Jerene was a student, working toward her Ph.D. in education, and Dempsey had found a poorly paying, uninspiring job working long hours in the basement of the state capital, on creditor/debtor legislation, so money was tighter than ever for the Mortensons. Greg worked his way through college, washing dishes in the school cafeteria, and as an orderly on the overnight shift at Dakota Hospital. Each month, he secretly sent a portion of his earnings home to his father.
In April 1981, Greg’s second year in Vermillion, Dempsey was diagnosed with cancer. He was forty-eight years old. Greg was then a chemistry and nursing student, and when he learned that his father’s cancer had metastasized and spread to his lymph nodes and liver, he realized how quickly he could lose him. While cramming for tests and holding down his student jobs, Mortenson endured the six-hour drive home to Minnesota every other weekend to spend time with his father. And at every two-week interval, he was shocked by how quickly Dempsey was deteriorating.
Mortenson, already well-versed in medicine, persuaded Dempsey’s doctors to discontinue radiation, knowing his father’s condition was terminal and determined that he should have a chance to enjoy what little time he had. Greg offered to drop out of school and care for his father full-time, but Dempsey told his son, “Don’t you dare.” So the biweekly visits went on. When the weather was fine, he would carry his father outside, shocked by how much weight he had lost, to a lawn chair where he’d sit in the sun. Dempsey, still fixated, perhaps, on the lush grounds of their compound in Moshi, took great care with his herb garden, and ordered his son to leave no weeds standing.
Late at night, while Greg wrestled with sleep, he’d hear the sound of Dempsey typing, painstakingly constructing the ceremony for his own funeral. Jerene would doze on the couch, waiting for the typewriter to fall silent so she could accompany her husband to bed.
In September, Greg visited his father for the last time. Dempsey by then was confined to the Midway Hospital in St. Paul. “I had a test the next morning and didn’t want to arrive home in the middle of the night, but I couldn’t leave him,” Greg remembers. “He wasn’t very comfortable with affection, but he kept his hand on my shoulder the whole time I was there. Finally, I got up to leave and he said, ‘It’s all done. It’s all okay. Everything’s taken care of.’ He was remarkably unafraid of death.”
As in Moshi, where Dempsey had thrown a mammoth party to mark the successful end of their time in Africa, Dempsey, having detailed the ceremony to mark the end of his time on Earth, down to the last hymn, died at peace the following morning.
At the overflowing Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, mourners received a program that Dempsey had designed called “The Joy of Going Home.” Greg gave his father a sendoff in Swahili, calling him Baba, kaka, ndugu, “Father, brother, friend.” Proud of his military service, Dempsey was laid to rest at the Twin Cities’ Ft. Snelling National Cemetery.
With Dempsey dead, and an honors degree in both nursing and chemistry in hand, Mortenson felt remarkably untethered. He considered, and was accepted to Case Western University medical school, but couldn’t imagine waiting five more years before earning any money. After his father’s death, he began to obsess about losing Christa, whose seizures had become more frequent. So he returned home for a year to spend time with his youngest sister. He helped her find a job assembling IV solution bags at a factory and rode the St. Paul city bus with her a dozen times until she was able to learn the route herself. Christa took great interest in her brother’s girlfriends and asked him detailed questions about sex that she was too shy to discuss with her mother. And when Greg learned Christa was dating, he had a nurse talk to her about sex education.
In 1986, Mortenson began a graduate program in neurophysiology at Indiana University, thinking idealistically that with some inspired hard work he might be able to find a cure for his sister. But the wheels of medical research grind too slowly for an impatient twenty-eight-year-old, and the more Mortenson learned about epilepsy, the further away any possible cure seemed to recede. Wading through his dense textbooks, and sitting in labs, he found his mind drifting back to intricate veins of quartz inlaid into granite on The Needles, spiky rock formations in South Dakota’s Black Hills, where he’d learned the fundamentals of rock climbing the previous year with two college friends.
He felt the tug with increasing urgency. He had his grandmother’s old burgundy Buick, which he’d nicknamed La Bamba. He had a few thousand dollars he’d saved, and he had visions of a different sort of life, one more oriented toward the outdoors, like the life he’d loved in Tanzania. California seemed the obvious place, so he packed La Bamba and bombed out West.
As with most pursuits he has ever cared deeply about, Greg Mortenson’s learning curve with climbing was as steep as the rock faces he was soon scaling. To hear him describe those first years in California, there was hardly an interval between the week-long course he took on Southern California’s Suicide Rocks and leading climbs of twenty-thousand-foot-plus peaks in Nepal. After a regimented childhood in his mother’s highly structured home, then the army, college, and graduate school, the freedom of climbing, and working just enough to climb some more, was intoxicatingly new. Mortenson began a career as a trauma nurse, working overnight and holidays at Bay Area emergency rooms, taking the shifts no one else wanted in exchange for the freedom to disappear when the mountains called.
The Bay Area climbing scene can be all-consuming, and Mortenson let himself be swallowed by it. He joined a climbing gym, City Rock, in an old Emeryville warehouse, where he spent hour after hour refining his moves. He began running marathons and worked out constantly between expeditions to climb the north face of Mount Baker, Annapurna IV, Baruntse, and several other Himalayan peaks. “From 1989 to 1992 my life was totally about climbing,” Mortenson says. And the lore of mountaineering had almost as strong a pull on him as the process of measuring himself against unyielding rock. He amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of climbing and combed the Bay Area’s used-book stores for nineteenth-century accounts of mountaineering derring-do. “My pillow those years was a mountaineer’s bible called Freedom of the Hills,” Mortenson says.
Christa came to visit him each year, and he’d try to explain his love for the mountains to his sister, driving her to Yosemite and tracing his finger along the half-dozen routes he’d taken up the monolithic granite slab of Half-Dome.
On July 23, 1992, Mortenson was on Mount Sill, in the eastern Sierra, with his girlfriend at the time, Anna Lopez, a ranger who spent months alone in the backcountry. At four-thirty in the morning, they were descending a glacier where they had bivouacked for the night after summiting, when Mortenson tripped, did a complete forward flip, then started sliding down the steep slope. His momentum sent him toppling down the glacier, flipping him five feet in the air with each bounce and slamming him against the compacted snow and ice. His heavy pack twisted and ripped his left shoulder out of joint, breaking his humerus bone. He fell eight hundred vertical feet, until he managed to jam the tip of his ice axe into the snow and stop himself with his one working arm.
After Mortenson spent a hallucinatory twenty-four hours stumbling in pain down the mountain and out to the trailhead, Anna drove him to the nearest emergency room, in Bishop, California. Mortenson called his mother from the hospital to tell her he’d survived. What he heard hurt him more than his fall. At the same hour that Greg was crashing down Mount Sill, his mother opened Christa’s bedroom door to wake her for the trip they’d planned for her twenty-third birthday, to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, where the movie had been filmed. “When I went to wake her Christa was on her hands and knees, like she was trying to get back into bed after going to the bathroom,” Jerene says. “And she was blue. I guess the only good thing you could say is that she had died so quickly of a massive seizure that she was just frozen in place.”
Mortenson attended the funeral in Minnesota with his arm in a sling. Jerene’s brother, Pastor Lane Doerring, gave a eulogy
, in which he added an appropriate twist to Christa’s favorite movie’s most famous line. “Our Christa’s going to wake up and say, ‘Is this Iowa?’ And they’ll say ‘No, this is heaven’,” he told a sobbing crowd of mourners at the same church where they’d bid Dempsey good-bye.
In California, Mortenson felt more meaninglessly adrift than he could ever remember. The phone call from Dan Mazur, an accomplished climber Mortenson knew by his reputation for single-mindedness, felt like a lifeline. He was planning an expedition to K2, mountaineering’s ultimate test, and he needed an expedition medic. Would Mortenson consider coming? Here was a path, a means by which Mortenson could get himself back on course and, at the same time, properly honor his sister. He’d climb to the summit those of his avocation respected most, and he’d dedicate his climb to Christa’s memory. He’d find a way to wring some meaning out of this meaningless loss.
Gingerly, Mortenson lowered GiGi from his face, and laid the monkey back on top of the photo album. An eighteen wheeler rumbled by out on San Pablo, shaking the little room as it passed. He walked out of the storage space and retrieved his climbing gear from the trunk of La Bamba.
Hanging his harness, his ropes, his crampons, carabiners, hex-bolts, and Jumar ascenders neatly on the hooks where they’d rested only briefly between trips for the last five years, these tools that had carried him across continents and up peaks once thought unassailable by humans seemed powerless. What tools did it take to raise money? How could he convince Americans to care about a circle of children sitting in the cold, on the other side of the world, scratching at their lessons in the dirt with sticks? He pulled the light cord, extinguishing the particularity of the objects in the storage space. A shard of California sun gleamed in the stuffed monkey’s scuffed plastic eyes before Mortenson padlocked the door.
Chapter 5
580 Letters, One Check
Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart.
Never give up, never lose hope.
Allah says, ‘The broken ones are my beloved.”
Crush your heart. Be broken.
—Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir, aka Nobody, Son of Nobody
THE TYPEWRITER was too small for Mortenson’s hands. He kept hitting two keys at once, tearing out the letter, and starting over, which added to the cost. A dollar an hour to rent the old IBM Selectric seemed reasonable, but after five hours at downtown Berkeley’s Krishna Copy Center, he’d only finished four letters.
The problem, apart from the inconvenient way IBM had arranged the keys so close together, was that Mortenson wasn’t sure, exactly, what to say. “Dear Ms. Winfrey,” he typed, with the tips of his forefingers, starting a fifth letter, “I am an admirer of your program. You strike me as someone who really cares what is best for people. I am writing to tell you about a small village in Pakistan called Korphe, and about a school that I am trying to build there. Did you know that for many children in this beautiful region of the Himalaya there are no schools at all?”
This is where he kept getting stuck. He didn’t know whether to come right out and mention money, or just ask for help. And if he asked for money, should he request a specific amount? “I plan to build a five-room school to educate 100 students up to the fifth grade,” Mortenson typed. “While I was in Pakistan climbing K2, the world’s second-highest peak (I didn’t quite make it to the top) I consulted with local experts. Using local materials and the labor of local craftsmen, I feel sure I can complete the school for $12,000.”
And here came the hardest part. Should he ask for it all? “Anything you could contribute toward that amount would be a blessing,” Mortenson decided to say. But his fingertips failed him and the last word read “bledding.” He tore the sheet out and started over.
By the time he had to head to San Francisco, for his night shift at the UCSF Medical Center emergency room, Mortenson had completed, sealed, and stamped six letters. One for Oprah Winfrey. One for each network news anchor, including CNN’s Bernard Shaw, since he figured CNN was becoming as big as the other guys. And a letter he’d written spontaneously to the actress Susan Sarandon, since she seemed so nice, and so dedicated to causes.
He wheeled La Bamba through rush-hour traffic, steering the Buick with a single index finger. Here was a machine perfectly suited to the size of Mortenson’s hands. He parked, leaned out the passenger window, and slid the letters into the maw of a curbside collection box at the Berkeley Post Office.
It wasn’t much to show for a full day’s work, but at least he’d started somewhere. He’d get faster, he told himself. He would have to, since he’d set himself a firm goal of five hundred letters. Easing La Bamba into westbound Bay Bridge traffic, he felt giddy, like he’d lit a fuse and an explosion of good news would soon be on the way.
In the ER, a shift could disappear in a blur of knife wounds and bleeding abcesses. Or, in the small hours, with no life-threatening admissions, it could crawl imperceptibly toward morning. During those times, Mortenson catnapped on cots, or talked with doctors like Tom Vaughan. Tall, lean, spectacled, and serious, Vaughan was a pulmonologist and a climber. He had climbed Aconcagua, in the Andes, the highest mountain outside Asia. But it was his experience as expedition doctor during a 1982 American attempt on Pakistan’s Gasherbrum II that forged a bond between the doctor and the nurse.
“You could see K2 from Gasherbrum II,” Vaughan says. “It was incredibly beautiful, and scary. And I had a lot of questions for Greg about what it was like to climb it.” Vaughan had been part of an attempt on what’s usually considered the easiest of the eight-thousand-meter peaks. But during his season on the mountain, no member of his team summited, and one member of the expedition, Glen Brendeiro, was swept over a cliff by an avalanche and never found.
Vaughan had a sense of what kind of accomplishment it took to nearly summit a killer peak like K2. Between crises, they spoke of the grandeur and desolation of the Baltoro, which they both believed to be the most spectacular place on earth. And Mortenson quizzed Vaughan intently about the research he was doing on pulmonary edema, the altitude-induced swelling of the lungs that caused so many deaths and injuries among climbers.
“Greg was incredibly fast, calm, and competent in an emergency,” Vaughan remembers. “But when you’d talk to him about medicine, his heart didn’t seem to be in it. My impression of him at that time was that he was just treading water until he could get back to Pakistan.”
Mortenson’s mind may have been focused on a mountain village twelve thousand miles away. But he couldn’t take his eyes off a certain resident in anesthesiology who swept him off-balance every time he encountered her—Dr. Marina Villard. “Marina was a natural beauty,” Mortenson says. “She was a climber. She didn’t wear makeup. And she had this dark hair and these full lips that I could hardly look at. I was in agony whenever I had to work with her. I didn’t know if I should ask her out, or avoid her so I could think straight.”
To save money while he was trying to raise funds for the school, Mortenson decided not to rent an apartment. He had the storage space. And La Bamba’s backseat was the size of a couch. Compared to a drafty tent on the Baltoro, it seemed like a reasonably comfortable place to sleep. He kept up his membership at City Rock, as much for access to a shower as for the climbing wall he scaled most days to stay in shape. Each night, Mortenson prowled the Berkeley Flats, a warehouse district by the bay, searching for a dark and quiet enough block so that he could sleep undisturbed. Wrapped in his sleeping bag, his legs stretched almost flat in the back of La Bamba, he’d find Marina flitting through his thoughts last thing before falling asleep.
During days he wasn’t working, Mortenson hunted and pecked his way through hundreds of letters. He wrote to every U.S. senator. He haunted the public library, scanning the kind of pop culture magazines he would never otherwise read for the names of movie stars and pop singers, which he added to a list he kept folded inside a Ziploc bag. He copied down addresses from a book ranking the one hundred richest Americans. “I had no idea
what I was doing,” Mortenson remembers. “I just kept a list of everyone who seemed powerful or popular or important and typed them a letter. I was thirty-six years old and I didn’t even know how to use a computer. That’s how clueless I was.”
One day Mortenson tried the door of Krishna Copy and found it unexpectedly locked. He walked to the nearest copy shop, Lazer Image on Shattuck Avenue, and asked to rent a typewriter.
“I told him, we don’t have typewriters,” remembers Lazer Image’s owner, Kishwar Syed. “This is 1993, why don’t you rent a computer? And he told me he didn’t know how to use one.”
Mortenson soon learned that Syed was Pakistani, from Bahawal Puy, a small village in the central Punjab. And when Syed found out why Mortenson wanted to type letters, he sat Mortenson in front of an Apple Macintosh and gave him a series of free tutorials until his new friend was computer literate.
“My village in Pakistan had no school so the importance of what Greg was trying to do was very dear to me,” Syed says. “His cause was so great it was my duty to devote myself to help him.”
Mortenson was amazed by the computer’s cut and paste and copy functions. He realized he could have produced the three hundred letters it had taken him months to type in one day. In a single caffeine-fueled weekend session under Syed’s tutelage, he cut and pasted his appeal for funds feverishly until he reached his goal of five hundred letters. Then he blazed on, as he and Syed brainstormed a list of dozens more celebrities, until Mortenson had 580 appeals in the mail. “It was pretty interesting,” Mortenson says. “Someone from Pakistan helping me become computer literate so I could help Pakistani kids get literate.”
After sending off the letters, Mortenson returned to Syed’s shop on his days off and put his new computer skills to work, writing sixteen grant applications seeking funds for the Korphe School.
When they weren’t hunched over a keyboard together, Mortenson and Syed discussed women. “It was a very sad and beautiful time in our lives,” Syed says. “We talked often of loneliness and love.” Syed was engaged to a woman his mother had chosen for him in Karachi. And he was at work saving money for their wedding before he brought her to America.