La Plata

“. . . eorge. George. George.” By the third “George,” I came to. I saw the spoken word “George” scrolling across a black screen in whatever place I was in, but when I regained consciousness I was still sitting in the dark at a frozen picnic table coated with thick frost, surrounded by pine trees and mountains.

I don’t know why I passed out, probably low blood pressure. My last check-up, the doctor told me I’d achieved old-person’s hallmark high blood pressure. I just told her “thanks,” and went home to fix that on my own. I’m competitive that way. Now I have low blood pressure, and regularly get dizzy if I stand up too fast. It feels like a kind of victory.

I’m also guessing it had something to do with driving for two days and sleeping in a tent and then waking up at 4:00 a.m. on an empty stomach in sub-freezing air and then swallowing a mouthful of too-strong coffee so I could climb a big mountain. I said “oh, I don’t feel good,” and the next thing I was aware of was Rob’s voice. Even in that weird blackness, I heard tenderness and genuine concern in the voice, qualities which I had never associated with Rob.

“Dude, you passed out,” he said. “If I hadn’t been here, you’d have hit the ground,” something I couldn’t disagree with because I didn’t even know at the moment how I’d gotten where I was. “You should go lie down, and we shouldn’t go up La Plata.”

Rob and I had planned to go up La Plata Peak a day before beginning a longer trip with Ed Mahoney in Maroon Bells. La Plata is one of Colorado’s fifty-eight “14ers”–peaks over 14,000 ft–and it’s a thing to collect ascents. There’s an enormous difference between 12,000 and 14,000 feet, especially if you just showed up from Texas. Rob has done a lot of them, but my collection is smaller, and at some point I always end up ready to die.

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Rob wasn’t going to argue the point and went back in his tent. I took a long walk around the frozen campground, felt better, and announced from just outside his tent “I’m fine; let’s go.” I really was fine (enough), but I was touched by that unexpected tenderness I’d heard in Rob’s voice. I think he was worried I’d die right there at that frozen picnic table, and I wanted to tell him that whatever had just happened to me had nothing to do with him, if I’d died it wouldn’t have been his fault.

It would have been entirely Rob’s fault later if I had died going up La Plata. Robert did not let me quit. Robert had engaged himself in the task with my concurrence, and Robert is a “no man left behind” guy; he was in it, and so consequently was anyone else along for the ride. There was no longer any tenderness or genuine concern in his voice. He spoke like Hannibal Lecter, or perhaps a Gestapo interrogator: “all of this pain will be over, once you do what I ask.” La Plata Peak is a Class 2, which means you can basically just walk up it. But it’s WAY up, a steady 1,000-foot rise per mile, and Rob refused to let me back off once we’d begun.

It took us six and a half hours to get to the top, where we joined a small group of 20-somethings who’d just made it up before us. They were laughing and FaceTiming their moms and talking about the latest iPhone and lunching on Snackables, while I laid on my back and stared at the sky and tried to breathe. Rob said “George, I believe you’re the oldest person on the mountain,” and I took pride in that. Then we saw a woman running up the mountain, wearing shorts and a jogbra. She arrived at the top, and without even stopping to take in the view, turned around and ran down the mountain. I thought “sure, she’s in incredible shape, but is she happy?” and about 20 minutes later she ran back up the mountain accompanied by her amazingly healthy and smiling kids and husband. I hated her.

I still had my pride in being the oldest person above 14,000 feet that morning as we started to head back down, when a lady wearing comfortable cotton gardening pants and blouse like my mom used to wear strolled up to the top. “My boys always make it a race when we hike together” she said, as her two adult sons caught up with her. I hated her, too.

I do not generally quit things I have decided I truly want to do, even if unconsciousness at the beginning would seem to contra-indicate my participation. But I feel the creeping desire now to not push myself so hard for some things that only matter because I have decided that they matter, and I do not like that. So I appreciate Rob keeping me from slipping a little further down that slippery slope, for adding his own judgement that what we were doing did matter, and I also appreciate not dying for those last thousand feet or so of altitude, because I didn’t want Rob feeling guilty for the rest of his life for killing me.

We met up with Ed that evening, waiting for us patiently with food and beer and a serenity one does not expect from someone who’s driven miles and then waited hours in an empty campsite for a meetup that should have happened a long time ago. Personally, I’d have drunk all the beer and eaten all the food myself, and anyone looking for me would have found me asleep in my tent, but there was Ed, Buddha-like, waiting for us at that picnic table. He’d made an enormous fire, as boys are want to do, and we sat there and talked without talking about me passing out, and drank the good beer and ate the food he’d brought, and got ready to start the new day tomorrow at 4:00 a.m.