The Best American Sports Writing 2014(110)
“Simone was out of order,” Dawa said. “He’s a friend of mine, but he’s a very fiery character. This had been building between Simone and the Sherpas for a while.”
He went on, “It’s embarrassing to all sides. Now my clients are getting messages from their friends back home, saying, ‘I hope you’re not fighting with your Sherpa.’ It’s very sad. For 50 years, the Sherpas have done so much for people. One small thing between a few egomaniacs, and now all the Sherpa are hurt. We feel betrayed and abandoned. The idea that Sherpas don’t like Westerners? That’s all bullshit.”
In the background, he occasionally joined a radio conversation in Nepali with some Sherpas who were breaking camp higher on the mountain. Every now and then, a helicopter landed nearby. He didn’t much want to talk about the details of the incident at Camp 2. “That was unacceptable. I can’t comment any further,” he said. But, he added, “I can completely understand how traumatized Ueli must’ve felt.” About Mingma Tenzing, the head of the fixing crew, he said, “He’s the most quiet guy. A shy guy, doesn’t ever ask for the credit. I was in shock to hear he was the forefront of this. I wasn’t so surprised that Simone was involved. There’s always something happening with him. Mingma is deeply embarrassed. He’s very sorry. He knows he let down his family. But it’s too late.”
Mingma wasn’t speaking to the press. “The Sherpas are not very good at talking,” Dawa said. “We’re workers. We don’t want to talk. The best way to repair our reputation is to work.”
Steck’s house is at the end of a narrow street lined with quaint Swiss homes and flower gardens, up on a slope, overlooking the village, the lake, and a broad set of cliffs that block the view of the Eiger. He built the house himself, with a crew (he is a carpenter by trade), and he and his wife moved in in January. It is spacious, by Swiss standards, with three stories and an underground garage, but it’s simple and spare, a modern interpretation of a chalet, with lots of light woodwork and, on the walls, large-format photographs of famous peaks.
In his office, on the ground floor, next to a giant map of Everest, a calendar sketched out his year. The summer was empty; he’d expected to be recovering from Nepal. On a day in early September, he’d written, in tiny print, “Annapurna,” with a line going down through the rest of the month.
In March, he’d talked a lot about Bonatti, whom he admired perhaps above all others. Bonatti, on a winter morning in 1965, walked up to the base of the Matterhorn’s North Face and climbed it by himself, a harrowing direct route that took him five days. Steck repeated the route seven years ago in 25 hours and spoke with wonder about the experience of placing his hands and feet where Bonatti had. A pitcher playing today can never know what it was like to strike out Ted Williams, but Steck could imagine himself in Bonatti’s boots—the opponent was the same. After the climb, Bonatti, 35 at the time, abruptly retired from professional climbing, and became a journalist. He lived to the age of 81. In some respects, Steck admires this more than anything.
Steck knows that to live a long time you need to quit. Before Everest, he’d figured he had two more years in him of pushing the limits. Now he wondered whether he had less. He would always climb mountains; it was a part of his personality, and his marriage. But the professional part of it, the Swiss Machine, had gone a little sour. A week after Steck got home, Alexey Bolotov, the partner of Denis Urobko, was killed in a fall. A rope broke. They found his body on the Khumbu Glacier. He was 50 and had quit his job to devote himself to climbing. There’s a part of Steck that wonders if the incident at Camp 2 wasn’t in some respects a blessing. “Maybe there might have been a big accident,” he said. “There are a lot of things in climbing that you can’t control.”
BUCKY MCMAHON
Heart of Sharkness
FROM GQ
IT SEEMED SOMEHOW SIGNIFICANT, or maybe particularly unfair, but anyhow a cold, dumb fact: Mathieu Schiller had just paddled out. He hadn’t had a chance to catch a single wave. In a case of bad timing within worse, the 32-year-old bodyboarder, a former French champion and the owner of a local surf school, had launched from the beach as one of the biggest sets of the day humped on the horizon. There’d been a month of solid swell (which may have been significant as well), and though the wave heights were finally beginning to decline, it was still a big day at a surf break renowned for its powerful waves, and negotiating the set would take Schiller a little farther out to sea than the normal lineup. He duck-dived under the last wave, feeling the upward surge of power as the lip of the breaking wave threw out over him. He came up, streaming water, scanning the horizon with his characteristic enthusiasm, his ever-present stoke.