Acquisition of Signal

EverestDay #49 | Camp 2

[Editor’s Note: I’m back online after my summit attempt on the mountain last week. While we were in Camp 2 waiting for the weather to clear I passed the time writing in my journal—bits and pieces of which I’ve included below.]

This entry will get posted well after I’ve succeeded or failed on the mountain, so my words here are at best moot and at worst are just taking up bandwidth. Still, I feel compelled to write something down now, here, high up on the highest mountain, to try and capture this strange conglomerate of thoughts and feelings that have slowly started to meld together.

We’re spending an unplanned second rest day here at Camp 2, waiting for an unforecasted bit of weather to pass, wiling away the hours as best we can. The mood amongst the team remains congenial, despite the delay; after seven weeks of sharing every meal together our words bounce off the dining tent playfully, with a brotherly love conditioned on sharing the same simple miseries for so long: baking in the sun, freezing in the snow, shitting in buckets, peeing in bottles.

With two Australians on the team, certain topics and turns of phrases can torpedo into private punches to the gut, but taken over the days and weeks, the barrages have slowly built to form a southern continent that once again exists in my mind outside the realm of just one thoughtless heart. I’m thankful my weeks with Finn and Nathan have served to re-kindle the excitement I used to feel for that strange and distant shore.

However these once and future daydreams are often counterbalanced by elegiac reveries from the deeper past, which float in and out of my mind during the listless hours spent praying for sleep and lusting for oxygen. The glue binding everything together is the yin-yang sense that I’ve given too much to those who’ve deserved far less and the core belief that loving in such excess is always preferable to the alternative. Perhaps I’ll grow wiser in parcelling out my love once this is all said and done—but I doubt this heart of mine will ever get the message.

The irony to these oddball thoughts and feeling is that rarely are they ever interluded by the peak that towers above me. Maybe it’s my mind’s way of repressing the fear associated with the mountain, but I’m beginning to suspect that it might just be growth instead: after nearly two months in the Himalayas, I’ve come to recognize that a single point on a map is not enough to define me, good or bad, summit or not, hell or high water. For the first time, the thought of not making it down seems far more devastating than the thought of not making it up.

Regardless of what’s in store for me here on Everest I have faith that whatever future Robert dreams up will be worth fighting for still. Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of my first big adventure, my first footsteps on the Appalachian Trail, the thru-line that connects Maine to Boulder to Zermatt to Kathmandu, and the mantra that kept popping up in my head is that I’ve got a whole lifetime ahead of me, that even if there’s heartache left for me on the horizon, I’ll have the vulnerability to see it through, that even if more hardship is on the forefront, it will only serve to strengthen my resolve, and that even if I don’t summit this mountain I’ll always have my own highest mountains to climb.