Left for Dead Page 15

  There was a shotgun, a .22 rifle, a .38 revolver, a .357 Magnum, a .22 pistol, a little Derringer and a pellet gun. They all went to the police, including the pellet gun, which I’d never quite thought of in that context.

  Peach:

  Still, I feared for Beck, not so much because he was suicidal—that obviously was a concern—but because he couldn’t feel our love. I felt enormous sadness that he didn’t like himself, and felt he had to prove himself. He couldn’t just go out and enjoy the sunrise and sunset. He couldn’t enjoy the little things. Beck could only proceed from goal to goal. That makes for a very unhappy person.

  TWENTY

  The order in which I chose the mountains to climb belies my claim of careful thought and planning. Denali was spontaneous folly. If I had been going about this business in a logical way, El Popo and Pico de Orizaba would have preceded it. In truth, my choices were dictated for the most part by the availability of a competently led expedition to a suitable peak at a convenient date. These factors in combination brought me in August of 1991 to Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains.

  These were the dying days of the Evil Empire, and Moscow even in summertime was a cold, gray, dismal place. Bizarre, too. For instance, strict foreign-exchange restrictions complicated the simplest purchases. On a visit to Moscow’s Olympic Stadium I encountered a man selling lacquered boxes displayed on a blanket. After the usual haggling to set a price, he gave me my box and an empty cigarette pack and instructed me to walk around for a while before placing the agreed-upon amount of U.S. currency in the pack, which I was then to discard in some nearby bushes for him to retrieve.

  The leader of our climbing group was an unusual character named Sergio Fitz Watkins, who claimed to be part Mexican, part Apache and part something else. Sergio was a handful. For some reason, he didn’t want to have his picture taken, nor was he into collegial relationships. Sergio let you know that he was the boss and you weren’t, and would go to extremes to dramatize his issues.

  Sergio commonly began climbing days with the statement, “Today is a good day to die.”

  People keep stealing my lines.

  From Moscow we flew to the republic of Kabardino-Balkar, and were bused to a ski resort near the base of Mount Elbrus. At 18,481 feet, it is the tallest mountain in Europe. That’s the only reason I was there.

  I remember along the way we made a pit stop at a shack that served as a comfort station, even though inside there was nothing but a dirt floor.

  The hotel food was dreadful. One day for lunch we were served a pile of formless, colorless vegetables of some sort. Then I was given a slab of meat, except that it was not meat. It was a half-inch-thick, four-inch-wide slice of fat.

  Our first night, I looked out my third-floor balcony to see a little kid standing on a four- or five-inch ledge, offering to sell me ice screws made of titanium from the nearby titanium mine, the largest in the world.

  Then we all went looking for something to drink. In a country famous for its alcoholics, you’d think that would be a simple task.

  Uh-uh.

  There was no vodka or other strong drink available at our hotel, so we lit out with our packs to the piva store. Piva is Russian for “beer.” They give piva away on their airlines for one good reason: No one with a choice would ever pay for it.

  They also have a thing they call wine, but it is easily mistaken for something a domestic animal with kidney problems might produce. So we loaded up at the piva store and came clanking back with our Russian beer.

  The climb began with a ski-lift ride about a mile up the mountain to a round, metal-skinned hut that resembled an immense circular airstream trailer. Called Priut (Russian for “refuge”), the structure was built in 1939, just in time for the German army to shoot up the place on its marches to and from the Soviet oil fields on the Caspian Sea.

  When we encountered Priut, the place was a pigsty. Water, if you dared drink it, had to be retrieved from the middle of a melt pool outside the front door. The latrine, ankle-deep in feces, lay just beyond. It was an act of grace when Priut was later destroyed in a gas fire.

  We did one acclimatization hike, then arose the next night for the assault, which is a long slog up a snow trail. It was very cold. When we came to a saddle at about sixteen thousand feet, a young lawyer from Dallas looked like he was getting ready to lose consciousness. Another member of our group, a plastic surgeon from Atlanta, had a hell of a headache. So he and the lawyer headed back together, a perfectly fine plan except the kid then proceeded to take a big old dumper in his suit on the way down.

  This was not at all what the brochure promised.

  As the rest of us pushed on to the summit, I thought of a photo in my fellow Dallasite Dick Bass’s mountain-climbing memoir, The Seven Summits. It is a bronze head of Lenin, mounted on a wonderful pedestal at the very top of Elbrus. Eager to behold this memorial for myself, when we finally summitted I was instead reminded that this was, after all, the Soviet Union. The pedestal still stood, but Lenin’s likeness was long gone, a pipe wrench left in its place.

  The customary post-climb celebration was held in Moscow in a huge room that looked like the hall of mirrors at Versailles. There was a big table right in the center, sumptuously laden with food, Russian champagne, pitchers of vodka, white and black caviar. It was an incredible meal.

  There were other little tables all around the room. I assumed they were for other patrons, later. Sure enough, people did start coming in, most of them pairs of young women, who sat down and ordered aperitifs.

  I thought, How nice! Muscovites out on the town! Then I realized that all of the tables had two young women each. Our big table began to disperse as various guys went to sit down with these gals. Slow as I am, I finally did figure out there was a second course to that meal—intercourse. They were all working girls.

  No way was Spotless McFarland here going to hook up with one of these war brides, only to be taken aside and rubber-truncheoned by the KGB. But evidently such fears did not dissuade every member of our group. When I got back to our hotel, my roommate was missing in action.

  Peach:

  Family vacations pretty much stopped when he started climbing. There were occasional days at the beach. We went to Cancun once, and he had to leave early. That changed the dynamic of the trip. When he left, everyone else was flat and unhappy. We ended up coming home a day early.

  After a while, my brother Howie, together with his wife, Pat, and daughter, Laura, would join the children and me on vacations. He wasn’t there to replace Beck. But it was wonderful to have Howie around to talk to. Also, he was always a treat for the kids. He’d dream up things to do for them, keep them entertained all day. This was something that Beck never did. Howie made a big difference in their lives, and mine, too.

  Meg:

  Uncle Howie always came through Dallas on business trips, and he’d fix everything that was broken in our house. He fixed the basketball backboard, my dad’s shower and put in an underground drainage system for us.

  He refused to see the bad side of me, and was supportive of everything I did. I mean, he and his wife, Pat, came all the way from Georgia to see me in my eighth-grade musical. He’d play dominoes with me—which I never really understood—and he brought me Pixy Stix, little colored tubes of, like, pure sugar.

  Bub:

  Uncle Howie was the kind of guy who’d take my sister and me off our parents’ hands after dinner so they could relax and enjoy themselves without having to worry about entertaining us.

  When he came to town and went to work fixing things, he and I sometimes would go to the store to pick up any necessary parts and material. One particular time—I was about nine or ten—we needed to go to Target to find some automotive parts; Howie was going to repair one of our cars.

  He didn’t know the directions to Target, but I thought I did and said so, even though my knowledge of Dallas at that time was a bit vague. I quickly got us lost.

  We’d head one direction for a whil
e, until it was clear to me we’d gone too far, then we’d U-turn and head back. Most people would have let me continue like this a time or two before pulling over to call my mom for help.

  Howie didn’t. He patiently allowed me to figure it out for myself. Every time we had to make a U-turn, he’d make a joke and then drive in whatever direction I said. Eventually, we did make it to Target, and it meant the world to me that Howie believed enough in my ability to get us there.

  Peach:

  I doubt that Beck even realized we were taking vacations without him, much less that Howie and his family were now coming along, too. Beck was totally wrapped up in himself. I remember one time when I was feeling desperate, there was an $88 round-trip super-cheap flight to New Orleans. Our friends the Ketchersids were going to go with us, except Beck couldn’t possibly leave work early Friday afternoon to catch the flight. Then we discovered he had the week off and didn’t even know it. I was furious with him.

  The only thing he was aware of was his climbing. He became very odd. His attitude was “You don’t bother me with anything. Kids. Problems. Anything.”

  In January of 1992, I headed south again, this time to Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes. At 22,831 feet, Aconcagua is the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, and the sixty-third tallest peak in the world. All the taller hills are in Asia.

  The novelist Trevanian maligns Aconcagua in his thriller The Eiger Sanction as “a vast heap of rotten rock and ice. It destroys men, not with the noble counterstrokes of an Eigerwand or a Nanga Partbat, but by eroding a man’s nerve and body until he is a staggering, whimpering maniac.”

  Trevanian’s right. Aconcagua is a nasty place. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to climb it more than once.

  I signed on with Mountain Travel-Sobeck, the same California outfit that had organized the Elbrus climb, and was thus reunited with the prickly Señor Watkins, who on this occasion was considerably less demonstrative, possibly because he had contracted a nasty virus. He wouldn’t make it to the top.

  You fly first to Buenos Aires. From there, the next stop is the mountain city of Mendoza, which proved a culture shock for me. Training for the climb, I’d been rising at 4:00 A.M. and going to bed at 7:30 P.M. You couldn’t buy lunch at 7:30 P.M. in Mendoza. I saw people out walking around with their families until two and three in the morning.

  We drove in a pickup to a partially completed ski resort, where our gear was loaded onto mules for the twenty-mile trek to Aconcagua Base Camp. As we headed out on foot, we passed the climbers’ cemetery. They were packed in there pretty tight.

  At the end of the scruffy dirt trail was Plaza de Mulas, sort of the local Lobuje equivalent. Instead of yaks you got mules, and mule dung was everywhere. Unlike Lobuje, there were no permanent structures at Plaza de Mulas. We encountered a hundred or so people of widely varying experience and seriousness—I saw one woman dressed in a pink snowsuit carrying her little poodle—all formed into a haphazard tent village.

  There was a small watering hole, similar to what they call a tank in Texas, which seemed to serve a variety of communal uses, from drinking to washing to excretion. You got the impression that no one was particularly concerned about disease. You also wanted to be very careful not to face the wind with your mouth open. There was so much toilet paper floating around in the air—Aconcagua snowbirds—that you risked sucking up a wad of it.

  Plaza de Mulas was sickness waiting to erupt, and we did not want to linger in that swamp a moment longer than necessary. As it was, one member of our group developed the pestilential hellhole trots and had to be removed by emergency helicopter.

  My most dramatic recollection of the place had nothing to do with filth and disease, however. We were standing around one day when suddenly there came a deep rumble in the distance. I looked up to see a huge waterfall where there had been nothing two seconds before. An enormous river was thundering down the face of the mountain. You could see the waves rolling along, glistening in the sun.

  Then as I looked at it more closely, I realized the torrent wasn’t water at all, but rock! This whole mass flowing just like whitewater rapids actually was rock, a huge rock slide flowing along a couple hundred feet from us.

  We didn’t get very far up Aconcagua before Sergio let us know he was too sick to continue. Halfway to the top, we came to a flat open area and a little hut, where we encountered a group of climbers on their way down. As it happened, they, too, were a Mountain-Sobeck group, led by Ricardo Novallo Torrez, a guide distinguished for being the first Mexican to summit Everest.

  Sergio announced that he was packing it in at this point, leaving our group in the questionable care of his second-in-command, a Peruvian named Augusto Ortega, who didn’t speak much English. Torrez, although he’d already climbed Aconcagua and was whupped, saw that the job of taking us up was probably too much for Ortega. He volunteered to accompany the group as far as High Camp, whence the Peruvian would shepherd us the rest of the way to the summit and back.

  When the wind picked up and the ambient temperature plummeted, some of the less experienced among us reasonably began to worry about frostbite and their general inability to keep warm. I lacked their commonsense approach to this deepening discomfort. Having been pinned to the top of Denali when it was unhappy, I knew there was a whole other level of cold beyond this point that was well within my comfort range.

  No surprise, then, that when we started out for the summit together, we were a herd of turtles. Soon realizing that the eight of us would never make it to the top at that speed, the group retreated into High Camp for a parley. Half the climbers wanted to quit. I and three other guys wanted to try again. So that is what we did.

  One of those who headed back down the mountain was my tent mate, an old guy who absentmindedly took with him my single eating utensil, a spoon. Since the dog-food gruel we consumed on the mountain required an instrument for shoveling it into your mouth, I went outside in search of a suitable replacement.

  Nosing around, I spied a metal handle sticking out of the snow. I grabbed it, braced myself, shouted, “Excaliber!” and gave a good yank. Out popped a fork, missing a tine or two, but perfectly usable. I wiped it under my armpit and returned to the tent, once again a functioning member of the final four.

  Well after dark that night, probably around ten o’clock, an improbable visitor showed up. He was Marty Schmidt, a New Zealander, who’d just guided two policemen up and down the mountain.

  “Hey! Anybody there?” Marty shouted. He was in his climbing gear and sneakers. “Can I borrow some boots?” Marty also had a bicycle over his shoulder.

  We loaned him the boots and off he went. About five or six the next morning, Marty came back, without the bicycle. He returned the boots, put his sneakers back on and walked back to Plaza de Mulas to rejoin his two clients.

  As we later learned, the story of Marty’s remarkable double climb of Aconcagua—he hadn’t slept in two days—actually began at a hellacious stretch called the Caneletta, a huge, forty-five-degree hill of dirt and loose rock just below the summit.

  Schmidt and the policemen had discovered a bicycle strewn in pieces all over the Caneletta: a wheel here, pedals there, handlebars somewhere else. I don’t know if Marty pondered the mystery behind this unlikely discovery. But being a practical person, he gathered all the parts, assembled them, put the machine on his back and carried it down with him.

  Now here’s the surprise. When he got to Plaza de Mulas with the bike, a complete stranger accosted him, angrily, accusing him of stealing his bicycle!

  “What do you mean, stealing your bicycle?” Marty asked. “There were parts lying all over the mountain.”

  It turned out that this guy had been paying people to carry the bike up Aconcagua, one piece at a time. Once all the parts were up there, he intended to assemble the vehicle and then ride it down from the summit. He might even have had a sponsorship. Who knows?

  Nonplussed, Marty proposed a solution.

  “Okay, I’ll ma
ke you a deal,” he told the guy. “Stop screaming at me for stealing your bicycle and I will take it back to where I got it.”

  That’s what he did that night. Schmidt carried the bike all the way back nearly to the summit, disassembled it in the dark, strewed the pieces around, and then climbed down again. It was, among other things, a physical tour de force. Marty Schmidt is a very strong climber.

  Next day, weather conditions had not improved, but now only four of us and Augusto were heading up the trail. At no point had this been a pretty or even interesting climb, but when we finally reached the Caneletta, I understood why Trevanian so fiercely loathes Aconcagua.

  The Caneletta may be the most miserable natural incline on earth. You can’t go up it quickly, because you can’t get enough breath. But if you go too slowly, it slides out from under you.

  The trick is to move from rock to rock, looking for one with some traction. When you hit a magic stone that doesn’t move, you stand there gasping for air long enough to get your heart out of your throat and back into your chest. Then you move on, often losing three steps for every one you gain, and you do this for a number of hours. It is not fun.

  Three days were needed to climb from Plaza de Mulas to High Camp, plus an added overnight for our second assault, and then another day to get back down. I had been training very hard, however, and could feel the cumulative effect of all that work.

  I felt really good after summiting Aconcagua. I was ahead of the pack on the way down, and got to a place where a finger of rock sits on the traverse that heads across to the Caneletta. I stopped for some water and M&M’s.

  An Australian in our group came along behind me and fell over on his back, as if he were dead. Finally, he rose on an elbow and said to me, “Are you in as good a shape as you seem to be? Or are you just taking better drugs than the rest of us?”