DISPATCHES

Howkins

K2, like our emotions, is volatile, and there is no getting around the fact that we have been lucky so far. In the simple, black-and-white world of the mountains, the elements of life are condensed; timing is everything in this world, and yet timing, in the end, is nothing more than luck. At breakfast, I find myself examining a titanium Ushba ice screw that is hanging inside the mess tent for the umpteenth time. It is a testimony to both the strength of titanium, and the power of an avalanche; buried under the weight of hundreds of tons of wet ice and snow near the base of our route, it bent (at about a 20-degree angle), but didn't break.

I decide to go for a hike across the debris zone after breakfast, dancing across ice-covered stones, still in awe of the force of the explosion. At the fringes of the zone, the wind-blasted snow has a strange, polished surface, a gelatinous skin that shatters with each step like a sheet of fine crystal. After 22 days of continuous bad weather, clouds and intermittent snow, avalanches are of course a predictable thing. Avalanches are an unavoidable element of risk in climbing K2, but an avalanche of this size? It is almost inconceivable.

I stop, gaze for a while at the obviously-loaded flanks of the mountain, and find myself re-evaluating my risk threshold, wondering if there is some hidden meaning, some warning in the weather and the small cataclysm that occurred in the night.

Meaning in life is an elusive, feline thing, in my experience, not a thing to be sought, but a thing to let slip into your reality quietly, almost unnoticed, in the shadows of night, through portals of dreams and hope. It hides in the currents of life; withering follows blooming, death follows growth, decay follows death, life follows decay in an endless cascade of constantly shifting eddies.

Does it really make sense to try to distinguish beauty in the natural world? Does it really makes sense to attach relevance, meaning, to specific fleeting moments — a sunset, an avalanche, a smile, a birth — to believe that they are somehow separable and more significant than the normal chaotic flow? Nature herself makes no distinction. But of course we are creatures who inhabit finite life-bubbles, and somehow attaching relevance to certain events makes us see that our lives are part of a deeper and more destined flow. It is part of the art of making life sacred, of making the world our own.

As I am walking, somewhere in the middle of the rime-coated field of stones, in an evanescent, fragile skin of ice, I discover a moth. A small, brown moth, with psychedelic orange and yellow swirls on its delicate wings. Wings that were crusted in ice, frozen by the savage but gentle blast of the avalanche.

It is the same kind of moth that I saw on the south side of K2 in 1998. There, I was climbing up to Camp 2 in the hours before dawn, and spotted first one, then another, then another, embedded in the snow. A quick sweep of my headlamp across the field of snow revealed dozens of them.

Why, I wondered then, would moths fly into a field of snow at 21,000 feet?

An hour or so later, the full moon crested the peak behind me, and answered the question.

The moonlight, reflected off the smooth sheen of the ice, lit up the field of snow like a huge lamp. Moths are attracted to light. I could imagine the creatures spotting the irresistible glow from several thousand feet below. In my mind I saw them migrating up in a lather of anticipation. I saw them flying blindly into the luminous wall of ice. I saw them struggling to free their ice-encrusted wings from the icy embrace of the snow.

What an awesome, mysterious thing, this power of the mountain, of the moon, of avalanches and the wild and the sacred! The thoughts of another American climber, Willi Unsoeld, echo in my mind: "When was the last time you encountered the sacred," he asked, "the last time that your soul trembled with the indubitable awareness that it was being flooded with a numinous presence? Whatever the sacred is, it is unquestionably the most fascinating experience of our lives. It draws us almost against our will. We continue to seek it out as the moth does the flame."

In the presence of the sacred, as in the presence of the mysterious, unpredictable forces of the mountain, we find humility. And fear. And joy. The power, or the potency, of forces that transcend reason overwhelms our puny capacities for comprehension, and we experience the full range of human emotions. In the face of an avalanche, or a storm, or the quirky dangers of our everyday lives, the strongest of us are keenly aware that we can control only the flow of our life, and not our destiny.

This awareness is not the kind of thing that our Western, rational minds are comfortable with. Reason flees, and in the vacuum, that way of knowing that we call intuition emerges.

Sometimes.

Today, as I wrestle with the question of balancing risk and opportunity — it has been a year of unusually high precipitation, and the avalanche danger is clearly high — I find myself lost in a labyrinth of possibilities and thoughts and fears, without any clear intuition, praying for insight.

"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

— T.S. Eliot

— Heidi Howkins, MountainZone.com Correspondent

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