Seven Summits (11 page)

“Bass, I’ve been getting reports about how you've been carrying all these heavy loads. I’m proud of you.”

Dick swelled up like a male grouse on display. “Marty, you don't know how much your compliment means to me.”

“I’d have to be blind to miss that. You haven't forgotten about our deal have you? We're still going to the top, you know, me and you.”

“Marty, I don't know. I think when the moment of truth comes there may only be room for a few selects on the summit teams and you'd have a lot better chance with someone more experienced.”

“No way. Deal's a deal.”

“We'll see when the time comes, but whatever God wills I want you to know I appreciate your still wanting to take me.”

“How's everyone else? Seen Lou?”

“We came up to three together yesterday. Paid me a heck of a compliment, said I handled the rope better than anyone he'd been tied to this trip. But then that's because I had a good teacher.”

Marty smiled. Dick continued. “Then we tented together, and his appreciation waned when I started to recite poetry. He kind of rolled over and cold-backed me. Guess he didn't want a large-mouthed Bass laying a poem on him at 23,000 feet.”

“His problem. What poem?”

“Well, I’ve put Lasca to memory.”

“Lasca! Bass, you know that's my favorite, well, one of my favorites. I’ve got the Xerox of “Evolution” you gave me in my pack. Boy, Lasca is a lot to memorize. I don't see how you did it.”

“Unless you can sleep fourteen hours a day there's a lot of time lying awake in your sleeping bag.”

“Think you could recite it now?”

“Thought you'd never ask.”

Although there was no audience on the climb he would have preferred to Marty, he also knew how much she loved the poem so he made a silent prayer he didn't screw up. He recited it, though, without missing a word of the poignant story told by a cowboy of his half-breed woman who gave her life to save him in a cattle stampede.

Marty was thrilled.

“Dick, do those last lines again.”

Dick recited the last lines over:

“And I wonder why I do not care

For the things that are like the things that were.

Does half my heart lie buried there

In Texas, down by the Rio Grande.”

Marty pursed her lips and fought back a tear. “Thanks Dick. That was great.”

She turned and continued down the rope, and Dick noticed she was wearing those lapis earrings, and they matched her blue babushka.

Camp 5 was established at the base of the Great Couloir. After several days rest, Marty was back up the mountain, and with some of the others started the effort to establish camp 6 at about 26,500 feet. Once that camp was in and sufficiently stocked they would be in position for the first summit attempt. The team for that first effort was now chosen: Larry Nielson (the team member with perhaps the strongest physical endurance), Jim Wickwire, Marty Hoey. Dick and Frank were both excited for Marty; she was now in position to accomplish her dream of becoming the first American woman on top of Everest.

Meanwhile Dick had stayed in camp 3, each day humping loads up to 4, and now Frank moved up to join him. There was a third person in camp 3, Steve Marts, a Seattle-based climber and documentary filmmaker who was a one-man cinematography team shooting and recording a 16 mm film of the expedition. Both Frank and Dick had been impressed watching Marts, using a camera with a sound recorder strapped on and a microphone attached to the top, single-handedly get synced-sound coverage of the expedition, including the climbing up to about 25,000 feet.

This was the first time since his illness that Frank had seen Dick, and as Marts was crowded by himself in the cook tent, Frank moved in with Dick. They were both pleased at the chance to share time together. They were the neophytes, the outsiders in a sense. Conversation relating to sex and mountains was interesting enough, but nevertheless they both had other common interests which they enjoyed talking about.

But while they shared much, they were also very different from each other in some significant ways. Dick was open and gregarious, while Frank had a certain brusqueness that kept people at bay. Then, too, the pair were opposites when it came to the way they organized their lives. Frank was a delegating generalist, Dick the finicky, nitpicking do-it-himself type. Finally, they were at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Frank was a flaming liberal, Dick the arch conservative. And that led to some lively badinage during the many weeks they spent sleeping in the same two-man tent.

“Frank, what I don't understand is why you can't be more intellectually honest about human nature and get past your bleeding heart advocacy of socialism.”

“I don't advocate socialism. I advocate social welfare.”

“Welfare! The only way you'll help man is to get man to help himself.”

Steve Marts, listening in his nearby tent, thought, Boy, these two really are The Odd Couple.

“Look,” Dick continued, “it's not the duty of the government to support the people, but rather the duty of the people to support the government.”

“You got to admit, though, Kennedy was more eloquent.”

“But he didn't practice what he preached. Frank, I’m telling you, you're wearing blinders. Now I figure you and I have a lot of tent time coming up together if we're going to do these Seven Summits, and by golly if there's one thing I want to accomplish it's to turn you around politically.”

Now Marts yelled over, “What's Seven Summits?”

Other than Marty, Frank and Dick really hadn't discussed their Seven Summits dream with anyone. It wasn't that they wanted to keep it a secret as much as they felt sheepish talking about such a bold plan in front of some of the world's best climbers, especially when they themselves were such amateurs. But now that the cat was out of the bag they saw no harm in describing the project to Marts.

“Come on over here and we'll explain it,” Dick said.

Dick told Marts about the plan, and when he finished he suddenly had an idea. He was annoyed it hadn't occurred to him earlier, but here he was about to commit a great deal of time, risk, and money and he ought to have a film of it, if for no other reason than to show it to his children and grandchildren, and to remember his adventures once he was an old man. He visualized how it would be when he was ninety-five. He'd be in a rocker, and all he'd have to do was push a button and a screen would come down and the movie would start, and he'd rock back and forth pointing at the screen yelling, “Look at that boy go.”

“Marts, by golly, we've got to film the Seven Summits!”

Marts didn't say anything for a moment. Dick could tell he was mulling the idea over. Then he answered, “Dick, that's a fantastic story line. I mean it's commercial: two businessmen at age fifty either give up or jeopardize their successful careers to try to climb the highest peak on each continent. Do you realize with a film you could pay for your climbs?”

“You've got to be kidding!”

“Not only that, but you'd be a folk hero.”

Dick nearly gagged at that.

“Marts, you're full of B.S.”

“No, I mean it.”

“You really think so?” Dick then looked over to Frank, who was reading a book. “What do you think, Frank?” “It'll never sell.”

“Wells, sometimes you're such a wet blanket. What do you mean?”

“First, it's hard as hell to even make your money back on an expensive documentary. Second, we're probably going to have to climb Everest in the wrong sequence. Our most likely chance is to hook up with one of the groups going next spring, and that means the drama will be backwards. You want the hardest to come last, so it climaxes. The way we're doing it, we go up Kosciusko last, and that's a hike up a trail to only 7,300 feet. In fact, there's a gravel highway going up it. The whole thing's scripted wrong.”

“Frank, I’ve been telling you what my life is like back home, with people always telling me I can't do this or that, dampening my enthusiasm, and here I am at 24,000 feet on the side of Mount Everest and the same thing's following me up here. Now you might be some great Hollywood movie mogul but that doesn't mean you know everything about this stuff, and Marts here, who has years of experience in this documentary business, says it will go over like gangbusters. He even says we'll be folk heroes.”

Frank smiled condescendingly and went back to his book, but Dick wasn't about to give up.

“You've got to think positive. There's a solution to this getting the sequence in order.”

While Frank read, Dick lay thinking of possible solutions and forgot the time. He looked at his watch and said, “Darn, forgot to turn on the radio for the afternoon call. I wanted to get news on how they're doing above.”

“We'll get the morning call,” Frank said, and went back to his book. Dick slept hardly at all that night, pondering the film problem; at first light he shook Frank.

“I got it,” Dick said.

“Got what?”

“Got how to end this film. How we're going to climb Kosciusko last and still have a great ending. You and I’ll put on running shorts with packs on our backs and we'll jog up there—that'll give it some interest—and while we're doing that we'll have had our wives and best friends flown over there and get the longest black limos we can find and they'll be in tuxes and evening dresses, see, and while you and I are jogging up the road they'll come by in this limo and lean out the window and the sun will glisten on their studs and jewelry and we'll be sweating—that'll get a good laugh—and when we get to the top I have this Swiss chef named Hans who is the consummate sculptor and can take a huge hunk of ice and carve it into a horse's head or an eagle—any darn thing you want—like no one you ever saw, so we'll get him down there and have an ice carving on the summit and a banquet table waiting for us. It'll be a feast that would make Nebuchadnezzar envious, and the others will be waiting …”

“I’ll get my mother, too,” Frank said, “and a few other friends …”

“… and then we'll go behind a rock,” Dick continued, “and out will fly our T-shirts and jock straps and then you and I will emerge looking resplendent in our tuxes, then we'll hug our wives and friends and we'll go to the food spread where there'll be a pig with an apple in its mouth, pheasant under glass, oysters and shrimp and caviar piled high—remember the eating scene from
Tom Jones,
Frank? Heck, that was nothing, this will be sensual like that—gorging ourselves on gourmet delights while overlaying this—now close your eyes and imagine it—overlaying this are scenes of us with ice in our beards, and the wind blowing snow, and all this misery we got up here right now eating gruel out of tin cups, it'll be the juxtaposition of the incongruous that'll make it hilarious, Frank, and then we'll pop the bubbly and fade out, walking down the road into the sunset with our backpacks on over the tuxes and champagne in our hands.”

Frank was smiling. “Not bad, Bass, not bad. That might work.”

Buoyed with enthusiasm for his plan, Dick started dressing for that day's carry up to camp 4. Marts was in the other tent making breakfast for the trio. It looked like it would be another fine day and Dick wondered how things had gone yesterday.

“Get your mush,” Marts yelled.

Dick crawled out and brought back two bowls of oatmeal and finished dressing while he ate. He thought again about the climbers above. If they managed to get camp 6 in yesterday they could be in position for the first summit bid tomorrow or the day after. Which reminded him, time for the radio call. Frank picked it up and turned it on. Almost immediately Whittaker's voice from camp 1 came on the air.

“Hello camp 3. Camp 3. Frank or Dick. Do you read?”

“Morning, Lou. Frank here.”

“We've been trying to get you guys since yesterday evening. I’m afraid I have some very, very bad news. We had a tragedy late yesterday afternoon, just below camp 6. We're not sure yet exactly what happened, but apparently her waist harness came unsecured and Marty fell to her death.”

Dick dropped his oatmeal and stared at the tent wall.

Dick felt as if somehow his nerves now extended through his skin so each pore burned as though he might incinerate on the spot, vaporize and disappear. He prayed he could purge his memory of what he had just heard, that he could edit out that overwhelming despair, that he could come back and things would have returned to the way they were before. But the burning stayed and he started to scold her, saying to himself, Marty, damn you, why did you foul up? You are the one always preaching safety, always yelling at me on McKinley about the proper use of my ice axe and crampons and rope. How can you expect me to listen if you don't follow your own preaching? How can we ever go and climb the Seven Summits now that you've done this? Without you …

Then he was swept with guilt. He hadn't told Frank, or anyone except Marty, about the psychic in Dallas and what he'd said, that there would be a tragedy on Everest and someone would die. But he had told Marty back on Aconcagua, and she had said that that someone just might be her and now it had all come true, and was it somehow because he had told her in the first place about the prediction? Was he somehow an unwitting agent who created in her a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Then he started to cry. Frank too.

Wickwire showed up a short time later, visibly shaken, and told them the details.

“The others were about a hundred feet above, looking for a site for camp 6, and Marty and I were at a rock in the middle of the Great Couloir. The weather was deteriorating and we could see the others only intermittently through the mist. I heard a call down from above for more rope, and I was just moving to put my pack on when Marty said, ‘Let me get out of your way.’ Then I heard this rattling of carabiners and I looked over to see her falling backwards. She grabbed for the fixed rope but couldn't quite reach it. She really gathered speed and then was gone. I looked back and saw her jumar still attached to the rope and to it her open harness, just hanging there. I guess she didn't loop the belt back through the buckle, and it pulled through when she leaned back. I’m sure she went the whole way, 6,000 feet of vertical.”