Left for Dead (27 page)

In most of our conversations, if you could call them that, she beat on me incessantly. I’d never seen anybody fight. My parents never fought. So when Peach showed her anger, I’d withdraw, which made her feel even worse. She’d come back at me even harder.

Eventually I’d get thoroughly ticked off and we’d argue. But mostly I’d be silent. She’d come right out and say what bothered her. I just could not do that. I wasn’t very good at it at all. I’d shut down—withdraw. My stomach would go into knots for days. And we’d just keep going over the same territory.

Luckily, our parents did not include my brother or me in this. I only remember one mountain-climbing discussion. There was a lot of tension. My mother said something like “If you climb another mountain I’ll divorce you.” Then they both noticed that I’d come into the room and they didn’t say anything else.

It wasn’t a family topic. They talked about it on their own time. Obviously, there was some tension, but I didn’t choose sides. Nor did either one of them try to make us choose sides.

Peach and Beck kept their differences to themselves. She came to us, her friends, when she needed to talk, but you never felt any conflict in the Weathers house. Peach is very good at making people feel at home. She set the emotional tone of the household, and Beck followed.

We went to dinner one time with Beck’s parents, and afterward I played with his head a little bit. I asked, “Why do you never disagree with your parents on any issue?”

He answered, “I can’t disagree with them out of love and respect. You just don’t do that.”

I kept digging at him. “Well, Beck,” I said, “how are they ever going to know what you really think?”

He didn’t respond. Not long afterward, Beck and his mother
got into a humongous political argument. I think it was over President Clinton. I left the room, but our son stayed to listen. Later he told me, “Mama, I felt so sorry for Mimi”—my children call their grandmother Weathers Mimi—”because Daddy just pounded her.”

I said, “Don’t feel sorry. He’s doing this because he can’t tell her that he doesn’t want a red sweater. He’s her product.”

I didn’t understand why we couldn’t manage to be more happy together, given that we had no external problems. We had great kids. My work was going fine. We didn’t have any grand debts. There were none of the obvious kinds of triggers that get people at each other.

The second counselor we went to was as useless as the first.

After we’d talked at length, over several weeks, about Beck withdrawing from the family, physically and emotionally, he said, “Well, there are people who don’t need people, who just like to be by themselves. I think Beck’s one of those.”

That did us absolutely no good. The truth of the matter is that there’s something wrong with people who stay by themselves. That’s why we call them loners. I didn’t understand why this guy couldn’t see that Beck was depressed.

As I’m sitting there with my hair falling out, he went on. “You need to share. You need to share and unload on each
other.” Looking across the desk at him, I was thinking, “I believe you are not even in the same universe with us.”

If anything, this guy reinforced me. He certainly said it was okay for me to take off. “Follow your own heart! Go for the dream.” Great!

That week of fearing and not knowing if Beck was alive or dead was a watershed in a couple of ways. The mountaineering went from something I disliked to something that I hated. A part of me felt, If he cared about the kids and me at all, how could he possibly do this? Beck contended that he loved us, and it never occurred to me that he couldn’t love the kids. Maybe me, but not them.

The other part of this was that he would neither release us nor embrace us. From Antarctica forward, it would have been real easy for him to get a divorce. Real easy.

I made some changes. I stopped blaming myself for our problems and started putting the blame where it belonged. I now saw that what Beck was doing was simply unfair. Oddly, I had always been the trusting one. Never had any reason not to be. Beck, of course, never trusted anyone. But after Antarctica that changed. I better take care of myself, I thought, because no one else is going to.

I became self-contained. It really wasn’t that difficult. I just planned my own schedule.

One of my pet delusions at this time was that no matter how bad it got with Peach, it would be okay once I’d gone to Everest, whether or not I got to the top. I’d be okay, and everything could return to normal. In all honesty, if I’d summited Everest, I would have zipped right back and bombed up and down McKinley. I would not have been able to leave the Seven undone. That would have been too close. But at that point, I would not have climbed again. I sincerely believed that. I also believed we still could make the marriage work. I’d never divorce Peach. If we were split up, she’d have to do it. I still loved her, and there was no way I’d give up my children.

Part of the reason Beck climbed mountains was that he craved attention. There are some people who do things very quietly. You really have to extract information from them. With Beck, it was about the only thing he’d talk about.

There was working out, the next climb, what you were going to do, where you were going to go. At cocktail parties, whatever the subject, he’d bring the conversation around to what his next little project might be. You could almost see peoples’ eyes roll back into their heads as they tried to get away from him.

It is boring to hear people talk about themselves. Beck didn’t catch that. Beck did not read other people. He wasn’t aware of their feelings.

I think some people were truly interested when he started talking about it. I’m not sure they still were after an hour. Of
course, if you get Beck started on
anything
you can get at least half an hour. Pap smears, for example, are a subject he can go on about at length—and does.

It’s not like Beck to brag. I think he was really engrossed in it. I remember one time at a party, I was mad at him for being so stupid. Then he started talking about climbing. I got caught up in it. He was describing something that most of us don’t have the chance to experience. It was spellbinding, because he is a good storyteller. I got sucked in despite myself. I could see the allure for him. I could see how the mountains could pull him. I guess I forgave him a little bit.

The Carstensz Pyramid, named for a Dutch navigator who first spied the peak, is a thirty-pitch rock climb, not a high-grade technical challenge.

There are areas of exposure, sort of like the step you do on Longs Peak, from the east face to the north face. You have to let go of something, and just sort of step out straight into the void to make a long and very committing step to another wall. Otherwise, the only problem is rain, which can considerably heighten any climb’s degree of difficulty.

Irian Jaya, an Indonesian province since the 1960s, is among the least explored corners of the Earth. There are large portions of the New Guinea highlands that are described on maps only as “obscured by clouds.” It wasn’t until fairly recently that
everyone finally agreed the Carstenz Pyramid is 16,500 feet (more or less) tall.

Our November 1994 expedition was led by Skip Horner. We flew to the little island of Biak, near Irian Jaya, and then over to New Guinea itself, where we spent one night in the town of Nabire. Since we were near sea level and only a couple of degrees off the equator, it was very hot, but not as humid as Katmandu.

Accommodations in Nabire were not modern. We had running water only in the sense that our bathrooms were outfitted with vats that you filled from a cold water tap. You showered by dipping a bucket in your vat, which drained through a hole in the floor and out into an open sewer. The same hole in the floor served as your toilet.

A trip to secure some cash turned out to be a novel experience. Apparently, counterfeiting is a major industry in that part of the world, so that money handlers are keenly vigilant to avoid accepting bogus bills.

The local bank we tried to patronize would accept only crisp, new notes. If the paper money you handed them to exchange appeared ever to have been put to its intended use, they wouldn’t accept it. Breaking a U.S. $50 bill required an hour of patient waiting as various people walked in and out of the room to stare at the note, turn it over, ponder its authenticity.

From Nabire we flew in a chartered plane back in time to Ilaga, a little airfield on a jungle plateau adjacent to the village of Dani. One of several New Guinean Stone Age tribes, the Dani go barefoot, wear penis gourds and grass skirts and bones in their noses—reputedly, they once were ritual cannibals—and appear to have descended down a very straight family tree.

Every kid had some sort of upper-respiratory infection, and as far as I could tell the national bird was the fly.

Not a lot seemed to go on in the village, so we were a welcome diversion. They were fascinated by anything electronic. A chance to look over a wristwatch with an LCD readout was like a ticket to the Super Bowl for them. The kids would walk up one at a time and stare at my arm and then wander off. It was the neatest thing they’d ever seen.