I still can’t believe that he’s gone, Sam. I keep thinking about his parents. The authorities couldn’t give them a body, but they also don’t have a story, and that makes it all the more tragic. I’m the only one who can give them that. But isn’t it better not to tell them? If you think differently after reading this, tell me, okay?]
Augustin was a young gun. It was only the second time we went to the mountains together, so you could never really know what to expect. I was still pretty bummed out about Pieter lacking the time to go anymore due to his kids, because he was always my go-to climbing buddy. I never told you much about Augustin, did I? He was six years younger than me and overambitious with youthful enthusiasm, but we clicked. He was studying political science and was active in the Grünen’s youth wing. I came across him by sheer coincidence while I was searching for online photos of a remote, difficult route in the Swiss Alps which has barely been documented. But apparently Augustin had climbed it with his father a year before. We started chatting on Facebook, him with his amusing corrupted English, capitalized nouns; and the Rest is History.
Augustin was a much better climber than me. He lived in the Schwarzwald, elevation 4,000, near Feldberg village, so his lungs had a born advantage on me as far as acclimatization is concerned. But it’s the felsic outcrops that jut out of the hills out there, and which he had climbed since he was a kid, that led to the inevitable difference between our characters and ambitions. Whereas I always approach the mountains with respect and an almost solemn reserve, Augustin submitted himself to them with abandon. The reservations I feel before every climb were completely foreign to him. He seemed to hold power over the mountains and he entered their arena as a lion tamer; he subdued them, subjected them to his will. Next to my insecurity, his confidence bordered on the fatalistic.
But of course that’s an illusion. Mountains are untamable. What Augustin held power over was himself. It enabled him to climb the most impossible, sheer mountain faces. And he was good, Sam. When you saw him move in the vertical, it was with such agility, it seemed like the laws of gravity didn’t apply to him. His calm self-assurance surpassed bravado. He scorned the impossible, got high on defying the fall.
Those kinds of big walls are not my cup of tea. Dangling in a harness all day and having to perform daredevil feats above a gaping abyss scares me stiff. I distrust the limits of what I’m capable of (little), the condition of the rock (is it really solid?), and the quality of the gear (I mean, after all, a harness is nothing more than woven thread). But it’s mostly fear of falling. Not fear of heights; heights don’t bother me. [Remember in your dad’s office on the sixty-seventh floor, looking out over Manhattan and you didn’t dare come a step closer to the windows than six feet away? So cute . . . ] I always say, if you’re afraid of heights, you should never aspire to be an alpinist. But if you aren’t afraid of falling, you shouldn’t become an alpinist either. It’s that soup?on of angst that prevents you from doing reckless things and ending up as a page six report in the Walliser Zeitung.
In any case, a team is only as strong as its weakest link, so Augustin had to lower the bar to my level. So no technical wall climbing, but airy ridges instead, where you can always find solid ground under your feet in between challenging pitches. That’s why I figured we wouldn’t be climbing together again after last summer, but apparently he enjoyed my company enough to want to try it again. It surprised me a bit, but there you go.
A couple of days before we went up the Zinalrothorn, I asked him if he’d ever thought about the risk of a fatal accident. Augustin’s answer was as plain as it was disquieting: “When I go, I go. Nothing I can do about it.”
I think it was then that I got the premonition that Augustin would die young.
Our descent from the Zinalrothorn follows the same route as the way up. Carefully rappelling down the steeper pitches, deep drops left and right. The mountain harbors a cool indifference, and I become aware of its subdued power. There is always a moment when the descent starts to feel more like an escape. The solitude, pleasant at first, becomes brooding. Conversations become measured. Beauty becomes a somber threat. The mountain’s spell is gone; you want to get down as quickly as possible. Fatigue starts to take its toll, but it’s essential to remain fully concentrated, because the grim reality is that most accidents happen on the way down.
It happens on Le Bourrique, the donkey’s back.
Le Bourrique is a horizontal traverse about fifty yards long, where the ridge is so knife-edged you have to straddle it with one leg in the Zinal basin and the other in the Zermatt basin and inch forward. Minor detail: the glacier on the west side is about 2,500 feet down at the base of a steep-sloping, hostile-looking frozen mess of snow-covered rock. The glacier on the east side is right below you, 4,000 feet down, overshadowed by a perpendicular bulwark of granite. I remember soaking up its fatal beauty on the way up; now the pitch fills me with dread.
Augustin takes the lead. I carefully belay him till the halfway point; there’s a fixed anchor in the rock he can secure himself to so he can haul me in. When we sit facing each other, both secured to the bolt between us and one leg dangling on the west face and the other on the east face, it reminds me of the poster of those ironworkers on the Empire State Building. You know the one. New York, 1930s, they’re lunching along an I-beam, leisurely puffing a smoke, the streets 1,000 feet below. That’s how I feel now. Only it’s not New York beneath me but 3,000 feet of nothing.
Augustin coils the rope into loops in order to belay me as I go ahead, and in doing so, he looks to the right, into the abyss. For a second, I think his head rolls off his body, as if the tendons in his neck simply let go of it. Then I realize it’s his helmet, instead.
He’d taken it off at the summit, and when we were preparing for the descent he must have forgotten to buckle it under his chin.
“Fuck . . . me!” he yells.
Both of us watch it go, refusing to believe what we’re seeing: a red dot getting smaller and smaller as it sails down the east face. Somewhere on the way down it hits a buttress and bounces off, blurred by its speed, then disappears.
It isn’t difficult to imagine what it would look like if a body were attached to the helmet. The image is suddenly shockingly vivid. Like a child’s rag doll, it tumbles away from me; a wild, desperate cry of disbelief rises out of the depth, till it too smashes into the wall. And then? Do all the bones break? Does it simply rip apart?
I look away, afraid of losing my balance, suddenly nauseous from the abyss’s hypnotizing magnetism. I stagger, feel an irrational urge to flail my arms. Because there is no looking away here, there is no comfort. The drop on the left is just as disenchantingly deep. We are at the high point here; front and back is just this balance beam stretching out over certain death.
I try to pull myself together, make a vain attempt to erase the image from my mind.