Left for Dead (22 page)

In the spring of 1991, Beck and I and the children flew to Boston to revisit our first home. Beck had a meeting to attend as well. Afterward, we put Meg and Beck on the plane for Dallas, and then went back to our hotel. Beck said he needed to talk to me.

“I’m suicidal,” he disclosed. “And the problem is our marriage. I’m real unhappy and it is your fault.”

At this stage of our relationship, I was still willing to believe that. There wasn’t a night for five years that I had not cried about it, but I didn’t blame him. I was sure I was at fault for whatever was wrong. I asked him if he’d explain it to me.

“You’re not supportive of me,” he said. “You’re not supportive of my hobbies. I think you love me, but I don’t think you like me.”

That last sentence gave me pause. I wondered if it might be true.

I did tell her I was so damned depressed that I thought I was going to do myself in. But I don’t think I dumped my depression on her so much as I laid it open to her, revealed what was very, very difficult for me to reveal.

I didn’t see her problems with me as any kind of failure on her part. And I don’t recall ever feeling that the cause of my depression was our relationship. However, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if that is what she took away from that conversation.

I’d been hiding the fact I was miserable for a long time. But it was not my intention to say, “What’s wrong with us is you.” Or, “What’s wrong with me is you.”

I think he was looking for a way to ditch all of us.

That’s not true!

You said you were depressed, and that it was my fault.

I was suicidal. Peach told me that I needed help. Even though this was the last thing I would do on my own, I made an effort. I knew the wife of a colleague at the hospital was a psychiatrist, and I thought I could get some idea from her of who to talk to. She gave me a guy’s name.

This psychologist was terrified. Beck told him he was suicidal, and that two members of his family, a cousin and a great-uncle, had committed suicide, although he tried to justify it.

I wasn’t trying to justify anything. My cousin was a juvenile diabetic. I think my great-uncle was concerned about becoming a burden to somebody. He didn’t think he was going to be able to take care of himself. So he gave his gun to my father to clean, then took it back and shot himself. I did tell this psychologist that I always thought I’d die by my own hand.

Beck came back from seeing him and told me I had to go see him, too, because everything wrong was related to our marriage. So I went, and the guy seemed absolutely sure that Beck was going to kill himself. He said we had to get rid of all the guns in the house.

There was a shotgun, a .22 rifle, a .38 revolver, a .357 Magnum, a .22 pistol, a little Derringer and a pellet gun. They all went to the police, including the pellet gun, which I’d never quite thought of in that context.

Still, I feared for Beck, not so much because he was suicidal—that obviously was a concern—but because he couldn’t feel our
love. I felt enormous sadness that he didn’t like himself, and felt he had to prove himself. He couldn’t just go out and enjoy the sunrise and sunset. He couldn’t enjoy the little things. Beck could only proceed from goal to goal. That makes for a very unhappy person.

The order in which I chose the mountains to climb belies my claim of careful thought and planning. Denali was spontaneous folly. If I had been going about this business in a logical way, El Popo and Pico de Orizaba would have preceded it. In truth, my choices were dictated for the most part by the availability of a competently led expedition to a suitable peak at a convenient date. These factors in combination brought me in August of 1991 to Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus Mountains.

These were the dying days of the Evil Empire, and Moscow even in summertime was a cold, gray, dismal place. Bizarre, too. For instance, strict foreign-exchange restrictions complicated the simplest purchases. On a visit to Moscow’s Olympic Stadium I encountered a man selling lacquered boxes displayed on a blanket. After the usual haggling to set a price, he gave me my box and an empty cigarette pack and instructed me to walk around for a while before placing the agreed-upon amount of U.S. currency in the pack, which I was then to discard in some nearby bushes for him to retrieve.

The leader of our climbing group was an unusual character named Sergio Fitz Watkins, who claimed to be part Mexican, part Apache and part something else. Sergio was a handful. For some reason, he didn’t want to have his picture taken, nor was he into collegial relationships. Sergio let you know that he was the boss and you weren’t, and would go to extremes to dramatize his issues.

Sergio commonly began climbing days with the statement, “Today is a good day to die.”

People keep stealing my lines.

From Moscow we flew to the republic of Kabardino-Balkar, and were bused to a ski resort near the base of Mount Elbrus. At 18,481 feet, it is the tallest mountain in Europe. That’s the only reason I was there.

I remember along the way we made a pit stop at a shack that served as a comfort station, even though inside there was nothing but a dirt floor.

The hotel food was dreadful. One day for lunch we were served a pile of formless, colorless vegetables of some sort. Then I was given a slab of meat, except that it was not meat. It was a half-inch-thick, four-inch-wide slice of fat.

Our first night, I looked out my third-floor balcony to see a little kid standing on a four- or five-inch ledge, offering to sell me ice screws made of titanium from the nearby titanium mine, the largest in the world.

Then we all went looking for something to drink. In a country famous for its alcoholics, you’d think that would be a simple task.

Uh-uh.

There was no vodka or other strong drink available at our hotel, so we lit out with our packs to the
piva
store.
Piva
is Russian for “beer.” They give
piva
away on their airlines for one good reason: No one with a choice would ever pay for it.

They also have a thing they call wine, but it is easily mistaken for something a domestic animal with kidney problems might produce. So we loaded up at the
piva
store and came clanking back with our Russian beer.

The climb began with a ski-lift ride about a mile up the mountain to a round, metal-skinned hut that resembled an immense circular airstream trailer. Called Priut (Russian for “refuge”), the structure was built in 1939, just in time for the German army to shoot up the place on its marches to and from the Soviet oil fields on the Caspian Sea.

When we encountered Priut, the place was a pigsty. Water, if you dared drink it, had to be retrieved from the middle of a melt pool outside the front door. The latrine, ankle-deep in feces, lay just beyond. It was an act of grace when Priut was later destroyed in a gas fire.

We did one acclimatization hike, then arose the next night for the assault, which is a long slog up a snow trail. It was very cold. When we came to a saddle at about sixteen thousand feet, a young lawyer from Dallas looked like he was getting ready to lose consciousness. Another member of our group, a plastic surgeon from Atlanta, had a hell of a headache. So he and the lawyer headed back together, a perfectly fine plan except the kid then proceeded to take a big old dumper in his suit on the way down.

This was not at all what the brochure promised.

As the rest of us pushed on to the summit, I thought of a photo in my fellow Dallasite Dick Bass’s mountain-climbing memoir,
The Seven Summits
. It is a bronze head of Lenin, mounted on a wonderful pedestal at the very top of Elbrus. Eager to behold this memorial for myself, when we finally summitted I was instead reminded that this was, after all, the Soviet Union. The pedestal still stood, but Lenin’s likeness was long gone, a pipe wrench left in its place.

The customary post-climb celebration was held in Moscow in a huge room that looked like the hall of mirrors at Versailles. There was a big table right in the center, sumptuously laden with food, Russian champagne, pitchers of vodka, white and black caviar. It was an incredible meal.

There were other little tables all around the room. I assumed they were for other patrons, later. Sure enough, people did start coming in, most of them pairs of young women, who sat down and ordered aperitifs.

I thought, How nice! Muscovites out on the town! Then I realized that
all
of the tables had two young women each. Our big table began to disperse as various guys went to sit down with these gals. Slow as I am, I finally did figure out there was a second course to that meal—intercourse. They were all working girls.

No way was Spotless McFarland here going to hook up with one of these war brides, only to be taken aside and rubber-truncheoned by the KGB. But evidently such fears did not dissuade every member of our group. When I got back to our hotel, my roommate was missing in action.

Family vacations pretty much stopped when he started climbing. There were occasional days at the beach. We went to Cancun once, and he had to leave early. That changed the dynamic of the trip. When he left, everyone else was flat and unhappy. We ended up coming home a day early.