Left for Dead Read online

  I flew to Frankfurt, Germany, where I had a six-hour layover before connecting to Dubai and then on into Katmandu. In all, it took me thirty-some hours to get there, so I arrived in Katmandu around noon on Monday. I think that was just about an hour after Beck had arrived by helicopter from Mount Everest.

  I did not have a clue where he was. The first thing I did was explain to the customs people exactly what I had with me, why I was there and what I intended to do. They were very polite and as helpful as they could be. They gave me a one-week visa, and I headed for a hotel.

  I had just checked in when to my surprise a hotel employee told me some people were trying to find me. They were two employees from Adventure Consultants, who took me to David Schlim’s office. This all happened very quickly. Within an hour of my arrival in Katmandu, I was talking to David Schlim.

  I really liked him. He told me that he had examined the Taiwanese climber, Makalu Gau, who looked a lot worse than Beck. Schlim said he thought that at least one of Beck’s hands was going to be okay. He also said Beck was not ill, systemically, that he had only third-and fourth-degree cold injuries to his extremities.

  David and I talked for maybe half an hour, and then he personally took me over to the Yak & Yeti, which was just around the corner from his clinic. I had assumed Beck was in a hospital, and it wasn’t until David walked me past a young man standing at Beck’s door and into his room that it dawned on me that this was not a hospital at all, but a hotel.

  Beck was still in his climbing clothes, except for his boots. He smelled like a burn patient. Having cared for many such victims over the years, I recognized the smell of dead tissue.

  From the get-go Beck and I had markedly different perspectives.

  He was very, very happy to be alive, to be back from the dead. Very upbeat. But I focused on his injuries, which were devastating.

  I knew he’d require amputation. There was no doubt. His right hand was stone-cold dead. Already the skin was retracting around the bones. It looked like it had been stuck in an incinerator and left there.

  I had brought a lot of pain medication with me, but Beck didn’t need it. Once you recover from a third-or fourth-degree burn, or freeze, there isn’t much pain. The nerves are all dead.

  His left hand looked better. I really thought he’d only lose the ends of his fingers—a distal phalanx amputation.

  Without the use of his hands, Beck was helpless, which meant we established a relationship we’d never had before. I took care of his every body function. I did that gladly. He was skinny as a rail.

  That afternoon I received a visitor from the Japanese embassy. He asked if I would meet with Yasuko Namba’s family. I of course said that I would, although it was not a meeting that I relished. The man from the embassy had brought a small box of chocolates as a gift to honor the occasion.

  When Dan and I were returning from dinner that night, I saw a group of Japanese sitting at a table near the main entrance to the Yak & Yeti. I knew instantly that they were Yasuko’s family: her husband, her brother and two friends.

  They very much wanted to know about her and her last moments. I really didn’t know what to tell them. I searched for anything that might comfort them. But for one of the very few times in my life, the easy stream of words simply wouldn’t come. At some level I felt guilty standing there, alive, when Yasuko was gone. I couldn’t even offer meaningful consolation.

  TEN

  My strongest impressions during the two days Dan and I spent in Katmandu were of contrasts. One minute I had been as good as dead on that cold, sterile mountain; the next, I was safe and warm in Katmandu, which teems with life.

  I remember looking out the window of my ground-floor room into a beautiful garden. There were flowers and birds flying around, a jarring contrast to Everest. One night they held a huge formal party in the garden, very fancy with bright lights. It was a scene of rampant life enveloping me, even as my thoughts turned again and again to the five people I knew pretty well who were frozen dead on Everest.

  I also noticed another type of contrast, now that I resembled some creature out of a B horror film. My hands were two huge balls of bandages. My face was red and swollen with black scabs of dead tissue, called eschars, covering my nose and cheeks.

  The Japanese in Katmandu utterly ignored me. It was as if I had not so much as a hair out of place. On the other hand, I recall walking into the hotel hallway where a Nepalese housekeeper was mopping the floor. She took one look at me and froze, her mouth agape, her mop clattering to the floor.

  On our second day in Katmandu, after doing an interview with American television at one of the government buildings, I encountered a senior Nepalese official walking with his Gurka guard. I fascinated (or was it repelled?) him. He walked up to within three inches of my face and stared me up and down as if I were some sort of anthropology exhibit. He wasn’t the least bit shy about his curiosity.

  Dr. Schlim took one more look at me before we left. While I was at his clinic I was debriefed by Elizabeth Hawley, who’d rumbled up in her old Volkswagen. Hawley is something of a legend as the unofficial historian of mountain climbing in Nepal. Anyone who comes back from the mountains with a story must submit to a detailed grilling.

  The Lufthansa flight home—we splurged on first-class seats—was long and, for the most part, uneventful. Dan and I set some sort of high-altitude record for repeatedly stuffing two adults into tiny airliner bathrooms. In Frankfurt, where we had a layover, I was surprised to be approached by a young woman from TV journalist Diane Sawyer’s staff. She asked if I’d agree to a live satellite interview with Sawyer—immediately. I agreed automatically, almost without thinking. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to say no.

  Then on to Dallas. As we taxied to the gate, finally home, a fellow passenger who’d been drinking heavily for hours started yelling, “I’m never going to leave fucking home again! I’m never going to leave!” He was pretty emphatic.

  I toyed with asking why he’d stolen my lines.

  As we walked off the plane we were immediately turned through a door adjacent to the gangway. My escort said it would be easier to handle the crowd of reporters if I were willing to ride a wheelchair through the lounge. I agreed to do it.

  We met briefly with the press; Bub read a statement my family had prepared. I was just incredibly grateful to be back. I told them it wasn’t Kansas, but it was home.

  Peach waited for me in the VIP lounge. Someone from Lufthansa had given me a rose, which I placed in her hand. I saw love in her eyes, but also a look that said, I’m not sure where we’re going to be when we get back to the house. At that instant, all I wanted to do was hold her. I wasn’t thinking of anything else. I wanted to smell her hair and feel her face against mine. I had a sense that I was finally back, no longer just journeying.

  Peach:

  I just felt tremendous relief he was home. I was totally unbothered by his appearance. He didn’t look good, but Beck is Beck. I was just taking things in order, one crisis at a time. He’s sick, so let’s deal with that. I must have liked him at some time.

  Beck would say that he always loved me. But my definition of love did not include what I felt he’d done to me and especially to our children. If he loved me, I thought, he would never, never, ever have done this.

  I had long ago convinced myself that my relationship with my family might be salvageable if I refocused. If I could get the mountain-climbing part behind me, I believed that we could work it out. Now that the mountain years definitely were over, it was time to test that hypothesis.

  On the flight home, the joy at having survived mellowed into a sense of relief I was off the mountain and coming back. But there was apprehension. What about my wounds, the future, Peach? At that point, all were unknowns.

  I don’t have a lot of self-confidence, and most of the time I don’t feel that wonderful. Chasing up and down mountains had helped keep that problem at bay.

  Now the future had suddenly become very uncertain,
and I’m not wild about uncertainty. I worried about being crippled, how crippled; how things were going to stay together at work. I realized, too, that Peach had said I was going to get myself killed, or maimed, and here I was!

  I was not looking forward to that conversation.

  That first evening at home Peach told me the years of climbing and obsession had driven her and the children away from me. She’d had all she could stand, and had decided while I was on the mountain that as soon as I got back into Dallas, she was going to inform me our marriage was over, and that she would then leave.

  “Damn you for doing this to me,” she added.

  I told her I knew that I was to blame for everything that had happened to me, and that I’d have to bear the consequences. She did not have to stay through this—certainly not out of pity. I’d never blame her for leaving. I’d understand and never, ever speak ill of that decision.

  She said, “No, I’m going to give you one year. If you’re a truly different person at the end of that year, we’ll talk about it.”

  I decided at that moment that I’d dedicate all my obsession, drive and determination, and by the end of that year I truly would be a different person. Somehow, I’d reclaim not only her love, but the trust I’d lost. Even at that moment I believed Peach still loved me, but the pain in her eyes eloquently expressed her lack of trust in me.

  One singular joy of that first day back was a sip of a really fine single-malt scotch, a gift from our friend Dan Lewis. The next day I ate a small bowl of Blue Bell homemade vanilla (not the French) ice cream. It was absolutely wonderful. In the first week home, I went to see the alien invasion movie Independence Day with Bub and Meg. As we sat in the darkened theater, they watched the movie as I, sitting between them, stared at my two children and was supremely happy.

  Peach was under incredible stress. Anybody we’d ever met in history decided now was the moment to call up and quiz her on something, or try to get involved. They didn’t realize our need for some peace to get control of our existence.

  I felt like someone had taken me out and beaten me up. I’d lost the thirty pounds I’d purposefully gained in preparation for climbing Everest. My body was tired. I also developed a ripping infection from the IV that had been placed in my right arm on the mountain, an added memento of the climb. It had started to swell and was painful. We didn’t know exactly what the germ was, other than it didn’t respond to a number of antibiotics until we finally found one that worked.

  Despite my brother Dan’s opinion, I at first was hopeful I’d only lose the tips of my right fingers, and that the damage to my left hand might be trivial. Perhaps I’d need an amputation down to the first joints or possibly to the palm. But I’d end up with a working left hand, more or less, and at least something on the right.

  That was before my hand surgeon, Mike Doyle, ordered a scan that showed both hands were dead; there was no circulation at all. Soon thereafter my right hand began to self-amputate. Greg Anigian, my plastic surgeon, was concerned that the tendons were going to snap. Surgery was necessary now.

  I began slipping. I was full of medicine. I realized I probably was going to lose both my hands, and possibly wasn’t going to work again. I didn’t know if I were going to be able to continue providing my family an income. That was vitally important to me, because it meant I was contributing. Before Everest, that was one of the ways I rationalized that I was doing something good.

  Peach:

  After Beck learned he was going to lose both hands, he asked me, “Will this make a difference to you?”

  I said, “Well, no.” But the truth of the matter was that I wasn’t sure.

  I grew depressed; not the old black-dog darkness, but what I believe psychiatrists call a reactive depression; in other words, a very reasonable response to a world of problems.

  I brooded about a future of being alone, sitting and watching daytime television by myself in a custodial venue. Not an attractive prospect. I remember being given catalogs for prosthetic devices, looking at stuff to help you turn pages with your teeth. I wondered if I’d ever eat another hamburger, or would I have to take gruel through a straw for the rest of my life? And since I’d become seriously depressed twice before, I was scared of the potential for that to happen again, too.

  You could say that I saw a very limited upside to the situation.

  It was about then that I realized I needed to do a couple of things. One was not to fall apart. I had to find something to live for each day, to think about. For the foreseeable future, I needed a sense of something concrete that I could do physically.

  So, I made a whole series of decisions, mostly having to do with avoiding the pit. I was not going to feel sorry for myself under any circumstance, and I was not going to dodge responsibility for what I’d done and the harm I’d inflicted. I felt pretty guilty. If possible, I was going to redeem myself in Peach’s eyes. Whatever it took, I was going to give it a shot.

  I could not then have imagined the avenue to redemption that ultimately opened to me, or the trials that lay ahead for both of us. Suffice it to say that when the shadow of a second life-and-death crisis suddenly fell over the Weathers household that summer, it was my time to give back so much that I’d stolen away.

  Dan, Beck and Kit Weathers, 1951.

  Howard, Margaret (Peach) and Wayne Olson, 1951.

  Beck and Peach with Beck II, 1979.

  PART TWO

  ELEVEN

  It is a slander that we Southerners waste all the good names on our dogs.

  My father, Arthur Kitchings Weathers, was determined that each of his sons would have a given name with some heft to it. So his firstborn became Arthur Kitchings Weathers, Jr.; I was named Seaborn Beck Weathers; and my younger brother is James Daniel Weathers. It is not my father’s fault that we are known as Kit, Beck and Dan.

  I was born on December 16, 1946, in Griffin, Georgia, about thirty miles south of Atlanta. My mother, the former Emily Williams Beck, also was born in Griffin, a textile-manufacturing center of approximately 25,000 inhabitants. Griffin, which has been home to mother’s family for six generations, long ago was famous as a flower-growing center—the town once referred to itself as the Iris Capital of the World. More recently, Griffin served as the setting for the film Driving Miss Daisy, which won the Oscar for best picture of 1989.

  My father is a native of Cairo (Kay-Ro), Georgia, a small town in the southwestern part of the state, where his father, Jesse Seaborn Weathers, served as school superintendent and postmaster, and practiced law as well. Dad majored in political science and law at Emory University in Atlanta. After his graduation in 1940, he came to Griffin as an official with the National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency set up to provide educational opportunity to young people. In his free time, he took flying lessons and earned a private pilot’s license.

  My mother graduated from the University of Georgia in 1940 with a biology degree, and returned home to Griffin to teach high school. She met her future husband, the would-be aviator, at a party. They were married on a Saturday night in May 1942.

  Arthur and Emily spent their honeymoon on the road to Ocala, Florida, where my father would attend army air corps flight school. They paused occasionally along the way so he could teach her how to drive his Studebaker Champion.

  He expected to see combat but instead was told he’d be a flight instructor, and spent the balance of the war years teaching other young men how to fly a variety of combat aircraft, particularly P-38 fighters. My father is a gentle soul, and it probably was just as well he wasn’t required to shoot at anybody.

  After the war, he sold life insurance in Albany, Georgia, for a while, and worked part-time at a car rental agency owned by my mother’s uncle. Fate then intervened in the form of the 1948 Soviet blockade of West Berlin, which changed everything for my father, and thus for his family. Lieutenant Weathers was recalled to the newly organized U.S. Air Force, and was to have participated in the Berlin airlift until a last-minute chan
ge in orders sent him to Japan and the U.S. Army of Occupation there. Dad left for Japan in August of 1948, a week after my brother Dan was born.

  That made Dad three-for-three. Because of his military obligations, he hadn’t been home when Kit and I were born, either.

  Many of my earliest recollections are of Japan, where my mother brought my brothers and me in the spring of 1949 aboard an old tub, the S.S. Gen. M. M. Patrick, an experience that to this day she scorns as among the worst in her life. The trip began with me getting lost in the Atlanta train station—I slipped my leash and was later recovered happily seated in the colored waiting area—and deteriorated from there.

  On the voyage from Seattle, Dan developed a fever and had difficulty breathing. Both Kit and I were seasick. Mother decided the Patrick—she called it the Mickey Mouse Patrick—was too unsafe for us to leave our stateroom, so that is where she stayed with the three of us for the better part of nineteen days at sea. She refused even to participate in fire drills. When at last we disembarked (my parents happily reunited on the pier after an eight-month separation), little Dan in Mother’s arms brought her adventure from hell to an appropriate close by eating her orchid corsage.

  Our destination was Shiroi, a onetime golf resort the Japanese had converted into an airfield during World War II. The installation was located about twenty-five miles northeast of Tokyo. Because he had studied some law in college, my father was made base legal officer, among his other duties, and was known around Shiroi as “Judge.”

  Our first quarters at Shiroi was a Quonset hut infested with huge rats. They boldly came out each night to squeal and forage around the place. Even the big cat my parents borrowed in an effort to control the rodents was afraid of them. Arthur and Emily took turns watching out lest one of the furry devils bite us as we slept. My brother Kit thought the rats were pets.