The Unspoken

“God, how I hate this!   Son of a witch  . . . disgusting . . . hell . . .”

“Keep go!”  Sherpa Rhito’s demand hits and punctures my rumination.

            “ . . . and  bad-mannered!   Have you noticed Rhito?”   I continue,  “Up close your mountain is so goddamn demanding!   She swells up and up . . . gets bigger and bigger . . . then insinuates exhaustion is my problem.   Ah, but I know how a cloud feels . . . I hold the blue sky in my . . .”

Freezing to death in Everest’s Death Zone, groping for meaning, I feel prepared to die.  My Sherpa guide knows, better than most, death hovers — poised to clip my life’s tenuous thread — then pauses once more, as if to await still another poetic possibility.   Wandering in the infinite, seeking the infinitesimal, I am on a pilgrimage to the unknown¾a search for the essential defining reality.

Not only why, but why me?   Why life?  Why death?  I ask myself again and again, why is summiting this mountain so damn meaningful­—failing so devastating?  Why is a Sherpa able to breathe easily at 26,000 feet, while a California doctor gasps and dies?  Why is the cold on this mountain—so cold? Why in spite of being in the best shape of my life, am I so cold?  Why is Rhito yelling at me?

 Now, staggering on a slope of black and white shards, at the edge of eternity, I can hardly recall what it had been like to hold my wife—or a lover.  No such solid reminiscent remains fixed in the slow moving amberness of my memory.  I cannot, at this moment, recollect a single conversation.  I try, but my recollection thicken like a broth-in-progress in which events and dreams are left as neural-flotsam to fester or cool.  What had we talked about for hours on end?  I feel my insides fill with an icy distillates.  On some level I know I betrayed all that was sacred in our relationship.  “Son of a witch!  Why?”   Even now, my arrogance prevails, I insist on reasons that mean something to the heart still beating within my chest.

I’m much taller than my guide and when I stagger upward I’m sure I look like Icabod Crane on an ice pond.  I shuffle on to where the tag-ropes dangle for those who care enough to grasp them.  I do!  Pulling myself upward, the ice grows thinner and snow feels soft beneath the crust.  I groan again and go on, to the point where my tethered rope grows taut against the form of my doubting Sherpa.  “I am going to plant this hand-painted flag at the top, if it’s the last . . .  Llyn!  I will.  I will.”