Read Online Snowblind by Daniel Arnold - Free Book Online Page A

the counterculture, right? Didn’t Yosemite in the sixties mean anything? Gregor blamed Reagan. I don’t know, maybe. The point is that yours truly was going to be climbing with rich men who thought that Charles Fucking Darwin had sanctified the corporate hierarchy from the bow of the Beagle and anointed the CEO as the right and proper expression of man’s highest potential fulfilled.
    And Bill didn’t help any. He barely noticed me. Maybe I was shorter than he remembered. A slap on the back and nothing more. He didn’t even bother to go round the group with names. Which left me in the awkward position of introducing myself. As in: “Hey, I’m Chase. I’ll be climbing K2 with you. What’s your name?” I just don’t think Bill thought of small gestures like that. He was too busy running his expedition machine up the Baltoro Glacier in his mind. Alan from Seattle, Nick from Denver, Luther, who did something with natural gas, from Wyoming—those were the other three.
    We spent the rest of the day packing gear into bags, and the next morning, we loaded onto a bus bound for Skardu. A bus is a different kind of beast there. If you were to take an old Bedford flatbed truck, put it at the bottom of a lake for a year, bring it up, clean it off, paint it with rainbow sherbet, and plaster it all over with butterflies and epic poetry, you’d have a start. But then you’d still need to weld the double-decker platform onto the back, where the eight of us wedgedin with all our gear plus two old women in head-to-toe black, hauling baskets of trussed chickens. We never did figure out who they were or what they were doing on a bus that Bill had supposedly hired just for the team.
    Our liaison officer showed up an hour late. He had a daypack, a hard-sided rolling suitcase, a pith helmet, and a swagger stick. When he walked up to the bus, he thwacked it with his stick—I’m not sure whether he was testing its structural integrity or hoping to change it into a Mercedes—and said: “Now we will show the mountains what we are made of, no?”
    The heat was alive back there. The sky looked like wet wool, and that’s what the air felt like—hot, damp, and rotten. Smothering. It was the Magical Mystery Tour meets the Joads—eleven people and seven chickens packed into a tin box perched on top of a psychedelic bus bumping and grinding through Rawalpindi. Donkey carts held up traffic. Old men with long white beards on bicycles dodged in and out of the gridlock. Entire families with their groceries held on to fifty-cc Swingline motorbikes—dad up front, mom hanging off the back, kids on the handlebars. Some tour busses filled with freaked-out-looking white people lumbered toward Islamabad. Everyone else honked and jockeyed and waved their hands around. It was all a negotiation, like haggling over an apricot at the bazaar. No one seemed to care that they could get where they were going faster if they just got out and walked. I felt feverish. The mid-morning call to prayer echoed out of the mosques. The women in black chattered back and forth and laughed and poked each other’s knees through their burkas. They had comfortable seats. The liaison officer sat across fromthem with his legs crossed and his arms out and a big grin. He had huge, bright white teeth. He had a comfortable seat. Where had they gotten so much space? I was balled up in a corner like dirty laundry. Bill kept looking around and giving us all the thumbs-up. Gregor had told me that if I was smart, I’d stay up all night the night before. Now I knew why. He was snoring on top of the ropes duffle.
    We were on the bus thirty hours. When we got to Skardu, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to walk. For thirty hours, I had been breathing road dust, pot reek, diesel fumes, ripe sweat. Even though it was still damp and hot, the air up there tasted so good. It was like being resuscitated. I