No Way Down_ Life And Death On K2 Part 18

13.XII.197601.VIII. 2008 SUBOTICA.

SERBIA.

The Serbs sprinkled whisky on the plate and knocked some of it back themselves in honor of Mandic.

Another plaque was for Gerard McDonnell.

GERARD MCDONNELL.

20.01.197102.08.2008 LIMERICK.

IRISH.

Rolf Bae's plate had a cross hammered above his name:

ROLF BAE.

19.01.197501.08.2008 NORWAY.

On Monday morning, Marco Confortola had woken up alone at Camp Three, anxious because he had to navigate the Black Pyramid on his own. His feet throbbed as if they had nails in them, he feared he had frostbite in his left hand, and his p.e.n.i.s was frozen.

He heard the sound of a helicopter and saw it rising from below, but then it went away and its buzzing faded. As he got down the Black Pyramid, clouds and snow blew in, and out of the mist he saw the three figures of the rescue party from Base Camp approaching. It was George Dijmarescu and two Sherpas from the Makalu Valley, Rinjing Sherpa and Mingma Sherpa. They gave him extra oxygen. They helped Confortola down to Camp Two, where he borrowed Dijmarescu's satellite phone so that at last he could call Luigi. He told his brother he was alive.

Confortola limped down to an area below House's Chimney where Dijmarescu and the two Sherpas had cleared a landing s.p.a.ce for the helicopter. Confortola was excited that he was finally going to be delivered from his torment. But then Dijmarescu's radio blurted out the dispiriting news from Base Camp that the helicopter was canceled because of poor weather. Confortola's suffering was not going to end quickly and he realized he had to find yet more energy from he knew not where to keep going down.

The four men climbed down to Camp One, where they spent the night.

The next morning, Tuesday, they climbed down to Advance Base Camp, where a welcoming party hiked out from Base Camp to meet them, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, and salami in hand. The group included Eric Meyer, Chris Klinke, Chhiring Dorje, and the members of another newly arrived American expedition. They were carrying a stretcher but it was too difficult to walk with it on the rocks. They had heard he had been hit by an oxygen bottle, and Dijmarescu had radioed down that Confortola had also been caught in a rockfall. But Confortola was not in as terrible shape as they had feared, and his mood was improving now that he was convinced he was going to survive.

The weather was turning again. It was cold and damp, and a mix of snow and rain was coming down. Confortola sat on the rocks. The others gathered around while Meyer tried to diagnose his frostbite and they attempted to work out how they were going to carry him back to Base Camp. But Confortola soon lost patience and after ten minutes he stood up and started walking, and the others scrambled to catch up.

They walked slowly on the path between the mangled walls of the icefall. Despite his eagerness, he was unsteady on his feet and they coaxed him on for the three miles to Base Camp.

Halfway to Base Camp, he met another Italian climber, Mario Panzeri, who had hiked across from Broad Peak after news of the K2 disaster spread. Seeing someone he knew burst something inside Confortola, it seemed to the others, and he broke down. Sipping Red Bull, he sat for half an hour with Panzeri.

When the group reached Base Camp later on Tuesday, Confortola was surprised by how many of the tents had been taken down. The long strip of rocks was much barer. He learned about the number of people who had died. He hadn't known.

The Americans helped him inside the large, comfortable domed tent he shared with Roberto Manni, and Meyer treated him there, filling him with pain-relief drugs. He took off his boots and there was a purple line across his toes as if they had been burned. His worst fears were borne out. It was the damage wreaked by frostbite.

Confortola looked up at the doctor. "What a disaster," he said in astonishment.

Meyer shook his head. "I don't know," Meyer said uncertainly.

Confortola was angry at his HAPs, and at the whole country of Pakistan. One of his HAPs came to the tent and spoke to the other climbers. The Americans' Sherpa, Chhiring Dorje, chided him for not doing enough to help Confortola, for showing no respect to the people who employed him. The HAP went away looking embarra.s.sed.

Meyer had no tPA left over since he had used both doses on Wilco van Rooijen and Cas van de Gevel. He would not have given it to Confortola anyway because of the blow the Italian had received to his head at the bottom of the Bottleneck, which increased the risk of internal bleeding. Instead, the only thing he could do was scrub Confortola's skin clean and try to kill the pain as much as possible.

Klinke thawed Confortola's feet in warm water, careful with the ribbons of frozen flesh that were peeling away. The feet didn't look as bad as Van Rooijen's or Van de Gevel's had but if the frostbite worsened, Meyer said, it could lay bare tendons and bones. They wrapped iodine-impregnated gauze around his toes.

As they worked on him, Confortola tried to talk about some of the things that had happened up above Camp Four. The story of his terrible experience was boiling inside him, they could see. Starting to cry, he talked about stopping to help the Koreans and he mentioned Jesus. But he was so emotional and exhausted that Meyer and Klinke could not understand much. They felt sorry for him.

"What do you know about Gerard?" Meyer said.

"I am grateful for you helping me," Confortola said.

The next day, Wednesday, August 6, a helicopter came up the valley and took Confortola away. He spent a night at the military hospital in Skardu, where he related the story of his rescue of the Koreans to the Italian emba.s.sy staff. Then he caught the Pakistani Airways flight back to Islamabad. From there he flew via London to Milan.

In the next few weeks, he became increasingly upset, and on some days he drove around the roads near his hometown and he didn't know where he was going, sometimes in tears, unable to come to terms with the deaths on the mountain, until he went to a friend for help. His feet were in a bad way by then but he was given emergency medical treatment. About six weeks after he left the mountain, he was treated in a hyperbaric chamber at a hospital in Padua. It was one of the best hospitals in Italy for frostbite and burns. The people around him a.s.sured him he was going to be all right but he knew his condition was bad, and in the end all of his toes were amputated.

After packing up at Base Camp, what was left of the Dutch team trekked out in a line down the Baltoro glacier, pa.s.sing quickly through the camps at Concordia, Goro II, and Paiju, and skirting the big rock at Korophone, until in a few days they reached the muddy campsites at Askole.

From there they sped in dirty blue jeeps on the mountain road, packed tightly, swaying through the dust clouds thrown up by the Toyotas' wheels. Sajjad Shah, the team's bearded Base Camp manager, had traveled to K2 with the team on this same road two and a half months earlier. Now he gazed at the seat left empty by Gerard McDonnell.

The once polite, talkative Pemba Gyalje watched the ravines sullenly. When a fall of rocks blocked the road, Sajjad stayed with the equipment while the climbers switched to jeeps sent up from the western side. They drove four hours to the hotel in Skardu, to its cold showers and hard beds, delights after the mountain, and to the attentions of the international media. Wilco van Rooijen was already freely airing to the press his conclusions about what had gone wrong. When he returned to Europe, he would lose all the toes on his left foot and almost all the toes on the other. But a year later he would tell people he was considering another return to K2.

To the climbers left behind at Base Camp, the spine of rocks where the tents had stood seemed eerie and silent. The rocks were spotted with muck from the donkeys. Since the emergency helicopter evacuations, the crowds of fifty or more had fallen to less than a dozen people in a few days. Porters were taking down the Koreans' tents and burning the garbage. Eric Meyer and Chris Klinke's team was one of the last to leave, and before he walked out, Klinke left Meyer and Fredrik Strang and climbed a few hundred feet up to the Gilkey Memorial.

From high on the lonely promontory, he gazed down at the foot of K2, the spits of black and brown rock stretching onto the rubble of the bare glacier. The air was cold, still, and loud with the cawing of ravens. On the memorial, the metal plaques to the dead lined the wall, tied together with wire and tinkling slightly in the breeze.

Klinke was preparing to return to America and the real world. Before he came to Pakistan, he had split with his girlfriend, and he wasn't sure where he was going to live when he got back. He would find a job or join another expedition to somewhere else in the world.

Now that he was leaving K2, he thought of the people who were staying behind.

Before he had traveled to Pakistan and to K2 this season, the names on these plaques had been just that, names. But now there were new plates. Some of the names belonged to friends he had come to know. They had chosen to venture toward the ultimate prize, the summit of K2, and they had paid a terrible price. They had become a part of its history.

As he turned away, he saw their faces, heard their voices, remembered their kindnesses.

THE DEAD.

Dren Mandic Jahan Baig Rolf Bae Hugues d'Aubarede Karim Meherban Gerard McDonnell Jumik Bhote Pasang Bhote Park Kyeong-hyo Kim Hyo-gyeong Hw.a.n.g Dong-jin

EPILOGUE.

My own journey to K2 began in Kilcornan in western Ireland. I flew from New York to Limerick and, in a jet-lagged haze, drove one hundred miles to the southern mountains to meet McDonnell's climbing mentor, Pat Falvey, a fast-talking Irishman in his fifties who organized climbing expeditions and had taken Gerard on his first climb of Everest. We sat in front of his computer and he pointed out the Bottleneck and the serac on photographs of K2. Sc.r.a.ps of climbing gear cluttered his house. A helmet. Boots. In the kitchen he tied a rope between two wooden chairs and clung on, demonstrating how the climbers on K2 had progressed up the Bottleneck and how Dren Mandic had unclipped from the fixed line. Falvey's own life had been hurt by his pa.s.sion for climbing, he explained. His wife had left him; his sons called him names for risking his life. Behind him on the wall he had hung a painting of McDonnell beside one of Ernest Shackleton-"another Irish hero," he said.

Among the burble of drinkers in Kate Kearneys, a nearby pub, Falvey balanced a wallet on top of a beer gla.s.s and tipped it, flopping the wallet onto the table to demonstrate the effect of the serac falling. As we drove back in his Land Rover, I asked whether Gerard McDonnell had ever thought he was going to die. I expected Falvey to say, Of course not Of course not. But he shrugged and with an air of resignation said, "Everyone who ventures into the Death Zone knows they are dicing with death."

The following morning I drove back north to McDonnell's hometown for McDonnell's wake. A big white tent covered a rainy parking lot behind the Kilcornan school. Inside the tent, more than a thousand people dressed in their Sunday best stood at the edges or sat in rows in front of a long, white table. It was the first time many of them had heard the name K2. Behind the table hung a framed picture of McDonnell-a blue s.h.i.+rt, blue tie, a lick of brown hair, his enigmatic smile.

I was struck by how bewildered the people of McDonnell's village seemed to be. What exactly had motivated their son and brother to travel four thousand miles across the earth to risk his life on a mountain? they wondered. Was it worth such a cost?

The priest, Father Joe Noonan, uttered a few words through the microphone.

"We know we are here to honor Gerard, to praise him, and welcome Gerard to his heavenly home. Gerard, who died on the K2. That is his burial place, and in a sense where he wished to die."

McDonnell's mother, Margaret, a small woman dressed in black, was helped from the front row to the table to light a single candle that stood for her son's absent body. As she turned back, her un-comprehending loss seemed to ripple across the faces of the whole community.

"It was on a mountain that Moses communicated with G.o.d," Father Noonan went on. "It was on a mountain where Jesus was transfigured. It was on a mountain that Gerard achieved one of his life's ambitions. It was such a spiritual experience that he even referred to it as being an honor to die on a mountain."

A friend of McDonnell's read William Butler Yeats's poem "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven."

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark clothsOf night and light and the half light,I would spread the cloths under your feet:But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Then, one by one, people who had known McDonnell carried gifts to the table. A drum, a picture of his home in Kilcornan, a Kilcornan flag to ill.u.s.trate Ger's love of his parish, a pa.s.sport. An Irish flag, a book for his love of literature, his late father's wrist.w.a.tch. Annie Starkey, his girlfriend from Alaska, a trim young woman with dark curly hair, carried Tibetan prayer flags.

"Ger was a brave one," said his older brother, J.J., who also stood up to speak. "Ger, we miss you and we will love you. The future will be hard to face without you. Ger, G.o.d bless you, and may G.o.d have mercy on your brave soul."

Clearly, or at least it seemed to me, few of the people present could comprehend what drove McDonnell to K2. I encountered the same yearning for understanding, the void at the center of things, when I visited Hugues d'Aubarede's family in Lyon, France. In the elegant dining rooms of his friends, I listened to the stories of his love for the mountains and came to grasp the fascinating alter ego he had carefully constructed through his pursuit of distant peaks. But as well as the love, I witnessed the anger-in his partner, Mine, a wondrously robust woman who at first refused to talk to me before spending hours describing Hugues, and in his thirty-one-year-old daughter, Julia. Julia, who remained silent, carefully listening to my questions to others about her father's death only five months earlier, while Hugues's grandchild played at her knees.

I visited the dead, but I also had to confront the living. One morning in late November, I landed in Milan with an agreement to meet Marco Confortola. That evening he was to travel to Rome to receive a medal from the a.s.sociation of Olympic Athletes of Italy. I was two hours late flying into Malpensa and by the time I was sprinting across the station platform at Milan's grand main station, the train was leaving with him on it. My phone beeped with a text message from his agent, Barbara Baraldi, explaining that he could not wait around any longer because his feet hurt so much. It had been only a month since his toes had been amputated.

In Rome, later that evening, at the Hotel Torre Rossa, I finally got my chance to meet Confortola. A young man emerged from the crowd, hopping awkwardly on crutches, broad-shouldered, wearing a white top and jeans, with a shaved head and a long sunburned face. An earring shone in his left ear.

"I am Marco," he said.

He immediately swung around and moved awkwardly back into the crowd, greeting well-wishers and pulling off his socks to show off his bandaged feet. Over dinner, he was treated like a rock star. Women flocked to the table. When I finally asked him what it was like on the summit of K2, he glanced up at me with sullen brown eyes as if he had been waiting for my question.

"Did it fill you with joy?"

"No. People died," he replied in his poor English. The conversation was over before it even began.

The next morning at Rome's Olympic stadium he gave a speech in front of five hundred people. He praised Gerard McDonnell. "It is important to say that Gerard, because he stayed too long above eight thousand meters, he went out of his mind. He is no longer with us. He gave his life. I was lucky not to go out of my mind. A part of this medal is also his."

Just as it was getting interesting, he cut the talk short. There was loud applause and then to my surprise I was called to the front to give my own a.s.sessment of the 2008 climb and of Confortola's heroics. Even as I spoke, staring at the rows of intent faces eager for further praise of their national hero, it struck me as implausible that I was speaking at all. Confortola stood at my side, listening, too, as if he were waiting for some sort of judgment about himself and the mountain.

On the journey back to Milan, he was less than keen to talk. Grimacing, he placed his feet on the table and ma.s.saged them through his socks. He hid behind his iPod earphones, insisting he wanted to sleep. Barbara looked embarra.s.sed. She said he had been bombarded with media interviews. I felt both that he was wasting my time and that I was intruding on a terrible memory. But just when I felt like giving in, Confortola removed his earphones. He stretched out his legs and for the rest of the way to Milan sketched detailed scenes from the mountain on a napkin and gave me a blow-by-blow account of his fight to save the two Korean climbers and Jumik Bhote. His mood improved. We ended our journey standing in Milan Stazione, eating grilled cheese and ham sandwiches, while he pointed out the tallest stilettos on the women striding by and grinned at me.

He talked for hours, but even then there were questions he would not answer, and parts of his account already felt rehea.r.s.ed, as if he were not telling the whole story. Two days later, we traveled north to the Alpine village where he grew up, and I saw another side of Confortola. By now it was clear to me he was a wily survivor, a full-time mountaineer who climbed to make money. I met his father, a plain, pleasant man. Marco was liked in his village, even if he was regarded as something of a hothead. We sat on the lawn in front of his house in Via Uzzi. He did not invite me inside. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered from the roof in the breeze. His nephew, who had Down syndrome, played with a dog, Bobby, and Confortola occasionally showed off his strength by tussling with them. He grew taciturn again and shook his head when I asked questions, such as whether his Pakistani high-alt.i.tude porters were responsible for forgetting essential equipment at Camp Four, just before the main summit push. Baraldi said he would not be able to climb for a long while and he needed to find other ways to make money. When we said good-bye, he joked about the amazing strength of his arms. I expected a crus.h.i.+ng handshake but his hold was surprisingly weak. He dropped my hand quickly.

I was relieved when I returned to New York to receive an email from a friend of Cecilie Skog, who said that she would talk to me. She had granted no other interviews. I expected to be flying to Norway but instead I was told to meet her in Denver, Colorado. There, two weeks later, a small, beautiful woman dressed in a white blouse with lace cuffs stepped into the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza.

Only sixteen weeks after the death of her husband on K2, she had traveled to the Rockies to return to the mountains. She had brought her ice axe with her and was planning on going ice climbing near Boulder.

"I will see how I feel," she said, shrugging as she sat opposite me in the booth in the hotel restaurant, explaining that she had just wanted to get away from Norway.

Skog began to cry as she poured forth her memories of how the mountain shook that night in the dark beneath the serac, how she called for Rolf Bae until Lars Nessa finally urged her to go down, and she talked of her guilt about leaving Bae behind.

"We did look for him," she said, wiping her eyes on her red napkin. "For so long, I regretted going on. I still do sometimes. I ask myself sometimes. I don't know how I got down."

Despite her grief, Skog communicated something that I found infectious. It was a powerful joy for the outdoors-she called it a "devotion to the outdoors"-a love of life in the open. I saw this same physical joy in the Spanish climber Alberto Zerain when I visited him at his home in a small village about forty miles outside Bilbao. We talked for hours on the sofa in his living room, watching the homemade film of his K2 trip-bizarrely set to the soundtrack of the Who's "Baba O'Riley."

Afterward we drove to a nearby highway restaurant for a late lunch. He was a gentle, polite man who had bonded most strongly on the mountain with the Pakistani high-alt.i.tude porters and said he wanted to write a book about the region from their perspective. I told him I would send him Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea Three Cups of Tea.

Like all of the climbers I met, Zerain was extremely fit, and when I asked him how long it would take him to prepare if he wanted to go back to K2, he pushed back his chair and clenched his fist demonstratively. "I would go back now!" he said, in a surprisingly loud voice, gazing through the window as if the mountain were already calling him.

But while Zerain exuded the same physical pa.s.sion as Skog, there was something Skog and Bae shared in their love for the outdoors that the others lacked. The mountains were the place where Skog and Bae could be together. It was where and how they expressed their love for one another. In contrast, Zerain's wife, Patricia, a teacher, glanced over uneasily when he talked about his plans to spend months away again on Kanchenjunga; and in the case of Hugues d'Aubarede, frictions with the loved ones he left behind ran through his life. When Skog discussed their life at Base Camp-the conversations with friends, the days side by side on the slope-it made me think how the couple had brought their relations.h.i.+p to the wilderness and imposed it there, a very human urge. Cruel then that K2 had cared nothing for that and wiped it blithely away.

One January morning, I flew to the Netherlands for what I considered would be my most difficult interview, with Wilco van Rooijen. I had talked to him at the wake in Kilcornan, where he had sat erect in a wheelchair, his bandaged feet pushed out in front of him. His wife, Heleen, sat beside him looking weary of the attention, and a bit resentful. At that time, Van Rooijen had told me he had no time for involved explanations of what went wrong on K2.

"Bulls.h.i.+t," he said. "It's K2. You know it is going to happen," he said, referring to the collapse of the serac. "Some people had bad luck."

His subsequent emails were abrupt, though eventually he offered a time and a date for another meeting. One evening I found myself in the east of the Netherlands near the German border, walking across a plowed field in the dark on the outskirts of a village called Voorst. Even now, I was worried that Van Rooijen would slam the door in my face. How could I presume to pry into the inner experiences of his profession? A white Land Rover, splashed with mud and sponsors' logos, was parked outside the old straw-roofed farmhouse into which he had recently moved.

When he opened the door, wearing slippers and holding back a golden retriever, he looked me up and down and seemed both surprised and impressed that I had managed to find him at all. He switched on the kettle for tea but it went unpoured for four hours as he stood before me and gave a fevered, nonstop recounting of his horrific experiences on K2. He sat on the stone floor, legs crossed, to demonstrate how he had bivouacked, and paced across the room as he waded through the deep snow and the whiteout below the Shoulder. I listened in wonder and grat.i.tude for the time he was giving me.

At 1 a.m., my tea cold, Van Rooijen stopped. My notebook was full as he called a taxi for me.

I heard a faint crying, and when we opened the door to the hallway his young son was screaming.