Left for Dead (23 page)

After a while, my brother Howie, together with his wife, Pat, and daughter, Laura, would join the children and me on vacations. He wasn’t there to replace Beck. But it was wonderful to have Howie around to talk to. Also, he was always a treat for the kids. He’d dream up things to do for them, keep them entertained all day. This was something that Beck never did. Howie made a big difference in their lives, and mine, too.

Uncle Howie always came through Dallas on business trips, and he’d fix everything that was broken in our house. He fixed the basketball backboard, my dad’s shower and put in an underground drainage system for us.

He refused to see the bad side of me, and was supportive of everything I did. I mean, he and his wife, Pat, came all the way from Georgia to see me in my eighth-grade musical. He’d play dominoes with me—which I never really understood—and he brought me Pixy Stix, little colored tubes of, like, pure sugar.

Uncle Howie was the kind of guy who’d take my sister and me off our parents’ hands after dinner so they could relax
and enjoy themselves without having to worry about entertaining us.

When he came to town and went to work fixing things, he and I sometimes would go to the store to pick up any necessary parts and material. One particular time—I was about nine or ten—we needed to go to Target to find some automotive parts; Howie was going to repair one of our cars.

He didn’t know the directions to Target, but I thought I did and said so, even though my knowledge of Dallas at that time was a bit vague. I quickly got us lost.

We’d head one direction for a while, until it was clear to me we’d gone too far, then we’d U-turn and head back. Most people would have let me continue like this a time or two before pulling over to call my mom for help.

Howie didn’t. He patiently allowed me to figure it out for myself. Every time we had to make a U-turn, he’d make a joke and then drive in whatever direction I said. Eventually, we did make it to Target, and it meant the world to me that Howie believed enough in my ability to get us there.

I doubt that Beck even realized we were taking vacations without him, much less that Howie and his family were now coming along, too. Beck was totally wrapped up in himself. I remember one time when I was feeling desperate, there was an $88 round-trip super-cheap flight to New Orleans. Our friends the Ketchersids were going to go with us, except Beck couldn’t possibly leave work early Friday afternoon to catch the flight.
Then we discovered he had the week off and didn’t even know it. I was furious with him.

The only thing he was aware of was his climbing. He became very odd. His attitude was “You don’t bother me with anything. Kids. Problems. Anything.”

In January of 1992, I headed south again, this time to Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes. At 22,831 feet, Aconcagua is the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere, and the sixty-third tallest peak in the world. All the taller hills are in Asia.

The novelist Trevanian maligns Aconcagua in his thriller
The Eiger Sanction
as “a vast heap of rotten rock and ice. It destroys men, not with the noble counterstrokes of an Eigerwand or a Nanga Partbat, but by eroding a man’s nerve and body until he is a staggering, whimpering maniac.”

Trevanian’s right. Aconcagua is a nasty place. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to climb it more than once.

I signed on with Mountain Travel-Sobeck, the same California outfit that had organized the Elbrus climb, and was thus reunited with the prickly Señor Watkins, who on this occasion was considerably less demonstrative, possibly because he had contracted a nasty virus. He wouldn’t make it to the top.

You fly first to Buenos Aires. From there, the next stop is the mountain city of Mendoza, which proved a culture shock for me. Training for the climb, I’d been rising at 4:00
A.M.
and going to bed at 7:30
P.M.
You couldn’t buy
lunch
at 7:30
P.M.
in
Mendoza. I saw people out walking around with their families until two and three in the morning.

We drove in a pickup to a partially completed ski resort, where our gear was loaded onto mules for the twenty-mile trek to Aconcagua Base Camp. As we headed out on foot, we passed the climbers’ cemetery. They were packed in there pretty tight.

At the end of the scruffy dirt trail was Plaza de Mulas, sort of the local Lobuje equivalent. Instead of yaks you got mules, and mule dung was everywhere. Unlike Lobuje, there were no permanent structures at Plaza de Mulas. We encountered a hundred or so people of widely varying experience and seriousness—I saw one woman dressed in a pink snowsuit carrying her little poodle—all formed into a haphazard tent village.

There was a small watering hole, similar to what they call a tank in Texas, which seemed to serve a variety of communal uses, from drinking to washing to excretion. You got the impression that no one was particularly concerned about disease. You also wanted to be very careful not to face the wind with your mouth open. There was so much toilet paper floating around in the air—Aconcagua snowbirds—that you risked sucking up a wad of it.

Plaza de Mulas was sickness waiting to erupt, and we did not want to linger in that swamp a moment longer than necessary. As it was, one member of our group developed the pestilential hellhole trots and had to be removed by emergency helicopter.

My most dramatic recollection of the place had nothing to do
with filth and disease, however. We were standing around one day when suddenly there came a deep rumble in the distance. I looked up to see a huge waterfall where there had been nothing two seconds before. An enormous river was thundering down the face of the mountain. You could see the waves rolling along, glistening in the sun.

Then as I looked at it more closely, I realized the torrent wasn’t water at all, but rock! This whole mass flowing just like whitewater rapids actually
was
rock, a
huge
rock slide flowing along a couple hundred feet from us.

We didn’t get very far up Aconcagua before Sergio let us know he was too sick to continue. Halfway to the top, we came to a flat open area and a little hut, where we encountered a group of climbers on their way down. As it happened, they, too, were a Mountain-Sobeck group, led by Ricardo Novallo Torrez, a guide distinguished for being the first Mexican to summit Everest.

Sergio announced that he was packing it in at this point, leaving our group in the questionable care of his second-in-command, a Peruvian named Augusto Ortega, who didn’t speak much English. Torrez, although he’d already climbed Aconcagua and was whupped, saw that the job of taking us up was probably too much for Ortega. He volunteered to accompany the group as far as High Camp, whence the Peruvian would shepherd us the rest of the way to the summit and back.

When the wind picked up and the ambient temperature plummeted, some of the less experienced among us reasonably began to worry about frostbite and their general inability to keep warm. I lacked their commonsense approach to this deepening
discomfort. Having been pinned to the top of Denali when it was unhappy, I knew there was a whole other level of cold beyond this point that was well within my comfort range.

No surprise, then, that when we started out for the summit together, we were a herd of turtles. Soon realizing that the eight of us would never make it to the top at that speed, the group retreated into High Camp for a parley. Half the climbers wanted to quit. I and three other guys wanted to try again. So that is what we did.

One of those who headed back down the mountain was my tent mate, an old guy who absentmindedly took with him my single eating utensil, a spoon. Since the dog-food gruel we consumed on the mountain required an instrument for shoveling it into your mouth, I went outside in search of a suitable replacement.

Nosing around, I spied a metal handle sticking out of the snow. I grabbed it, braced myself, shouted, “Excaliber!” and gave a good yank. Out popped a fork, missing a tine or two, but perfectly usable. I wiped it under my armpit and returned to the tent, once again a functioning member of the final four.

Well after dark that night, probably around ten o’clock, an improbable visitor showed up. He was Marty Schmidt, a New Zealander, who’d just guided two policemen up and down the mountain.

“Hey! Anybody there?” Marty shouted. He was in his climbing gear and sneakers. “Can I borrow some boots?” Marty also had a bicycle over his shoulder.

We loaned him the boots and off he went. About five or six the next morning, Marty came back, without the bicycle. He returned
the boots, put his sneakers back on and walked back to Plaza de Mulas to rejoin his two clients.

As we later learned, the story of Marty’s remarkable double climb of Aconcagua—he hadn’t slept in two days—actually began at a hellacious stretch called the Caneletta, a huge, forty-five-degree hill of dirt and loose rock just below the summit.

Schmidt and the policemen had discovered a bicycle strewn in pieces all over the Caneletta: a wheel here, pedals there, handlebars somewhere else. I don’t know if Marty pondered the mystery behind this unlikely discovery. But being a practical person, he gathered all the parts, assembled them, put the machine on his back and carried it down with him.

Now here’s the surprise. When he got to Plaza de Mulas with the bike, a complete stranger accosted him, angrily, accusing him of stealing his bicycle!

“What do you mean, stealing your bicycle?” Marty asked. “There were parts lying all over the mountain.”

It turned out that this guy had been paying people to carry the bike up Aconcagua, one piece at a time. Once all the parts were up there, he intended to assemble the vehicle and then ride it down from the summit. He might even have had a sponsorship. Who knows?

Nonplussed, Marty proposed a solution.

“Okay, I’ll make you a deal,” he told the guy. “Stop screaming at me for stealing your bicycle and I will take it back to where I got it.”

That’s what he did that night. Schmidt carried the bike all the way back nearly to the summit, disassembled it in the dark, strewed the pieces around, and then climbed down again. It
was, among other things, a physical tour de force. Marty Schmidt is a very strong climber.

Next day, weather conditions had not improved, but now only four of us and Augusto were heading up the trail. At no point had this been a pretty or even interesting climb, but when we finally reached the Caneletta, I understood why Trevanian so fiercely loathes Aconcagua.

The Caneletta may be the most miserable natural incline on earth. You can’t go up it quickly, because you can’t get enough breath. But if you go too slowly, it slides out from under you.

The trick is to move from rock to rock, looking for one with some traction. When you hit a magic stone that doesn’t move, you stand there gasping for air long enough to get your heart out of your throat and back into your chest. Then you move on, often losing three steps for every one you gain, and you do this for a number of hours. It is not fun.

Three days were needed to climb from Plaza de Mulas to High Camp, plus an added overnight for our second assault, and then another day to get back down. I had been training very hard, however, and could feel the cumulative effect of all that work.

I felt really good after summiting Aconcagua. I was ahead of the pack on the way down, and got to a place where a finger of rock sits on the traverse that heads across to the Caneletta. I stopped for some water and M&M’s.

An Australian in our group came along behind me and fell over on his back, as if he were dead. Finally, he rose on an elbow and said to me, “Are you in as good a shape as you seem to be? Or are you just taking better drugs than the rest of us?”

We probably wouldn’t have stay married but for the kids. Children really need two parents. They need balance in their lives. They need fathers to roll around on the floor and horse around with them. Learning how to play is important. Both of my kids are fairly cautious. They didn’t have anybody to tell them to take risks, take chances, be physical.

You also have to understand that no one in my family has ever been divorced. No one. The word was not in my vocabulary. I thought of divorce as a failure—a major one.

I remember my mother telling me stories about old Miz So-and-So. Her husband used to run around on her but she stuck with him, she said, and now he’s sick and they’re together. It’s nice to be old and have somebody.

Something else occurred to me then. You
ought
to know that you have to work on a marriage. One of my friends, Victoria Bryhan, is locally famous for a remark she made while we were discussing somebody who was getting a divorce.

“Why is she getting divorced?” Victoria asked. “She’ll just marry another man.”

That is the truth.

My friends became a great source of strength to me. Victoria and Pat White and Linda Gravelle. Mary Ann Bristow (who also has family in Georgia), Marianne Ketchersid and Cecilia Boone. There were lots of them, mostly mothers of children who went to school with my children. We saw a lot of each other. Somehow, this sisterhood emerged, which is interesting since I had no sisters as a child, and didn’t even join a sorority in college.