Alaska (164 page)

Encouraged by his successes, Japanese supporters had raised funds for him to lead lesser expeditions to Aconcagua in the Argentine, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the Matterhorn on the Italian-Swiss border, twice to Mount St. Elias in Alaska and once to Tyree in Antarctica. Even his German competitors agreed that Takabuki-sensei was a complete mountaineer. Said one German periodical specializing in alpinism: 'He can do anything he sets his mind to, and he has two salient characteristics. Even in adversity he smiles to keep the spirits of his fellow climbers high, and he brings them back alive.

The two deaths that destroyed his 1974 assault on Everest occurred two thousand feet below where he was climbing close to the summit. Two members of his team, unroped, moved carelessly and plunged to their deaths.'

But in all his recent triumphs, another challenge gnawed at him, and in time his obsession grew so great that the mountain he had not yet conquered seemed to move about with him wherever he went, filling his mind. It can be done, he assured himself repeatedly. It's not a difficult climb. I could have mastered it when I was a boy.

It's no more than

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a walk, really, but to take that walk requires a mixture of brute strength and infinite delicacy. At this point in his reverie he usually stopped, stood flat-footed, looked off into space, and questioned: If it's so simple, why do so many meet their death on that damned mountain?

He

was in this frame of mind on the third of January when he was scheduled to meet with the mountaineering leaders of Japan, especially those industrialists who in the past had financed expeditions. When he and his associate Kenji Oda stood, before them he realized that the Japanese New Year celebrations wildest in the world, with even more alcohol consumed than at Scotland's Hogmanay roistering had left these gentlemen somewhat hungover and bleary-eyed, but after some friendly joshing as to who had been drunkest everybody in Japan, it seemed, having been so to some degree or other they were as ready for business as they were going to be this day.

'How many would be in your team, do you think?'

'Five. Three men, two women.'

'Very small in comparison with your Everest teams.'

'A totally different climbing method.'

'In what way?'

'Fewer camps, much lighter gear.'

'But why does Denali fascinate you, Sensei?' Quickly the interrogator added: 'Because it does, you know.'

Takabuki's face hardened. His hands clenched and he disclosed what tormented him.

'Compared to the really great mountains of the world, Everest and Nanga Parbat for height, Matterhorn or the Eiger for rock work, Alaska's Denali is trivial.'

'Then why allow it to become an obsession?'

'Because of its challenge. Especially to a Japanese.'

'But you just said it was easy.'

'It is, except for three facts. It lies close to the Arctic Circle, less than two hundred and fifty miles . . .'

'In kilometers?'

'In Alaska they use miles. Everest is nearly two thousand five hundred miles farther south, and that difference in latitude makes Denali seem quite a few thousand feet higher than it really is.'

'Why?' a well-lubricated industrialist asked, and Takabuki said: 'At higher latitudes the air is thinner, just as it is at the higher altitudes. Everest, very high and moister. Denali, not so high, but very thin all the way up.' Satisfied that he had justified his basic respect for Denali, he moved on to his second-point: 'It's true that Denali does not present us with much serious rock work, hardly any. And that's where the

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trouble comes for us Japanese and Germans, Because we're used to steep rock work and very high altitudes, we scamper to the top and yell back jubilantly ”See! It was nothing!” And then on the way down, we grow careless in our euphoria, plunge over the edge or get lost in an avalanche, and no one ever sees us again.' He stopped, stared at his questioners, and added: 'They don't even find the bodies.' Halting again, he said painfully: 'Denali is a burial ground for German and Japanese climbers who come down the mountainside rejoicing,' and he asked Kenji Oda, who had studied with him at Waseda, to show the committee the map and chart they had drawn up. It displayed the mournful record of the arrogant Germans and the inattentive Japanese.

'Here is a team of four Germans, great climb, record speed I believe. No challenge whatever, they said later. That is, the two who didn't die on the way down.' He indicated another group of five Germans: 'A masterful team. I climbed with three of them in the Alps. They could go straight up any rocky face. Two more dead.' He pointed to the record of a team of seven that had lost two, a team of five that had lost one.

'How could a relatively easy mountain like Denali exact such a heavy toll on experienced climbers?' asked a manufacturer who had climbed with Takabuki-sensei in earlier years, and the dean of mountaineers added his third significant fact about this tall, beautiful and terrible mountain: 'Because it lures you, like the sirens of Ulysses, but when you're up there on its peak, triumphant, it's apt to send forth storms of hellish magnitude. Winds of a hundred miles an hour, temperatures of minus-ninety with chill factors to below a hundred and twenty, and when a storm strikes, if you don't burrow into a snow cave like an animal, you perish.'

The listeners said nothing, but finally the man who had done some climbing with the sensei pointed out: 'But you said the Japanese were careless. If you're hit by a storm like that, it doesn't sound much like carelessness.'

And now Takabuki became almost solemn, as if he were the undertaker in some small rural town: 'You're right, Okobi-san. Our people dig in, protect themselves from the storm, but when it's over they come romping down the slopes, fail to keep their ropes taut, and over the edge they go.'

'How do you know that?' a man asked, and Takabuki replied: 'We don't. We're guessing.

All we know are the terrible figures. Show them, Oda-san,' and the next doleful summary was displayed. 'Look at that record! Eleven Japanese dead, and we've not recovered a single body. They van—

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ished. Into a crevasse here? Over the side there? We don't know. They toiled, they conquered, and they vanished. And Denali refuses to tell us how it conquered them.'

At this point he stopped, his hands clenched with suppressed anger, and only Kenji Oda, looking at the man he worshiped, knew what ugly fact Takabuki was going to reveal next: 'Gentlemen, we Japanese have performed so poorly on Denali. Going up we're unbeatable, coming down we're ...”His voice trembled; he mastered it and said bitterly as he pointed at the ridge from which his predecessors had vanished: 'Look what they call this place! Come up and look!' and when the men did they saw that American cynics had given the ridge where so many Japanese fell a hideous name. Since most of the committee could read English if not speak it, Takabuki did not translate, but two members asked: 'What do the words mean?'

'The Orient Express,' he said grimly. 'The place where we Japanese roar out of sight,'

and there the mocking words stood on a map which had become semiofficial.

'It is my job,' he said quietly when discussion resumed, 'mine and Oda's here, to lead a Japanese expedition which will demonstrate what we can do, how we can discipline ourselves. We've been so careless in the past, so one-man daring and contemptuous of risk, that the people around Denali, the real mountaineers . . . Do you know what they call us when we appear at Talkeetna to climb into the planes that fly us to the mountain? The Kamikaze Crowd. Well, this expedition will not be a banzai charge.

Have I your permission? And the necessary budget?”

Before an answer could be given, the chairman brought up a problem which perplexed mountaineers in many nations: 'The maps name your mountain McKinley. You climbers call it Denali. I don't understand.'

'Very simple,' Takabuki said. 'It's always been Denali. Real Alaskans and climbers call it nothing else. Honored Indian name, very ancient, meaning the High One.'

'Then where does the McKinley come from?'

'In 1896, I believe' and the sensei looked for confirmation to Oda, who nodded' the Democratic party nominated for the presidency a minor politician from Kansas, I think it was, man named McKinley. Nobody knew him nationally or thought much of him locally.

The party needed some big event to give him prominence, and some politician dreamed up the idea of naming this great mountain after him. Very popular . . . with the Democrats.'

The committee members laughed, and one said: 'Same sort of thing happens in Japan.

Why don't they go back to the real 1006

name?' During the discussion which followed, Kenji Oda, who had studied in America, spoke quietly to the chairman: 'I could never contradict the sensei in public. Or private either, for that matter, but McKinley was a Republican, their conservative party. Not a particularly bad man. And he came from Ohio, not Kansas.'

'Will his name remain on the mountain?' 'Everybody with good sense is trying to remove it.'

THE SEASON FOR CLIMBING DENALI WAS RIGOROUSLY De fined: before the first of May the snow, storms and cold were too severe; after the middle of July the heat made the snow so rotten that avalanches came thundering down and bridges over crevasses collapsed. So in early June, Takabuki-sensei and the four members of the expedition took the short flight from Tokyo to Anchorage, where they reported to the shop of furrier Jack Kim, who served as liaison for all Japanese climbers. A Korean with a winning smile and a sharp knowledge of Alaskan business, he knew Takabuki by reputation, and after a brief discussion, had the team and their small mountain of equipment packed in a big station wagon headed north for the 133-mile drive to Talkeetna.

At a spot some miles south of the little town, the young man driving swerved to the shoulder of the road, slammed on the brakes, and cried: ”There it is!' From the almost level plain rose the three great mountains of the Alaska Range: Foraker to the left, Denali in the center, Silverthrone on the right, with off

to one side the remarkable black cube called Mooses Tooth. They formed a majestic march across the blue sky, a line of mountains that would have been commendable in any terrain; here, where the surrounding plain was so low, with an elevation not much above sea level, they soared enormously, white-capped, inviting but filled with subtle menace.

'Each mountain in the world is different,' Takabuki-sensei told his team. 'And each is precious in its own way.'

'What's different here?' one of the women asked, and he said: 'The surrounding terrain is so ordinary, so low, and the range of mountains so very high and so close together.

They are like conspirators, up where the winds blow, and they are plotting storms.

For us.'

At Talkeetna, like many Japanese teams before them, they sought out LeRoy Flatch, who now made a business of flying mountain climbers onto the 7,200-foot elevation of the southeast fork of Kahiltna Glacier. With the rear seats of his Cessna-185

removed, he could accommodate, as he said, 1007

'three chubby Americans or five trim Japanese.' With wheels retracted and skis in place, he had delivered many young Japanese climbers to the starting point of their great adventure, flying back to meet them nineteen or twenty days later when they descended. Of course, if they became cavebound during some monumental snowstorm, he awaited a radio message from the park rangers and came for them after twenty-seven or even thirty days. He was their lifeline for getting on and off the mountain.

When Flatch assured them that he was ready and that weather reports for the next few days looked good, the Takabuki team repaired to the hut provided for visiting climbers, spread each item of their voluminous gear on the deck for a final check, and listened attentively as their sensei reviewed his instructions: 'There is only one purpose for this expedition. To restore the honor of Japan. And there is only one way to accomplish that. To put three men on the top of that mountain and to get five of us back here safely. It is our task to erase the opprobrium of that insolent phrase the Orient Express.

'So, the rules. We'll portage high and sleep low. That means climb diligently all day to get our gear up the mountain, but hurry back down”at night so that we acclimatize gradually and in an orderly way. We'll take five days to our camp at eleven thousand feet. Very careful around Windy Corner and up to the last two camps at fifteen thousand and sixteen thousand nine hundred.

'Skis to eleven thousand, crampons the rest of the way. Roped three in my group with me, two in Oda-san's, and no slack. At our last stop we build a solid base which can be extended into a snow cave if a storm comes, and from there the three men ascend to the top, up and back fast in one day while the two women maintain supplies and gear at the camp. Only three thousand feet to cover, and more than a mile, very steep.

We'll climb light and hurry back.

'Now' and here his voice dropped to a whisper 'having attained the summit, the easy part, our real task begins. To get back to this hut, all five of us, in good shape, with no call to the rangers or the air force planes to rescue us, and no disappearances.

I want each of you to look at this map.'

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At this point he spread the offending chart before them, and each of his four climbers read in English the insulting legend the Orient Express, and each swore privately that this time there would be no Japanese cascading down those steep slopes to oblivion.

TAKABUKI'S TEAM HAD BEEN CLEVERLY COMPOSED. HE, of course, was one of the world's premier climbers, experienced in almost everything that could happen on a mountain.

His endurance was extraordinary, a slim man weighing less than a hundred and sixty who could lug up the tallest mountains in the world not only a protective uniform that would stagger most men, but at the same time carry a cleverly packed and disposed backpack weighing just under sixty pounds. Takabuki-sensei was determined to climb Denali, up and down.

Equally determined was Kenji Oda, who had served as base-camp commander in the second Takabuki assault on Everest, the one that succeeded. The third man, Yamada, had not participated in previous expeditions, but was a superb athlete and had a reputation for endurance in various punishing sports. Of the two women, only Sachiko had any experience in mountain climbing; Kimiko, Takabuki's daughter, had begged her father to let her join this expedition, and at the last minute he had consented.