Free Snowblind by Daniel Arnold

Captain told me not to worry. “They will try to trick you, cheat you, bully you, and swindle you,” he said, in his cheerful singsong. “But they will not mug you.” I asked him why not. I mean, wouldn’t you? Pale infidels show up in your valley with sweaty wads of money—more money than you’ll earn in a lifetime—and they’ve got machines and gear that might as well be from Mars. And for what? To walk past you and try not to die on mountains. But they could just as easily try not to die on mountains in Skardu. So, Captain, why not? “Mister Chase,” he said, “poverty does not turn men into animals. Meannessand meaninglessness are what make animals.” And the goofy bastard was right. And I still might have snatched the money.
    Negotiations began on a dirt floor in a wood hut with china teacups. Half an hour later, Gregor was snorting like a bull with his hands rolled up into enormous fists, Captain was screaming, eyes bulging, sweat pouring down his face, and the dahl man was crying and invoking Allah, which was the only word I could understand the whole time. In another half hour, we signed a receipt with all the pomp and mutual congratulations of a new-made Palestinian peace treaty. And then we joked back and forth and drank more tea on the ground. When we left, I asked the Captain how we had done. “Who can say?” he said. “It is not your money or my money or his food.”
    We spent the night in the K2 Hotel, and the next morning, an aging squad of Land Rovers was ready to take us and our expanding pyramid of supplies to the end of the road—Askole. The road couldn’t have been more than two inches wider than the Land Rovers—cliff on one side, air on the other. All dirt and crumbling edges. Then we stopped again and rounded up more porters and more supplies. Feeding an expedition is like some sort of nightmare paradox. For each porter, you need another porter to carry food for the first porter and a third porter to carry food for the second.
    I was so antsy, those days. I wanted to move . In California, in Canada, Alaska, everything you do moves you closer to the mountain. You can feel yourself pulling closer. But I had been sitting in buses and haggling over goats with bags of money tied around my neck. And all of that was an experience, but none of it felt like mountaineering. I hadn’t even been for a run since Banning, let alone doneany climbing. And I could see how the others were dealing with the time—Bill with his commands, read each morning to us from a list he’d made the night before, Frank and Hubert with their mantras and tea, Alan with his big talk and Norwegian girlfriends, Gregor with sleep—the man was amazing, he could sleep eighteen hours a day if nothing was going on. But what did I have to fall back on? All I knew was the climbing itself. I wasn’t any good at not climbing.
    What I’m trying to say is that I was hardly in my right mind when this big tan Oregonian named Wind came walking up to me in Askole. He’d picked his name himself, he told me proudly, and grown into it. No last name. He had a fuzzy blond beard and fuzzy blond dreads coiling off his head like snakes. He wasn’t one for interpersonal barriers—he’d wrap an arm around you just to say “good morning.” His clothes were kaleidoscopic. Like a Pakistani bus. Impossible to tell where the old cloth ended and the patches began. But the stitches were all neat and small. He talked high and quavery, and it sounded all wrong, like size-seven shoes on a six-foot guy. Maybe he was twenty-five, maybe older, I was never sure.
    I asked him where he was from. “I started out as a little newt in Camas,” he said. “I’ve been crawling along ever since.” A newt? What? “Dude, you know, a newt? The lizards that like creeks? They look like fetuses.” No, I told him, they don’t. “Sure