Left for Dead (18 page)

But it gets worse and worse, and you realize at some point, This has gone past not feeling up. After about six months, I was fairly miserable. There was no apparent cause for this. It just felt as if I’d stepped into a black hole.

It’s a complete coincidence that just as this second depression hit I also discovered mountaineering. Actually, I had received a foretaste of its seductions some years earlier.

Hiking never interested me as an adult, and I didn’t give it much thought until around 1980 when Peach and I went on a backpacking expedition to Texas’s Big Bend National Park with some other doctors and their families. This is beautiful countryside, full of wonderful vistas, but it is also arid and hot, a climate dominated by the Chihuahua Desert across the Rio Grande in Mexico.

About halfway through our hike I was incredibly dry, could have peed dust. My canteen was long since drained, and I’d annihilated the single apple I’d been given. So this gal in front of me starts nibbling her apple in slow motion. I watched her in an agonal state, pretty much like a dog at table. When she got ready to throw the core away, I asked her for it and grabbed it and sucked it right down to the seeds. Then I looked around and announced that I was heading back the way we came. The only thing on my mind was my thirst.

I ran the six miles or so back to our van, where I knew there
was a big ice chest full of cold beer in the back. When I got there, I opened six cans at once, set them all up on the hood, and addressed each in turn. One by one, I knocked them down. By the time I got to the end I was just beginning to feel perhaps I wasn’t going to die on the spot.

Dehydration aside, I had a great time on this outing. I enjoyed being out in nature with the pretty views, as well as the camaraderie. It was a lot of fun.

Now fast-forward to 1985 and the very earliest stages of my depression. On another group holiday, this time at the YMCA camp in Estes Park, Colorado, all the dads decide to get up early one morning for an eight-mile hike. However, next morning, a freezing rain is falling. It’s really cold and nasty. Only two of us, myself and Ken Zornes, whom Peach and I had met through the Boones, show up in the gloom. Every other cabin is pitch black.

Cecilia and I were the ones who pulled together that Y-camp group. I remember Beck and Ken Zornes invited me along on their morning hike. I said I’d think about it. I heard the gravel crunch as they drove up. That’s when I pulled the pillow over my head and went back to sleep.

We headed up the trail anyway, and came marching back hours later just
filled
with ourselves for being so bold and determined and manly to complete the hike while everyone else—the sane ones—stayed in bed.

Estes Park became an annual summer event, and cemented a sort of Mutt and Jeff relationship between us.

Ken and I are nothing alike. He is tall and a real jock and supremely confident of his physical gifts. There never is any question in Ken’s mind that his body can do anything. He just takes a look at something and says, “Boy, that’d be fun to do.”

My self-image wasn’t athletic at all. Although I jogged or walked to work each day and otherwise kept myself fit, my innate self-doubt and the shadow slowly smothering my spirit made me cautious. We’d look at a peak. He’d say, “Let’s go for it!” I’d say, “Maybe we ought to try something a little more rational.”

Most people don’t want to get up at three o’clock and go out and punish themselves for twelve hours. But we did. Either it’s in you or it isn’t. I remember I broke an artery in my finger on a rock climb one time. We just laughed our asses off about that. Kept asking each other, “Are you having fun yet?”

We were like the tortoise and the hare. When we’d cross a boulder field on hikes, for instance, Beck went ahead methodically, putting one foot in front of the other. I’d run forty yards and then stop with my tongue hanging out. Here comes Beck. About the time he gets to me, I take off again. We both get to the top about the same time, just different styles of getting there.

We could hike for hours and not say a word. When we did talk, usually it was Beck who talked and I listened. That’s also part of what made us a good team. I don’t talk a whole lot, and he does.

Usually we would go for it, really pushing ourselves on these trips. Each year we’d get up there and try to find something challenging. One time, for instance, we climbed three contiguous peaks in one day. That was pretty tiring.

We also managed to make some very big mistakes that we were lucky to survive. One was the decision to save ourselves a long walk by sliding down this glacier on plastic garbage bags. My only other equipment was a walking stick with a small metal point. We made it down uninjured, too ignorant to realize how narrowly we’d cheated death, how easily we might have accelerated down that glacier to oblivion, just as the feckless Chen Yu-Nan later would on Everest.

To show you how far Beck traveled on his quest, on our first trip to Estes Park I went on an overnight hike with Ken Zornes, Ken’s son, Ben, Beck and little Beck. We got to where we wanted to camp and set up the tents. The boys amused themselves with a pissing contest off a rock, seeing how far they could shoot it.

Beck surprised me by unpacking a six-pack of beer. That seemed the most important thing to him about this hike. He got to the top with a six-pack.

One of our earliest hikes was up a mountain called Flat Top. It was a beautiful twelve-thousand-footer. Suddenly a storm
came in. I think we had windbreakers and sandwiches with us. It got really cold and snowy. We hunkered down shoulder to shoulder against some rocks, because we couldn’t see the trail to get back down.

I remember us saying, “What the hell are we going to do? Die here?”

Fortunately, after about twenty minutes the storm moved on. The sun came out and we took off for another peak. But we did learn. We never went up there again without plenty of gear.

We were definitely summer soldiers, but gradually, by trial and error, Ken and I did learn a few basic lessons about mountaineering.

The year after that first climb, I went to Alaska with Jim Ketchersid and a group of other doctors to hike the Chilkoot Trail, a storied thirty-three-mile track that leads up from Skag-way to 3,525-foot Chilkoot Pass and then into the Canadian Yukon. Tens of thousands of so-called stampeders took the same rugged trail in search of their fortunes during the Alaskan gold rush of a hundred years ago. I had a great time chugging along through forests and swamps and past old tin cans, bottles, stoves and even boats discarded by the prospectors.

The Chilkoot trek also confirmed a surprise discovery I’d made about climbing: The strenuous, focused exertion out in the mountain wilds relieved my deepening depression, if only for a while. I could throw off the gloom out there, because mountains—particularly big mountains, as I would learn—
force you to be in the moment. You’re absorbed by your labors and by your surroundings, physically and emotionally liberated from the world below. It became a form of self-medication.

As Beck and Ken got more and more involved in climbing on
family
vacations, all of us were very much aware of it. The whole thing was oriented toward family, but Beck and Ken either were not there at all, or were exhausted. This was a family vacation for everyone but them. They had their own agenda. Both Peach and Debbie Zornes were irritated, at best.

By this time, around 1987, the black dog was my constant companion, and I was to some extent trapped with him by my absolute unwillingness to admit my condition and to seek professional help. My motive, by the way, wasn’t so much to hide the truth from others as it was to deny it to myself. I could not admit that I suffered such a weakness.

I was further isolated by my deep distrust of psychiatry and a practical abhorrence of medication. I don’t necessarily think of psychologists and psychiatrists as mountebanks and fools, but that’s close to what I believe. I am a very concrete person; what they do strikes me as mumbo jumbo. I simply couldn’t believe that just talking to someone was going to make a difference.

As a doctor, I also worried about jeopardizing my professional standing by admitting I was depressed, that there was something medically wrong with me. I certainly did not want
someone determining whether I was fit to practice. I was not going to regularly report to someone to demonstrate that I was okay.

I really wasn’t okay.

I was overcome with deep, deep sadness and hopelessness. It was like looking down into a dark well, not knowing how in the world I was going to get out. It seemed so much stronger than me.

At work I was having a horrible time with my concentration. Half the time I was reading out my surgical cases, I was thinking of how pleasant it would be if the pain would stop—and I knew an easy way to do that.

Of course, I’d been miserable when the first depression descended over me in college, but then at least I could go lie down for three or four hours. Now I had to be upright, and upbeat, especially at work. I couldn’t let
any
of it show.

So with no outlet at work, it became even harder to keep it together at home. Sometimes I’d come home and only make it as far as the garage door before I’d have to sit down for five minutes, trying to get myself back together enough to walk in the house.

As before, there was a lot of ideation about ending it all, the kind of thing where you go to the bookstore in search of the manual on how to kill yourself. You don’t want to screw it up. The ideal way seemed to be a really good bottle of scotch and a large amount of pills. Then I decided that avenue required too many proactive steps. I began to think that if it really came down to it, I’d probably try something a little messier.

The absolute lowest point, where I really scared myself, came
one night while I was sitting on the sofa, holding my .357, and thinking this was a good time to drive out to the lake. The inner certainty I’d felt about suicide seemed about to express itself in action. I felt there really was no other solution, no place to turn, no refuge, except the mountains.