Into Thin Air (38 page)

On Tuesday afternoon, Neal Beidleman presided over a memorial service at the Mountain Madness encampment. Lopsang Jangbu’s father, Ngawang Sya Kya—an ordained lama—burned juniper incense and chanted Buddhist scripture beneath a metallic gray sky. Neal said a few words, Guy spoke, Anatoli Boukreev mourned the loss of Scott Fischer. I got up and stammered out some memories of Doug Hansen. Pete Schoening tried to raise everyone’s spirits by urging us to look forward, not back. But when the service ended and we all dispersed to our tents, a funereal gloom hung over Base Camp.

Early the next morning, a helicopter arrived to evacuate Charlotte Fox and Mike Groom, both of whom had frostbitten feet that would have been damaged further had they attempted to walk out. John Taske, who was a doctor, flew out as well to treat Charlotte and Mike en route. Then, shortly before noon, while Helen Wilton and Guy Cotter stayed behind to oversee the dismantling of the Adventure Consultants compound, Lou Kasischke, Stuart Hutchison, Frank Fischbeck, Caroline Mackenzie, and I trudged out of Base Camp, bound for home.

On Thursday, May 16, we were helicoptered from Pheriche to the village of Syangboche, just above Namche Bazaar. As we walked across the dirt landing strip to await a second flight into Kathmandu, Stuart, Caroline, and I were approached by three ashen-faced Japanese men. The first said that his name was Muneo Nukita—he was an accomplished Himalayan climber who’d twice reached the top of Everest—and then politely explained that he was acting as a guide and an interpreter for the other two, whom he introduced as Yasuko Namba’s husband, Kenichi Namba, and her brother. Over the next forty-five minutes they asked many questions, few of which I could answer.

By then Yasuko’s death had become headline news across Japan. Indeed, on May 12—less than twenty-four hours after she perished on the South Col—a helicopter had touched down in the middle of Base Camp, and two Japanese journalists had hopped out wearing oxygen masks. Accosting the first person they saw—an American climber named Scott Darsney—they had demanded information about Yasuko. Now, four days later, Nukita warned us that a similarly predacious swarm of print and television reporters lay in wait for us in Kathmandu.

Late that afternoon we jammed aboard a gigantic Mi-17 helicopter and lifted off through a gap in the clouds. An hour later the chopper set down at Tribhuvan International Airport, and we stepped out the door into a thicket of microphones and television cameras. As a journalist, I found it edifying to experience things from the other side of the fence. The throng of reporters, mostly Japanese, wanted a neatly scripted version of the calamity, replete with villains and heroes. But the chaos and suffering I’d witnessed were not easily reduced to sound bites. After twenty minutes of grilling on the tarmac, I was rescued by David Schensted, the consul from the American Embassy, who delivered me to the Garuda Hotel.

More difficult interviews followed—by other reporters, and then by a gauntlet of scowling officials at the Ministry of Tourism. Friday evening, wandering through the alleys of Kathmandu’s Thamel district, I sought refuge from a deepening depression. I handed a scrawny Nepalese boy a fistful of rupees and received a tiny paper-covered packet in return, emblazoned with a snarling tiger. Unwrapping it back in my hotel room, I crumbled the contents across a leaf of cigarette paper. The pale green buds were sticky with resin and redolent of rotting fruit. I rolled a joint, smoked it down to nothing, rolled a second fatty, and smoked nearly half of that one, too, before the room began to spin and I stubbed it out.

I lay naked across the bed and listened to the sounds of the night drift through the open window. The jingle of ricksha bells blended with car horns, the come-ons of street peddlers, a woman’s laughter, music from a nearby bar. Flat on my back, too high to move, I closed my eyes and let the glutinous premonsoon heat cover me like a balm; I felt as though I were melting into the mattress. A procession of intricately etched pinwheels and big-nosed cartoon figures floated across the backs of my eyelids in neon hues.

As I turned my head to the side, my ear brushed against a wet spot; tears, I realized, were running down my face and soaking the sheets. I felt a gurgling, swelling bubble of hurt and shame roll up my spine from somewhere deep inside. Erupting out of my nose and mouth in a flood of snot, the first sob was followed by another, then another and another.

On May 19 I flew back to the States, carrying two duffels of Doug Hansen’s belongings to return to the people who loved him. At the Seattle airport I was met by his children, Angie and Jaime; his girlfriend, Karen Marie; and other friends and family members. I felt stupid and utterly impotent when confronted by their tears.

Breathing thick marine air that carried the scent of a minus tide, I marveled at the fecundity of the Seattle spring, appreciating its damp, mossy charms as never before. Slowly, tentatively, Linda and I began the process of becoming reacquainted. The twenty-five pounds I’d shed in Nepal came back with a vengeance. The ordinary pleasures of life at home—eating breakfast with my wife, watching the sun go down over Puget Sound, being able to get up in the middle of the night and walk barefoot to a warm bathroom—generated flashes of joy that bordered on rapture. But such moments were tempered by the long penumbra cast by Everest, which seemed to recede little with the passage of time.

Stewing over my culpability, I put off calling Andy Harris’s partner, Fiona McPherson, and Rob Hall’s wife, Jan Arnold, for such a long time that they finally phoned me from New Zealand. When the call came, I was able to say nothing to diminish Fiona’s anger or bewilderment. During my conversation with Jan, she spent more time comforting me than vice versa.

I’d always known that climbing mountains was a high-risk pursuit. I accepted that danger was an essential component of the game—without it, climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling diversions. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.

Until I visited the Himalaya, however, I’d never actually seen death at close range. Hell, before I went to Everest, I’d never even been to a funeral. Mortality had remained a conveniently hypothetical concept, an idea to ponder in the abstract. Sooner or later the divestiture of such a privileged innocence was inevitable, but when it finally happened the shock was magnified by the sheer superfluity of the carnage: all told, Everest killed twelve men and women in the spring of 1996, the worst single-season death toll since climbers first set foot on the peak seventy-five years ago.

Of the six climbers on Hall’s expedition who reached the summit, only Mike Groom and I made it back down: four teammates with whom I’d laughed and vomited and held long, intimate conversations lost their lives. My actions—or failure to act—played a direct role in the death of Andy Harris. And while Yasuko Namba lay dying on the South Col, I was a mere 350 yards away, huddled inside a tent, oblivious to her struggle, concerned only with my own safety. The stain this has left on my psyche is not the sort of thing that washes off after a few months of grief and guilt-ridden self-reproach.

Eventually I spoke of my lingering disquietude to Klev Schoening, whose home was not far from mine. Klev said that he, too, felt awful about the loss of so many lives, but unlike me, he had no “survivor’s guilt.” He explained, “Out on the Col that night, I used up everything I had trying to save myself and the people with me. By the time we made it back to the tents I had absolutely nothing left. I’d frostbitten one cornea and was practically blind. I was hypothermic, delirious, and shivering uncontrollably. It was terrible losing Yasuko, but I’ve made peace with myself over it, because I know in my heart that there was nothing more I could have done to save her. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. It was a bad storm. In the condition you were in at the time, what could you have possibly done for her?”

Perhaps nothing, I concurred. But in contrast to Schoening, I’ll never be sure. And the enviable peace of which he speaks eludes me.

With so many marginally qualified climbers flocking to Everest these days, a lot of people believe that a tragedy of this magnitude was overdue. But nobody imagined that an expedition led by Rob Hall would be at the center of it. Hall ran the tightest, safest operation on the mountain, bar none. A compulsively methodical man, he had elaborate systems in place that were supposed to prevent such a catastrophe. So what happened? How can it be explained, not only to the loved ones left behind, but to a censorious public?

Hubris probably had something to do with it. Hall had become so adept at running climbers of all abilities up and down Everest that he got a little cocky, perhaps. He’d bragged on more than one occasion that he could get almost any reasonably fit person to the summit, and his record seemed to support this. He’d also demonstrated a remarkable ability to prevail over adversity.

In 1995, for instance, Hall and his guides not only had to cope with Hansen’s problems high on the peak, but they also had to deal with the complete collapse of another client named Chantal Mauduit, a celebrated French alpinist who was making her seventh stab at Everest without oxygen. Mauduit passed out stone cold at 28,700 feet and had to be dragged and carried all the way down from the South Summit to the South Col “like a sack of spuds,” as Guy Cotter put it. After everybody came out of that summit attempt alive, Hall may well have thought there was little he couldn’t handle.

Before this year, however, Hall had had uncommonly good luck with the weather, and it might have skewed his judgment. “Season after season,” confirmed David Breashears, who has been on more than a dozen Himalayan expeditions and has himself climbed Everest three times, “Rob had brilliant weather on summit day. He’d never been caught by a storm high on the mountain.” In fact, the gale of May 10, though violent, was nothing extraordinary; it was a fairly typical Everest squall. If it had hit two hours later, it’s likely that nobody would have died. Conversely, if it had arrived even one hour earlier, the storm could easily have killed eighteen or twenty climbers—me among them.

Certainly time had as much to do with the tragedy as the weather, and ignoring the clock can’t be passed off as an act of God. Delays at the fixed lines were foreseeable and eminently preventable. Predetermined turn-around times were egregiously ignored.

Extending the turn-around times may have been influenced to some degree by the rivalry between Fischer and Hall. Fischer had never guided Everest before 1996. From a business standpoint, there was tremendous pressure on him to be successful. He was exceedingly motivated to get clients to the summit, especially a celebrity client like Sandy Hill Pittman.

Likewise, since he had failed to get anybody to the top in 1995, it would have been bad for Hall’s business if he failed again in 1996—especially if Fischer succeeded. Scott had a charismatic personality, and that charisma had been aggressively marketed by Jane Bromet. Fischer was trying very hard to eat Hall’s lunch, and Rob knew it. Under the circumstances, the prospect of turning his clients around while his rival’s clients were pushing toward the summit may have been sufficiently distasteful to cloud Hall’s judgment.

It can’t be stressed strongly enough, moreover, that Hall, Fischer, and the rest of us were forced to make such critical decisions while severely impaired with hypoxia. In pondering how this disaster could have occurred, it is imperative to remember that lucid thought is all but impossible at 29,000 feet.

Wisdom comes easily after the fact. Shocked by the toll in human life, critics have been quick to suggest policies and procedures to ensure that the catastrophes of this season won’t be repeated. It has been proposed, for example that a guide-to-client ratio of one to one be established as the standard on Everest—i.e., each client would climb with his or her own personal guide and remain roped to that guide at all times.