Left for Dead (6 page)

Doug kept climbing past two o’clock, then three o’clock and four o’clock, ignoring the risk. I don’t know why Rob let him do it. But when Doug finally reached all the way to the summit, it was a rerun of 1995. That’s all he brought with him. That’s all he had.

Now Rob Hall had a heck of a problem on his hands. He could not save Doug. He could not rescue him. Doug had to get down on his own legs.

Rob called down to Base Camp. He was told, “Rob, this is hard, but you have
got
to leave him. You cannot save him. Save yourself.”

It comes as no surprise to those of us who knew him that Rob could never do that, leave Doug alone on the mountain to save himself. If he did, Rob could never again look in the mirror.

So this father-to-be would damn himself if he did not, and be doomed if he did. He got back on the radio and said, “We’re in desperate trouble,” and asked for help. Young Andy Harris, who was about a third of the way down to High Camp and pretty much exhausted himself, heard this.

Andy, sapped by his exertions as well as an intestinal bug he contracted in Lobuje, turned and slowly labored his way back up that hill. He reached an oxygen cache and took several canisters all the way back to Doug and Rob near the summit. What happened next is unclear. However, hours passed as they tried to get Doug across the knife-edged summit ridge.

Rob and Andy made it to the South Summit, but Doug did
not. He apparently fell on the way. Andy stayed with Rob until sometime in the night when, disoriented and physically spent, he disappeared into the storm, never to be found.

Harris’s ice ax later was recovered near Rob’s body, suggesting that Andy had reached his limit. No climber readily surrenders his ice ax.

Rob lived through that night, but late the next afternoon, as darkness began to fall, when there was no longer any hope of a rescue, Base Camp called his wife, Jan, in New Zealand and patched her through to her dying husband. Everyone on that mountain with a radio bore silent witness to their last moments together. Hall had regained his faculties. He and Jan decided at that moment to name their unborn child Sarah.

Jan to Rob: “Don’t feel that you’re alone. I’m sending all my positive energy your way.”

Rob to Jan: “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.”

Both of them knew exactly what lay ahead. When those moments had passed and Rob no longer had to be strong, you could hear him quietly weeping as he faced his own death. He didn’t know the radio was still on.

The storm relented on the morning of the eleventh. The winds dropped to about thirty knots. Stuart Hutchison and three Sherpas went in search of Yasuko and me. They found us lying next to each other, largely buried in snow and ice.

First to Yasuko. Hutchison reached down and pulled her up by her coat. She had a three-inch-thick layer of ice across her face, a mask that he peeled back. Her skin was porcelain. Her eyes were dilated. But she was still breathing.

He moved to me, pulled me up, and cleaned the ice out of my eyes and off my beard so he could look into my face. I, like Yasuko, was barely clinging to life. Hutchison would later say he had never seen a human being so close to death and still breathing. Coming from a cardiologist, I’ll accept that at face value.

What do you do? The superstitious Sherpas, uneasy around the dead and dying, were hesitant to approach us. But Hutchison didn’t really need a second opinion here. The answer was, you leave them. Every mountaineer knows that once you go
into hypothermic coma in the high mountains, you never, ever wake up. Yasuko and I were going to die anyway. It would only endanger more lives to bring us back.

I don’t begrudge that decision for my own sake. But how much strain would be entailed in carrying Yasuko back? She was so tiny. At least she could have died in the tent, surrounded by people, and not alone on that ice.

Hutchison and the Sherpas got back to camp and told everyone that we were dead. They called down to Base Camp, which notified Rob’s office in Christchurch, which relayed the news to Dallas. On a warm, sunny Saturday morning the phone rang in our house. Peach answered and was told by Madeleine David, office manager for Hall’s company, Adventure Consultants, that I had been killed descending from the summit ridge.

“Is there any hope?” Peach asked.

“No,” David replied. “There’s been a positive body identification. I’m sorry.”

About four in the afternoon, Everest time—twenty-two hours into the storm—the miracle occurred: I opened my eyes. Several improbable, if not impossible, events would follow in succession. I would stand and struggle alone back to High Camp. Next day I’d stand again and negotiate the Lhotse Face. Then there would be the highest-altitude helicopter rescue ever. Those were the
big
things. The miracle was a quiet thing: I opened my eyes and was given a chance to try.

In my confused state, I at first believed that I was warm and comfortable in my bed at home, with Texas sunlight streaming in through the window. But as my head cleared I saw my glove-less hand directly in front of my face, a gray and lifeless thing.

I smashed it onto the ice. It bounced, making a sound like a
block of wood. This had the marvelous effect of focusing my attention: I am not in my own bed. I am somewhere on the mountain—I don’t know where. I can’t see at any distance, but I know that I am alone.

It would take a while to recapture the previous night in my mind. When I did, I assumed the others all were rescued and that for some reason I was overlooked, left behind. Was it something I said?

Innately, I knew that the cavalry was not coming. If they were going to be there, they already would have been there. I was on my own.

One mystery still unsolved is why I no longer was lying next to Yasuko. She remained where Stuart Hutchison and the Sherpas found, and left, us that morning. But I awoke from the coma alone and a good distance away that afternoon. I can only surmise that sometime between morning and late day I semi-revived and somehow made my way (perhaps fifty yards) in the direction of High Camp before collapsing again.

Somewhere in the midst of all this came another shock—my epiphany. Suddenly, my family appeared in my mind’s eye—Peach, Bub and Meg. This was not a group portrait or some remembered photo. My subconscious summoned them into vivid focus, as if they might at any moment speak to me. I knew at that instant, with absolute clarity, that if I did not stand at once, I would spend an eternity on that spot.

I thought I was inured to the idea of dying on the mountain. Such a death may even have seemed to me to have a romantic and noble quality. But even though I was prepared to die, I just wasn’t ready.

I struggled to my feet and took off my pack, discarding it
along with the ice ax. This was going to be a one-shot deal. If I don’t make that camp, I’m not going to need equipment, I decided. It would just slow me down. For a fleeting moment I reflected that these likely were my last earthly possessions.

I also realized at just that moment that I had to take a major-league leak. There was no choice but to let fly in my suit. At least that warmed me up, temporarily.

My first idea was to walk in a sort of grid. I started out in a succession of squares, searching for some landmark or way to orient myself. Soon, however, I realized that was getting me nowhere.

Then I recollected that the night before someone had yelled out during the storm, “What direction does the wind blow over High Camp?”

The answer was “It blows up that face, across the camp, across the Col.” Which meant that if the wind had not shifted, High Camp ought to be somewhere upwind.

So I chose that direction, feeling it was as good as any of the 359 other choices I had. If I fell down, I was determined to get up. If I fell down again, I would get up again. And I was going to keep moving until I fell down and could not stand or I walked into that camp, or I walked off the face of the mountain.

Both my hands were completely frozen. My face was destroyed by the cold. I was profoundly hypothermic. I had not eaten in three days, or taken water for two days. I was lost and I was almost completely blind.

You cannot sweat that small stuff, I said to myself. You have to
focus
on that which must be done, and do that thing.

I began to move in that same repetitive, energy-conserving
motion that my body knows so well. The ground was uneven, scattered with little ledges maybe five to eight inches deep that in the flat light of late afternoon were invisible to me.

Each time I encountered one of these hidden ledges, I would fall. At first, I instinctively put out my hands to break the fall, but I didn’t want to compound the effects of the frostbite by further damaging my hands, so I held them close to my body and tried to turn on my back, or on my side, each time I slipped and fell. I hit the frozen ground pretty hard.
Blam!
Each time there’d be this little light show in my head from the jolt. Then I’d get up and start again.

Part of me was apathetic, even accepting, a reprise of the previous afternoon up on the Balcony. The sun was going lower and lower, and I knew the second it was gone, I was gone, too. I’d lose the light, and the temperature would come screaming down. I had thoughts of falling one last time and not being able to get up and then just watching that sun set.

What surprised me about that realization was I was not at all frightened by it. I am not a particularly brave individual, and I would have expected myself to be terrified as I came to grips with that moment. But that was not what I felt at all.

No, I was overwhelmed by an enormous, encompassing sense of melancholy. That I would not say good-bye to my family, that I would never again say “I love you” to my wife, that I would never again hold my children, was just not acceptable.

“Keep moving,” I said to myself again and again.

I began to hallucinate again, getting awfully close to losing it. Things were really moving around.

Then I saw these two odd blue rocks in front of me, and I
thought for one moment, Those might be the tents! Just as quickly I said to myself, Don’t! When you walk up to them and they are nothing but rocks, you’re going to be discouraged and you might stop.
You cannot do that
. You are going to walk right up to them and you are going to walk right past them. It makes
no
difference.

I concentrated on these blue blurs, torn between believing they were camp and fearing they were not, until I got within a hundred feet of them—when suddenly a figure loomed up! It was Todd Burleson, the leader of yet another climbing expedition, who beheld a strange creature lurching toward him in the twilight.

Burleson later shared his first impressions of me with a TV interviewer:

“I couldn’t believe what I saw. This man had no face. It was completely black, solid black, like he had a crust over him. His jacket was unzipped down to his waist, full of snow. His right arm was bare and frozen over his head. We could not lower it. His skin looked like marble. White stone. No blood in it.”

Todd Burleson’s amazement stemmed in part from my appearance, and in part from the news he’d received that everyone above High Camp, including me, was dead.

He quickly recovered his composure, reached out and took me by the arm to the first tent—the dead Scott Fischer’s tent—where they put me into two sleeping bags, shoved hot water bottles under my arms, and gave me a shot of steroids.

“You are
not
going to believe what just walked into camp,” they radioed down to Base Camp. The response back was “That is fascinating. But it changes nothing. He is going to die. Do not bring him down.”

Fortunately, they didn’t tell me that.

Conventional wisdom holds that in hypothermia cases, even so remarkable a resurrection as mine merely delays the inevitable. When they called Peach and told her that I was not as dead as they thought I was—but I was critically injured—they were trying not to give her false hope. What she heard, of course, was an entirely different thing.

I also demurred from the glum consensus. Having reconnected with the mother ship, I now believed I had a chance to actually survive this thing. For whatever reason, I seemed to have tolerated the hypothermia, and genuinely believed myself fully revived. What I did not at first think about was the Khumbu Icefall, which simply cannot be navigated without hands. I was going to require another means of exit, something nobody had ever tried before.

They left me alone in Scott Fischer’s tent that night, expecting me to die. On a couple of occasions I heard the others referring to “a dead guy” in the tent. Who could that be? I wondered as I slipped in and out of wakefulness.

To complicate matters, the storm came roaring back, every bit as ferocious as the previous night. It shook that tent and me in it as if we were absolutely weightless. I remembered how Scott had talked about a new tent he was trying out, how it was an experimental, lightweight model, extremely flexible. I wondered if I was in that tent and, if so, how well it had been secured to the ground. The wind certainly was strong enough to blow me and the tent clear off the South Col.

With each gust it pressed so heavily on my chest and face that I couldn’t breathe. In the brief moments between the gusts, I rolled onto my side, eventually discovering that if I lay on my side, I could breathe even as the tent pressed down on me.

My right hand and forearm were less than useless in all this. They started to swell and discolor down to my wristwatch. I tried desperately to bite the thing off, but Seiko makes a darn good watchband, and I failed.

All the commotion and discomfort notwithstanding, I must
have lost consciousness repeatedly that night. I don’t remember the blizzard blowing out the doors and filling the tent with snow, but it did. I don’t remember being blasted out of my sleeping bag, but clearly I was, because that was how I found myself at dawn.

I can sort of understand why no one was able or willing to risk their lives to rescue Beck or Yasuko. I even sort of understand the medical edict from Base Camp that Beck should be left to die at High Camp. What I don’t understand is why they left him alone in that tent overnight.