Snowblind Read online

  Jay stopped his car and jumped out. They embraced, then they each grabbed one handle of the duffle and swung it into the back of the Subaru, which bucked and settled lower. They took their seats, and Jay eased back into the river of cars washing through the airport.

  Chase’s expedition had not gone well, that was clear enough. He seemed ready to fend off words like fists. Jay could imagine Chase’s seatmate on the plane leaning way out into the aisle, pushed away by the psychic tide. But Jay didn’t mind it himself. The man could take as much time as he needed.

  “The mountain was a shitstorm,” Chase said, at last. “I’ll tell you about it. Just let me get used to talking again.”

  “Sure,” Jay said. “What’s next, now that you’re back?”

  Chase said nothing. The car groaned up onto the freeway. Jay began to think he might not answer at all.

  “Guess I’ll go to Joshua Tree,” Chase said, and Jay concluded that Chase had actually been pondering the question, as if he hadn’t thought about it before. “Look for a guide job,” he continued. “Probably lie on top of a rock for a few days. Play the lizard. I left some boxes of my things under a rock out on Queen Mountain. It was cheaper than storage.”

  “Is your bus out there, too?” Years ago, Chase had acquired a yellow school bus, one of the short ones. He cut a hole in the roof and installed a four-legged, potbellied iron stove and chimney. He pulled out the rows of seats and built a bed frame from scrap wood salvaged out of a derelict house south of Olancha. It was easy to tell if Chase was about—around the mountains, there was only one decommissioned school bus sporting a chimney. On a storm day, you could knock on his door and come in and sit on old bench seats turned in toward the stove and listen to the rain on the roof, and he’d make coffee and tell stories.

  “I sold it for my plane ticket,” Chase said.

  Jay whistled. The freeway rattled below them. Lights sped by.

  “I know,” Chase said. “What could I do? I heard from a friend that Bill Coleman was trying to find me. So I borrowed his phone and called. ‘Come to the Karakorum,’ he said. That’s Bill. No questions. He doesn’t ask them.” Chase’s voice dropped and rasped in imitation: “‘Come to the Karakorum.’ ‘Come lead this pitch.’ ‘Come here, boy.’ He liked to be at the center of things. ‘Attend me now,’—he said that—‘Attend me now, I’ve been up here before.’ A member of his expedition had dropped out. Can’t imagine why. Didn’t think about it at the time. The permit was paid, high-altitude gear already bought. They were leaving in three weeks. I’d only need a plane ticket and my own things.”

  Jay waited for more, but Chase’s tongue had jerked awake and then lapsed again. It was good to have him in the car, a moody, bristly presence whom Jay could understand. Jay was uncomfortable around the violent optimism that made people build freeways and own fine automobiles. He exited the 405 and bumped along patched pavement six lanes wide, Inglewood Avenue, 190th. The roads matched the cars. Shiny asphalt laid down right by potholed lanes, as if they’d run out. Maybe they had. Sometimes Jay imagined the weight of concrete pushing all of Los Angeles down, cracking the ground, causing earthquakes. He glanced over at Chase, who was staring out the window.

  “Just think,” Jay said. “A hundred years ago, none of this existed. It was practically a Mexican pueblo. How did you meet Bill Coleman?”

  “In Alaska. Denali basecamp. I’d just gotten off the Cassin. Bill seemed impressed with that. At least he wanted to make a lot of noise about it. He grabbed my shoulder and pulled me around to all these people he knew. Like I was his prodigy even though we’d only just met. I was half dead, and Bill kept pulling me through the snow from tent to tent.” Chase paused. “So what the hell are you doing in LA? I mean, I’m grateful and all. I’d be sleeping in the airport without you.”

  “Back in school,” Jay said. “We started to think we’d want a family with all the trimmings. Didn’t seem right to raise kids in the Subaru.” Jay pulled the car around a corner and parked on a street walled with flat-faced apartment buildings. They left the car and the duffel. The walls were thin, and the Subaru’s years had given distinction to its sound. Carrie came to the door.

  “Where have you been?” she said to Chase. “I saw you once at the Druid Stones. Jay used to talk about you. But then you vanished.” She gave him a hug. “You reek,” she said, pleasantly. “Welcome home.”

  Chase came in, gulped a beer, looked overwhelmed despite Carrie’s best efforts to ease him. He was happy, that much was clear. He’d wrap an arm around Jay, or Carrie, or both of them at once—the apartment was so small, they were usually both in reach. Then he’d let them go, wash his hands in the bathroom sink, unlock and relock the front door, pull books off the bedroom case and leave them unopened on the table. “I went to the snow,” Chase said. “Rainier then Canada then Alaska. I was looking for big ice mountains. Mixed climbs that would blow my mind. So I kept moving north. I missed California, but it’s hard to leave Alaska. Impossible, actually. If it storms in the Sierras, you just drive down into the desert. You can practically coast in neutral. But when it’s bad in Alaska, in winter, dark, cold, forty below, what can you do? The Alcan Highway is buried, and I didn’t have the money to put my bus on a ferry. I ran out of wood once and spent three days in a blizzard under all the sleeping bags and blankets I had. There were icicles two feet long hanging down inside Big Yellow. And then summer would come back, and the mountains were incredible, and it never got dark. So I couldn’t leave then either.”

  Jay and Carrie had a round table about the size of a deluxe pizza in the middle of their apartment. Carrie laid out plates and forks. “Here,” Carrie said to Chase. “Sit.” She took Chase’s hand and guided him to a chair. He sat, and she pressed down on his shoulders as if trying to plant him. She was small, but he was smaller yet, five two to her five three. Watching them, Jay felt pressed up against the ceiling. They were like the moon and the night; Carrie blond, pale, her hair in a wreath around her oval face, rising above Chase with her hands on his shoulders. Here was something Jay couldn’t see too well out his window anymore—the moon and the night—and it made him happy to see the two of them like that. Carrie grinned back at him. Chase was still talking. His tongue had recovered.

  IT WAS APRIL when I talked to Bill. I was in Talkeetna waiting for the snowpack to stabilize. If I could meet them in Islamabad on May 10, I was in. Of course I said yes. The only thing I have is no attachments. It would have been a betrayal not to go. And I wanted to go, you understand? We’ve got stone on this continent, but they’ve got mountains. What did I care that I didn’t know anyone on the team—didn’t know anyone in Asia? Bill had been there before. It almost felt good selling Big Yellow. Snip. The last attachment. I knew a guy in Banning, a welder I’d met in Joshua Tree, who had always wanted her. It took me nine days to drive there, and it didn’t matter because I was staring at the Himalayas the whole time. I showed up at the airport with the duffle and three thousand dollars in cash, and the woman behind the Emirates Air counter looked at me like I had syphilis.

  Probably she thought I was running drugs. You know pot grows wild there? You’re walking up some valley staring at the river or the mountains, and then you realize you’re in a crowd of five-fingered hands waving back at you. The bus drivers smoke it. Their tires are three inches from the edge of the Indus Gorge—no guardrails and straight down—and they’re up front hacking and giggling and rocking out to Hindustani disco pop.

  The team had rooms near the bazaar in Rawalpindi. I was the last one to get there. It was 102 and raining. It’s obscene for it to be that hot and raining. I felt like I had been taken out of the icebox and thrown in a lobster pot. Most of the city supplies had already been bought. I was jet-lagged and stir-crazy. Nine days in Big Yellow. Three days in Banning with the welder and his greasy car buddies. Two days in airplanes and airports. Rawalpindi spun me around like a kid on a merry-go-round. I had gone from white to green to orange to brown. Brown faces staring at
me, imploring me, ignoring me. I felt like a ghost. Some people laughed at me, some begged me, some looked right through me and refused to see anything there at all.

  There were eight of us, all Americans. Five were out gawking and getting the last of the gasoline for the stoves. The other two were in a teahouse attached to the hotel, seated side by side, drinking out of china cups as if the British had never left. When they saw me, they barely moved, just waved me over. Frank and Hubert—a lawyer and a doctor—good men to have on a third-world expedition, I guess. I learned later that their offices shared a building in Minnesota, which meant that they could eat the cold, and salted pig feet, for breakfast. Both balding, but whip-cut and tough, the way forty-year-olds get when they don’t quit, skin stuffed with rocks. I had felt jagged, edgy, a little bit mean and dangerous, taking my first steps through the Wild East toward the world’s baddest mountains. Looking at those two took the air out of me.

  “Bill tells us you did well on the Cassin Ridge,” Frank said. He was the lawyer. “How long did it take you?”

  “One push,” I told them, maybe too proudly. “Thirty-six hours.”

  Hubert shook his head—wait—it was more like a quiver, an inch to the left, an inch to the right.

  “It’s different here,” Frank said. “Slowly, slowly. People are always racing around, losing their heads. They get infected by the people and the mountains.” But what if I wanted to get infected? “I like to think that each extraneous motion adds a drop of fluid to the brain”—that’s him, still going, he talked real slow, like he was charming a snake—“the cerebral edema, you know. It’s not scientific, but I find it useful.”

  “You look tense,” Hubert whispered. He had a moustache like two squirrel tails stapled to his lip. He spoke so softly I had to lean in to hear him. Even then I felt like I was trying to read his lips. “Sit down. Have tea.”

  I found out they had the best résumés of any of us. Broad Peak. Ama Dablam. Annapurna. Still, we were all B- and C-listers. None of us with sponsors or big names, except for Bill, and him only because of his money. None of us had done anything important that hadn’t been done before. So our reasons for climbing the mountain were strictly personal, and that, at least, seemed right to me at the time.

  Bill came back with the other four and convened a meeting. “Come here,” he said, “gather round.” As if he were trail boss, or maybe Moses—maybe he thought he was the burning bush, for all I know. He had methods. He had principles. Now that we were all together, he could get on with the business of extolling them. Have you ever seen Bill? He’s got this wavy hair that comes down low in the back, like he’s the wild man in the executive suit. His eyes open a little too wide. I don’t know whether he does that on purpose, but it gives you the feeling he’s seeing something you can’t. When he gets going, the veins stand out in his neck. He’s a big broad-shouldered dude. I bet high-heeled women and corporate soldiers get all fluttery around him.

  What was he saying? It was inspiring. It was invigorating. We were his lieutenants, his comrades. He had built the expedition like a machine, and each of us was a part with a job to do. He expected us to work hard, keep our heads down, do our part for the greater glory. The machine depended on each of us, and we depended on the machine. It was bizarre. Like Lenin lecturing in the boardroom. We were being collectivized by a capitalist. We were being sent to war. Once I had the gist of it, I stopped listening and watched the other faces. Frank and Hubert—that’s the lawyer and the doctor—looked attentive. Kind of like buzzards. They could have been watching theater with maybe the hope of a meal afterward. Three of the four I hadn’t met looked freakily rapt. They were receiving a message. Strong, shining faces ready for the campaign. March on, soldiers! The last of the four was also looking around, and we caught each other’s eye and shared a moment.

  Everyone else called him Stump because of his build—short, wide, and strong—but he introduced himself to me as Gregor, so I called him that. Later on, I asked him how it was that we were climbing in the middle of a corporate team-building exercise. One of the others, Alan, was a stockbroker! Another one—Luther—liked to talk about “bagging” the mountain as if he were going to stuff it and put it on his wall. Where were the bearded vagabonds? I had read the books. I knew who was responsible for setting the Himalayan standard. Hairy vegetarians and bleak, foul-mouthed Brits, and none of them had retirement accounts.

  “You tell me,” Gregor said, “how an unsponsored hippie gets to the Himalaya today. Who pays the permit fee?” When he talked, he rumbled. His voice came up out of his chest. “Where’s-ah-money-come-from?” Like that—no real spaces between words. He told me that if I was hoping for bearded desperadoes and poets, I should have tried hitchhiking on an expedition from the Czech Republic or Slovenia, not America. So what in the hell happened to us? I mean, we started the counterculture, right? Didn’t Yosemite in the sixties mean anything? Gregor blamed Reagan. I don’t know, maybe. The point is that yours truly was going to be climbing with rich men who thought that Charles Fucking Darwin had sanctified the corporate hierarchy from the bow of the Beagle and anointed the CEO as the right and proper expression of man’s highest potential fulfilled.

  And Bill didn’t help any. He barely noticed me. Maybe I was shorter than he remembered. A slap on the back and nothing more. He didn’t even bother to go round the group with names. Which left me in the awkward position of introducing myself. As in: “Hey, I’m Chase. I’ll be climbing K2 with you. What’s your name?” I just don’t think Bill thought of small gestures like that. He was too busy running his expedition machine up the Baltoro Glacier in his mind. Alan from Seattle, Nick from Denver, Luther, who did something with natural gas, from Wyoming—those were the other three.

  We spent the rest of the day packing gear into bags, and the next morning, we loaded onto a bus bound for Skardu. A bus is a different kind of beast there. If you were to take an old Bedford flatbed truck, put it at the bottom of a lake for a year, bring it up, clean it off, paint it with rainbow sherbet, and plaster it all over with butterflies and epic poetry, you’d have a start. But then you’d still need to weld the double-decker platform onto the back, where the eight of us wedged in with all our gear plus two old women in head-to-toe black, hauling baskets of trussed chickens. We never did figure out who they were or what they were doing on a bus that Bill had supposedly hired just for the team.

  Our liaison officer showed up an hour late. He had a daypack, a hard-sided rolling suitcase, a pith helmet, and a swagger stick. When he walked up to the bus, he thwacked it with his stick—I’m not sure whether he was testing its structural integrity or hoping to change it into a Mercedes—and said: “Now we will show the mountains what we are made of, no?”

  The heat was alive back there. The sky looked like wet wool, and that’s what the air felt like—hot, damp, and rotten. Smothering. It was the Magical Mystery Tour meets the Joads—eleven people and seven chickens packed into a tin box perched on top of a psychedelic bus bumping and grinding through Rawalpindi. Donkey carts held up traffic. Old men with long white beards on bicycles dodged in and out of the gridlock. Entire families with their groceries held on to fifty-cc Swingline motorbikes—dad up front, mom hanging off the back, kids on the handlebars. Some tour busses filled with freaked-out-looking white people lumbered toward Islamabad. Everyone else honked and jockeyed and waved their hands around. It was all a negotiation, like haggling over an apricot at the bazaar. No one seemed to care that they could get where they were going faster if they just got out and walked. I felt feverish. The mid-morning call to prayer echoed out of the mosques. The women in black chattered back and forth and laughed and poked each other’s knees through their burkas. They had comfortable seats. The liaison officer sat across from them with his legs crossed and his arms out and a big grin. He had huge, bright white teeth. He had a comfortable seat. Where had they gotten so much space? I was balled up in a corner like dirty laundry. Bill kept looking around and giving us all the
thumbs-up. Gregor had told me that if I was smart, I’d stay up all night the night before. Now I knew why. He was snoring on top of the ropes duffle.

  We were on the bus thirty hours. When we got to Skardu, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to walk. For thirty hours, I had been breathing road dust, pot reek, diesel fumes, ripe sweat. Even though it was still damp and hot, the air up there tasted so good. It was like being resuscitated. I stumbled around, just remembering how to breathe. The LO, whose name was Shafiq, but who we all called Captain, ambled next to me.

  “Mister Chase,” he said. “Are you not very small?” I admitted that I was undersized. “But should you not be a large strapping man like Mister Bill in order to climb mountains?” I told him that Bill would make a bigger target when the mountain started throwing things at us. He chortled, and just for a moment, the buffoon look vanished off his face and he said, “Mister Bill makes a very fine target for a mountain, does he not?” Then it was like he caught himself, and his eyes went dumb and happy again, and he twirled his ridiculous stick and walked away whistling.

  Skardu isn’t Boulder, but it could be Moab. Restaurants. Gear shops. Guide companies. Tour groups. We had journeyed into deepest northern Pakistan, but it was the least foreign place I’d seen yet. It looked like it should be foreign—up on the hills above town, there were homes that were basically dugouts closed up with sticks—but town was filled with white people and badly translated Urdu in a bunch of European languages. Eight Norwegian women with short shorts, ponytails, and sunglasses propped on their heads sat in a teahouse on the center street. A German expedition headed the same way as us was making a lot of noise and not very much progress packing porter-loads. An American expedition to Masherbrum was just leaving. Four French snowboarders were planning a first descent on Broad Peak. Some scruffy Poles sat on the ground against a wall smoking cigarettes, and I thought of what Gregor had said and wanted to go join them. But I still wanted to play my part, too, I guess, so I didn’t. There were Spaniards walking around arm-in-arm singing soccer anthems—I think that’s what they were singing. Big raindrops came down in bunches. There was concrete along the main road, but everything behind was dirt, and then the foothills jumped up into the clouds.