I went to bed last night at 8:45 and read for a half hour. Ambien drops me quickly. I wake feeling surprisingly good and ready to move.
Last night, Ossy announced that the groups were officially merged, and to seal the union, we move two dinner tables together and ate at one. While our enlarged team has the lower hut to itself, we won’t be so lucky higher up. Ossy says another group—eight climbers plus their guides—will be summiting with us tonight. That means the upper hut will be relatively crowded on what is normally an off-night.
Ossy also says we might aim for a later start than usual, because conditions are dry and avalanche risk is very low. A later start means less time in the dark and cold, at the cost of more time tossing and turning in pained anticipation of kickoff. This time tomorrow, we should be well over halfway to the summit, having watched the sunrise on the way.
Sitting around killing time, one of the new crew, Brian, shows off his certifiable Rain Man skills. He worked at a grocery store in 1997 and memorized all the fruit and vegetable codes, and somehow still knows them. He claims these codes are universal — same codes in every country. Nations that can’t agree on units of measurement or electrical outlets or which fucking side of the road to drive on, agree on a four-digit number for kohlrabi. We quiz him, while googling the codes, and he gets nearly all of them right.
Another climber, a mother of a five-year-old boy, imagines the excitement of giving her boy his gift of a tribal shrunken head, and the inevitable conversations with his school after the head makes its impression at show-and-tell. A third in the new crew shows off her mind-blowing collection of tragic Tinder profiles, including the blood-chilling image of a psychopath thinly-disguised by the clown-paint of a backyard wrestler. (Thanks, Erica, for that brain-seared memory.).
In Ecuador, exactly as in Tanzania, Jeff struggles to communicate with our guides. Regardless the circumstance, he never varies from his rapid mumbling speech, injected with cryptic language, and devoid of any tonal clues that might indicate humor, contentment, or life-threatening emergency. “Yeah, Pancho, so my tibia is fully sheared and itslikeanelectricshocktomyballs, it’d be great if you could stop whatyourfuckingdoing and maybe help me out, whatdoyousay?” “Um, what are you saying, something about your ears?” Inevitably, a guide will have to ask him to repeat the comment. Often twice. Half these exchanges end with the attempted communication abandoned mid-sentence.
After lunch, Ossy got a weather update, and it looks bad: wet and windy, gusts to 50mph. Ossy says if it’s like that, we won’t summit. But no matter what, the new crew will go out for a while in order to get some time at altitude. It’s up to us in the old crew whether we want to join. I’m inclined to go regardless. I’m excited and don’t really want to spend more downtime in the upper hut. And if the other group somehow gets a shot at the summit, I don’t want to miss my chance.
Travels With Burma Jones 