SELF-STORAGE.
Greatness is always built on this foundation: the ability to appear, speak and act, as the most common man.
-Shams-ud-din Muhammed Hafiz
The storage s.p.a.ce smelled like Africa. Standing on the verge of this unlocked six-by-eight-foot room, a closet really, with rush-hour traffic boiling past on busy San Pablo Avenue, Mortenson felt the dislocation that only forty-eight hours of air travel can inflict. On the flight out of Islamabad he had felt so full of purpose, scheming a dozen different ways to raise money for the school. But back in Berkeley, California, Greg Mortenson couldn"t orient himself. He felt blotted out under the relentlessly sunny skies, among prosperous college students strolling happily toward their next espresso, and his promise to Haji Ali felt more like a half-remembered movie he"d dozed through on one of his three interminable flights.
Jet lag. Culture shock. Whatever name you gave the demons of dislocation, he"d been a.s.sailed by them often enough in the past. Which was why he"d come here, as he always did after returning from a climb-to Berkeley Self-Storage stall 114. This musty s.p.a.ce was Mortenson"s anchor to himself.
He reached into the fragrant dark, fumbling for the string that illuminated the overhead bulb, and when he found and tugged it, he saw dusty mountaineering books stacked against the walls, a caravan of fine elephants carved out of African ebony that had been his father"s, and sitting on top of a dog-eared photo alb.u.m, GiGi, a coffee-colored stuffed monkey that had been his closest companion back where memory fringes into mere sensory recall.
He picked up the child"s toy, and saw that the animal"s African kapok stuffing was leaking out a seam in its chest. He pressed it to his nose, inhaling, and was back by the sprawling cinder-block house, in the courtyard, under the all-enveloping limbs of their pepper tree. In Tanzania.
Like his father, Mortenson had been born in Minnesota. But in 1958, when he was only three months old, his parents had packed him along on the great adventure of their lives, a posting to work as missionaries teaching in Tanzania, in the shadow of the continent"s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro.
Irvin Mortenson, Greg"s father, was born of the well-intentioned Lutheran stock that Garrison Keillor has mined for so much material. As with the taciturn men of Lake Wobegon, language was a currency he was loath to spend carelessly. Well over six feet, and a raw-boned athlete like his son, Irvin Mortenson was nicknamed "Dempsey" as an unusually stout baby, and the boxer"s name blotted out his given name for the rest of his life. The seventh and final child in a family economically exhausted by the Great Depression, Dempsey"s athletic prowess-he was an all-state quarterback on his high-school football team and an all-state guard on the basketball team-got him out of Pequot Lakes, a tiny fish-crazy town in northern Minnesota, and sent him on a path to the wider world. He attended the University of Minnesota on a football scholarship, earning a degree in physical education while nursing the bruises inflicted by defensive linemen.
His wife, Jerene, swooned for him shortly after her family moved to Minnesota from Iowa. She, too, was an athlete and had been the captain of her high-school basketball team. They married impulsively, while Dempsey, then serving in the army, was on leave from Fort Riley, Kansas, on a three-day pa.s.s. "Dempsey had the travel bug," Jerene says. "He had been stationed in j.a.pan and had loved seeing more of the world than Minnesota. He came home one day while I was pregnant with Greg and said, "They need teachers in Tanganyika. Let"s go to Africa." I couldn"t say no. When you"re young you don"t know what you don"t know. We just did it."
They were posted to a country neither knew much about beyond the s.p.a.ce it occupied on the map of East Africa between Kenya and Rwanda. After four years working in the remote Usambara Mountains, they moved to Moshi, which means "smoke" in Swahili, where the family was billeted by their Lutheran missionary society in a Greek gun dealer"s sprawling cinder-block home, which had been seized by the authorities. And with the sort of serendipity that so often rewards impetuousness, the entire family fell fiercely in love with the country that would be renamed Tanzania after independence in 1961. "The older I get, the more I appreciate my childhood. It was paradise," Mortenson says. Greek gun dealer"s sprawling cinder-block home, which had been seized by the authorities. And with the sort of serendipity that so often rewards impetuousness, the entire family fell fiercely in love with the country that would be renamed Tanzania after independence in 1961. "The older I get, the more I appreciate my childhood. It was paradise," Mortenson says.
More so than the house, which wrapped comfortably around a lush courtyard, Mortenson saw the enormous pepper tree as home. "That tree was the image of stability," Mortenson says. "At dusk, the hundreds of bats that lived in it would swarm out to hunt. And after it rained, the whole yard smelled like pepper. That smell was exquisite."
With both Dempsey and Jerene wearing their faith lightly, the Mortenson home became more of a community than a religious center. Dempsey taught Sunday school. But he also laid out a softball diamond with the trunk of the pepper tree as a backstop and launched Tanzania"s first high-school basketball league. But it was two all-consuming projects that came to dominate Dempsey and Jerene"s lives.
Dempsey threw every molecule of himself into the great achievement of his life-raising money for and founding Tanzania"s first teaching hospital, the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center. Jerene labored with the same single-mindedness to establish the Moshi International School, which catered to a cosmopolitan melting pot of expatriates" children. Greg attended the school, swimming happily in a sea of cultures and languages. The divisions between different nationalities meant so little to him that he was upset when they fought with each other. During a time of intense conflict between India and Pakistan, Greg was disturbed by the graphic way Indian and Pakistani students played war at recess, pretending to machine gun and decapitate each other.
"Otherwise, it was a wonderful place to go to school," he says. "It was like a little United Nations. There were twenty-eight different nationalities and we celebrated all the holidays: Hanukkah, Christmas, Diwali, the Feast of Id."
"Greg hated going to church with us," Jerene remembers, "because all the old African ladies always wanted to play with his blond hair." Otherwise, Mortenson grew up happily oblivious to race. He soon mastered Swahili with such accentless perfection that people presumed he was Tanzanian on the phone. He sang archaic European hymns in his church choir, and joined an otherwise all-African dance troupe that competed in a nationally televised tribal dance contest for Saba Saba, Tanzania"s independence day.
At age eleven, Greg Mortenson scaled his first serious mountain. "Ever since I was six, I"d been staring at the summit and begging my father to take me there." Finally, when Dempsey deemed his son old enough to make the climb, rather than enjoying his trip to the top of Africa, Greg says, "I gagged and puked my way up Kilimanjaro. I hated the climb. But standing on the summit at dawn, seeing the sweep of African savannah below me, hooked me forever on climbing."
Jerene gave birth to three girls: Kari, Sonja Joy, and finally, when Greg was twelve, Christa. Dempsey was often away for months at a time, recruiting funds and qualified hospital staff in Europe and America. And Greg, already over six feet by the time he turned thirteen, shuffled easily into the role of man of the house when his father was absent. When Christa was born, her parents took her to be baptized and Greg volunteered to serve as her G.o.dfather.
Unlike the three oldest Mortensons, who quickly grew to their parents" scale, Christa remained small and delicate-boned. And by the time she started school, it was apparent she differed profoundly from the rest of her family. As a toddler, Christa had a terrible reaction to a smallpox vaccination. "Her arm turned completely black," Jerene says. And she believes that toxic injection of live bovine virus marked the beginning of Christa"s brain dysfunction. At age three, she contracted severe meningitis, and in her frantic mother"s eyes, never emerged whole after the illness. By eight, she began suffering frequent seizures and was diagnosed as an epileptic. But between these episodes, Christa also ailed. "She learned to read right away," Jerene says. "But they were just sounds to her. She didn"t have a clue what the sentences meant."
A still-growing Greg became a looming presence over anyone who would consider teasing his littlest sister. "Christa was the nicest of us," he says. "She faced her limitations with grace. It would take her forever to dress herself in the morning, so she"d lay her clothes out the night before, trying not to take up too much of our time before school. She was remarkably sensitive to other people.
"In some ways, she was like my dad," Mortenson says. "They were both listeners." Dempsey listened, especially, to the young, ambitious Africans in Moshi. They were eager for opportunity, but postcolonial Tanzania-then, as now, one of the poorest nations on Earth-had little to offer them beyond menial agricultural work. When his teaching hospital was up and partially running, he insisted, against the wishes of many foreign members of the board, that they focus on offering medical scholarships to promising local students, rather than simply catering to expat children and the offspring of East Africa"s wealthy elite.
Just after Greg"s fourteenth birthday, the 640-bed hospital was finally completed, and the president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, spoke at the ribbon-cutting. Greg"s father purchased gallons of pombe, pombe, the local banana beer, and cut down all the bushes in their yard to better accommodate the five hundred locals and expats he"d invited to a barbecue celebrating the hospital"s success. Standing on a stage he"d built for musicians under the pepper tree, Dempsey, wearing a traditional black Tanzanian outfit, stood and addressed the community he"d come to love. the local banana beer, and cut down all the bushes in their yard to better accommodate the five hundred locals and expats he"d invited to a barbecue celebrating the hospital"s success. Standing on a stage he"d built for musicians under the pepper tree, Dempsey, wearing a traditional black Tanzanian outfit, stood and addressed the community he"d come to love.
After fourteen years in Africa, he"d put on weight, but he held himself straight as he spoke, and looked, his son thought, if not like the athlete he"d once been, then still formidable. He began by thanking his Tanzanian partner at the hospital, John Moshi, who Dempsey said was just as responsible for the medical center"s success as he was. "I have a prediction to make," he said in Swahili, looking so at peace with himself that Greg remembers, for once, his father didn"t seem awkward speaking in front of a crowd. "In ten years, the head of every department at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center will be a Tanzanian. It"s your country. It"s your hospital," he said.
"I could feel the swell of pride from the Africans," Mortenson remembers. "The expats wanted him to say, "Look what we"ve done for you." But he was saying, "Look what you"ve done for yourselves and how much more you can do."
"My dad got blasted by the expats for that," Mortenson says. "But you know what? It happened. The place he built is still there today, the top teaching hospital in Tanzania, and a decade after he finished it, all the department heads were African. Watching him up there, I felt so proud that this big, barrel-chested man was my father. He taught me, he taught all of us, that if you believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything."
With both the school and hospital well-established, the Mortensons" work was done in Tanzania. Dempsey was offered a tempting job- establishing a hospital for Palestinian refugees on Jerusalem"s Mount of Olives-but the Mortensons decided it was time for their children to experience America.
Greg and his sisters were both excited and anxious about moving back to what they still considered their country, despite the fact that they"d only been there on brief visits half a dozen times. Greg had read the entry on each of the fifty states in the family"s set of encyclopedias, trying to both picture and prepare for America. For fourteen years, their relatives in Minnesota had written of family functions the African Mortensons had to miss and sent newspaper clippings about the Minnesota Twins, which Greg preserved in his room and reread at night, artifacts from an exotic culture he hoped to understand.
The Mortensons crated up their books and weavings and woodcarvings and moved into Jerene"s parents" old four-story home in St. Paul, before buying an inexpensive pale green home in a middle-cla.s.s suburb called Roseville. On his first day of American high school, Greg was relieved to see so many black students roaming the halls of St. Paul Central. He didn"t feel so far from Moshi. Word quickly spread that the big, awkward fifteen-year-old had come from Africa.
Between cla.s.ses, a tall, sinewy basketball player wearing a Cadillac hood ornament around his neck on a gold chain shoved Mortenson up against a drinking fountain, while his friends closed in menacingly. "You ain"t no African," he sneered, then the pack of boys began raining blows on Mortenson while he tried to cover his head, wondering what he"d done. When they finally stopped, Mortenson lowered his arms, his lips trembling. The leader of the group wound up and smashed his fist into Mortenson"s eye. Another boy picked up a trash can and upended it onto his head. Mortenson stood by the drinking fountain, the reeking can covering his head, listening as laughter faded down the hallway.
In most respects, Mortenson proved adaptable to American culture. He excelled academically, especially in math, music, and the sciences, and, of course, he had the genetic predisposition to succeed at sports.
After the Mortensons moved to the suburbs, Greg"s looming presence on the Ramsey High School football team as a defensive lineman broke open a path of, if not friendship, then camaraderie with other students. But in one respect, he remained out of sorts with American life. "Greg has never been on time in his life," his mother says. "Ever since he was a boy, Greg has always operated on African time."
The family"s work in Africa had been rewarding in every way except monetarily. Paying tuition at an expensive private school was out of the question, so Mortenson asked his father what he should do. "I went to college on the GI Bill," Dempsey said. "You could do worse." In April of his senior year, Greg visited an army recruiting office in St. Paul and signed on for a two-year tour of duty. "It was a very weird thing to do, right after Vietnam," Greg says. "And kids at my school were amazed I"d even consider the military. But we were broke."
Four days after his high-school graduation, Mortenson landed in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. While most of his cla.s.smates were sleeping in during the summer before college, he was jarred awake the first morning at five by a drill sergeant kicking and shaking his bunk and shouting, "Drop your c.o.c.ks and grab your socks!"
"I decided I wasn"t going to let this guy terrify me," Mortenson says. So he greeted Senior Drill Sergeant Parks the next morning at five, sitting fully dressed in the dark on his tightly made cot. "He cussed me out for failing to get eight hours" sleep while I was on government time, made me do forty push-ups, then marched me over to HQ, gave me a stripe, and marched me back to my bunk. "This is Mortenson, he"s your new platoon leader," the sergeant said. "He outranks all you m.o.f.os so do what the man say." "
Mortenson was too quiet to effectively order his fellow soldiers around. But he excelled in the army. He was still supremely fit from football and the high-school track team, so the rigors of basic training weren"t as memorable to Mortenson as the poor morale he found endemic in the post-Vietnam military. He was taught advanced artillery skills and tactics, then embarked on his lifelong interest in medicine when he received training as a medic, before being posted to Germany with the Thirty-third Armored Division. "I was really naive when I enlisted, but the army has a way of shocking that out of you," Mortenson says. "A lot of guys after Vietnam were hooked on heroin. They"d OD in their bunks and we"d have to go and collect their bodies." He also remembers one winter morning when he had to collect the corpse of a sergeant who"d been beaten and left in a snowy ditch to die, because his fellow soldiers found out he was gay.
Posted to Bamberg, Germany, near the East German border, Mortenson perfected the ability he would have for the rest of his life, thanks to the military"s irregular hours, to fall asleep anywhere, at a mo-ment"s notice. He was an exemplary soldier. "I never fired a gun at anyone," Mortenson says, "but this was before the Berlin Wall fell and we spent a lot of time looking through our M-16 scopes at the East German guards." On watch, Mortenson was authorized to fire at the Communist snipers if they shot at East German civilians trying to escape. "That happened occasionally, but never while I was on watch," Mortenson says, "thank G.o.d."
Most of the white soldiers he knew in Germany would spend weekends "catching the clap, getting drunk, or shooting up," Mortenson says, so he"d catch free military flights with black soldiers instead-to Rome or London or Amsterdam. It was the first time Mortenson had ever traveled independently and he found it, and the company, exhilarating. "In the army my best friends were black," Mortenson says. "In Minnesota, that always seemed awkward, but in the military race was the least of your worries. In Germany I felt really accepted, and for the first time since Tanzania, I wasn"t lonely."
Mortenson was awarded the Army Commendation Medal, for evacuating injured soldiers during a live-fire exercise. He was honorably discharged after two years, glad he"d served and now saddled with his second-most-unbreakable habit, after arriving late-the inability to drive a car forward into a parking s.p.a.ce. Long after his discharge, he"d still back every vehicle-a jeep in Baltistan, his family Toyota on a trip to the mall-into a s.p.a.ce as the army teaches, so it"s facing forward and prepared for a quick escape under fire.
He headed to tiny Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, on a football scholarship, where his team won the 1978 NAIA II National Championship. But he quickly grew weary of the h.o.m.ogeneous population at the small, unworldly campus, and transferred to the more diverse University of South Dakota, in Vermillion, on a GI scholarship.
Jerene was a student, working toward her Ph.D. in education, and Dempsey had found a poorly paying, uninspiring job working long hours in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the state capital, on creditor/debtor legislation, so money was tighter than ever for the Mortensons. Greg worked his way through college, washing dishes in the school cafeteria, and as an orderly on the overnight shift at Dakota Hospital. Each month, he secretly sent a portion of his earnings home to his father.
In April 1981, Greg"s second year in Vermillion, Dempsey was diagnosed with cancer. He was forty-eight years old. Greg was then a chemistry and nursing student, and when he learned that his father"s cancer had metastasized and spread to his lymph nodes and liver, he realized how quickly he could lose him. While cramming for tests and holding down his student jobs, Mortenson endured the six-hour drive home to Minnesota every other weekend to spend time with his father. And at every two-week interval, he was shocked by how quickly Dempsey was deteriorating.
Mortenson, already well-versed in medicine, persuaded Dempsey"s doctors to discontinue radiation, knowing his father"s condition was terminal and determined that he should have a chance to enjoy what little time he had. Greg offered to drop out of school and care for his father full-time, but Dempsey told his son, "Don"t you dare." So the biweekly visits went on. When the weather was fine, he would carry his father outside, shocked by how much weight he had lost, to a lawn chair where he"d sit in the sun. Dempsey, still fixated, perhaps, on the lush grounds of their compound in Moshi, took great care with his herb garden, and ordered his son to leave no weeds standing.
Late at night, while Greg wrestled with sleep, he"d hear the sound of Dempsey typing, painstakingly constructing the ceremony for his own funeral. Jerene would doze on the couch, waiting for the typewriter to fall silent so she could accompany her husband to bed.
In September, Greg visited his father for the last time. Dempsey by then was confined to the Midway Hospital in St. Paul. "I had a test the next morning and didn"t want to arrive home in the middle of the night, but I couldn"t leave him," Greg remembers. "He wasn"t very comfortable with affection, but he kept his hand on my shoulder the whole time I was there. Finally, I got up to leave and he said, "It"s all done. It"s all okay. Everything"s taken care of." He was remarkably unafraid of death."
As in Moshi, where Dempsey had thrown a mammoth party to mark the successful end of their time in Africa, Dempsey, having detailed the ceremony to mark the end of his time on Earth, down to the last hymn, died at peace the following morning.
At the overflowing Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, mourners received a program that Dempsey had designed called "The Joy of Going Home." Greg gave his father a sendoff in Swahili, calling him Baba, kaka, ndugu, Baba, kaka, ndugu, "Father, brother, friend." Proud of his military service, Dempsey was laid to rest at the Twin Cities" Ft. Snelling National Cemetery. "Father, brother, friend." Proud of his military service, Dempsey was laid to rest at the Twin Cities" Ft. Snelling National Cemetery.
With Dempsey dead, and an honors degree in both nursing and chemistry in hand, Mortenson felt remarkably untethered. He considered, and was accepted to Case Western University medical school, but couldn"t imagine waiting five more years before earning any money. After his father"s death, he began to obsess about losing Christa, whose seizures had become more frequent. So he returned home for a year to spend time with his youngest sister. He helped her find a job a.s.sembling IV solution bags at a factory and rode the St. Paul city bus with her a dozen times until she was able to learn the route herself. Christa took great interest in her brother"s girlfriends and asked him detailed questions about s.e.x that she was too shy to discuss with her mother. And when Greg learned Christa was dating, he had a nurse talk to her about s.e.x education.
In 1986, Mortenson began a graduate program in neurophysiology at Indiana University, thinking idealistically that with some inspired hard work he might be able to find a cure for his sister. But the wheels of medical research grind too slowly for an impatient twenty-eight-year-old, and the more Mortenson learned about epilepsy, the further away any possible cure seemed to recede. Wading through his dense textbooks, and sitting in labs, he found his mind drifting back to intricate veins of quartz inlaid into granite on The Needles, spiky rock formations in South Dakota"s Black Hills, where he"d learned the fundamentals of rock climbing the previous year with two college friends.
He felt the tug with increasing urgency. He had his grandmother"s old burgundy Buick, which he"d nicknamed La Bamba. He had a few thousand dollars he"d saved, and he had visions of a different sort of life, one more oriented toward the outdoors, like the life he"d loved in Tanzania. California seemed the obvious place, so he packed La Bamba and bombed out West.
As with most pursuits he has ever cared deeply about, Greg Mortenson"s learning curve with climbing was as steep as the rock faces he was soon scaling. To hear him describe those first years in California, there was hardly an interval between the week-long course he took on Southern California"s Suicide Rocks and leading climbs of twenty-thousand-foot-plus peaks in Nepal. After a regimented childhood in his mother"s highly structured home, then the army, college, and graduate school, the freedom of climbing, and working just enough to climb some more, was intoxicatingly new. Mortenson began a career as a trauma nurse, working overnight and holidays at Bay Area emergency rooms, taking the shifts no one else wanted in exchange for the freedom to disappear when the mountains called.
The Bay Area climbing scene can be all-consuming, and Mortenson let himself be swallowed by it. He joined a climbing gym, City Rock, in an old Emeryville warehouse, where he spent hour after hour refining his moves. He began running marathons and worked out constantly between expeditions to climb the north face of Mount Baker, Annapurna IV, Baruntse, and several other Himalayan peaks. "From 1989 to 1992 my life was totally about climbing," Mortenson says. And the lore of mountaineering had almost as strong a pull on him as the process of measuring himself against unyielding rock. He ama.s.sed an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of climbing and combed the Bay Area"s used-book stores for nineteenth-century accounts of mountaineering derring-do. "My pillow those years was a moun-taineer"s bible called Freedom of the Hills, Freedom of the Hills," Mortenson says.
Christa came to visit him each year, and he"d try to explain his love for the mountains to his sister, driving her to Yosemite and tracing his finger along the half-dozen routes he"d taken up the monolithic granite slab of Half-Dome.
On July 23, 1992, Mortenson was on Mount Sill, in the eastern Sierra, with his girlfriend at the time, Anna Lopez, a ranger who spent months alone in the backcountry. At four-thirty in the morning, they were descending a glacier where they had bivouacked for the night after summiting, when Mortenson tripped, did a complete forward flip, then started sliding down the steep slope. His momentum sent him toppling down the glacier, flipping him five feet in the air with each bounce and slamming him against the compacted snow and ice. His heavy pack twisted and ripped his left shoulder out of joint, breaking his humerus bone. He fell eight hundred vertical feet, until he managed to jam the tip of his ice axe into the snow and stop himself with his one working arm.
After Mortenson spent a hallucinatory twenty-four hours stumbling in pain down the mountain and out to the trailhead, Anna drove him to the nearest emergency room, in Bishop, California. Mortenson called his mother from the hospital to tell her he"d survived. What he heard hurt him more than his fall. At the same hour that Greg was crashing down Mount Sill, his mother opened Christa"s bedroom door to wake her for the trip they"d planned for her twenty-third birthday, to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, where the movie had been filmed. "When I went to wake her Christa was on her hands and knees, like she was trying to get back into bed after going to the bathroom," Jerene says. "And she was blue. I guess the only good thing you could say is that she had died so quickly of a ma.s.sive seizure that she was just frozen in place."
Mortenson attended the funeral in Minnesota with his arm in a sling. Jerene"s brother, Pastor Lane Doerring, gave a eulogy, in which he added an appropriate twist to Christa"s favorite movie"s most famous line. "Our Christa"s going to wake up and say, "Is this Iowa?" And they"ll say "No, this is heaven"," he told a sobbing crowd of mourners at the same church where they"d bid Dempsey good-bye.
In California, Mortenson felt more meaninglessly adrift than he could ever remember. The phone call from Dan Mazur, an accomplished climber Mortenson knew by his reputation for single-mindedness, felt like a lifeline. He was planning an expedition to K2, mountaineering"s ultimate test, and he needed an expedition medic. Would Mortenson consider coming? Here was a path, a means by which Mortenson could get himself back on course and, at the same time, properly honor his sister. He"d climb to the summit those of his avocation respected most, and he"d dedicate his climb to Christa"s memory. He"d find a way to wring some meaning out of this meaningless loss.
Gingerly, Mortenson lowered GiGi from his face, and laid the monkey back on top of the photo alb.u.m. An eighteen wheeler rumbled by out on San Pablo, shaking the little room as it pa.s.sed. He walked out of the storage s.p.a.ce and retrieved his climbing gear from the trunk of La Bamba.
Hanging his harness, his ropes, his crampons, carabiners, hex-bolts, and Jumar ascenders neatly on the hooks where they"d rested only briefly between trips for the last five years, these tools that had carried him across continents and up peaks once thought una.s.sailable by humans seemed powerless. What tools did it take to raise money?
How could he convince Americans to care about a circle of children sitting in the cold, on the other side of the world, scratching at their lessons in the dirt with sticks? He pulled the light cord, extinguishing the particularity of the objects in the storage s.p.a.ce. A shard of California sun gleamed in the stuffed monkey"s scuffed plastic eyes before Mortenson padlocked the door.
CHAPTER 5.
580 LETTERS, ONE C CHECK.
Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart. Never give up, never lose hope. Allah says, "The broken ones are my beloved." Crush your heart. Be broken.
-Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir, aka n.o.body, Son of n.o.body
The typewriter was too small for Mortenson"s hands. He kept hitting two keys at once, tearing out the letter, and starting over, which added to the cost. A dollar an hour to rent the old IBM Selectric seemed reasonable, but after five hours at downtown Berkeley"s Krishna Copy Center, he"d only finished four letters.
The problem, apart from the inconvenient way IBM had arranged the keys so close together, was that Mortenson wasn"t sure, exactly, what to say. "Dear Ms. Winfrey," he typed, with the tips of his forefingers, starting a fifth letter, "I am an admirer of your program. You strike me as someone who really cares what is best for people. I am writing to tell you about a small village in Pakistan called Korphe, and about a school that I am trying to build there. Did you know that for many children in this beautiful region of the Himalaya there are no schools at all?"
This is where he kept getting stuck. He didn"t know whether to come right out and mention money, or just ask for help. And if he asked for money, should he request a specific amount? "I plan to build a five-room school to educate 100 students up to the fifth grade," Mortenson typed. "While I was in Pakistan climbing K2, the world"s second-highest peak (I didn"t quite make it to the top) I consulted with local experts. Using local materials and the labor of local craftsmen, I feel sure I can complete the school for $12,000."
And here came the hardest part. Should he ask for it all? "Anything you could contribute toward that amount would be a blessing," Mortenson decided to say. But his fingertips failed him and the last word read "bledding." He tore the sheet out and started over.
By the time he had to head to San Francisco, for his night shift at the UCSF Medical Center emergency room, Mortenson had completed, sealed, and stamped six letters. One for Oprah Winfrey. One for each network news anchor, including CNN"s Bernard Shaw, since he figured CNN was becoming as big as the other guys. And a letter he"d written spontaneously to the actress Susan Sarandon, since she seemed so nice, and so dedicated to causes.
He wheeled La Bamba through rush-hour traffic, steering the Buick with a single index finger. Here was a machine perfectly suited to the size of Mortenson"s hands. He parked, leaned out the pa.s.senger window, and slid the letters into the maw of a curbside collection box at the Berkeley Post Office.
It wasn"t much to show for a full day"s work, but at least he"d started somewhere. He"d get faster, he told himself. He would have to, since he"d set himself a firm goal of five hundred letters. Easing La Bamba into westbound Bay Bridge traffic, he felt giddy, like he"d lit a fuse and an explosion of good news would soon be on the way.
In the ER, a shift could disappear in a blur of knife wounds and bleeding abcesses. Or, in the small hours, with no life-threatening admissions, it could crawl imperceptibly toward morning. During those times, Mortenson catnapped on cots, or talked with doctors like Tom Vaughan. Tall, lean, spectacled, and serious, Vaughan was a pulmonologist and a climber. He had reached twenty-two thousand feet on Aconcagua, in the Andes, the highest mountain outside Asia, and summited Nanda Devi, India"s tallest peak. But it was his experience as expedition doctor during a 1982 American attempt on Pak-istan"s Gasherbrum II that forged a bond between the doctor and the nurse.
"You could see K2 from Gasherbrum II," Vaughan says. "It was incredibly beautiful, and scary. And I had a lot of questions for Greg about what it was like to climb it." Vaughan had been part of an attempt on what"s usually considered the easiest of the eight-thousand-meter peaks. But during his season on the mountain, no member of his team summited, and one member of the expedition, Glen Brendeiro, was swept over a cliff by an avalanche and never found.
Vaughan had a sense of what kind of accomplishment it took to nearly summit a killer peak like K2. Between crises, they spoke of the grandeur and desolation of the Baltoro, which they both believed to be the most spectacular place on earth. And Mortenson quizzed Vaughan intently about the research he was doing on pulmonary edema, the alt.i.tude-induced swelling of the lungs that caused so many deaths and injuries among climbers.
"Greg was incredibly fast, calm, and competent in an emergency," Vaughan remembers. "But when you"d talk to him about medicine, his heart didn"t seem to be in it. My impression of him at that time was that he was just treading water until he could get back to Pakistan."
Mortenson"s mind may have been focused on a mountain village twelve thousand miles away. But he couldn"t take his eyes off a certain resident in anesthesiology who swept him off-balance every time he encountered her-Dr. Marina Villard. "Marina was a natural beauty," Mortenson says. "She was a climber. She didn"t wear makeup. And she had this dark hair and these full lips that I could hardly look at. I was in agony whenever I had to work with her. I didn"t know if I should ask her out, or avoid her so I could think straight."
To save money while he was trying to raise funds for the school, Mortenson decided not to rent an apartment. He had the storage s.p.a.ce. And La Bamba"s backseat was the size of a couch. Compared to a drafty tent on the Baltoro, it seemed like a reasonably comfortable place to sleep. He kept up his membership at City Rock, as much for access to a shower as for the climbing wall he scaled most days to stay in shape. Each night, Mortenson prowled the Berkeley Flats, a warehouse district by the bay, searching for a dark and quiet enough block so that he could sleep undisturbed. Wrapped in his sleeping bag, his legs stretched almost flat in the back of La Bamba, he"d find Marina flitting through his thoughts last thing before falling asleep.
During days he wasn"t working, Mortenson hunted and pecked his way through hundreds of letters. He wrote to every U.S. senator. He haunted the public library, scanning the kind of pop culture magazines he would never otherwise read for the names of movie stars and pop singers, which he added to a list he kept folded inside a Ziploc bag. He copied down addresses from a book ranking the one hundred richest Americans. "I had no idea what I was doing," Mortenson remembers. "I just kept a list of everyone who seemed powerful or popular or important and typed them a letter. I was thirty-six years old and I didn"t even know how to use a computer. That"s how clueless I was."
One day Mortenson tried the door of Krishna Copy and found it unexpectedly locked. He walked to the nearest copy shop, Lazer Image on Shattuck Avenue, and asked to rent a typewriter.
"I told him, we don"t have typewriters," remembers Lazer Image"s owner, Kishwar Syed. "This is 1993, why don"t you rent a computer? And he told me he didn"t know how to use one."
Mortenson soon learned that Syed was Pakistani, from Bahawal Puy, a small village in the central Punjab. And when Syed found out why Mortenson wanted to type letters, he sat Mortenson in front of an Apple Macintosh and gave him a series of free tutorials until his new friend was computer literate.
"My village in Pakistan had no school so the importance of what Greg was trying to do was very dear to me," Syed says. "His cause was so great it was my duty to devote myself to help him."
Mortenson was amazed by the computer"s cut and paste and copy functions. He realized he could have produced the three hundred letters it had taken him months to type in one day. In a single caffeine-fueled weekend session under Syed"s tutelage, he cut and pasted his appeal for funds feverishly until he reached his goal of five hundred letters. Then he blazed on, as he and Syed brainstormed a list of dozens more celebrities, until Mortenson had 580 appeals in the mail. "It was pretty interesting," Mortenson says. "Someone from Pakistan helping me become computer literate so I could help Pakistani kids get literate."
After sending off the letters, Mortenson returned to Syed"s shop on his days off and put his new computer skills to work, writing sixteen grant applications seeking funds for the Korphe School.
When they weren"t hunched over a keyboard together, Mortenson and Syed discussed women. "It was a very sad and beautiful time in our lives," Syed says. "We talked often of loneliness and love." Syed was engaged to a woman his mother had chosen for him in Karachi. And he was at work saving money for their wedding before he brought her to America.
Mortenson confided about his crush on Marina and Syed strategized endlessly, inventing ways his friend could ask her out. "Listen to Kish," he counseled. "You"re getting old and you need to start a family. What are you waiting for?"
Mortenson found himself tongue-tied whenever he tried to ask Marina out. But during down time at the UCSF Medical Center, he started telling Marina stories about the Karakoram, and his plans for the school. Trying not to lose himself in this woman"s eyes, Mortenson retreated into his memories as he talked. But when he"d look up, after chronicling Etienne"s rescue, or his lost days on the Baltoro, or his time in Korphe under the care of Haji Ali, Marina"s eyes would be shining. And after two months of these conversations, she ended Mortenson"s agony by asking him out on a date.
Mortenson had lived with monkish frugality since his return from Pakistan. Most days he breakfasted on the ninety-nine-cent special- coffee and a cruller-at a Cambodian doughnut shop on MacArthur Avenue. Often, he didn"t eat again until dinner, when he"d fill up on a three-dollar burrito at one of downtown Berkeley"s taquerias.
For their first date, Mortenson drove Marina to a seafood restaurant on the water in Sausalito and ordered a bottle of white wine, gritting his teeth at the cost. He threw himself into Marina"s life vertiginously, jumping in with both feet. Marina had two girls from a previous marriage, Blaise, five, and Dana, three. And Mortenson soon felt almost as attached to them as he did to their mother.
On some weekends when the girls stayed with their father, he and Marina would drive to Yosemite, sleep in La Bamba, and climb peaks like Cathedral Spire all weekend. When the girls were home, Mortenson took them to Indian Rock, a scenic outcropping in the breathtaking Berkeley Hills, where he taught them the fundamentals of rock climbing. "It felt like I suddenly had my own family," Mortenson says, "which I realized I really wanted. And if the fundraising for the school had been going better I might have been completely happy."
Jerene Mortenson had been anxiously following her son"s odyssey from her new home in River Falls, Wisconsin. After finishing her Ph.D., she had been hired as princ.i.p.al of the Westside Elementary School. Jerene convinced her son to visit, and to give a slide show and speech to six hundred students in her school. "I"d been having a really hard time explaining to adults why I wanted to help students in Pakistan," Mortenson says. "But the kids got it right away. When they saw the pictures, they couldn"t believe that there was a place where children sat outside in cold weather and tried to hold cla.s.ses without teachers. They decided to do something about it."
A month after returning to Berkeley, Mortenson got a letter from his mother. She explained that her students had spontaneously launched a "Pennies for Pakistan" drive. Filling two forty-gallon trash cans, they collected 62,345 pennies. When he deposited the check his mother sent along for $623.45 Mortenson felt like his luck was finally changing. "Children had taken the first step toward building the school," Mortenson says. "And they did it with something that"s basically worthless in our society-pennies. But overseas, pennies can move mountains."
Other steps came all too slowly. Six months had pa.s.sed since Mortenson had sent the first of the 580 letters and finally he got his one and only response. Tom Brokaw, like Mortenson, was an alumnus of the University of South Dakota. As football players they had both been coached by Lars Overskei, a fact Mortenson"s note made clear. Brokaw sent a check for one hundred dollars and a note wishing him luck. And one by one, letters arrived from foundations like hammer blows to his hopes, notifying Mortenson that all sixteen grant applications had been rejected.
Mortenson showed Brokaw"s note to Tom Vaughan and admitted how poorly his efforts at fundraising were progressing. Vaughan supported the American Himalayan Foundation and decided to see if the organization could help. He wrote a short item about Mortenson"s K2 climb, and his efforts to build a school for Korphe, that was published in the AHF"s national newsletter. And he reminded the AHF"s members, many of whom were America"s elite mountaineers, of Sir Edmund Hillary"s legacy in Nepal.