We were all breathing hard as the terrain grew steeper. Even Kito, Bakari, and the other guides were audibly puffing. The only other sound was the crunching underfoot. With the effort, my headache had become a nail driving into the center of my forehead. No one was talking at all anymore.
And then, suddenly, we pulled to a stuttering stop. Up ahead, Bakari was speaking to someone on a radio. I noticed a rushing sound next to us. Like the roar of a river.
“Is that sound melting water from the glacier?” I called up to Kito.
“That is the rocks,” Kito shouted back. They must have been raining to be making so much noise. An avalanche. “Don’t worry, they are much farther away than they sound.” He waved a hand. “And we are clear of them now.” He turned to the group and gestured behind us. “Look! Like seeing the face of God.”
We all turned, golden light pouring over our faces as the sun broke above the edge of the rise to the east, sending pink and gold beams kaleidoscoping through the swirl of clouds far below. The ragged edge of the rock we clung to was bathed in a ruddy light. It was beyond beautiful. Radiant. Breathtaking. Luminous. Bliss.And, just like that, all my terror—not just from that moment but from the past twenty-two years—was swallowed by hope.
Van glanced back over his shoulder. “Holy shit. Don’t. Look. Down.”
Reflexively, we all did exactly that. The sun was up, the mist cleared. We were standing on an exposed edge of rock, nearly nineteen thousand feet in the air. Beneath us lay a bottomless abyss. One stumble and that would be it. You’d be gone.
“You’re okay,” I said out loud to myself. “You’re okay.” I repeated it over and over again as we began to move once more, praying it would stick. “You’re fine. Just don’t look down.”
—
For the next thirty or forty minutes, I was okay. I felt less underwater, and my headache had even receded. Maybe my body was equalizing, after all.
But then we hit the scramble. Like climbing an endless rock ladder, hands over feet, hands over feet. On and on and on. Not straight vertical, but nearly. The effort would have been intense at sea level, but at this altitude, the force of my racing heart made my chest feel like it might explode. The clouds rolled back in as we climbed, the temperature plummeting as the wind picked up off the sheer face of the mountain. I gripped the rocks more tightly. But we’d all put on our thickest gloves and pulled up our balaclavas, which made it hard to hold on, nearly impossible to navigate with the narrow line of sight and the blowing snow and the fog. No, not fog. It was clouds. We were in the clouds.
Brooks was behind me, Scotty in front of me, Richard in front of him, Van all the way in the back. Kito last. Always. But the rest of us regularly switched places anytime we paused at the occasional brief flat stretch. We moved as a single, well-oiled machine. Despite myself, I kept trying to catch a glimpse of the side of Richard’s face. It was lovely even in the dull, gray light. Lovely and reassuring. He turned back toward me then, as if he could feel me thinking about him. He lifted a thumb, turning it left and right,asking if I was okay. My chest felt as if it might explode with joy. What was wrong with me?
Or maybe inappropriate feelings were just human. Maybe I was. Maybe there were options other than right and wrong.
I held up my thumb in return.
“I’ve never seen him like this before,” Brooks said behind me.
“Like what?” I was sure I’d misheard him.
“He’s only ever had eyes for Gretchen as long as I’ve known him. But he’s…smitten with you.” He sounded almost impressed.
“He’s just being nice,” I said, my heart thudding. “Iamhere alone.”
“Seems to me you haven’t been alone since the second he met you.”
—
Three more hours of exhausting scrambling—hands and arms pulling, feet and legs driving, body screaming, fingers and palms aching, Brooks’s words humming happily in my heart—and we finally, at long last, crested the Western Breach.
We stopped and bent over, trying to catch our breath and reorient ourselves to the flat, steady earth. A second later, Brooks started throwing up. Richard was coughing. Scotty sat down on the ground; I found a boulder, at least. We’d made it—up the most dangerous stretch, spit out onto the surface of the moon. Black volcanic sand stretched out in every direction, a huge, bright-white glacier in the distance like an ice cube dropped from the heavens. Our red tents were already set up about a hundred yards away, flapping loudly in the freezing wind. The air was so thin and sharp, each inhale felt like it was slicing my lungs.
“That is it,” Bakari said, gesturing to a ridge directly above us.
“That’s what?” Richard asked, wincing at his labored breathing.
“The summit,” Bakari said. Then he motioned to the dining tent as we braced against another gust of wind. “Come and eat lunch. Then we can discuss our options. Check how everyone is feeling.”
—
The escalating gusts of wind shook the dining tent so hard it felt like we were inside a hurricane. We were all picking at our sandwiches—I knew I should take comfort in the fact that everyone was feeling like shit, but my headache was a vise, my fingers weirdly tingling. My hands had fallen asleep, but there was no waking them. It was fucking terrifying. And even worse, the feeling seemed to be creeping into other parts of my body. Could altitude sickness trigger a stroke?
“Here we go!” Kito called cheerfully as he started circulating the oximeter.
Bakari entered the dining tent. He forced a smile but seemed tense.
“We will summit today,” he said definitively. “It’s only about an hour. Weather is moving in, so it’s better that we go now, if possible. If everyone is feeling good. And sometimes if everyone is feeling bad, it is better to go also.”
