DISPATCHES

Howkins

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Giving thanks in July always seemed a natural thing to do. After all, there is plenty to be thankful for as a kid growing up in America: vacation, sun, grasshoppers, banana splits, salty breezes, cannonball splashes, warm afternoon thunderstorms....

Of course you don't have to be a kid to appreciate July. And so, as we 18 fallible adults wander restlessly around a glacier at the foot of K2, planning and conspiring and re-grouping and accusing and apologizing and disagreeing, I find myself trying to maintain perspective (and sanity) by thinking about all the things we have to be thankful for. We are stymied (yes, still stymied) by a record-breaking 17-day stint of bad weather, but even without the opportunity to climb there are reasons to give thanks.

We are lucky, of course, just to be here. Despite the factions and disagreements, the expedition would never have happened except through a phenomenal collective will. It is a dream we all agreed to dream; our ambition to climb K2 is a mass fantasy, shared in varying degrees by team members, friends, mentors, family and sponsors. It is a hope, an aspiration, an against-all-odds dare to believe in the barely possible, a collective wish that is surpassed only by those two other powerful communal realities, money and religion.

So why, given the strength of this beginning, do we find ourselves bickering? Eighteen mature adults — carpenters and doctors and teachers, alone on a glacier, a month away from the nearest jeep or Coca-Cola, arguing about who said and who gets and who thinks what. Maybe it is the sheer force of the dream, an ambition that must be sustained, a hope that periodically needs the sanctification and renewal sometimes provided by the rituals of argument and assertion.

Or maybe it is something more, some deeper human need to create a familiar, manageable kind of turbulence in the world around us. Even as adults, we can't explain all the truly terrifying things in the world like war and rape and colon cancer, and we can't fix these things, so we sometimes search for the worrisome things that are closer to us, and become obsessed with them, peeling off layer after layer of reality until only the pit is left. Inside we find the seed of problem, something that we can manage, something that isn't as terrible as it had at first seemed.

It is a relief to discover that although there might be terrorists and kidnappers and serial killers out there, the people in the world around us are a lot like us — sometimes cruel and sometimes kind, sometimes afraid and sometimes courageous, sometimes selfish and sometimes generous, sometimes appreciative, sometimes not.

Enough rambling. Back to my original theme. Here are our Top Five Reasons to give thanks:
1. Fred's beer will be done in seven days.
2. It is July 16, not August 16.
3. We still have at least 23 rolls of toilet paper and eight jumbo boxes of Chips Ahoy left.
4. The 20-foot boulder at the upper end of our base camp toppled over last night, providing more than 30 new boulder problems.
5. The Japanese team went up to Camp 1 today, and pulled out some of the ropes that were buried going up to Camp 2.

There are voices in the peanut gallery adding comments about smashed tents at Camp 1 and dal bhat for three days in a row. You get the picture.

I do have one serious contribution to the list, one thing I have been giving thanks for ever since the beginning of the expedition: when I open my eyes each morning, I can see. "Yeah, of course you can see," I hear you say. No, I mean I can see, with "20-20" vision. My eyesight has always been my "Achille's heel," the one part of my body that doesn't function the way it's supposed to, the one part that leaves me vulnerable on the mountain. Without glasses or contact lenses, I would be completely incapacitated.

Glasses fog up and tend to break, so I have worn contact lenses for the last 15 years or so. The problem is I haven't been able to sleep with them in, because my eyes are sensitive and tend to build up protein deposits, especially at altitude, where oxygen is in short supply. To keep them from freezing at night on previous expeditions, I have had to sleep with the contact case sandwiched in my armpit or crotch or another warm part of my body. Just before I left, though, my optometrist discovered an alternative, a new super-oxygen-permeable lens, Pure Vision, produced by Bausch & Lomb.

So now I can open my eyes at dawn and see either the fierce pink glow of the sun rising on the summit of K2 or, if the weather is bad, a swirling mass of wraith-like clouds where the summit should be.

For those of you who can see every morning, this probably sounds mundane. But stop, think for a moment, dredge up all the sights, hopes, visions you have seen, imagined, remembered in that blue hour of the morning, that hour just before dawn when the whole world waits without breathing for the first wave of light. Vision, either visual or internal, is the glue of experience, the bridge between memories and aspirations; just as the awareness of oneself as constant entity across time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of the personality, projecting us past and present into the future.

I say "internal" vision because a friend of mine emailed me an incredible story about visual memories shortly after I returned from the south side of K2 in 1998. It was posted to the rec.skydiving newsgroup by a skydiver named Dan Rossi, who has given us permission to reprint it here. I know this is a climbing expedition dispatch, not a skydiving dispatch, but bear with me. Dan's story is well worth reading, and yet another reason to give thanks:

"In the spirit of storytelling that's been going on around here, I thought I would share some thoughts.

"It was late October and the season was winding down. It was cool but not very cold yet. That certain temperature where you know winter is on its way but you've still got some time before the first snows cover the runway.

"The canopy ride was uneventful and would not have stuck in my mind except for one thing. I was just drifting around enjoying the cool air. I could even smell the leaves on the ground. I remember thinking that was pretty neat and decided to slow down the canopy and hang in the quiet air for a while. I sunk into deep breaks and just let the canopy hang above a stall. It was so quiet and the air was just so crisp and smelled so wonderful, it was a very peaceful moment.

"Suddenly, my radio crackled to life. Now the guy who usually talks me down is not known for his 'mildness.' He is usually harassing me, telling me he's going to have me try to do a hook-turn landing, just generally joking around and so on. Well anyway, on this particular talk-down he was apparently in a thoughtful mood. In a much softer and mellower tone than his usual bark I heard him saying:

'Hey Dan. The sun is just about going down. It will probably be down by the time you get on the ground. If you could look off to the west you'd see it setting. It looks real nice. And the moon is just rising in the East. You can see it very clearly. And below you all the leaves have turned color and are all these great shades of red and yellow and gold. It's really beautiful.

"It was perfect timing. Hanging under that canopy in the cool air, smelling the leaves, picturing the scenery. It was really beautiful. I could see it in my mind as clear as day. The way the sun looks when it's setting. It looks like the edge of the world is on fire. All those shades of red and yellow shifting and sliding down the sky. The big mottled grey face of the moon slowly creeping up to replace the sun. And those leaves. The image of those leaves was very powerful. I'd seen them before. I'd seen them from above just like I was seeing them now.

"You see, I haven't been blind all my life. It was back in the late fall of 1974, I was 7 years old at the time. The time was drawing near for me to go into the hospital to have my second eye removed. My family was trying to expose me to many visual stimuli so that I might remember them in the future. Trips to Manhattan, out to the ends of Long Island, relatives, all that stuff. Well, one of the last things we did was for me and my dad to go for a plane ride. We flew around the island a bit and even got permission to fly over Manhattan. I saw the Twin Towers, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the hospital where I'd be going. But when we flew over Long Island on the way back home I remember looking down and seeing carpets of red and gold leaves. Some of them in the trees and many on the ground. It was a beautiful sight. One that has stuck with me all these years. And when my radio-man mentioned it, that vivid flash of color came into my head again. I'd seen this before and it was just as beautiful as it had been long ago.

"So, for all you jumpers living in areas that get to experience the magic of the changing of the leaves don't forget to stop and look around when that time comes. It can truly be an inspiring view.

"Blue skies and colored leaves.

"Flare when you hear the crickets."

— Heidi Howkins, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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