To the Last Breath Read online

  Advance Praise for

  TO THE LAST BREATH

  “Francis Slakey’s exciting, perilous adventures from El cap to the Indian Ocean are at first just a stunt—the cool, calculated goal of a hardcore scientist. But when the acts of grace and heroism of others open his heart. To the Last Breath becomes a tribute to the remarkable connectedness that binds the world and its people together.”

  —NORMAN OLLESTAD, New York Times bestselling author of Crazy for the storm

  “To the Last Breath is, in a word, breathtaking. Dr. Slakey takes you with him as he blasts through blizzards and dangles by frayed lines to get to the top of the highest mountains. He also adds the science of surfing to your body of knowledge. I left his transformation as if it were my own: from restrained physics professor who gives his students equations instead of himself, to humane, caring soul willing to love and to lose and to truly enter the world. Slakey’s story has the adrenaline of high adventure, but more important, it delivers the thrill of self-discovery.”.

  —LUCINDA FRANKS, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of My Father’s Secret War

  A JOURNEY TO THE MOST EXTREME POINTS ON EARTH AND DEEP INSIDE THE HUMAN SPIRIT

  Before Georgetown physics professor Francis Slakey decided to climb the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean, he had shut himself off from other people. His lectures were mechanical; his relationships were little more than ways to fill the evenings. But as his journey veered dangerously off course, everything about him began to change.

  A gripping adventure of the body and mind, To the Last Breath depicts the quest that leads Slakey around the globe, almost takes his life, challenges his fiercely held beliefs, and opens his heart. The scientist in Slakey explores the history of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed Antarctica expedition, the technology of climbing, and the geophysics of waves. But it is the challenges he endures and the people he encounters—a Lama who gives him a mysterious amulet, a life-or-death choice atop Everest, an ambush at gunpoint in Indonesia, a head-on collision in the high desert—that culminate in a moving lesson about what it means to be human.

  FRANCIS SLAKEY is the Upjohn Lecturer on Physics and Public Policy at Georgetown University and an Associate Director of Public Affairs at the American Physical Society, where his focus is the intersection of science and society. The founder and co-director of the Program on Science in the Public Interest, a Lemelson Associate of the Smithsonian Institution, and a MacArthur Scholar, Dr. Slakey has been featured by NPR, National Geographic, and others, and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, and Scientific American.

  VISIT HIM AT WWW.TOTHELASTBREATH.COM

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  • THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •

  JACKET DESIGN BY DAN REMBERT

  JACKET PHOTOGRAPH BY MIKE FARRIS

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  Copyright © 2012 by Francis Slakey

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint articles from the following publications:

  “New ‘green’ pyre to cool planet while burning India’s dead” by Tripti Lahiri, Agence France-Presse

  “U.S. Links Indonesian Troops to Deaths of 2 Americans” by Raymond Bonner, The New York Times

  “Indonesia Military Allegedly Talked of Targeting Mine” by Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress, The Washington Post

  Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2012

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Joy O’Meara

  Maps by Paul Pugliese

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Slakey, Francis.

  To the last breath / Francis Slakey.

  p. cm.

  1. Slakey, Francis. 2. Mountaineers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  GV199.92.S59A3 2012

  796.522092—dc23 2011025391

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9895-7

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9897-1 (ebook)

  CONTENTS

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter 1

  Beyond the Sky

  Chapter 2

  Be Strong

  Chapter 3

  Three Pillars

  Chapter 4

  The Amulet

  Chapter 5

  Cold and Broken

  Chapter 6

  The Ambush

  Chapter 7

  Shared Purpose

  Chapter 8

  Interconnected

  Chapter 9

  A Map Comes Alive

  Chapter 10

  The Amulet Decoded

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Photograps

  CAST OF CHARACTERS*

  In Order of Appearance

  Tom Paxton

  Climbing partner

  Estomii Molell

  Masai elder, Tanzania

  Most Holy Rinpoche

  Thyangboche monastery, Nepal

  of the Khumbu

  Gina Eppolito

  Trekker on Mt. Everest, Nepal

  Jim Williams

  Climbing partner

  Ang Nima

  Sherpa, Khumbu Valley, Nepal

  Mike McCabe

  Climbing partner

  Patsy Spier

  Survivor of the ambush in Papua, Indonesia

  Antonius Wamang

  Leader of the ambush in Papua, Indonesia

  Hassan

  Driver, Essaouira, Morocco

  Pemba

  Drooling mutt

  the Fixer

  Professional grifter, Lhasa, Tibet

  the Snake Goddess

  Deity, Bhutan

  Kinle

  The Lama of Dhorika, Bhutan

  Mr. Jayasinghe

  Innkeeper, Haputale, Sri Lanka

  Agarwal the Engineer

  Inventor, New Delhi, India

  Knute

  Owner, bunkhouse, Vestvågøy Island, Norway

  Pictures at: www.ToTheLastBreath.com

  For one who never got the chance and one who, tragically, did

  None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change all the tenor of our lives.

  —Kathleen Norris

  TO THE

  LAST

  BREATH

  Chapter 1

  BEYOND THE SKY

  I am out of balance. I hang dangerously off center but I’m oblivious, until some dim awareness of the world shakes me awake.

  I lift my head up slightly and look toward my feet. Sure enough, I’m not flat. My body is sloping downward and
I can barely see the tips of my toes in the faint moonlight. This wouldn’t be anything to worry about if it weren’t for the fact that I’m on a cot pinned to a sheer granite wall two thousand feet above the valley floor.

  My shifting around was enough to wake my climbing partner, Tom Paxton. Pax is lean, but with a muscled frame that looks like he could haul a bull if the circumstances called for it. I don’t know much about his past, and he knows nothing about mine, and that makes for an ideal pairing. We both live without rearview mirrors, driving ahead through our days, and only when absolutely necessary tapping the brake. Pax never boasts, another admirable quality. There are plenty of climbers who talk and never summit; Pax summits, without complaint or glory.

  At the moment, like me, he’s trying to make sense of what’s happened to the cot. Since it is just barely long enough and wide enough for the two of us he was bound to sense my slightest motion. We’re sleeping head to toe so when he lifts up, he sees that he’s sloping dangerously upward—his head is a good ten inches lower than his feet.

  We had spent a half hour pinning the cot into the wall to make sure it was secure. We jammed thick aluminum blocks into a crack in the granite face, pulling them tight, wedging them deep into the rock. The blocks are solid, they could hold the weight of an elephant; there’s no way that they’re coming loose. Something else must be going wrong.

  As my eyes adjust to the dark, the strips of webbing that hold the cot together come into focus. The strip attached to one of the corners looks like it is lengthening, stretching out like a rubber band.

  After a few moments, I shake off my sleep haze and my brain starts processing things more carefully. I realize that the webbing isn’t stretching; our situation is much worse than that. The webbing is unraveling. In a few more seconds the webbing will come completely undone and our cot will drop out from under us. There is nothing we can do to stop that from happening.

  “Slake.”

  “Yeah, Pax.”

  “We’re going to fall.”

  I look over the edge of the cot, down into the void, and wait for the inevitable.

  There was a time when people thought that El Capitan could not be climbed. It is easy to understand why. The hammerhead of granite bursts out of the ground and rises straight up, three thousand sheer vertical feet, looming over Yosemite Valley in central California.

  Nothing man has ever built has stood this high. Even after a century of hoisting scaffolding, welding steel, and pouring concrete, no building on the planet reaches even two thirds the height of El Cap. When you stand at its base, arch back, and look up, it seems to rise without end, farther than the limits of vision, past the bounds of Earth, pushing up and beyond the sky.

  Magnificent, imposing, the rock taunts you, daring you to climb it. There was no question that one day someone would try.

  Early attempts were unsuccessful for a simple reason: humans aren’t built to scale a smooth vertical wall. We don’t have sticky pads on our feet, like a gecko. We don’t have the clinging legs of a centipede or the hooves of a mountain goat. Flat and long, our feet are best designed to propel us off flat ground, away from an oncoming mastodon.

  To scale a crack in a vertical wall, your legs and feet have to be used in ways that aren’t part of our evolutionary development: you pivot a knee out wide to one side, slide your toes into the crack in the rock face, and then twist and press down on the foot with all your body weight, mashing your toes hard into the crack and locking your foot into place. The bones of the foot are compressed and twisted, crushed to conform to the profile of the crack.

  The hands follow the same pattern: fingers, knuckles, a fist all getting mashed and pivoted into the crack. The granite is unforgiving and the hand placements need to be precise. If a hand slides against the rough granite, the rock flays off a layer of skin like a potato peeler.

  Twist, crush, repeat—that is the methodical technique that propels a climber up the crack in a vertical rock face.

  If at some point the crack thins out, too narrow to mash in a foot, then the climber searches for options, balancing on features and contours often no thicker than a nickel, or smearing the rubber of the climbing shoe on the rock, hoping that friction alone is sufficient to stay pinned in place.

  If all else fails, climbers come back down and look for a new route. But now they face another evolutionary disadvantage. Our eyes are well placed when we’re climbing up since we can have good visibility of our foot and hand placements. In down climbing, the view is obscured, the balance less assured, the toe sweeps the air searching for the placement.

  So the granite monolith of El Cap was unyielding and the requirements for scaling it were inhuman. The climber who would be the first to conquer it would have steady nerves, astounding patience, and a body fully adapted to scaling the vertical world.

  Warren Harding, the climber who first scaled El Cap, was an inspiration to me. I was fourteen years old when I first heard about his climb. From that moment on, I wanted his adventure to be my adventure.

  His adventure began in the summer of 1957 when he and his two teammates dropped their gear at the base of El Cap like so many other climbers had before them. They carefully pieced together their route, zigzagging up yard by yard. They established camps in the sheer rock wall. They linked their camps with ropes fixed into the rock with pitons—hammering the four-inch-long metal spikes into the cracks—then returned back down to the valley floor.

  Progress was slow; too slow. After four laborious months, with the cold settling in and snowstorms approaching, the team was forced to halt the climb for the winter. El Cap was crushing them.

  The next summer there was more disappointment. One of Harding’s teammates fractured a leg; the other was discouraged and dropped out. It seemed that El Cap would defy another attempt. Harding, determined and fixed on the prize, found two new climbing partners and faced the stone once again.

  Months ticked by as the team continued to push upward, establishing a few dozen more feet of the route each day and then descending back down to the valley floor to rest. As fall approached, the fixed ropes began fraying. Weakened and unraveling after a year of use, the ropes would never last through another winter. If the team couldn’t scale El Cap before the snows came, nearly eighteen months of work would be lost. It was now or never for Harding.

  They loaded up their gear and took to the wall for one final try. With the weather turning and ropes weakening, they knew the odds were completely against them.

  The team moved quickly at the start of the climb. It was familiar; they had scaled it dozens of times in going up and down the wall establishing the route. Then hope faded; an early winter storm settled into the valley and they were forced to take shelter on a ledge and wait it out. Days went by; cold rain pounded at the rock, the wind whipped at their backs.

  When the storm finally broke, their rhythm was shattered, their morale draining away. Their pace slowed to just five feet an hour—a caterpillar could move faster. They faced a choice: push past the fatigue and go higher; or descend, pack up, forget about El Cap, and get on with their lives.

  They decided to push on.

  On November 12, 1958, nearly five hundred days after Harding started the climb, he and his team hauled themselves over the lip of El Cap. They had done what no one had ever done before, what some people had considered utterly impossible: they had scaled three thousand feet of sheer vertical granite. They had started on a flat valley floor and propelled themselves directly up, straighter than a rocket, directly into the sky.

  They challenged nature and suffered a beating for it. Their hands were bloodied and calloused, bodies scarred, feet crushed and bruised. But the day was theirs. They waged war against gravity and, against all odds, had won. They, and they alone, had conquered that colossal piece of granite. As a boy, when I first heard this story, I couldn’t imagine a more spectacular ending.

  When their feet finally touched the stable ground of the valley floor, there was no press
corps to greet them, no microphones or cameras. The public didn’t care. Harding’s achievement was in the shadow of another, more famous, climb. There was euphoria when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Mount Everest a few years earlier—their achievement made world headlines. But the conquering of El Cap was a climbing footnote. Harding didn’t grumble; instead, he developed a following.

  With Harding demonstrating that gravity could be defied, climbers began migrating to Yosemite Valley. They brought with them a new attitude: they swore off the use of pitons. Pounding the metal spikes into the wall severely damaged the rock, disfiguring it, leaving streaks of rust and widening the cracks. And since many of the pitons were left behind in the rock, climbers began viewing it as a garbage trail.

  Climbers developed alternative hardware that would allow an ascent without leaving a trace. The piton was replaced with machined bits of metal and camming devices that a climber could slip into fissures of the rock, and the second climber, following behind, could pull out on ascent.

  Over the decades, gear became lighter, sturdier, allowing for cleaner ascents that didn’t scar the rock. With the new gear came speed; Harding’s five-hundred-day ascent was cut down to seven days, then three, then two. Pitons were replaced by equipment with names like bat hooks, Camelots, Ball Nutz, and Big Bros. The new equipment made Harding’s gear look like museum pieces: quaint and unreliable.

  On our climb of El Cap, Pax and I have all that modern gear with us and we’re confident that every piece is 100 percent reliable, manufacturer-tested and -approved. I have been climbing for years and I have never known the gear to fail—mine or anyone else’s. Never. The likelihood of a critical piece of equipment actually breaking is vanishingly small, say, one in a million.