I still didn’t know what to say—the loss of a lung to cancer must be a terrible thing—and I was too dull-witted to ask him where and when he might have climbed above 28,000 feet. The region above 8,000 meters, around 25,000 feet, is called the Death Zone for good reason: every minute a climber is at such altitude, his body is becoming weaker, he is coughing, gasping, always short of breath, and the climber is unable to recharge energy even by sleeping (which is all but impossible at such altitude anyway). I later wondered if Mr. Perry was just using that altitude—28,000 feet—as an example of how hard it was for him to breathe now or if he’d actually ever ventured that high. I knew that Mount Vinson, the tallest mountain in Antarctica, was just a little over 16,000 feet high.
Before I got around to asking an intelligent question, Mr. Perry clapped my shoulder. “I’m not complaining. I just love irony. If there is a God of this poor, sad mess of a universe it’s got to be Bitch Irony. Say…you’re a published writer.”
“Yes,” I said. My voice may have sounded wary. The most common thing that published writers are approached for by new acquaintances is to be invited to help that would-be writer either (a) find an agent, (b) get published, or (c) both of the above.
“You have a literary agent and all that?” said Perry.
“Yes?” I was even more tentative now. After just four hours I admired the man greatly, but amateur writing is amateur writing. Almost impossible to get published.
“I’ve been thinking of writing something…”
There it was. In a way, I regretted hearing those familiar words. They were the punch line of too many conversations with new acquaintances. But I also felt a sense of relief. If he hadn’t already written his book or whatever, what were the chances that he could do so now, almost ninety years old and dying of cancer?
Mr. Perry saw my face, read my thoughts, and laughed loudly. “Don’t worry, Dan. I’m not going to ask you to get something of mine published. I’m not sure I’d want it published.”
“What then?” I asked.
He rubbed his cheek and chin again. “I want to write something and I want someone to read it. Does that make sense?”
“I think so. It’s why I write.”
He shook his head, almost impatiently I thought. “No, you write for thousands or tens of thousands of people to read your thoughts. I’m hunting for just one reader. One person who might understand it. One person who might believe it.”
“Family, maybe?” I suggested.
Again he shook his head. I sensed that it was hard for him to make this request.
“The only family I know about is a grandniece or great-grandniece or whatever the hell she is in Baltimore or somewhere,” he said softly. “I’ve never met her. But Mary and the home here have her address written down somewhere…as a place to send my things when I check out. No, Dan, if I manage to write this thing, I want someone to read it who would understand it.”
“Is it fiction?”
He grinned. “No, but I’m sure it’ll read like fiction. Bad fiction, probably.”
“Have you started writing it?”
He shook his head again. “No, I’ve been waiting all these decades…hell, I don’t know what I’ve been waiting for. For Death to bang on my door, I guess, to give me some motivation. Well, he’s banging.”
“I’d be honored to read anything you’d choose to share with me, Mr. Perry,” I said. I surprised myself with the emotion and sincerity of my offer. Usually I approached reading amateurs’ efforts as if their manuscripts were coated with the plague bacillus. But I realized I’d be excited to read anything this man wanted to write, although I assumed at the time it would probably be about Byrd’s South Polar expedition in the thirties.
Jacob Perry sat motionless and looked at me for a long moment. Those blue eyes seemed to touch me somehow—as though the eight blunt, scarred fingers of his were pressing hard against my forehead. It was not altogether a pleasant sensation. But it was intimate.
“All right,” he said at last. “If I ever get the thing written, I’ll send it your way.”
I’d already given him my card with my address and other information on it.
“One problem, though,” he said.
“What?”
He held up his two hands, so dexterous, even with the left hand missing most of the last two fingers. “I can’t type worth a damn,” he said.
I laughed. “If you were submitting a manuscript to a publisher,” I said, “we’d find a typist who could type things up for you. Or I’d do it myself. But in the meantime…”
From my battered briefcase, I produced a Moleskine blank book journal—its 240 creamy blank pages never touched. The blank journal was wrapped in a soft leather “skin” that had a leather double loop to hold a pen or pencil. I’d already slipped a sharpened pencil into the loop.
Mr. Perry touched the leather. “This is too dear…,” he began, moving to hand it back.
I loved hearing the archaic use of the word “dear,” but I shook my head and pressed the leather-wrapped blank journal back into his hands.
“This is mere token payment for the hours you spent talking to me,” I said. I’d wanted to add “Jake,” but still couldn’t manage calling him by his first name. “Seriously, I want you to have it. And when you write something you want to share with me, I look forward to reading it. And I promise you that I’ll give you my honest assessment of it.”
Still turning the leather journal over and over in his gnarled hands, Mr. Perry flashed a grin. “I’ll probably be dead when you get the book…or books…Dan, so be as honest as you want in your critique. It won’t hurt my feelings a bit.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
I talked to Jacob Perry in July 1991, twenty years ago as I write this foreword to his manuscript in the late summer of 2011.
In late May 1992, Mary phoned to tell us that Mr. Perry had passed away in the Delta hospital. The cancer had won.
When I asked Mary if Mr. Perry had left anything for me, she seemed surprised. Everything he’d left behind—and it wasn’t much, his books and artifacts—had been packed up and shipped to his grandniece in Baltimore. Mary hadn’t been at the hospice at the time—she’d been in a hospital in Denver. Her assistant had mailed the packages.
Then, nine weeks ago, in the late spring of 2011, almost twenty years after my trip to Delta, I received a UPS package from someone named Richard A. Durbage (Jr.) in Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland. Assuming that it was a batch of my old books that someone wanted signed—something that really irritates me when the reader hasn’t asked permission of me to send the books—I was tempted to return the package to the sender, unopened. Instead, I used a box cutter to slash the package open with more than necessary energy. Karen looked at the shipping information and made me laugh by saying that we’d never had books for signing sent from Lutherville-Timonium and she immediately went to look it up online. (Karen does love her geography.)
But they weren’t old books of mine to be signed.
In the package were twelve Moleskine notebooks. I flipped through and saw that each page, front and back, was filled with small, precise cursive handwriting in a man’s strong hand.
Even then I stupidly didn’t think of Mr. Perry until I got to the last journal at the bottom.
The leather cover was wrapped around it, still holding the stub of a #2 pencil, but the leather was now weathered and worn and darkened by the oils transmitted through the repeated touch of Mr. Perry’s hands. He’d obviously transferred the leather cover to each volume during his ten months of effort at writing this single, long tale.
There was a typed note.
Dear Mr. Simmons:
My mother, Lydia Durbage, passed away this April. She was 71 years old. In going through her things, I found this box. It had been sent to her in 1992 by the nursing home where a distant relative of hers, a Mr. Jacob Perry, had lived his last years and where he died. Not really knowing and never having met her grand
-uncle, it seems that my mother only glanced at the contents of the box, chose one or two items for sale at her weekly garage sale, and left the rest untouched. I don’t believe she ever opened the notebooks I have included in this package.
On page one of the top notebook there was a note, not to my mother but evidently to a certain “Mary” who ran the assisted living facility in Delta, that asked that these notebooks and a certain Vest Pocket Kodak camera be sent to you. Your address was given, which was how I knew where to send this much-belated package.
If these items were something you anticipated receiving twenty years ago, I apologize for the delay. My mother was absent-minded, even in her middle years.
Since the notebooks were meant to be sent to you, I’ve decided not to read them. I did skim through and noticed that my mother’s relative was an accomplished artist: the maps, drawings of mountains, and other sketches seem to be of professional quality.
Again, I apologize for the inadvertent and accidental delay that kept you from receiving this package in the timely manner that I’m sure Mr. Jacob Perry had hoped for.
Sincerely yours,
Richard A. Durbage, Jr.
I carried the box to my study and lifted out the stack of notebooks and began reading that afternoon and read straight through the night, finishing about nine the next morning.
After pondering his wishes for months, I’ve decided to publish two versions of Jacob Perry’s final (and only) manuscript. In the end, I’ve decided that publication is what he would have wanted after spending the last ten months of his life laboring over the effort. I also believe it’s why he chose me as his primary reader. He knew that I could judge whether a manuscript deserved publication or not. I believe with all my heart that Jacob Perry’s manuscript—this book—does deserve that publication.
A second and very limited edition will show Mr. Perry’s own handwriting and will include the scores of sketches, portrait drawings, carefully done maps, mountain landscapes, old photographs, and other elements that Mr. Perry had added to the text. This version will be of text alone. I think it succeeds in telling the story that Jacob Perry, 1902–1992, wanted me to hear. Wanted us to hear. As his editor, I’ve made only a few spelling corrections and added a very few explanatory notes to his text. I can only trust and hope that, in allowing me to be his first reader and editor, Mr. Perry understands my own hunger to allow others to read this strange and oddly beautiful testament.
I do think this is what he wanted.
I can only hope to God that it was.
Part I
THE CLIMBERS
Chapter 1
The summit of the Matterhorn offers very clear choices: a misstep to the left and you die in Italy; a wrong step to the right and you die in Switzerland.
T he three of us learn about Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance on Mount Everest while we are eating lunch on the summit of the Matterhorn.
It is a perfect day in late June of 1924, and the news lies folded in a three-day-old British newspaper that someone in the kitchen at the small inn at Breuil in Italy has wrapped around our cold beef and horseradish sandwiches on thick fresh bread. I’ve unwittingly carried this still-weightless news—soon to be a heavy stone in each of our chests—to the summit of the Matterhorn in my rucksack, tucked alongside a goatskin of wine, two water bottles, three oranges, 100 feet of climbing rope, and a bulky salami. We do not immediately notice the paper or read the news that will change the day for us. We are too full of the summit and its views.
For six days we have done nothing but climb and re-climb the Matterhorn, always avoiding the summit for reasons known only to the Deacon.
On the first day up from Zermatt we explored the Hornli Ridge—Whymper’s route in 1865—while avoiding the fixed ropes and cables that ran across the mountain’s skin like so many scars. The next day we traversed to do the same on the Zmutt Ridge. On the third day, a long day, we traversed the mountain, again climbing from the Swiss side via the Hornli Ridge, crossing the friable north face just below the summit that the Deacon had forbidden to us, and then descending along the Italian Ridge, at twilight reaching our tents on the high green fields facing south toward Breuil.
I realized after the fifth day that we were following in the footsteps of those who’d made the Matterhorn so famed—the determined artist-climber 25-year-old Edward Whymper and his ad hoc party of three Englishmen: the Reverend Charles Hudson (“the clergyman from the Crimea”); Reverend Hudson’s 19-year-old protégé and novice climber Douglas Hadow; and the confident 18-year-old Lord Francis Douglas (who had just passed at the top of the British Army’s examination list, some 500 marks ahead of the next closest of his 118 competitors), the son of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry and a neophyte climber who’d been coming to the Alps for two years. Along with Whymper’s motley assortment of young British climbers with such wildly different levels of experience and ability were the three guides Whymper had hired: “Old Peter” Taugwalder (only 45, but considered an oldster), “Young Peter” Taugwalder (age 21), and the highly skilled Chamonix Guide, 35-year-old Michel Croz. In truth, they would have needed only Croz as a guide, but Whymper had earlier promised employment to the Taugwalders, and the English climber was always as good as his word, even when it made his climbing party unwieldy and two of the guides essentially redundant.
It was on the Italian Ridge that I realized the Deacon was introducing us to the courage and efforts of Whymper’s friend, competitor, and former climbing partner Jean-Antoine Carrel. The difficult routes we were enjoying had been Carrel’s.
We had our mountain tents—Whymper tents, they were still called, since the famous Golden Age climber had designed them for use on this very mountain—pitched on the grassy fields above the lower glaciers on both sides of the mountain, and we arrived on one side or the other just before dusk every evening, often after dark, there to eat lightly, to talk softly by the small fire, and to sleep soundly for a few hours before rising to climb again.
We climbed the Matterhorn’s Furggen Ridge but bypassed the impressive overhangs near the top. This was not a defeat. For one full day we explored approaches to that never-climbed overhang, but we decided that we had neither the equipment nor the skill to climb it direct. (The overhang would eventually be climbed by Alfredo Perino and Louis Carrel, known as “the little Carrel” in honor of his famous predecessor, and by Giacomo Chiara eighteen years later, in 1942.) Our modesty in not killing ourselves in an impossible—given the equipment and techniques of 1924—attempt on the Furggen Ridge overhang reminded me at the time of how I had first met the 37-year-old Englishman Richard Davis Deacon and the 25-year-old Frenchman Jean-Claude Clairoux at the base of the unclimbed north face of the Eiger—the deadly Eigerwand. But that is a tale for another time.
The essence is that both Deacon—known as “the Deacon” to many of his friends and climbing partners—and Jean-Claude, just become a fully accredited Chamonix Guide, perhaps the most exclusive climbing fraternity in the world, had agreed to take me along for months of their winter, spring, and early summer climbing in the Alps. It was a greater gift than I had ever dreamed of. I’d enjoyed going to Harvard, but my education with the Deacon and Jean-Claude—whom I eventually came to call “J.C.” since he did not seem to mind the nickname—for those months was by far the most demanding and exhilarating educational experience of my life.
At least until the nightmare of Mount Everest. But I get far ahead of my tale.
On our last two days on the Matterhorn we made a partial ascent of the mountain by its treacherous west face, then rappelled down to work out routes and strategies on the truly treacherous north face, one of the Alps’ final and most formidable unsolved problems. (Franz and Toni Schmid will climb it seven years later, after bivouacking one night on the face itself. They will ride their bicycles all the way from Munich to the mountain and, after their surprise ascent via the north face, will ride them home again.) For the three of us, it was a reconnaissance only.
/> This final day we had teased out routes on the seemingly unassailable “Zmutt Nose” overhanging the right part of the north face, then retreated, traversed to the Italian Ridge, and—when the Deacon nodded his permission to climb the final 100 feet—finally found ourselves here on the narrow summit on a perfect day in late June.
During our week on the Matterhorn we endured and climbed through downpours, sudden snowstorms, sleet, ice that turned rock to verglas, and high winds. On this final day, the weather on the summit is clear, calm, warm, and quiet. The winds are so docile that the Deacon is able to light his pipe after striking only a single match.
The top of the Matterhorn is a narrow ridge about a hundred yards long, if you wish to walk the distance between its lower, slightly broader “Italian summit” and its higher and narrowest point at the “Swiss summit.” In the past nine months or so, the Deacon and Jean-Claude have taught me that all good mountains give you clear choices. The summit of the Matterhorn offers very clear choices: a misstep to the left and you die in Italy; a wrong step to the right and you die in Switzerland.
The Italian side is a sheer rock face falling 4,000 feet to rocks and ridges that would stop a fall about halfway down the face, and the Swiss side falls away to a steep snow slope and rocky ridges hundreds of feet lower than the halfway mark, boulders and ridges that might or might not stop a body’s fall. There is enough snow here on the ridgeline itself for us to leave clear prints of our hobnailed boots.
The Matterhorn’s summit ridge is not quite what excited journalists like to call “a knife-edge ridge.” Our boot prints in the snow along the actual ridge prove this. Had it been a knife-edge ridge, with snow, our boot prints would have been on both sides, since the smart way to traverse a true knife edge is to hobble slowly along like a ruptured duck, one leg on the west side of the narrow summit ridge, one on the east. A slip then will lead to bruised testicles but not—God and fate willing—a 4,000-foot fall.