Altitude

 I am utterly, utterly, unbelievably, and soul-shatteringly exhausted.

I am lying on the ground under the pines, listening to water tumbling over the smooth, round rocks in the stream just to my left and the wind tickling the tops of the trees, with my legs resting in a patch of scratchy heather and my back pricked by brown pine needles, my small pack tucked under my head and bending my head too far forward. Two mountains claw their way three thousand feet into the sky behind me, and I can hardly believe that I was just on top of one of them, nor how little satisfaction it provided. My last thought is that  those pine needles are going to stick to the back of my shirt like glue before I blend into the scene, become a part of it, no longer myself but just a part of the landscape, and I don’t care, because I am no longer upright- a state for which I’ve been intensely yearning for for twelve hours. Moments later I am asleep right there under the clouds which are trying hard to gather enough momentum to burst forth into a magnificent, ecstatic, and cathartic afternoon thunderstorm.

It all started twelve hours ago, at 2:45 a.m. That’s when my watch alarm went off, chirping into the alien peace of a three hour night’s sleep spent at eleven-thousand feet underneath a sky clear enough to watch the milky way spin its eternal circles around me. I was cold when I woke up. It was in the eighties at home at this time of the day, but here it was closer to thirty. Forgetting the lessons I’d learned from dozens of mountains before, I neglected to eat a heavy meal the night before, meaning that by the time we awoke my metabolism was no longer churning through the calories and keeping me warm. There’s something unique and absurdly pleasurable about leaving the warmth and softness of a puffy down sleeping bag to strike out into the crisp cold of an alpine morning, though, so before long I was sitting in the doorway of the tent willing my already slightly numb toes into even colder, stiffer boots.

Soon the familiar routine was complete and, under the red light of my headlamp, my low-weight, high calorie pop-tart rested contentedly in my belly, each item in my pack had been carefully selected and placed in its designated “accessible” or “non-accessible” location, the clothing layers had been adjusted just right so that I would be cold when I started moving but warm up to just the right temperature as soon as I started moving. It all seemed so comfortingly familiar and easy, I thought, just like it used to be. This time I didn’t even need to worry about figuring rope lengths between climbers or checking to ensure I had all of my crevasse rescue gear (an ever-evolving assortment of pulleys, ice screws, and cordolette), put the skins on my skis, or find my ice axe.

But then, there was the one thing… A small reminder, really, that this was not like all the other mountains, and it came just before our small circles of light blazed out into the darkness like explorers from younger times when there were still blank spots on the map. That is, I had to take my chemo pills. I tried, I really did. And then I gagged and puked all over the ground in front of our tent. I even got a little on the part of my puffy down coat right in front of my nose, which would smell like vomit all day, some on my pants, a little on my shoe, and I buried one of the tent stakes in a pile of pop-tart. Great, I thought, I was starting out the day without all of the drugs I needed to get through a normal day, let alone one like this, but my buddy James understood what this day meant and, instead of questioning out loud whether we should continue, simply gathered some pine needles and covered up the mess, then looked up at me with the question, “well, are you ready yet?” in his eyes. God bless him, I thought, for not questioning. He should have questioned, he wanted to question, but God bless him for not questioning. We shouldered packs and moved out, neither one of us entirely sure our planned daily activities were a good idea.

This was certainly the easiest mountain I’d climbed in the last decade, and I had selected it for that purpose since I had no idea how wrecked I’d feel at altitude after a year of cancer treatment while still on chemo. The approach is insanely easy and there’s very little commitment- you can bail at any time if you see storms approaching. The trail itself is well-maintained and not very remote. The mountain is actually many people’s first 14,000’’+ peak to visit. It’s much closer to lots of uphill hiking than actual alpinism, the kind to which I have grown accustomed in fifteen years climbing from Asia to Alaska that requires technical knowledge, sound judgment, and a level of commitment that, at some points, requires action that means life or death. But I just needed a win this year, something easy, both as a celebration of finding myself in cancer remission and a proclamation to my own soul that I was back to what I love doing most. I resolved to keep it down to one mountain, though and to only climb it with perfect weather conditions and a strong partner with all the right equipment and research. All of those things rarely coalesce in the mountains, but on this day, they actually had.

The climb wasn’t quite the win I was looking for, though. During the time it took me to get up and down that easiest of mountains, I was passed by little kids the same age as my own and elderly people much older than my own parents. Before the sun rose, when it was just my tiny circle of light and the darkness enveloping me, I was so dizzy that I was forced to use trekking poles just to stay upright and I stumbled from one side of the trail to the other like Otis from Andy Griffith. I knew James was concerned, but he mercifully didn’t mention it. The experience was disorienting and nauseating, but dizziness has, of late, become like an old but always annoying friend who drops by unexpectedly and often. So, rather than allowing my altered cochlear activity to disturb me like it might have someone witnessing the effort, I started to laugh at my own pathetic pep-talks to myself that I “mumbled as I bumbled” (that gave me a good chuckle).

And the first mantra was this: Don’t Stop. “Don’t stop,” I told myself, as each step became harder. Just don’t stop. You don’t think you can make it to the top, but just don’t stop. You can always take one more step. Always one more. Over and over and over. Just don’t stop. Soon we were above treeline. Just don’t stop. James is waiting. We worked our way around what would be a mountain at home but barely counted as a hill here. Just don’t stop. Just don’t stop. One more step. James is waiting. We made it to the final push- a series of who-knows-how-many switchbacks over tallus right up to the summit. Just don’t stop. Just don’t stop. One more step. James is waiting. And then suddenly I was on top. I took a nap. I ate a lemon pepper tuna packet. And then we descended, which somehow felt like it took ten times as long as the ascent, with quads burning the whole time and stumbling over over loose rock, hating the larger steps down for the way they jarred my knees. And then I stole this stupid good climber from Czechia’s mantra- “a muerte,” which means, “to death”, in Spanish. God, it felt like a death march. How could the trail back be this much longer than the trail up? And then, when I finally saw our tent, I swear the distance grew longer as I approached it.

And then I was there, lying in the heather and the pine needles, looking up at a newly-clouded sky after my sleeping. James was patiently leaning against a tree not far away, presumably contemplating the stream in front of him. We weren’t finished for the day, and he knew it, but he also knew I couldn’t go any further. We were out of water, which was an especially prickly predicament for those of us belonging to the Mono-kidney Club at altitude taking chemo meds. Because of our lack of water, we had to descend more. There was more to be done that day. Sleeping bags to be stuffed, tents to be rolled, more distance to cover… too many things to contemplate all at once. I sat up, James looked my way at the noise, and we began. Soon, we shouldered packs and headed out with more to do, always more, the struggle never ending.

And I have to say that although I may have stood on top of it, I don’t feel like I got my victorious win from Grays Peak. Despite what I’m able to believe during my everyday life, I’m not back to normal after a year of cancer. I am much, much weaker physically than I had hoped, and there was no ignoring it on that mountain. There was more mourning than celebrating on that trail. I’m happy and I’m grateful for having survived many things in this life that should have killed me- stage 4 cancer being high on the list, but up there where the thin air was clouded by the distant wildfires, I couldn’t help but feel bitter and angry. It’s not fucking fair. I’m sorry for the language, but that sentence needs the intensity it brings. It’s not fucking fair. I didn’t ask for cancer. I didn’t ask for any of this. All I ever wanted was to live my little life with my little family in our little corner of the world and then be forgotten in a few years, but here I was feeling, as James wrote so well a little after our trip, “mournful, decimated, overwhelmed, and angered.” I’ve lost so much, even my ability to enjoy the place where I most readily commune with God.

So the mountain didn’t give me what I asked of it, and as I’m writing this I’m two blocks from M.D. Anderson waiting for appointments tomorrow where doctors will tell me if the cancer has returned, still wondering if this life is going to give what I ask of it. I’m scared, even six months after treatment has ended.  But if there’s anything to learn from Grays peak, it has to be that things will unabashedly and stubbornly be as they will be, and that we have absolutely no control over them.  I can’t force a mountain to provide resolution to a year of cancer any more than I can herd cats, but instead we should, as Shunryu Suzuki rightly said, “accept everything as it is without difficulty,” because right there, in the still, silent eye of the hurricane of suffering in our temporal lives, we will find stillness, comfort, and a peace beyond understanding. It is only from this place that we can even begin to love truly in a way that forgets self and sees the beloved with clarity, which is the end for which we all were created, the round peg that fills the holes in all of our hearts. It is only from this place that we can begin to live.

Today I am grateful for Grays Peak- that high point in the dirt to which we will all return. I puked at its feet and I slept on its head and I suffered much in between, and that suffering was as sweet as drinking from the crystal-clear, cold, streams that hurry down its flanks only to return, year after year, like Sisyphus to his summit.