A Million Years with You (29 page)

I couldn't move. I thought that sooner or later, back at home, Steve would notice that dinner wasn't ready and the laundry wasn't done, and he would come to save me. I must have said this to Ramsay, because Ramsay patiently pointed out that Steve hadn't climbed since he was in college. “You're better off with me,” he said kindly.

You're a child
, I thought.

Ramsay sighed. But he said no more. We just waited. And waited. After a very long time he touched my arm and, still saying nothing, pointed up the valley.

Jesus! Black clouds flashing lightning were moving toward us. A storm was almost on us. Lightning would strike us. Rain would make everything slippery. We'd fall thousands of feet down to those tiny trees, which would not look like toothpicks when we reached them.

I had thought I could not feel more terror, but I was wrong. I jumped up and we kept going, across the rest of the ledge, up the third pitch to the top of the mountain and down the far side, which, as I remember, was just a steep downhill trail through a forest. The storm, by the way, went past us.

On the way we met two nice ladies who also had been climbing. They smiled when they saw us and said it was good to see people like us who climbed together. Well, they were wronger than wrong, I thought, and it was a sight they'd never see again and neither would anyone else, because by then I had resolved never to go anywhere near another mountain.

 

Years later, when Ramsay became a guide, I remembered the problem I'd caused him on Skyline Traverse when he was in his teens and just a rock climber. I also remembered how patient he was, and how splendid he had been about my panic—not a whisper of criticism, no blame, no irritation. These would be good qualities in a guide, I reasoned. So I was hopeful for him.

By then he was married and living in Boulder, Colorado, where he specialized in avalanche prediction. On skis, he taught the skill to others, and he told a scary story of showing a dangerous slope to his class. Up in the Rockies they had come upon a bowl, thousands of feet around its rim, with long, steep slopes thick with enticing powder. The class was thrilled, and wanted to ski down it. But Ramsay had already explained that avalanche conditions were bad that day, and told them they shouldn't even think about it. They didn't believe him, and would have launched themselves if Ramsay hadn't told them to wait until he showed them something first.

At the top of the bowl, the slope was fairly gentle. Ramsay went there, stamped his ski once, and thousands of tons of snow went thundering into the valley. The entire bowl emptied—the mother of all avalanches. As it happened, the snow that Ramsay was standing on slid too, but this was the tail of the avalanche, and on his skis he rode it down until he could ski off to the side.

His students applauded. They thought he was cool. But they also learned why it's best to listen to one's teacher. If they had skied on the slope, every one of them would have been buried. Thus it was a useful lesson.

 

Once during one of my visits, Ramsay offered to show me how to predict an avalanche. I welcomed the invitation, although I hoped I'd never need the skill. We went high up in the Rockies, where we planned to ski cross-country to a site where he would dig a snow pit and examine the layers of snow.

I could ski cross-country well enough on the stable snow of New England, but the deep powder in Colorado was beyond my skills. Ramsay wanted to go to a more distant location, but when I gave up with the skis, kicked them off, and simply plowed on foot through the hip-deep snow as best I could, he saw how long it would take to get where he meant to go and decided to dig his snow pit where we were.

All this time he had been explaining about different kinds of slopes and different kinds of snow, most of which I wasn't hearing because I'd been looking at a huge slope near us, wondering what chance there was of the snow sliding. I tried to warn Ramsay that this could happen. He said if it slid, the avalanche would go past us, not on us. I saw his point, as the slope wasn't over us, but what if the avalanche spilled sideways? We'd be buried. It's hard to accept reassurance from one's children, so I told him I was nevertheless concerned. “Oh, Mom,” he said. “Don't worry.”

What did he think a mother was for? “If you don't want a mother, why do you have one?” I asked him.

Ramsay began to dig the snow pit. When he finished, the pit was square, about four cubic feet in volume, and looked like a little white room. He showed me the many layers of snow, explaining their textures, also which layers might be stable and which unstable. He explained about temperatures and weather and how these affected the different layers. Under certain conditions, this layer might slide. Under different conditions, that layer might slide. The size of the avalanche would depend on how much snow had collected above the layer that was unstable. That's why one had to keep track of snowfall and temperature change, he told me.

He did seem to know quite a bit about the subject. He then pointed to the slope I'd been watching and said that judging from what his snow pit told him, the slope was indeed unstable.

My skin began to prickle. Hadn't I just warned him? Reassuring me that if it slid, it wouldn't touch us, he threw a snowball to see if he could set it off. Nothing happened. But I was scared. I asked him not to do that again. And so, not wanting a repeat of Skyline Traverse, he discarded the second snowball he was packing and asked if I'd like to leave. I said yes. He slipped gracefully away on his skis and I, up to my hips in snow, struggled along behind him. Again he had no words of criticism. He was the very soul of patience. Later he told me he hadn't felt patient but he hadn't let it show. Obviously I'd been a pain in the neck. But after all, I was his mom. He owed me a little patience. “Remember, I gave you life,” I told him.

 

Another day we climbed a route called the Bomb in El Dorado Canyon, again a three-pitch climb but this time a 5.4 (although it has also been called a 5.6) and thus somewhat more challenging than Skyline Traverse. But it had no real exposure and therefore was not as scary, except for one place where I thought I couldn't make it. Maybe that part was 5.6.

Ramsay was leading again, of course, and when I didn't come up to him, he looked down. I told him the handhold was too far above me. I couldn't climb any higher. We had to go back, I said.

In his calm, matter-of-fact manner he said it would be difficult to go back. But he added that we probably wouldn't need to because he was sure I could reach the handhold if I shifted my position and tried again.

Difficult to go back? I didn't like the sound of that. So I moved as he suggested and tried a few times, until at last I gained the handhold and went up. At the top were several young men who perhaps were excited to have climbed something called the Bomb. But their faces fell when mine appeared above the ledge as I reached the top—the face of somebody's middle-aged mom, who, because she came over the ledge on her hands and knees, was clearly not much of a climber.

 

I had gone to ADAPT demonstrations to see my daughter do her thing, but clearly I would never see my son do his thing. The kind of climb I could manage would not take me up the towering mountains with their cliffs and glaciers, their seracs and crevasses, their avalanches and their whiteout storms, and thus Ramsay's life in that vast, frozen world that covered much of Europe was beyond me.

Even so, it was easy to see why he liked it. Once on a visit to Chamonix, Steve and I went with him up the
téléphérique
on Mont Blanc. The
téléphérique
was almost as big as a train and was jammed with hundreds of people, but as soon as it stopped, the people got off and vanished like a handful of peppercorns tossed in a lake. The enormous, timeless space with its ice and snow and silence swallowed them. Who wouldn't want to work in a place like that?

 

Most of what I learned about Ramsay's work I learned from the rare occasions when he'd tell his war stories. His worst client was a man who wanted to climb all the 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado. Other guides had taken this man up some of the peaks, but as Ramsay later discovered, any guide who had guided him once refused to guide him again.

Ramsay learned why. The client was a temperamental businessman from California who thought he knew more than he did. At ten o'clock one morning, he insisted on climbing a certain peak. Ramsay told him that to climb that peak, one had to start at six in the morning. To start at ten would take them into the afternoon thunderstorms, which would be dangerous, and even if they didn't find thunderstorms, they might be down-climbing in the dark, which, needless to say, is less safe than down-climbing in daylight.

If I were going to climb a dangerous peak, the very last thing I'd do would be to insult my guide, but the client wasn't as smart as I am. Furious and blustering, he kept accusing Ramsay of laziness and cowardice until Ramsay asked himself,
Why not?
And up they went.

After climbing a few hundred feet they came to a ledge where Ramsay suggested that his winded, red-faced client rest for a moment. And again the client got angry, yelling insults at Ramsay and flinging his arms about until the ice ax that he'd been using flew out of his hand and fell down, down, and down, almost all the way to the place from which they'd started. Without it, the client was helpless.

Ramsay tied the client to a rock. I don't know if the client agreed to this or not. Then Ramsay rappelled down to the ice ax, brought it up, and told the client they were going back to Boulder.

 

Ramsay and a climbing partner, Bruce Miller, made the first ascent of the north face of Lobuje East in the Himalayas. I have an account of that trip, not from Ramsay but from Peter Schweitzer, who sent an e-mail to tell me that after Bruce and Ramsay reached the summit and started to climb down,

 

they used their only pot for something-or-other. As one sometimes does outdoors, when they were through, Miller grabbed the handle and swung the pot to empty out whatever was still inside. Oops! The pot went flying down the mountainside. Therefore they had no way to melt snow for their drinking water. Therefore they had better get off the mountain right away, no overnight bivouac. It was dark. Their flashlight batteries soon ran down. Of course weight was an issue, which was why they didn't carry water, and they probably had brought less in the way of spare batteries (and for that matter, flashlights, bulbs) than I routinely bring when we visit you for a night or two in Peterborough. So they climbed down in the dark. Not, perhaps, the most delightful end to a successful climb, but actually the kind of thing that one treasures later.

 

When they came down they encountered an enormous, unseasonal snowstorm that was making international news, blocking the roads, filling up the valleys. Ramsay and Bruce went to a mountain village where they thought to wait it out. But there they were met by the Sherpa villagers, some of whom knew about Ramsay. Earlier he had become friends with a Sherpa guide who had summited Everest eight or nine times and who lived in the area, so word of Ramsay had spread. The villagers were concerned about their young children, five or six of them, who had gone down the mountain with their teacher but had not come back. They were not wearing warm clothes, so they were in danger. The villagers asked Ramsay and Bruce to find them, so, taking warm clothing, they went down through the blizzard, found the children and the teacher, bundled them up, and took them home.

Ramsay gave us a photo of himself and Bruce with the children. The storm has passed. They are sitting on sunlit grass. This may be the only photo ever taken of Sherpas who have been rescued by westerners, because it's normally the other way around. So Bruce and Ramsay made a first Himalayan ascent and then the first rescue of Sherpas by westerners. Yes, the Sherpas were small children, but a first is a first.

 

On one occasion Ramsay and two other guides took a party of twenty clients on a weeklong ski trip through the Mont Blanc massif in Italy, Switzerland, and France. Among the clients was a stunningly beautiful woman who had been a model. Her name was Heather McCoy. Heather was single, and Ramsay by then was divorced. They got to talking and found they liked each other.

Heather lived in Truckee, near Lake Tahoe. Her mother was the artist Stefani Esta, a delicately built woman who, with a welding torch and a welder's helmet, created huge sculptures in steel. She also made sculptures from large boulders. So Heather knew that there was more to womanhood than looking pretty. She hadn't much liked standing around in bathing suits while men ogled her, so by the time she went skiing in the Mont Blanc massif, she had left the lucrative modeling profession and become a chiropractor, with a practice so successful that she worked only three days a week and skied for the rest of the time. But soon enough she moved to Chamonix and into Ramsay's apartment, after which they came back to the States, got married in Yosemite Valley, went to India for their honeymoon, then bought a little house in Les Houches at a bend of the Chamonix Valley.

Beyond their front door was a heart-stopping panorama. To the right was Mont Blanc—the highest mountain in Europe
⁷
—also the Helbronner Peak and the Mer de Glace, and beyond these, towering on both sides of the valley, were the Needles of Médoc, Midi, and M, also three peaks called the English Sisters, also Les Drus and Les Grandes Jorasses, all of them thousands of feet high, most of them snow-covered. The view was stupefying.

That wasn't why they lived there, though. The neighborhood was an avalanche-free zone, one of relatively few in the Chamonix Valley. Now and then an avalanche would come thundering down off the Alps and engulf some houses or even a town, but Ramsay's neighborhood was immune. Other guides also lived there. The man whose house they bought was a guide. The entire neighborhood was favored by guides, and no wonder.