Snowblind Read online

  Everything on the main road looked hasty. People and buildings. Unfinished concrete. Jury-rigged electrical wires strung roof-to-roof, hanging down in the street. Back from the road, time ran backward. Go one block, and you stepped back a century. Two blocks, two centuries. Much further, and you lost a thousand years.

  With all the foreigners around, there were guys lined up to sell stuff to us—expedition pimps, basically, which is what we called them. Food, porters, gear, vodka, hash. There were porters milling around—hundreds of them, and there still weren’t enough. Bill planned on using a hundred and forty porters just for our expedition, and there was no way we were going to find that many in Skardu with all the other expeditions there too.

  Nick took out the Pelican laptop case and got to work updating the expedition blog by satellite. Bill ruffled his hair, watched over his shoulder, dictated. He was pleased. “One hundred and eighty-two hits since yesterday,” he announced, which was our cue to clap. Here was a man who owned a goddamn empire, but he was slumming for a couple hundred bored armchair mountaineers to read about his expedition and wait for the mountain to start killing people. Here was one of his principles at work: “The only thing that matters is that it’s happening right now.” That’s Bill. He was always performing, and there was more than one audience. He could be vicious, too. Sometimes he got slit-eyed and furious, and I never knew whether he was playing that or not.

  Gregor and I, with Captain Shafiq, had the job of buying porter rations. Hundreds of pounds of dahl, ghee, rice. And six goats. That was important, Frank told me, for morale. What the hell did I know about choosing goats? If expedition morale was going to ride on my goats, I’d have preferred a more experienced goatherd. I had a pouch around my neck uncomfortably stuffed with rupees. Captain told me not to worry. “They will try to trick you, cheat you, bully you, and swindle you,” he said, in his cheerful singsong. “But they will not mug you.” I asked him why not. I mean, wouldn’t you? Pale infidels show up in your valley with sweaty wads of money—more money than you’ll earn in a lifetime—and they’ve got machines and gear that might as well be from Mars. And for what? To walk past you and try not to die on mountains. But they could just as easily try not to die on mountains in Skardu. So, Captain, why not? “Mister Chase,” he said, “poverty does not turn men into animals. Meanness and meaninglessness are what make animals.” And the goofy bastard was right. And I still might have snatched the money.

  Negotiations began on a dirt floor in a wood hut with china teacups. Half an hour later, Gregor was snorting like a bull with his hands rolled up into enormous fists, Captain was screaming, eyes bulging, sweat pouring down his face, and the dahl man was crying and invoking Allah, which was the only word I could understand the whole time. In another half hour, we signed a receipt with all the pomp and mutual congratulations of a new-made Palestinian peace treaty. And then we joked back and forth and drank more tea on the ground. When we left, I asked the Captain how we had done. “Who can say?” he said. “It is not your money or my money or his food.”

  We spent the night in the K2 Hotel, and the next morning, an aging squad of Land Rovers was ready to take us and our expanding pyramid of supplies to the end of the road—Askole. The road couldn’t have been more than two inches wider than the Land Rovers—cliff on one side, air on the other. All dirt and crumbling edges. Then we stopped again and rounded up more porters and more supplies. Feeding an expedition is like some sort of nightmare paradox. For each porter, you need another porter to carry food for the first porter and a third porter to carry food for the second.

  I was so antsy, those days. I wanted to move. In California, in Canada, Alaska, everything you do moves you closer to the mountain. You can feel yourself pulling closer. But I had been sitting in buses and haggling over goats with bags of money tied around my neck. And all of that was an experience, but none of it felt like mountaineering. I hadn’t even been for a run since Banning, let alone done any climbing. And I could see how the others were dealing with the time—Bill with his commands, read each morning to us from a list he’d made the night before, Frank and Hubert with their mantras and tea, Alan with his big talk and Norwegian girlfriends, Gregor with sleep—the man was amazing, he could sleep eighteen hours a day if nothing was going on. But what did I have to fall back on? All I knew was the climbing itself. I wasn’t any good at not climbing.

  What I’m trying to say is that I was hardly in my right mind when this big tan Oregonian named Wind came walking up to me in Askole. He’d picked his name himself, he told me proudly, and grown into it. No last name. He had a fuzzy blond beard and fuzzy blond dreads coiling off his head like snakes. He wasn’t one for interpersonal barriers—he’d wrap an arm around you just to say “good morning.” His clothes were kaleidoscopic. Like a Pakistani bus. Impossible to tell where the old cloth ended and the patches began. But the stitches were all neat and small. He talked high and quavery, and it sounded all wrong, like size-seven shoes on a six-foot guy. Maybe he was twenty-five, maybe older, I was never sure.

  I asked him where he was from. “I started out as a little newt in Camas,” he said. “I’ve been crawling along ever since.” A newt? What? “Dude, you know, a newt? The lizards that like creeks? They look like fetuses.” No, I told him, they don’t. “Sure do,” he said. “Black eyes like glass. Half-webbed fingers. Kind of wrinkled and smooth at the same time. Take another look.” I asked him where all he had been. Up in the hills, he told me. Praying with the monks. What for? He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t gotten that far. “Those guys are pretty seriously quiet, you know.” For someone so hard all over—he was a stone tower—his mouth was weirdly wide. It flapped. There was something rubbery about his lips, something gross. Loose lips for making loose thoughts, I told myself. So what was he doing now? “Waiting for you,” he said. But not for me specifically. He was waiting until there were enough people moving up the trail toward the mountains. He didn’t have a permit, and he needed cover.

  Captain came up to me later and asked me who the man with the dreadlocks in his hair was. I told him he was with the American team going to Masherbrum. Captain suggested that he did not look much like a mountain climber. I allowed that the fellow was unique. “I like you, Mister Chase,” he said. “Please do not put me in a difficult position.” Trouble was, I liked him too. In fact, I liked him better than I liked Wind. But he was a captain or a major or whatever in the Pakistani army. His job was to watch us. To make we sure we didn’t take pictures of bridges or climb mountains outside our permit or pass messages to India, I guess. And Wind was—what? The pure wanderer. A miracle. He made me feel rooted, attached to my baggage and my position in Bill’s machine. What made him so goddamned free? He didn’t seem to be struggling at all! I was mesmerized by him. Like suddenly seeing a wooly mammoth.

  The next morning, we were supposed to begin walking up the Braldu Valley. Eight climbers, the Captain, and 141 porters. It took us three hours just to get started. All we had to do was give each porter a load, a pair of sunglasses, and shoes. You put a hundred Americans together, and a line just magically appears. We do it unconsciously, without even talking. But a hundred Pakistanis look and sound like three hundred. A scrum of hands and voices, shouts, laughter, grasping fingers. It was a mob. I thought a riot was on, though I didn’t know what for, but in between translating Bill’s hollering, Captain assured me it was quite normal.

  The valley started out brown and a little green, but huge. Mound over mound of brown river-cut hills, bigger than our mountains. The water looked like dirty silver. Massive and fast. God, we were small in that place. We weren’t supposed to carry anything—we were supposed to be saving ourselves for the real work ahead. But it made me uncomfortable to have half-naked locals doubled over with my gear while I strutted around with a daypack and a camera. I wasn’t used to anyone doing anything for me in the mountains. I didn’t much like it. I wasn’t there to be waited on. I live in the basement—by choice, I know—but I didn’t know how to
behave around someone living below me. When’s the last time I even ate at a restaurant? I don’t get served. But it didn’t bother the others. Frank would’ve happily let the porters untie his shoes for him in the evening. He was just a half-century late for that treatment. I caught him mumbling “coolies” to himself one day on the trail, trying the sound out in different ways, rolling it around his mouth like he was tasting the word. He shrugged, grinned at me, said that he belonged in a simpler time.

  He made my skin crawl, not really so much because he was volunteering his services as a plantation owner, which just seemed outlandish, but because he assumed the white guys were all friends. I wasn’t feeling friendly. I asked him how far back he’d want to go. He thought about it for a moment, treated it as a serious question.

  “Nineteen twenty-three,” he said. “Imperialism falling apart, sure. That only seems fair. But I’d prefer to call a coolie a coolie and not pretend otherwise. After the first World War, but with good years to go before the second. A year before Mallory and Irvine died on Everest. The mountains still all brand-new. That would have been the time to be in the Himalaya.”

  And I was implicated in this. Wasn’t I using the locals the same as him? Sure, shower them with paper currency, Tylenol, antibiotics. If the pills don’t work, they can wipe with the paper. Did that change the fact that we were driving them like glorified donkeys?

  We were a small country. The rich and powerful doing bizarre stuff at the top while the workers labored at the bottom. And it worked, just like in real life. The porters never said: Screw this, what a waste, I could feed my family for three months with what I’ve got on my back. They wouldn’t even have had to riot. They could have just walked home. What could we have done to stop them? And our little republic of America wasn’t alone. Germany was on the move that day, too, and we caught up with Italy the next day. So it was complete chaos. A few dozen white people all speaking different languages trying to herd hundreds of brown people down a trail six inches wide and five hundred feet above a river like a roaring freight train.

  My fever spiked somewhere along here, and I started shitting green goo. Hubert tutted over me, fed me pills, scolded me for exerting myself so pointlessly. I stumbled along during the day because I didn’t want to be left and because I was certain that somewhere up ahead was a mountain that I had come around the world to climb. Wind stuck with me in those days. He helped me along when I was in a bad way. Kept me steady when the path was crumbling right into the Braldu Gorge. “Careful there, chief,” he’d say, and he’d keep his hand on my shoulder. Tucked me in at night when I was half out of my mind with fever dreams. Kept me drinking water and eating rice, which was the one thing that seemed to stay in me. I was grateful, but it was also embarrassing. Here I was, the mighty mountaineer, come to duke it out with the most dangerous mountain in the Himalayas. And I could barely stay on the trail on the approach. And there was Wind, looking like a lumberjack dressed as a court jester, with no plan or experience—he’d just decided it would be cool to see the mountains. And he was the one taking care of me.

  Of the bad nights, I only remember things in snatches. We roasted one of the goats, and Bill cut it up, giving the porters each a sliver of meat. Bill waved this giant knife around and bellowed enthusiastically and asked each porter what cut he’d like, even though they couldn’t understand him and he didn’t care anyway. There was a huge fire—flames ten feet high, shadows, glowing faces, singing and dancing. Gregor stomped out some kind of Russian jig that made the porters wild. Even Luther and Alan got up and pranced around. Wind was sitting shoulder to shoulder with the porters eating goat. I don’t know how he got his hands on a portion. I don’t think he knew more than six words of Urdu, but it didn’t seem to be a problem. Somehow he was still joking with the porters, slapping them on the knees and getting the same in return. But he never forgot himself, either. He always had twenty yards’ separation from Bill and the Captain. During the dancing, Captain charged him from the other side of the bonfire, like some kind of flanking maneuver, winding up his stick like he was going to impale Wind, but Wind rolled backward into the dark and disappeared while the porters cheered.

  There was trash everywhere from past expeditions. Maybe some of them didn’t care, but most, I think, were just too desperate to get away to pay attention to their garbage. Anyway, Wind had been scavenging. He found a shredded backpack that he fixed up the same way as his pants. Piece by piece, he accumulated clothes as we moved higher and the temperature dropped. A mouse-bit sock here, a dirty sweater there, a strip of Gore-Tex that he sewed on to a shirt to start a jacket. He had stiff competition—the locals were the ultimate recyclers, and the expedition junkyards were like a Goodwill to them. But he was ingenious, and the sand was always shifting and exposing new leavings. One scrap at a time, he added insulation. After all, what did he really need? He drank the river water—which was basically liquid silt—straight without getting sick. I guess he had been hanging out long enough in the valleys that his guts ate the local bugs like candy. He schmoozed food from the porters who looked on him as some kind of mascot or fallen white demon or something. Maybe he stole a pinch of rice or sugar here and there—there were enough expedition kitchens, it couldn’t have been noticed. What more did he need? The ground was free. The air was free.

  My fever burned itself out, and I shat myself clean through. I was light as a feather. Weak, but floaty, like my bowels had shed lead. That day, we reached the Baltoro, and I could see the mountains. Great Trango Tower. Nameless Tower. Muztagh. They were beautiful. Like, I wanted to cry they looked so good. I don’t know much about music—my mom used to play the piano in the house when I was growing up, but it didn’t rub off on me. But sometimes I hear a sound that’s pure and deep and it swells up big, fills all of Big Yellow and keeps going, and kind of makes me ache. And I’ll have to turn off the radio to let the sound roll around in my head because I want it to last a while. Those mountains are like that—beautiful and scary big, uncontainable, and I had to stand there a moment and let them echo through my brain.

  Alan came up to me while I was staring at Trango Tower. “You’re feeling better, man, that’s good,” he said. He stood next to me, chin up, tan, square jaw stuck out, blond hair just the right amount disheveled. Christ, what am I saying? What did I care that he looked like Captain California? “Trango, huh?” he said. “Epic. You know what that makes me feel like?” He cupped his pecker in his hands and worked his hips. “Here, I’ll show you,” he said. He made a big show of whipping out his digital point-and-shoot, then held the screen over his crotch. He turned the camera on and zoomed the lens all the way out. He cracked up then, like that was the funniest thing. “Bro, it’s epic out here,” he said, and he slapped me on the shoulder and walked away hooting.

  Wind walked with me for a while up the glacier. His pants were irregular. One leg was patched with threadbare wool, or maybe rotten burlap, I wasn’t sure, but it looked like leopard-spotted camel. The other was covered in wisps of purple and green fleece. He had found a good sun shirt missing a sleeve and a stripe out of the back, and he fashioned the missing bits from duct tape and strips of a torched tent. He was still bulking up his winter coat. He was a great shaggy hulk of a guy, and he hardly knew what to do with all that strength. Earlier, I had watched him catch a rock that was bouncing down the gorge toward a porter. He just stuck out one paw and cradled this flying granite basketball. And then he looked kind of sheepish and uncomfortable while the porters made a lot of noise and he held this big rock in one hand. He took a few steps with it and then flipped it into the river.

  That first day on the glacier, the ice was mostly covered in moraine rubble with paths through it from all the passing feet. A lot of the porters were still barefoot. They’d sold the shoes we’d given them in Askole. We’d sent about a quarter of the porters back already because their loads had been eaten. I asked Wind how far up the glacier he planned to go. He asked me how far it went. About fifty miles, I tol
d him. He thought for a moment and told me that that sounded far enough. I asked him if he had even thought about his destination before the moment I’d asked. He laughed at me, rubbery lips flapping. “You mean physically or metaphysically?” he said. “Are you fooling around in the cosmic punnery?” I told him I wasn’t. I just wanted to know, when he woke up in the morning, did he think about where he was headed or did he just walk?

  That made him get all serious. “No difference, man. The whole point is to move.”

  Which was weird, right? Because the whole time, I had been wanting to move, too. But I wanted to move toward something—the summit—and Wind just wanted to move. I wanted the destination, and he wanted the action itself—a pure desire for the world to turn under his feet. And it had gotten him to the same place I had gotten to. Here we both were. Only he had no baggage. No obligations to Bill’s list. No army of porters carrying his belongings. No obligations to the mountain up ahead or the hubris in his own mind. Of course, the porters were carrying him, just like they were carrying me. I was the class above the workers, and he was the class below them. If it had been 1923 and the mountains empty, he would have been stuck on the outside unless he press-ganged his own coolies or found a way to live on the river water alone. Which made me consider my life stateside, which only works because there are farmers growing cheap food and people paying taxes to maintain the roads. Course, it’s no different for Alan. Jerking off in the stock market doesn’t produce anything but his own juices. It’s not like he’s making anything but money.