Aconcagua
I approached the Antarctic peninsula on a southeastern tangent, working in and out of storms. After several weeks, whipping snow replaced rain squalls. I ran them undercanvassed, awed by the fierce, incessant blast of wind, like a steady breath from a giant skull. All I had out were storm trysail and storm jib, but Approach crashed along far above her official hull speed. If I were racing against anyone but myself, I would have won.
—Jeremiah Fall,
Still Life at the Bottom of the World
THE DRIVE UP THE ANDEAN HIGHWAY was pleasantly frigid, and Jeremiah Fall’s new filling was smooth under his tongue. It felt good to get away from the chilly desert clime of Mendoza to the truly cold high places. Gil Parra, a local andinista, drove, and Jeremiah sat in the passenger’s seat, listening to him sing horrible Argentine folk ballads.
They were in Parra’s Citroën, a car that always looked to Jeremiah like a Volkswagen that had been crunched longways between two semis. The little automobile could go practically anywhere, Parra claimed, and proved it by taking it many miles down the snow-covered mule trail that left the main road near Puente del Inca. The drive completely terrified Jeremiah. Argentinians did not share the same consensus reality with Americans when it came to driving, he had long ago decided. In the Argentine driving universe, stop signs meant “speed up and beat the other guy through the intersection,” and hazardous road conditions were obstructions brought about by tidal wave or earthquake—everything else was no problema, eh? Sí. ¡Ay caramba! Sí.
The only other human being they saw on the way was a shivering private standing outside of the army checkpoint. The Argentine military permeated the country like a bad case of rash on a dog. Police and military roadblocks and checkpoints were a daily way of life. Jeremiah found it both annoying and sinister. They always asked you your destination and your business. What possible reason could they want to know such a thing, and how could they check to see if you were telling the truth, anyway? What it came down to was that they were trying to intimidate the citizens, let the people know who was really in charge and who could pull the rug out from under the democracy at any time they wished. Jeremiah made it a habit to answer all questions asked by police or military with a lie.
Today, however, the private was obviously a poor kid far from home. He couldn’t have been much over eighteen, and as he leaned into the Citroën and asked them where they were going, he was shaking so badly that Jeremiah was terrified that he’d accidentally pull the trigger on the machine gun he had strapped over his shoulder and discharge a few rounds into two innocent mountain climbers. Parra handled the situation quickly and well, however. He slipped the poor kid a little money in the bargain, and promised to carry a letter to the boy’s parents on their way back out. As they drove away, Jeremiah noticed that the private was not wearing any socks.
“They make them provide their own,” Parra answered when he commented on the fact. “It’s part of their conscription duties. If they don’t have any, they don’t have any,” he said, and shrugged. The shrug was the universal method used in Argentina to comment on the government’s inanities. That, and the ubiquitous graffiti.
After another five miles or so—Jeremiah had tried to break the habit of always thinking in miles instead of kilometers, feet instead of meters, but never could—the trail became truly impassable. Snow had avalanched down the steep banks of the valley they were driving along and sealed off the way. Parra found a relatively level and sheltered place to park, and they got their equipment out and strapped on their snowshoes. It would be a long, long approach hike in to the mountain. Most of the people who attempted Aconcagua in the summer hired a team of mules and a guide to take their stuff on the two-day trip to the base camp at Plaza de Mulas. No guides worked in winter, and besides, a mule could gain no footing in the snow it would have to walk through. Parra had climbed the mountain over ten times, however—though never before in winter—and knew the way well.
They walked diagonally up the side of the valley for a ways, hoping to reach a plateau that Parra knew to be a few hundred feet up, and so to avoid the danger of an avalanche that continuing down the bottom of the valley would bring. Jeremiah couldn’t see the Vacas River, which ran below, under a thick layer of snow and ice, but he could make out its meander by the shape of the valley floor. He imagined it twisting and turning in dark and secret tunnels down through the valley. Had anyone ever tried to run a snow-caved river with a kayak? But this one would be impossible; it was little more than a creek. He’d save that idea for later when he got old and would have to let the elements do most of the work.
After a half hour of climbing, they reached the plateau, and after that, the walking became much easier. The plateau was flat for a couple of hundred feet from its edge to where it met the rising valley walls. It was very much like a step cut into the side of the valley by some giant race of gods. Maybe the same ones who’d created the Incas? Jeremiah thanked whatever process it was that had led to the easier going. Still, his pack weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and he was feeling the first effects of the altitude. This always happened to him: a day of intense mountain sickness, after which the thin air would not bother him at all. At least he’d kept in decent shape, running every day while he’d lived in Mendoza. Many times his route would take him up to see old San Martín, and the grotesque obelisk that marked his crossing of the Andes.
* * *
In winter, Mendoza clung to the cerros like lint, like a fungal infection. Low ceilings, low spirits, low everything. For months, Jeremiah had longed for high places, but all he’d had was a room on the third floor of an old hotel that had been converted into efficiency apartments. These were rented out to rich tourists from Buenos Aires in the summer. In the winter, he paid a modest rate. Third-floor rooms were the cheapest because they would be the first to collapse when the next big quake hit.
Earthquakes were a way of life in this city. If you didn’t like some piece of architecture, stick around for a few years and it would get shaken down to its foundations. There was still rubble poking through the irrigated shrubbery from the one that had hit a few years ago. Many killed, forty thousand people homeless.
Yet Mendoza was not a city that made one think of death. Mendoza was, instead, fine wine (okay, wine, anyway, at least) and thin doñas in high heels. You could get good and bloody chorizos here, with mustard that would reanimate a week-old corpse and sauerkraut that could serve as an astringent in a medical emergency.
He also had the highest view in town, such as it was, because due to the earthquakes, no building was over three stories in Mendoza. Only old General San Martín on the top of Cerro de la Gloria had a better view. Jeremiah had spent hours in his apartment, gazing down the Calle 25 de Mayo over the bare sycamores that lined the street to the Andes beyond. Or making love to Ánalia, his andinista dentist with the perfect white teeth.
Two days ago, he’d had no idea he would be here, with Parra, on the way up Aconcagua. Sure, he’d intended to climb Aconcagua sometime. But life in Mendoza had been . . . not easy . . . settled. After the special hell of Vinson, Mendoza was, if not heaven, then at least Limbo. Limbo just before the Judgment Day. Before the earthquake.
* * *
Up here, there were no trees at all. This side of the Andes was a high desert. That made the approach easier on the feet, but harder on the soul for Jeremiah. He did love trees. He loved to be above them, looking down at the texture they gave to the mountains. The sky was clear, but the wind was shifting and unsteady. More than once, Parra stopped short and looked around, sensing something in the air that he did not like. When Jeremiah asked him what it was, he could not say. “Maybe a storm. I don’t know. Nothing.” And they walked on. And on.
It was late winter, but the days were still very short. They were on the wrong side of the range for lingering sunsets. When the sun dipped below the western peaks, the air became leaden with cold. Nevertheless, Jeremiah and Parra decided to push to the base camp, and donned headlamps so that they could see as they walked. Jeremiah liked to hike at night in the winter, for the colder temperatures froze the snow fast and made avalanches less likely. But they couldn’t depend on that. And they couldn’t be certain that a massive avalanche wouldn’t sweep them off the plateau and into the valley below, to lie buried under snow until spring, then to become fertilizer for wreaths of wildflowers.
I might not mind ending like that, Jeremiah thought, and despite its morbidness, the idea comforted him. He felt chilly, but strong. The cold, however, was getting to Parra. Once or twice he stumbled, but insisted that they press onward. The moon came up, nearly full, and the snow shone bony blue, as if it were capillaried with blue-tinted oxygenated blood. All along, they were steadily climbing. Jeremiah’s head began to pound and his bowels felt loose and weak. He knew the symptoms, and knew that there was little to be done except drink lots of water and endure. After about two hours of snow-shoeing in the darkness, they came to the Plaza de Mulas, the base camp. They had reached 13,700 feet.
Parra flung his pack to the ground and sat with his head on his knees. Jeremiah patted him on the shoulder and began to set up camp. He got out the tent; it was Parra’s, but Jeremiah had used many like it. He took the shock-corded poles and flung them out onto the snow. He always enjoyed how this seemingly random, energetic action was the exact technique for getting the separate pole sections to slide into the broadened fitting of the section next to it. The shock cord kept the sections together and lined them up. Then Jeremiah shook the poles and all the pole sections clicked into place, forming long pliant ribs for the tent. Next, Jeremiah leveled out a spot of snow and laid a sheet of plastic over it. The plastic would be under the tent and would provide further protection and waterproofing for their floor. He threaded the pole ribs through sleeves in the tent and notched them into holes on the tent’s four sides. When he was done, the tent stood domed and taut. He picked it up and placed it on the plastic ground sheet. Next, he jammed their ice axes and ice tools into the snow, and anchored the four corners of the waterproof fly, which covered the tent, to the axes. He stood back and looked over his handiwork with pleasure. He loved tents, loved their smallness and coziness. A tent was all that was necessary for human shelter. All else, he often felt, was ostentation.
Jeremiah’s apartment in Mendoza had been about the size of a tent, and a medium-sized one at that. Maybe that was part of the reason he’d felt so comfortable there, so reluctant to leave, to get on with things. That, and Ánalia. Just before he’d seen her for the last time, he’d torn himself from the small window—from gazing out in Aconcagua’s general direction—and spent a half hour trying to get the apartment into some kind of presentable shape.
Papers cascaded from the brick-and-board desk like a calving glacier. He hesitated to touch them. The avalanche danger was great, and he could fall into one of those crevasses between the pages and never hit bottom.
Still, he thought that he should make it seem to Ánalia that he had been writing today. You should finish your book, she’d told him. If you finish your book on your Antarctic trip, I will trust you to pay me for that silver filling. That was how he’d met her. A cavity. At thirty-five years old. In Argentina. After he’d spent his last precious unconverted dollars on new, necessary climbing rope.
When he’d gotten the paper somewhat under control, he’d sat staring at his typewriter—her typewriter—thinking about Antarctica. Trying to think about the bottom of the world. But nothing came. Yet surely he could get together five hundred words to show Ánalia. She couldn’t read English, anyway. If it were bad, he could tell her it had lost something in the translation. He had to write soon, in any case, because he needed to buy supplies. He’d spent the last of his advance money getting back from the Antarctic and getting settled in Mendoza. The climbing equipment wouldn’t be a problem; he’d made sufficient friends within the local andinistas, the climbing community, to beg or borrow what he would need. He already had his ax, his boots, and his crampons. He had his down sleeping bag, still salt-caked, his pack, his parka, a stove, long underwear, and wind pants. He would need to buy food, though, and fuel bottles. The andinistas had some sort of weird reluctance to loan out fuel bottles. He never should have given his own bottles to the guys at Palmer. I am entirely too generous, Jeremiah thought. Charlie Worth, his old climbing partner, had told him that many times, but he’d never taken it to heart. Jeremiah resolved to become more acquisitive.
He’d like to start by acquiring Ánalia for the entire afternoon. He knew she’d only committed to staying with him during siesta, but Jeremiah surveyed his current needs and found that three hours would not be enough. Yet there was little that he had left to barter with. His promises were meaning less and less to Ánalia, of that he was sure. It was funny how women trusted him so completely when they first met him, then gradually lost faith. The opposite should be the case. Why did it always come down to either keeping his promises to himself or keeping them to other people? Were love and a meaningful life mutually exclusive in the long run? For a moment, he saw the face of Mandy Asterwood in his mind’s eye. His other climbing partner. The dead one. Her happy windburned face smiled at him. Just before she fell three thousand feet. Stop it.
Traveling and women. Traveling or women. Which was the correct logical operator?
There was nothing to write today, and he wanted Ánalia desperately. Women. On a gloomy day like today, he would choose a woman over anything. He stared at the blank paper in his typewriter until Ánalia knocked at his door.
He opened it, and once again was struck by how stunning she was. Ánalia was dark for an Argentinian. This country was populated with European stock, and it constantly surprised Jeremiah to hear Spanish coming out of the mouths of the fair and blonde. But Ánalia’s parents had been Uruguayan immigrants, and there was Indian in her blood. She was honey-tan, after the fashion of Polynesian women, with jet-black hair and obsidian eyes. Today she was all in white, down to her white shoes. Most Argentinians dressed like sleazy Assembly of God clergy, as far as he had seen. But Ánalia was far from being a country preacher’s wife.
She was smart and quick, as a woman had to be in this country of male-dominated profession. Yet she was kind. She was used to making tiny moves that hurt her patients as little as possible, and that attitude carried over into her relationship with Jeremiah. He appreciated her gentleness, even when she was probing.
Ánalia giggled as he pulled her toward him. “Do I smell like teeth?” she asked because he’d once made an offhanded comment about that certain smell that dental offices had. Today she had on a trace of subtle perfume.
“Jaguar teeth,” he said and kissed her neck. “Grizzly bear teeth, shark teeth.” A kiss for each. “Giraffe teeth.”
“Giraffe teeth?” She drew back playfully. “I brought you something, Jeremiah.” She always pronounced the J as Dj. He liked that. Djeremaya was the name of a much mellower man than Jeremiah, certainly not a man who could pronounce doom on Israel.
“What is it?” he said. He hoped it was nothing expensive, for which he would feel a debt to her.
She reached into her purse—an off-white purse to accent her outfit, he supposed—and pulled out a small package. She handed it to him, and he started to rip off the wrapping paper.
“Careful,” Ánalia said. He unwrapped it more slowly.
It was exquisite. A wooden frame surrounded a mountain scene that was formed and colored by the iridescent wings of butterflies. It fitted neatly into the palm of his hand. As he turned it into the light, the overlapping scaly hills flashed and shimmered, as if the mountains were aglow with spring wildflowers.
“That big purple one in the back is Aconcagua,” Ánalia said. “How do you like it?”
“I like it very much,” he said. “It’s amazing. How do they do this?”
“I don’t know. They are very inexpensive, though. I have several myself.”
He set the butterfly mosaic down on his desk and pulled Ánalia close. “Thank you,” he said, and kissed her. They kissed hard and deep. Her teeth felt like curved porcelain under his tongue.
* * *
Parra climbed wearily inside the tent and dragged his nonpointy equipment along with him, but Jeremiah lingered outside. He got out his camp stove and attached the fuel line to one of Parra’s fuel bottles, into which he’d put his stove’s pump assembly. He gave the pump a few strokes, then lit the stove. He let it warm a moment and build the natural flow pressure out of the fuel bottle, then set some snow upon it inside a moistened stainless steel pan. The snow began to sizzle and steam. While it was melting, Jeremiah gazed up at the moon.
It was stark white this evening, a bunched, hard stone in the sky. I’d like to climb that, Jeremiah thought. On a small self-contained expedition, bringing nothing but himself, leaving no trace of his passing. The moon shots were so wasteful and bottom-heavy. They were bureaucratic ladders to the sky. Like the siege tactics of expedition mountaineering—necessary perhaps, but ugly, unsymmetric. An alpine expedition to the moon. Now there was an idea! But not even Charlie Worth had the funding for that one.
Charlie did have the funding for Everest, however, the next lowest solid matter. There was money enough. Was there time? Jeremiah looked into the sky, feeling his smallness, his inconsequence. I am thirty-five. I will be thirty-six by summer. Was he too old for Everest? No. People over fifty had climbed it. But they had struggled up, and the climb had nearly done them in. Up above, the Southern Cross hung mournful in the sky, with the Magellanic Clouds smeared across its crosspieces like shining blood.
What it came down to was endurance and will.
And the ability to face the ghosts of those who had died on the two previous attempts he’d been a part of. The chance that it would happen again. Death at the bottom of a three-thousand-foot scream. Jeremiah shuddered.
The wind whipped up and his snow sizzled faintly, and again Jeremiah was a lone man under a big black sky. To the west was the blank east face of Aconcagua, glowing an impassive white. It seemed possible that he could question the mountain, the old Inca god, and get some sort of response, some sort of direction. But Jeremiah knew from long experience that the mountains did not answer. Or at least they did not answer directly. Like God. After all these years, he still believed. But he knew better than to pray. After a while, Jeremiah made tea for himself and took a cup in to Parra.
When he got inside the tent, Jeremiah removed his plastic overboots, then the felt liners, wrapping them in a stuff sack. He rolled out his thermal pad and his down sleeping bag, and shoved the liners into the sleeping bag’s toe. He did not want them to freeze overnight and give him frostbite while he was climbing tomorrow. Then he got into the bag. It was very cold at first, but he’d brought warmth in with him, and the down retained most of what his body produced. Soon he was relatively comfortable. The bag smelled a bit moldy, a bit salty. He thought of Ánalia, in her small house on a narrow street in Mendoza. Ánalia, sleeping naked, brown among her white sheets. The wind flapped the tent. All tents were like this, everywhere. It was a separate universe he could crawl into, on any mountain on any continent. A cocoon, the stationary point around which all the relative world spun. Tents were a constant in his life.
He awoke before dawn and found that his headache had passed and his diarrhea was no longer a problem. He was over his altitude sickness, and well on the way to becoming acclimated. He’d had much the same experience in climbing Vinson in Antarctica, but there the diarrhea had been a special problem because dropping his pants to relieve himself was a life-threatening maneuver in the cold. In the Himalayas, at much greater elevation, the mountain sickness had laid him up for two days, not merely with discomfort, but with exhaustion and unmoving muscles. He slept it off between fevers and vomiting, in a Sherpa’s hut. Then, on the third day, he was just well. There was no gradual emergence; he walked out of the hut, up the trail, and joined the climbing party at base camp. By the next day, he was on the mountain.
So he was used to the altitude once more. Without disturbing Parra, Jeremiah slipped into his liners and boots—cold, but bearable—and went out to start breakfast. He would need to melt a lot of snow this morning. He needed to force himself to drink large amounts of water before he began the real climb. The eastern sky colored, and Jeremiah heard Parra stirring within the tent.
“Oatmeal’s cooking,” he called out, his voice a strange thing in the natural quiet.
“Nick’s American Bar and Grill opens early these days,” Parra said, with a laugh. It seemed that the tent was talking. “Where are my biscuits and dulce de leche, you stinking norteamericano?” After a moment, Parra stumbled out and held out his metal cup. Jeremiah filled it up with mush.
“Yvon Chouinard will not touch this stuff,” Jeremiah said, wolfing down a big spoonful of his own.
“The great climber does not eat oatmeal?” Parra was incredulous.
“He got picked up for vagrancy when he was bumming out to Yosemite one time. Spent eighteen days on a work crew eating nothing but oatmeal once a day. Now he can’t stand the taste of it.”
Parra looked with compassion at Jeremiah. “You Yankees have it very tough when you are young, let me tell you.”
“Don’t call me a Yankee,” Jeremiah said. “Don’t ever call me that!”
“What are you then, amigo?” Good question. Middle-class Southern white boy who accidentally ended up soloing the seven summits of the world? Well, five of them so far, anyway. And Everest would not be a solo, most likely. But he was digressing, as usual, avoiding the question.
“I don’t know. But I’m not a Yankee.”
They broke camp within an hour and started up the mountain. After snow-shoeing another mile, he saw that rocks began to poke through the snow, and then gravelly scree. Soon the snow became mixed with ice and scree entirely, and became too steep for snowshoes. They replaced them with crampons. Their weight was more concentrated over a smaller space now, and when there was no ice or rock to support them, they plunged hip-deep into the snow and had to plow forward. The process was very physical, and while it was tiring, Jeremiah felt fine and strong. Parra began to lag behind. The day was very cold, and the wind stole away much of the warmth they generated. Jeremiah estimated the wind speed to be about fifteen knots. This worried him somewhat, for it could be an augur of storms. When they got to Camp 1, he would ask Parra what he thought.
Suddenly, from behind him, there came the familiar chilling roar that filled many a climber’s nightmares. Avalanche! It was far to their right, but angling down the slope of the mountain toward them. Where was Parra? There. He was a dot, far below Jeremiah, almost hidden by some rocks. Jeremiah watched in horror as the avalanche’s edge caught the rocks and sprayed upward over them, like breaking surf. It was not a large avalanche, but any avalanche was big enough to kill a man if it caught him just right. Parra was lost in the powder. Jeremiah turned around and ran down the slope in long strides, turning to either side as if he were skiing.
“Gil,” he called out. “Gil Parra!”
“I’m here. I’m okay.”
Parra had seen the avalanche coming and made a run for the rocks that jutted out of the slope. He’d just made it to their lee side when the edge of the avalanche struck. He’d escaped with nothing worse than a dousing of snow.
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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