It was looking like the retreat from Moscow when we came to the first of the new bridges. These are pretty neat pieces of backwoods engineering; there aren’t any logs in the area long enough to span the river, so they take four logs and stick them out over the river, and weigh them down with a huge pile of round stones. Then four more logs are pushed out from the other side, until their ends rest on the ends of the first four. Instant bridge. They work, but they are not confidence builders.
Our group stared at the first one apprehensively. Arnold appeared behind us and chomped an unlit cigar as he filmed the scene. “The Death Bridge,” he announced into his camera’s mike.
“Arnold, please,” I said. “Mellow out.”
He walked down to the glacial gray rush of the river. “Hey, George, do you think I could take a step in to get a better shot of the crossing?”
“NO!” I stood up fast. “One step in and you’d drown, I mean look at it!”
“Well, okay.”
Now the rest of the group were staring at me in horror, as if it weren’t clear at first glance that to fall into the Dudh Kosi would be a very fatal error indeed. A good number of them ended up crawling across the bridge on hands and knees. Arnold got them all for posterity, and filmed his own crossing by walking in circles that made me cringe. Silently I cursed him; I was pretty sure he had known perfectly well how dangerous the river was, and only wanted to make sure everyone else did too. And very soon after that—at the next bridge, in fact—people began to demand to be taken back to Lukla. To Kathmandu. To San Francisco.
I sighed, remembering it. And remembering that this was only the beginning. Just your typical Want To Take You Higher Ltd. videotrek. Plus Arnold.
III
I got another bit of Arnold in action early the next morning, when I was in the rough outhouse behind the trekkers’ teahouses, very hung over, crouched over the unhealthy damp hole in the floor. I had just completed my business in there when I looked up to see the big glass eye of a zoom lens, staring over the top of the wooden door at me.
“No, Arnold!” I cried, struggling to put my hand over the lens while I pulled up my pants.
“Hey, just getting some local color,” Arnold said, backing away. “You know, people like to see what it’s really like, the details and all, and these outhouses are really something else. Exotic.”
I growled at him. “You should have trekked in from Jiri, then. The lowland villages don’t have outhouses at all.”
His eyes got round, and he shifted an unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth. “What do you do, then?”
“Well, you just go outside and have a look around. Pick a spot. They usually have a shitting field down by the river. Real exotic.”
He laughed. “You mean, turds everywhere?”
“Well, something like that.”
“That sounds great! Maybe I’d better walk back out instead of flying.”
I stared at him, wrinkling my nose. “Serious filmmaker, eh Arnold?”
“Oh, yeah. Haven’t you heard of me? Arnold McConnell? I make adventure films for PBS. And sometimes for the ski resort circuit, video rentals, that kind of thing. Skiing, hang gliding, kayaking, parachuting, climbing, skateboarding—I’ve done them all. Didn’t you ever see The Man Who Swam Down the Zambesi? No? Ah, that’s a bit of a classic, now. One of my best.”
So he had known how dangerous the Dudh Kosi was. I stared at him reproachfully. It was hard to believe he made adventure films; he looked more like the kind of Hollywood producer you’d tell couch jokes about. “So you’re making a real film of this trip?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure. Always working, never stop working. Workaholic.”
“Don’t you need a bigger crew?”
“Well sure, usually, but this is a different kind of thing, one of my ‘personal diary’ films I call them. I’ve sold a couple to PBS. Do all the work myself. It’s kind of like my version of solo climbing.”
“Fine. But cut the part about me taking a crap, okay?”
“Sure, sure, don’t worry about it. Just got to get everything I can, you know, so I’ve got good tape to choose from later on. All grist for the mill. That’s why I got this lens. All the latest in equipment for me. I got stuff you wouldn’t believe.”
“I believe.”
He chomped his cigar. “Just call me Mr. Adventure.”
“I will.”
IV
I didn’t see Freds and Kunga Norbu in Namche Bazaar, and I figured they had left already with Freds’s British friends; I probably wouldn’t see them again until we got up near their base camp, because I planned to keep my group in Namche a couple days to acclimatize, and enjoy the town. Namche functions as the Sherpas’ capital, and a more dramatically placed town you could hardly imagine; it is perched on a promontory above the confluence of the Dudh Kosi and the Bhote Kosi, and the rivers lie about a mile below in steep green gorges, while white peaks tower a mile above all around it. The town itself is a horseshoe-shaped ring of stone buildings and stone streets, packed with Sherpas, trekkers, climbers, and traders dropping in for the weekly bazaar.
It’s a fun town, and kept me busy; I forgot about Freds and the Brits, and so was quite surprised to run into them in Pheriche, one of the Sherpas’ high mountain villages.
Most of these high villages are occupied only in the summer, to grow potatoes and pasture yaks. Pheriche, however, lies on the trekking route to Everest, so it’s occupied almost year-round, and a couple lodges have been built, along with the Himalayan Rescue Association’s only aid station. It still looks like a summer pasturage: low rock walls separate potato fields, and a few slate-roofed stone huts, plus the lodges and the tin-roofed aid station. All of it is clustered at the end of a flat-bottomed glacial valley, against the side of a lateral moraine five hundred feet high. A stream meanders by, and the ground is carpeted with grasses and the bright autumn red of berberi bushes. On all sides tower the fantastic white spikes of some of the world’s most dramatic peaks—Ama Dablam, Taboche, Tramserku, Kang Taiga—and all in all, it’s quite a place. My clients were making themselves dizzy trying to film it.
We set up our tent village in an unused potato field, and after dinner Laure and I slipped off to the Himalaya Hotel to have some chang. I entered the lodge’s little kitchen and heard Freds cry, “Hey George!” He was sitting with Kunga Norbu and four Westerners; we joined them, crowding in around a little table. “These are the friends we’re climbing with.”
He introduced them, and we all shook hands. Trevor was a tall slender guy, with round glasses and a somewhat crazed grin. “Mad Tom,” as Freds called him, was short and curly-headed, and didn’t look mad at all, although something in his mild manner made me believe that he could be. John was short and compact, with a salt-and-pepper beard, and a crusher handshake. And Marion was a tall and rather attractive woman—though I suspected she might have blushed or punched you if you said so—she was attractive in a tough, wild way, with a stark strong face, and thick brown hair pulled back and braided. They were British, with the accents to prove it: Marion and Trevor quite posh and public school, and John and Mad Tom very thick and North Country.
We started drinking chang, and they told me about their climb. Lingtren, a sharp peak between Pumori and Everest’s West Shoulder, is serious work from any approach, and they were clearly excited about it, in their own way: “Bit of a slog, to tell the truth,” Trevor said cheerfully.