Left for Dead (25 page)

Beck went through this incredible process of transforming his body from that of a mild-mannered pathologist to a world-class mountain climber. He had been a slight guy who spent a great deal of time indoors looking at slides. Over time, however, he transformed his chest and arms and legs. I’ve never seen anybody work as hard at anything in my whole life.

One of my favorite authors, Dan Jenkins, in his book
Baja Oklahoma
, outlined what he called “Mankind’s Ten Stages of Drunkenness.” I went over the top as a mountaineer when I achieved the final two stages, “Invisible” and “Bulletproof.”

What I forgot was Jenkins’s closing thought: “That last stage was about certain to end a marriage.”

He’d work out all day, and I’d never see him. Then he’d go and climb these mountains for weeks at a time. It was really kind of hard on me, just because I missed my dad and I wished he was here.

I never really noticed when he was gone, because he was absent when he was here. He’d come home at six-thirty, eat, unwind and go to bed.

Beck got up at four in the morning to exercise, and had to be in bed by eight o’clock at night. It was very boring. We had no social life.

It was about this time that Beck decided Peach needed a passionate interest, that her life must be pretty flat, and that was why his mountain climbing bothered her so much. This was not a good approach for him to take.

Beck was never available to do anything with me or the kids. It just didn’t interest him. Then he started saying that I had to have a hobby, an interest. In other words, he felt I was unhappy because I wasn’t doing anything fulfilling.

I discussed with Ken Zornes my thought that Peach would be happier if she had some interest that I could understand. She’s a
very bright and capable person. I thought that if she developed a passion it would also give me a better grasp of how she worked.

We weren’t doing great. I thought she should know it was great by me if she had more opportunities to do things that stimulated her. Maybe that would bring us together.

Or get Beck off the hook.

I thought about what he said, that I couldn’t be happy just taking care of the kids. And I thought to myself, I’ve got to find something to make me happy. Then one day came a big realization. I
am
happy to be taking care of the kids. Leave me alone.

After that whenever he brought up the subject of hobbies for me I’d say, “Leave me alone. I’m perfectly happy. I don’t consider myself to be a dull, dim person.”

It was becoming increasingly difficult for me to focus on anything but climbing. By now, mountaineering was a full-blown obsession.

Two of the Seven Summits already were behind me, Elbrus and Aconcagua. At some point, I’d have to try Denali once more. Then besides Everest there was the Vinson Massif in Antarctica; Kilimanjaro in Africa and the Carstensz Pyramid in Irian Jaya, the Indonesian province on the west side of New Guinea.

The Carstensz Pyramid was a late-substitute addition to the
Seven Summits Quest. When Dick Bass first climbed them in the 1980s, Australia was represented by Mount Kosciusko, an unprepossessing 7,314-foot bump in New South Wales. In order to replace Kosciusko with a more worthy challenge—the Carstensz Pyramid—the Canadian photojournalist Pat Morrow (the second person after Dick Bass to complete the Seven Summits Quest) successfully lobbied to have Australia redefined as the Australo-Asian Tectonic Plate, or something like that, which subsumes New Guinea.

Of the five mountains I had yet to address, Everest was easily the toughest target, but the Vinson Massif and the Carstensz Pyramid presented unique and special problems, too. The former is the most physically remote and inaccessible of the seven summits, reachable only for a brief period of time around January each year, and then via a single expedition company. As I would discover, lots of things can go wrong on Antarctica.

The Carstensz Pyramid was a challenge of a different sort. At that particular time, Irian Jayans unhappy with their Indonesian overlords had formed into guerrilla groups and were considered a possible menace to the likes of me wanting to climb Carstensz—which they call Puncak Jaya, “Mount Victory.”

So, I decided that my next major destination would be the bottom of the world.

Fun facts about Antarctica: At 5,100,000 square miles, it is the fifth largest continent after Asia, Africa and the Americas, and about twice the size of Australia. It has the highest average elevation of any continent, mainly because most of Antarctica is buried under about six thousand feet of ice. In some places the ice is more than two miles thick. No surprise, then, that Antarctica has the most fresh water (frozen, of course) of any continent.

According to one estimate, if all that ice were to melt, the world’s oceans would rise fifteen to twenty feet.

Adíos, Miami.

Yet Antarctica also has the driest climate on earth, much drier even than the Sahara.

Nothing the unaided eye would recognize as a living thing exists in the continental interior. Antarctica is a frozen desert. Its tallest peak, the 16,860-foot Vinson Massif (named for that intrepid Georgia congressman Carl G. Vinson) in the Ellsworth Mountains, wasn’t identified until 1957, or climbed until 1966. At the time of my visit, January 1993, only fifteen previous expeditions—probably fewer than fifty people—had reached Vinson’s summit.

“Antarctica,” warned a brochure, “is one of the most inhospitable regions of the planet. The logistical problems are enormous, the weather highly unpredictable and tempestuous. Distances are immense, and facilities scarce. Safety and self-sufficiency are paramount concerns.”

This is the list of gear I took for the climb:

For my feet:

For my body:

For my head:

For my hands:

Pack:

Technical equipment:

Personal gear:

The expedition began with a flight to Santiago, Chile, and then on to Punta Arenas, a community of approximately 100,000 situated at about 54 degrees south latitude on the Strait of Magellan in Chilean Patagonia. Punta Arenas sometimes is called the Earth’s southernmost city.

Civilian access to Antarctica is strictly controlled. About the only way to get there is via Adventure Network International
(ANI), a Canadian-owned company formed in 1985. My guide, Martyn Williams of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was an ANI co-founder, along with Pat Morrow.

Besides our group heading for the Vinson Massif, ANI also was providing transportation and logistical support to three other expeditions on the ground, or rather ice, in Antarctica.

One was the American Women’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition. These women brought parachutes with them, hoping that if the wind was right they could open them and skim along on their skis that way. That plan didn’t work. They made it to the South Pole, but then had to return to Patriot Hills, the staging base in Antarctica for ANI.

Likewise, three Japanese adventurers trying to get to the South Pole didn’t, and returned with frostbitten cheeks, a condition with which I’d later become familiar.

Then there was Erling Kagge, a thirtyish Norwegian whose fairly audacious plan was to cross from the coast to the South Pole alone and unaided on cross-country skis, making about forty or fifty kilometers a day. The staple of Kagge’s diet was to be raw bacon, which has the highest caloric return of any kind of food. Bacon, at least theoretically, is ideal fuel for someone moving rapidly across a flat frozen expanse, dragging along behind him a sled weighing about 350 pounds. The trick, I was told, is to eat a little bit of bacon all the time. You cannot sit down to a big happy meal of it, even if you wanted to. Kagge kept his in a little pouch on his belt, and constantly chewed the stuff as he went along.

Eskimos, of course, eat blubber, which fires their engines in much the same way bacon did Kagge’s. If you think that near
the close of the millennium someone might have come up with something a bit more palatable, more high-tech than raw pork for Kagge, at least it sounds no worse than “hoosh,” a vile melange that was the standard food for arctic explorers for decades. According to a recipe provided by Malcolm Browne in
The New York Times
, hoosh was a stew of seal or penguin meat, mixed with lard, flour, cocoa, sugar, salt and water. The tasteless freeze-dried mulch and cardboard I consumed on most of my mountain expeditions was ambrosia by comparison.

Kagge made it to the South Pole. He’d already conquered the North Pole. In 1994, he summited Everest with Rob Hall, and made a little bit of history by doing a live radio broadcast from the highest point on Earth.

Martyn Williams would be leading me and Barbara Gurtler, a petite and compact grandmother from St. Louis. There also were two other two-person expeditions joining us for the climb. One was the team of Charlotte Fox and Nola Royce, a school administrator and former competitive bodybuilder from upstate New York. They were in the care of Skip Horner, a Montanan who was the first person ever to guide all Seven Summits. Also on board was Sandy Pittman, who was climbing with a male friend, Chris Kinnen. Their guide was Pete Athans.