novelty to look at myself in one. Mom sits in an upholstered chair as I strut out of the dressing room in one outfit after another, pretending to be a runway model and striking poses. We laugh at the bad ones and she oohs and aahs at the good ones.
While I change, Mom tells me how the media ambushed her when the news broke that we had reached the summit. Two men were waiting outside her apartment building as she arrived home after enduring a root canal. She hadn’t heard the news yet.
“One man put a camera up close to my face while the other asked me, ‘Peggy, how do you feel about your daughter becoming the first woman from the western hemisphere to climb Mount Everest?’ Were you still alive is what I really wanted to know!” She continues, “But I tell him something like, ‘Well, I’m just stunned. I don’t know what to say!’ So the interviewer told me I must be so proud of you. And he kept prodding for answers until finally I blathered something about how strong-minded you were as a teenager.”
“Why did you even agree to talk to them, Ma—of all the times?”
“Oh, because I couldn’t say no, of course. It all happened so fast.”
“I know what you mean.” I didn’t feel like I could say no either.
We pick out two suits, one robin’s egg blue with a knee-length pencil skirt with a slit up the back, and one navy blue double-breasted blazer with a matching pleated skirt. As well, there are a pair of houndstooth pants, a casual pair of black slacks, a white blouse—and a pair of low pumps. “I can’t do heels yet, Ma,” I say. But I will.
Straight after shopping with Mom, I visit my sister, who helps me “clean up,” as she puts it. I’m not used to wearing anything more than mascara, so Barb plucks my Groucho Marx eyebrows and shows me how to put on makeup. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I can make it look subtle.” And she does. Yet despite her efforts, all I can see is clown.
“Okay, well, let’s see the new clothes,” she says. I tell myself that I am no longer the little sister who used to worship her opinion. Yet I am reluctant to model these new clothes for her because I love them and know I won’t after she has her say. She spins me around to get a better look. “Very nice—a little roomy, though. But then you’d look good in anything right now, even if it’s Mom’s taste.” I wince and back out of her place.
At dinner with Dad that night, I tell him about my session with Barb. “I thought, after all I’ve been through, that I might have gained some confidence. Grown up a bit, you know? But still I take whatever she says so personally.”
Dad has been a mender of all things family, the mediator, the smoother of feathers, the lay philosopher and now minister. He laughs, as he often does when I complain—he’s a bit like Laurie that way. Then he says, “If you think you’ve evolved, come spend a week with your family.”
The last thing I do after the week of interviews and appearances before going home to Canmore is spend a few days with Chris up at Whistler to decompress and try to get reacquainted. I haven’t been able to look him in the eyes when he tells me he loves me. One night after we’ve made love he tells me again. But this time he gently cradles and tips my face to bring my eyes up to meet his, and I crack—slowly at first. “Sorry,” I say, then I start blubbering, “I’m just not ready for this—yet. I think we just need to start over again as friends.”
He is underway packing to move his business to Canmore. “Friend, lover or neither,” he tells me, “the train is already in motion. If and when you’re ever ready, I’ll be there for you.”