Sometimes I can’t believe it was me. On my first trip to Pakistan, in 2004, my friend Josh Wharton and I had our eyes on an unclimbed route on Great Trango Tower. From base to summit it rose for 7,400 vertical feet of technical rock climbing. Between us we carried a 28-pound backpack, two ropes, a rack of gear and a preternatural belief that bordered on magical. We completed our climb in four and a half days — the final two without water. On our last night, anchored to the rock in our sleeping bags, we watched the sun set over serrated ridgelines and an ocean of snow-capped mountains. Beneath us, over a mile of air dropped to the glacier. I loved feeling so small.
In February 2010, at age 41, I was in Montana, climbing better than ever. I’d been road tripping from my cabin in Colorado, after having come out of a very rough patch: My fiancée had nearly died of a rare brain disease, and during the month that I lived by her hospital bed, one of my best friends was killed in a climbing accident. Now, with the help of loved ones and the single thing that has always brought me joy — climbing — I was regaining my life. Friends and I were making plans: local routes on rock and ice, Alaska in the spring, Pakistan in the summer.
I had gone out for a day of ice climbing. On our warm-up route, I led and a friend belayed. I secured the rope at the top, then paused, taking in my surroundings in a moment of gratitude after the hellish previous months. The rope felt tight, but I didn’t confirm it with my partner below. Stupidly, I leaned back — and fell. I dropped only 10 feet before the rope stretched taut and caught me. But as I fell, my extended leg hit a ledge and my crampon bit into the ice as my body continued downward.
The next thing I knew, my lower leg was flopping to the side. Six surgeries followed in 13 months. I worked hard at rehab, and as soon as I was able, I returned to some of my old alpine haunts — Chamonix, Pakistan, Alaska, Patagonia. But I found myself increasingly distracted by pain, more scared, less confident than before. Inside my ankle, the remaining cartilage was rapidly disintegrating. Soon the bones were grinding together. With each trip, I felt like I’d aged a decade. Trying to be optimistic, I figured that even if alpine climbing was over for me, I could find satisfaction on gym walls and roadside cliffs.
Doctors eventually fused my ankle, which removed the gnawing and grinding that had left me in a haze of pain. Like the aging boxer who can’t let go, I began to dream again. But it didn’t last long. As a child, I had fractured a vertebra playing backyard football. Over the decades, it had slowly degenerated. Now spinal nerve pain was ramping up, pulsing and insidious. On good days I could still climb, so I’d hobble to nearby crags. On bad days, thunderbolts rolled from my spine and down my legs, and I would curl into a ball, disengaged from the world. It seemed like forever since I had known the person whose heart sang in the mountains.
By the time I got an M.R.I. this summer, I could barely walk for more than a few minutes. To straighten my body long enough to get the scan, doctors had to knock me out with general anesthesia. I never harbored the illusion that I would stay young forever. But surrender, I was finding, was harder than any climb.
At the end of August I lay on an operating table, an IV in my arm. That morning, I had turned in a round of edits for a book I was helping a friend write. It was part of my attempt to reinvent myself, I suppose. Still, I wanted my old life back, even just a little bit of it, to carry me forward. As the nurses prepared to put me to sleep, I felt pensive and hopeful. When I awoke, the news was encouraging. “It was truly awful in there,” my neurosurgeon said of my spine. But awaiting me, he said, was “a new life.”
I was determined to recover. But to do what? My feelings were complicated by the recent disappearance of my friend Kyle Dempster and his climbing partner Scott Adamson. Kyle and I had climbed together in the Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan, where I had never felt more alive. In those same mountains, they were last spotted high up on the hauntingly spectacular north face of Ogre II when a storm hit. No trace of them has been found.
Was I still willing to accept the risks I once took? Did I still have the drive?
My birthday arrived two weeks after my surgery. I celebrated alone with a hike. I began walking at dusk, when the last flickering light cast soft hues upon the golden leaves of autumn. Soon I noticed my smile, one that seemed to have left me an eternity ago. The moon was nearly full, guiding me without my headlamp. After an hour, I reached an alpine lake at 10,000 feet in a glacier-carved gorge, surrounded by walls, spires and memories. How long had it been since I could walk even half this far?
Between the shadows and the stars, I gently scrambled to a rock outcropping. I stood and breathed slowly, staring into the distance. Along the margins of my consciousness, like a pulse I couldn’t control, the question still danced: What would I do with my precious new life? I sat down and listened to the rippling water and the invisible wind. The answer seemed to drift just out of reach.
Continue reading the main story
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar