Left for Dead (19 page)

I knew that Beck was in pain.

At first I asked myself, What have I done? What can I do? I blamed myself for it. For a long time I believed I’d failed him. And I’d failed myself. Growing up without a father, all I ever wanted was for
my
children to have a father.

Not until much later did I finally understand that this wasn’t my fault. All I knew at the time was that I could have packed up and left with the children, and Beck would not have noticed until the house payment came due.

I tried everything I could think of to get his attention. Affection and attention. That didn’t work. Withholding affection and attention. That didn’t work. Finally I decided to be the best doctor’s wife I could be, and just wait and see if he grew out of it. Wait for him to change. It’s just a period, I told myself. All guys go through phases. Then I thought, Maybe this is a
long
phase.

I’ve never doubted that my father loves me. I didn’t always agree with how he spent his time.

I remember when I was really young and he was driving me to school, I said, “Daddy, promise me you’ll never climb Mount Everest.”

He said, “Okay.” I don’t think he was as obsessed then as he got later.

When we were young, Mom was
always
there. Dad was there sometimes. I pined for his attention. All I wanted him to do was be around. It’s not that I didn’t value my mother just as much. I did, and I do. It’s just that she was always reliably there, so I didn’t
have
to pine for her.

Ken and I harbored an ambition to climb Longs Peak, a 14,255-foot mountain northwest of Boulder in Rocky Mountain National Park. The thirty-fifth tallest mountain in the United States, Longs Peak was first climbed in August of 1868 by John Wesley Powell, the explorer and former Union major who’d lost an arm at the battle of Shiloh.

Handicapped as he was, Powell did not attempt Longs Peak via its most famous feature, a sheer, 945-foot-high diamond-shaped rock face known, unsurprisingly, as the Diamond. As famous among rock climbers as El Capitán in Yosemite, the
Diamond is a fearsome natural barrier, especially if you decide to tackle it straight up.

We had no such intention. There’s a hiking trail to the top of Longs Peak that would have suited us just fine. However, each July when we came to Estes Park the trail was still closed by the previous winter’s snow. Park rangers wouldn’t let anyone up there.

We devised an alternative plan. We knew that professional guides took climbers up the Diamond, and that there were routes that even us rank amateurs could negotiate. Thus one bright day on our third or fourth summer at Estes brought me to the highway sign for the Colorado Mountain School, which I previously must have passed a zillion times without ever giving it a thought. As would anyone else so terrified of heights. I don’t like steep places at all, never have. If possible, I would have had my crib put on the floor.

Inside I walked, however, and picked up some brochures. After glancing through them with Ken, we decided to take a day of training in rock climbing, a day of ice and snow climbing and then we’d join a so-called technical climb of Longs Peak.

We showed up at the appointed hour for our introductory lesson to discover we were the only students in the class. Both of us were also fairly intimidated by our instructor, Mike Caldwell, a high school wrestling coach about my age who’d been a college gymnast at Berkeley, as well as a bodybuilder. Mike was a former Mr. Colorado. Even his earlobes had muscles.

Ken and I managed to keep our poker faces on as we drove with Mike out to Lumpy Ridge, which is right above Estes Park, and is an excellent rock-climbing area. He started us out with
the basics. “Here is a rope. This is a harness.” Then he familiarized us with the Tao of rock climbing, the use of your weight and balance, not your strength, to climb. In Mike’s case, I didn’t see where it mattered. He looked strong enough to pick up and throw the boulder I was trying to scale.

Of course there are times in rock climbing when you just have to pump it up and go. But you learn to climb with your feet, not your hands. A good climber doesn’t look up for a handhold, he looks down for a foot placement. And you need to keep your weight on top of your feet. It’s not realistic to think you are going to chin yourself up a hill.

Caldwell took us to a boulder about ten feet high to demonstrate some techniques. First was how to get a purchase on the rock. He pointed out a little crystal jutting perhaps an eighth of an inch from the surface, like a big button. He put his thumb over it, then wrapped two fingers over the thumb and pulled himself up until he could reach the top of the boulder with his free hand. Then he slowly rolled up onto it. Spiderman is no defter than that. He made it look like he could do it backward in his sleep.

We tried it, and pretty soon were more or less flinging ourselves at this rock. Scratched and bleeding, this was our introduction to “red chalk,” the mountaineering term for blood mixed with stone dust.

At one point I saw a bush growing out of the stone and grabbed it. “This is
rock
climbing,” said Mike with a disapproving glance. Ashamed, I let go of the plant.

The highlight of the day was to climb a couple of pitches, or two rope lengths—approximately 160 feet—up a rock face.

Most rock climbing involves installation of wedgelike devices into cracks in the rock. When you pull down on them, these doodads jam tightly and, presumably, are securely wedged. You then attach your rope to them, affording the person behind you a reliable connection to the rock face. If he slips, the wedge will break his fall. It will also keep you from being pulled off the mountain with him.

The rope of choice is mainly nylon, because nylon rope has high elasticity, which helps absorb some of the shock if you fall, sort of like the bungee effect. Nylon also is less likely than stiff line, such as steel cable, to rip out those little devices that keep you attached to the mountain.

The rock face angled up about seventy degrees above us, and the first move required going out over a 150-foot drop. Mike and Ken started up the pitch ahead of me and soon disappeared from view. Standing there by myself, eyeing that first move, I got a little cotton-mouthed. I
hate
heights. Not far away, another group was trying to do more or less what we were doing, but on a much gentler slope. I saw a middle-aged guy, whimpering like a baby, spread-eagle on a deal that looked about as dangerous as an escalator.

Why didn’t I get to go over there? I wondered.

But I did move out, and actually managed to get around the overhanging rock. My heart was pounding in my ears. I then started the next move and got about halfway through it when I couldn’t find a place to put my feet or anything to grab with my hands. Thirty seconds into my climbing career and suddenly I had the sickening sensation that I was about to head into outer space. Even though Mike had told me I probably was not going
to get hurt, and I trusted his word, that really was an act of faith. My body was crying, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”

Then it happened. I just came peeling off. The wedge above me held, to my abundant relief, and I dangled there for a while, about six or eight inches from the face, until I got myself reattached to the rock and managed to climb up this thing. When I got to the top and told Ken, he was angry that I’d fallen and he didn’t. I offered to kick him off the mountain, if he liked.

My major surprise about rock climbing was that while it is the most spectacular type of mountaineering, and can be very challenging physically, it is a pretty safe sport. You may break a few bones but, generally speaking, you are not apt to kill yourself. The obverse of this coin is that snowfield climbing, which looks pretty safe, if arduous, is in fact much more dangerous than rock climbing. Start to slide down one of those little slopes, and you are dead.

Not yet grasping that simple fact, Ken and I headed out the next day for our glacier training. We figured the hard and scary part was behind us. Imagine our amazement, then, when we met a fellow student, a woman, who confided she was deathly afraid of glacier climbing. I was about to reassure her in my manly way that Ken and I already had seen the little thing we were going out to, and that it wasn’t steep at all—nothing compared with the rock climbing we’d done yesterday.

Before I could make a fool of myself, however, she let on that she’d just climbed the Petite Grypon, which at that time I knew only from photos in a brochure. But they are all I had to see. The Petite Grypon is incredibly steep, essentially an eight-hundred-foot-tall vertical spire, a needle. I had assumed the only
way to get to the top of the thing was with a gun to your head in a helicopter.

Yet this experienced rock climber was telling us she was terrified of going out on that snow, that she’d already taken this particular class twice before. By the end of the day we understood why.

The core of the snow-climbing curriculum is self-arrests, how to stop yourself from skidding away no matter which way you fall—on your face or back, head up or head down. The key lies in correctly deploying your ice ax as a brake.

Mike made a snow bollard—a mound of snow around which he secured a rope—to act as our anchor. Tethered to the bollard, we then practiced the various ways of getting the ax underneath us as we slid, with one hand on the end of the ax and the other down on the shaft, and our weight pressing directly down on it. These were the do’s. The single imperative don’t was don’t ever let your feet dig into the hill. It is a natural instinct to do so. But if you do, and if you are wearing crampons, when they catch on the ice they will likely snap your leg or ankle or, just as bad, launch you into space.

The twenty-mile, approximately sixteen-hour guided climb of Longs Peak began at 2:00
A.M.
with a long hike to the bottom of Lamb’s Slide, an ice field of about one thousand feet named for Elkanah Lamb, an itinerant preacher who first negotiated the treacherous stretch in 1871. Big rocks routinely rumble down Lamb’s Slide. That morning, as I dashed to avoid one of them, I fell flat on my face.

At the top of Lamb’s Slide you move onto a traverse that takes you toward the Diamond. Here I encountered my first
taste of climber humor. The traverse is called Broadway, which most assuredly it is not. In some places on this trail, there are just a few inches of ledge. For a rookie climber such as myself, deathly afraid of heights, this was not ideal.

When you reach the edge of the Diamond, you then scramble up a relatively easy rock climb, rated 5.4, that takes you to the top, the very apex of the Diamond. At the time, it seemed quite difficult to me, although it’s actually a very easy climb. There, you must step from the mountain’s east face to its north face to go on, a two-or three-foot affair that would be no big deal except for the fact that you do your little jump over about 2,500 feet of clear air.

I had read about this step with fear and anticipation. Pacing back and forth in my cabin with the brochure, I began to slip around the hardwood floors. I looked down and realized that my feet, like my hands, were sopping with perspiration.

At the moment of truth atop Longs Peak I did not panic—thank goodness—and made my way back down the mountain without incident. It was a transforming moment. I was really frightened up there, yet I’d faced up to that terror and managed to come through it.

That night, a big restaurant dinner was planned for all the families. Ken and I, of course, were whipped, but too macho to admit that. So we got dressed and went to this nice restaurant, where I basically fell asleep, my face planted in the mashed potatoes. I was gone.

When we were first dating, but before I moved to Dallas, Beck had the Hobie Cat. Then he got a bigger Hobie Cat. I think I went out once with him.

After he sold it, we crewed with people in Dallas who had a boat. That was fun. I knew his dream was to someday sail around the world in a custom-built boat. That was fine with me. I knew I’d never go because it wouldn’t be air-conditioned.

But I did try to share his interest. We took boating lessons together in Fort Myers, Florida. Beck got his captain’s license, and I got some sort of certificate too. I thought, Okay, now we can charter a boat over spring break with the kids. But Beck found something else to do instead.

Next came ham radio. It was just a little hobby, and certainly an innocent hobby. I didn’t know
how
innocent until later. I don’t remember once trying to pull him away from it. But I do
recall that after he lost interest I asked if we could take down that tower. The neighbors didn’t like it. He said, “Oh, sure.”

The trips to Estes Park were fun. What I did not enjoy, however, was being given total responsibility for the kids. This is not a family vacation, I thought.

The one time I remember most clearly, he and Ken got up in the middle of the night to go climb. That evening, we were all going to have our annual meal at a nice restaurant. Beck told me that would be no problem. “Don’t worry. We’ll be back.”