Jim Shepard - You Think That's Bad

Bieniek’s wrist alarm went off and his little boy wished him another good morning. He then mentioned he was lucky to be here, having on his last trip overreached on a belay and fallen thirty feet and landed on his side on rock. He’d impacted with such force that his heart had come out of its casing.

“You know what they say,” Kolesniak said from the darkness on the other side of the tent. “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”

Bieniek went on to add that at first his boy told him he was the only one in his grade with a cool dad, but before the last two trips he’d been inconsolable at the airport and Bieniek had finally told his wife that maybe if these trips were injuring someone he loved, he should stop them.

“What’d she say to that?” I asked.

“She blew up,” he answered, a little sheepishly. “She said they’d already been injuring someone I loved.”

Kolesniak said his gesture toward family responsibility had been to buy a life-insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London. He said his wife had told him now that he had a grandchild, he’d finally find out what it was like to hold a baby.

The snow’s weight made the tent’s sides an embrace. We augered out more space by crossing our arms and twisting our torsos. Then Kolesniak enforced some quiet, since we had to be up at two a.m. for the next push. Before I fell asleep I could hear him eating jam from a little jar with a spoon.

Mielec is known as the Aviation City mostly because of the factory the Germans built during the war. It cranked out Heinkel 111s and 117s until the Allies bombed it flat. Then the Soviets rebuilt it and it cranked out MiGs. When you played in the vacant lots you were always finding unexploded artillery shells. You’d set them on a wall and try to detonate them by banging their firing pins with a rock. I only heard of it working once, and the triumphant artilleryman lost both his hands and his eyesight. The unexploded ordnance from the Allied bombers was buried more deeply, but was live enough that kids for blocks around would show up and watch when the town was digging a utilities line.

Whenever he heard the construction equipment, my father knew where to find me and would come from work to pull me out of the crowd. He repaired clocks in a street kiosk and everyone said he had golden hands when it came to fixing things. He gave me tasks, too, repairing simpler mechanical objects like rat traps or hand drills, and when I succeeded our time together went smoothly and when I failed it seemed to color the rest of our day. He told my mother that his impatience with his own children bothered him. She told him that she had enough to worry about. And when I somehow stripped the gears of a coffee grinder, he spent an hour trying to undo the damage and then gave up. On the streetcar home he remarked to himself that he wished he lived in a climbing hut in the Alps, one of those tiny shacks with a bed that lowered from the wall, where you saw another human being only on the occasional weekend.

For people like me, winter mountaineering is just ordinary life with the polite layers shorn away. Jacek likes to say that reunions like this with old friends are the only way to recharge our spirits. No one sees you with greater clarity than your teammates above eight thousand meters. And still they risk their lives to bring you safely down.

They say whatever your worst memory is, you see it again most often right before sleep. I climb because once I go back down, the world while I recover is easier for me. Agnieszka’s eyes and mouth become again my garden and our entangled sleep my chair in the sun.

Kolesniak had us up by two and under way by three. The expedition climbed in siege style, with fixed camps en route stocked with bivouac gear and food and fuel. Each climb to set up a camp and return was itself a mini-expedition and furthered our acclimatization. We stepped out into darkness and blowing snow and fell into line, and up above could see bobbing lights and black figures already ascending a steep belt of rock. Above the rock the route was hard ice under unconsolidated snow that by dawn had gotten very deep: Jacek, in the lead, was up to his chest in powder, working his arms in a breast stroke to clear the space ahead. At sunrise Nowakowski took over, leading us up a serac of blue opalescent ice and then tunneling into a mass of overhanging snow that pummeled down on the rest of us. By the time my turn came I had to kneel into the deep drifts above me on the slope in order to compress them to provide traction for my crampons. In the sun and working hard we were almost warmed. We were grateful for the relative calm. Even the plumes from the summit crest were diminished.

On a flat spot atop the Kinshofer Step we erected Camp 3 and collapsed and ate. Most of us could barely move. From above, Camp 1’s orange tents in the snow looked like something in a petri dish. The wind picked up. Cirrus clouds traversed to the northeast, a reliable sign of approaching trouble. When at a distance of forty kilometers Masherbrum was curtained by dark clouds, that was our meteorological alarm bell: at the speed the storm was moving we’d have just enough time to get down to Camp 2. We descended in a stew of white with snow crystals spiraling up around us.

I rode out the storm with Nowakowski and Leszek. Condensation froze into ice sheets on the tent walls and then shook off onto our heads. Leszek discussed what a bitch it had been to lose a third of his toes and four of his fingers. He’d tried to cook breakfast for friends and kept dropping the frying pan. A young woman had exclaimed to him at a party, “You’re still climbing ? With no fingers ?” and he said he’d told her to go back to her television: that was her life. His was a little different. While he spoke he organized and reorganized each of our packs. His unhurried attention to detail made him intolerable at sea level but at altitude kept him alive.

By late the next morning the storm had passed and another was blowing in. We left Leszek at Camp 2 and ascended back to Camp 3. By the time we arrived powder avalanches resembling cumulus clouds were being blown off the mountain at right angles by the wind.

We used our knives to cut chunks of snow for tea. The snow fell continuously all day with increasing intensity. We peered out of doorways into what looked like a milky vapor. In the lee of the wind, the snowbanks rebuilt themselves with alarming speed. We were all suffering variously from the cold. Nowakowski’s toes were dark blue. The nail of Kolesniak’s index finger was missing but he said the finger hurt, which was a good sign. Everyone was queasy, the fluid loss through breathing at altitude having wiped out our body salts. Our heads were metal doors that somebody was kicking with hobnailed boots. We shared our last big meal, a banquet of sardines and powdered potatoes and soup. Kolesniak poured the sardine oil onto his split fingertips to soothe them. Leszek reported by radio from below that his tent was getting buried so deeply that when he went outside there were no traces of the guy lines.

We were at that stage of the expedition in which home had begun to seem imaginary. Trying to plan meant wading in one’s head through a murky and drugged marsh. If some of us were going to press on to Camp 4 and then the summit, we would have to go soon. Our luck, such as it was, wouldn’t hold out much longer. A mountain like this was the apex of however many gigantic river valleys, all of which in winter were storm machines, sending their masses of evaporated water up its slopes at high speeds. The next morning made our decisions for us. Kolesniak’s headaches were so bad he could barely see. Nowakowski reported that he’d started to spit up blood. They both had to shed altitude, and quickly. They’d wait for us at Camp 2 or maybe even Camp 1. Jacek, Bieniek, and I would be the ones going up.