Dead Lucky (28 page)

In happier times, less close to death, when meditating I liked to focus my attention on my breath. As the minutes pass and I am drawn deeper into a meditative state, my attention rests longer on the spaces between inhalation and exhalation—that is where the perfect stillness lies. But up here on the mountain I was not looking for stillness. The process of breathing is an automatic one, which happens whether you observe it or not. The danger of attempting a breathing meditation in my current state was that my mind could easily be aware of my breath and yet not focus upon it. Before I could stop it, my mind might drift off, bouncing from meaningless thought to meaningless thought, keeping my breath in the background, forgetting the need for watchfulness, forgetting that my battle was to stay alive.

Even with my easier routine of observing my movements, my mind still managed to steal away, grabbing onto random thoughts. How long it would be until sunrise. What an inconceivable distance I had put between myself and my family. I dragged my mind back to the rotations, to the counterclockwise sweep of the forehand, the clockwise grace of the backhand. They were only small circles, really, but I gave them grander names. The process was simple, with nothing except the reversal of direction to separate one rotation from the next. Soon this became inconsequential as well, leaving me with no need to remember anything at all.

And so I have no clear memory of facing death and then rejecting it. But I did have an experience to which no name can be given.

Toward the end of that night, I found myself on a hill, which I somehow knew to be in Poland, although I have never visited that country. It was dark and I was sitting on a grassy knoll, still waiting and watching. Despite the darkness, I knew I was looking out over treeless rolling hills, all of which lay below me. I was wearing a cloak made of the finest wool; it was thick and warm and all-encompassing. The drape of the cloak made it exceptionally comfortable, although it was not designed for sleeping in, and I had difficulty finding the best place to tuck my hands.

The night sky began to weaken and fade, so I knew that dawn was coming. I looked around for Barbara. I had not seen her, but I knew she and I had been traveling together somewhere in the recent past. Light came quickly, but Barbara was still nowhere to be seen. The cloak was heavy enough for me to be undisturbed by the wind that had picked up as darkness turned to dawn. Although it had invested me with a sense of completeness, the cloak was not mine to keep. I knew I had to return it. I knew without turning my head that it belonged in the building behind me. With the coming of light, I could now see that the cloak was a gray color, and its unusual cut made me think it was ceremonial. As I slipped out of it, I noticed that the hood formed an integral part.

With the cloak in my arms, I turned around and began to walk. There was a slight drop from the knoll, then a gentle rise as I approached the building, which I sensed was some kind of house because it had a welcoming aspect. It was only twenty yards away, but the first light of dawn had not been able to reach it, which meant I had to walk back into the night. Despite the darkness, I was able to find the few steps which led up to the porch. There was no need for me to ring the bell. To the left of the closed door was a row of wooden pegs. Instinctively, I knew which peg the cloak belonged on, so I carefully put it back in its place. It was the only cloak on the row of pegs.

I turned to face the light, conscious of the gloom behind me. Soon I was back on the knoll, where there was still no sign of Barbara. I thought that perhaps she was never meant to come to this place, and I must take this part of my journey on my own. The sky had brightened considerably in the few minutes it had taken me to return the cloak. The hills were as bare of trees and houses as I had envisioned them to be, but there was a wide path that began beneath the knoll where I had spent the night and continued into the shallow valley. It dropped out of sight but then reappeared on the hillside beyond, curving upward to the rounded crest of the final hill.

I surveyed the scene briefly and then began to walk, setting off with no destination, not knowing what the future would bring but eager to be on my way at last. The walking was effortless. I felt only the sense of making the journey and not the passage of time. I found myself cresting the final grassy hillside to be greeted by a freezing wind.

Suddenly, there was a sharply different reality, as though I had stepped between worlds. I stood upon a narrow snow-covered space where the coldest touch of sunshine reflected from the peak above. In front of me was a steep and icy mountainside, which dropped into a dark valley far below. Behind me, where the grass-covered hills had been, there was only a precipice so enormous that it was beyond belief. Whatever the place was that I had been traveling to, I had arrived.

AWAKENING

O
N THE EVENING OF May 25, my fate was sealed. At Mushroom Rock, high on the Northeast Ridge, I lay motionless on the snow. It was obvious to Pemba that I was close to death—so close that I might have already passed into the next phase of the life-death-rebirth cycle. As a Tibetan Buddhist, he was aware that over the next three days the different levels of consciousness would leave my body.

Pemba himself was in very bad shape. Wounded by my accidental crampon-kick to his leg, drained and desperately thirsty because he had given all his food and water to Thomas Weber, he was now feeling the effects of snow blindness after a full day with no eye protection in bright sunshine. The pain was like having chilies in his eyes. After twenty hours on the go, most of them without oxygen, Pemba looked at me and decided he wanted to die as well. But then he remembered his family and slowly began to make his way down to High Camp. Dorje followed, carrying with him my camera, the only records of my final climb.

Dawa Tenzing and Lakcha stayed with me at 28,000 feet for another two hours, attempting to rouse me in whatever way they could, including poking me in the eyes. Both men were totally exhausted, having done absolutely everything within their power to keep me moving and—when movement was no longer an option—to keep me alive. Darkness was drawing near, and from 7,000 feet below at Advance Base Camp, Alex instructed them to retreat to High Camp. Dawa Tenzing was also snow-blind and has no memory of how he made his way back to High Camp. But the camp was not a sanctuary—it was dangerous for the exhausted climbers to spend the night at the extreme height of 27,000 feet, particularly when severely dehydrated, yet they had no energy to go any farther down.

The Sherpas were sadly familiar with altitude-induced deaths on the mountain, and they saw that the only difference between my body and those of David Sharp, Vitor Negrete, Igor Plyushkin, Jacques-Hugues Letrange, and Thomas Weber was that mine was not yet frozen.

Alex had instructed them to cover me with stones, in the way that stones had been placed over Igor, but it was not possible to do so at Mushroom Rock. The ridge at that point was a solid spine of rock, capped by a six-foot-wide snowbank tilting upward to the lip of the Kangshung Face. One of the cornices overhanging the lip had broken away, revealing a vertical precipice and a dizzying drop of 9,000 feet to the Kangshung Glacier. The pedestal of Mushroom Rock itself was six feet high, and beneath it the North Face sloped away steeply. Only a few shards of rock lay exposed at the edge of the snow. There were no stones that could be used for my burial.

AT BASE CAMP that evening Mike, Richard, and Christopher were in a state of shock and did not talk much. Richard started smoking heavily, which he had not done for years. Christopher listened to music. Mike's therapy was to busy himself with necessary tasks. He began with the issue of informing the authorities, but as Base Camp manager, Maxim decided he should handle that particular job. In my tent Mike located the notebook which had my insurance details written in a prominent place. He then began to pack up my belongings—not the most joyous of activities—and the tent that had been my Base Camp home for the last two months.

The plan had been for an early start, but the 7Summits-Club convoy was not ready to leave until ten o'clock. As the Landcruiser bounced across the rocky flats, Richard talked about returning next year and building a memorial to me at Base Camp. When Mike looked back at the mountain, he had never seen it more beautiful, so beautiful it was almost luminous.

LATE ON THE MORNING of May 25, Greg stood outside our house in Wentworth Falls. He remained there for a good while, taking in the spectacular view. The fresh, cold air did not soothe his emotions or ratify his disbelief, but his mind did become less clouded. When he came back inside to the living room, he found that the warmth from the slow-combustion stove, and the body heat of the people standing and sitting where they could, was anything but comforting. Instead, there was a heaviness in the room, a dank and close intensity from the deathly emotions of trauma, shock, and disbelief.

He immediately wanted to go back outside, but he also wanted to be a part of it. As one person consoled another, there were glimmers of humor, gentle ways of maintaining solidarity. At a different level there was a need to conduct rational conversations with people who were ringing up with questions or condolences. These were largely handled by Julia, who was sitting on a low stool that had been made by Roley Clarke and given to Dylan on his fourth birthday. Greg took advantage of a silence between phone calls to place a call to Base Camp. Christopher picked up the phone; he could only theorize about what had befallen me. Foul oxygen was one possibility, he said, and a faulty oxygen regulator was another. It was touching that human fallibility was not suggested.

Barbara thought of one phone call that she wanted to make herself— to Ang Karma in Kathmandu. When they spoke, she asked him if he would perform the appropriate Buddhist ceremony, one that needed to be completed within a certain time of my death.

There was a silence, and then Karma spoke with a hesitancy in his voice that Barbara had not heard before. “I can do that,” he said. “I will miss his friendship. He was a good man.”

TOWARD MIDDAY, Margaret Werner drove to the Wentworth Falls shops and returned loaded with supplies. She set about making leek and potato soup, and when it was ready, she laid out bread and cheese and a few extras, creating her usual irresistible spread. For many years Margaret had run the Bay Tree Teashop at Mount Victoria, which at the time was heavily patronized by Blue Mountains climbers needing a post-climb feed before the two-hour drive back to Sydney. But today Margaret's leek and potato soup was a post-climb offering, which reminded everybody that for one of our number, there would be no more two-hour drives to Sydney. Or anywhere.

A few people left at lunchtime, but others arrived and Barbara felt obliged to welcome them with cups of tea. This ritual was performed despite how Barbara felt. Her usual focused generosity was absent, not that anyone expected it from her. Instead, the tea-making was a default mechanism, so that she could escape from how she was feeling. People kept bringing food, a substitute for words they could not speak.

Late in the afternoon harpist Dawn Egan arrived with a huge chocolate cake; the beautiful music from her harp would only have brought tears. “I am famous for my chocolate cake,” she announced, her gentle voice dispelling any thoughts that she was bragging.

During this busy period someone had turned on the outside light, but the globe had blown. It was a necessary light because there was no other on the outside of our house, and it was a rough path to the gate. Our friend Paul Stephens busied himself trying to fix it, but he soon realized it was a bigger job than he imagined. He told Barbara that he would be back the next day to repair it for her properly.

By this stage the kitchen was overflowing with soups and food, curries and cakes. Our Tibetan mastiff, Norbu, whose head was conveniently at dining-table level, felt that there was so much food that he could take a big bite of chocolate cake without it being missed. But of course the deed was witnessed.

In his poem “First Things First,” W. H. Auden wrote, “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” At our place at Wentworth Falls, no one was going without food, and even the one who no longer lived was loved.

AT MANLY THAT MORNING Simon Balderstone's day had begun with a phone call to Greg Mortimer, asking him to check with Julia that all relatives and other people who should know of my demise were informed before the news hit the media.

He also rang Susie Badyari, general manager of World Expeditions— the trekking company that both Sue Fear and I had worked with over many years—with a similar request in mind. The day before, he had rung Susie with the news of my success, and now he needed to tell her what he knew about my death, partly for her, partly so she could pass on a correct account of events. Both of them were in tears.

The proof of my mortality naturally turned their thoughts to Sue, who was still climbing high on Manaslu, at the very end of the season.

“I'm really worried about Sue,” said Simon.

“Why?” asked Susie. “Because of her last e-mail?”

“Yes,” said Simon. Sue's most recent dispatch from Base Camp had been full of uncertainty, which was quite uncharacteristic. She wrote that she had “never seen the weather so crazy.” There was virtually no one else on the mountain, and she was unsure whether or not to make another attempt. It was a worrying set of circumstances.

Simon had sought to shield Barbara from the press, but interest in the story of my death was growing because of the startling announcement that I had been found alive. Climbers believed it impossible for anyone to survive being left for dead in the open at 28,000 feet. The handful of climbers who had lived through bivouacs at those extreme heights had remained conscious, had been able to talk to each other, and had kept themselves breathing. Only two or three had managed to survive alone, and none of these had been lying lifeless with cerebral edema. The odds were stacked against me, so if there were stories of me being alive, they needed to be proved indisputably. Others had been left on the mountain—if someone had been found alive, it was not necessarily me. And even if the stories proved to be true, what state was I in? And would I be able to survive the descent?