Each morning he wakes and lies awhile in bed just absorbing the sounds of the house. In those moments of fleeting serenity everything is pleasantly amplified. Peach moving about downstairs, the crockery piling up, the dog padding around greeting the day, the cat scratching busily. The wan Texas sun lights his room. Beck Weathers thinks to himself that this is going to be a good day, another good day.
Maybe he has been dreaming. When he came home first he never had nightmares, but for the longest time he dreamt that he was climbing. Night after night he felt that sensation of putting one foot in front of the other, slowly leaving the earth behind him. Recently he has different dreams, escapes which cant him into bullet-proof mode.
Everything is possible. Sometimes in his reverie he looks down and he has two hands. Some part of his brain insists that this is dreamtime, but his voice just says "Hey cool!"
Nothing fractures his contentment now. There is pleasure in every sunrise, he lives for the feel of wind on his face, for the pleasure of just contributing, he doesn't sweat the small stuff. Little aggravations don't matter.
He misses the sensation of touch of course. People think that maybe he misses doing things he once did, that he yearns to recover some old function. Wrong. It's the fact of no longer having feeling coming through hands and fingers. A human gets 40 per cent of sensory perception through the hands. You don't know what you've got till it's gone and being deprived of that is a cruel loss. It hurts relationships. People are tactile beings and having no hands makes an island of a man.
He thinks it a satisfactory trade, what he lost and what he gained. Even as they carried him down Everest with his two hands frozen solid in front of him he thought so. He remembers saying to Davie Breashears upon whose shoulder his was leaning "Hey Dave, before I came here they said it would cost an arm and a leg. I'm getting a bargain."
Breashears shook his head. Minutes later, as the shuffle downhill continued, Weathers asked was it only him or did anyone else feel like singing. Then he started up with Chain of Fools as they tramped along the worst terrain on earth. Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.
Peach hated him just then. His own wife loved him and hated him. Beck Weathers was never an easy man to live with. Depression whipped him. Work and climbing obsessed him. He says it himself, he filched the life from his family. As he came down the mountain, broken but singing, Peach Weathers wondered what to do with him. If he'd returned healthy she'd planned to leave him. Now she decided to give her dismantled husband a year.
What he lost and what he gained. Beck Weathers speaks from a perspective that perhaps no other human being has. Man has walked on the moon, man has run four-minute miles, man has mapped the genetic code of the human body, but no man has come out of a hypothermic coma. Except Beck Weathers, the man who was left for dead, twice, Beck Weathers who has been to that place where a man has nothing left physically or emotionally.
He is frank to the point of nakedness. He stands in the warmth of the American summer four years later wearing a burgundy T-shirt with what's left of his arms hanging from the sleeves, his big red nose dipping down towards his loopy grin. He confronts you with his dismantled body, encourages you to deal with it.
"Being maimed," he says "it's just something that is. Nothing I can do, nothing I worry about any longer." He looks at you straight with his fierce brown eyes. This is not some rich goombah who went up a mountain and got into trouble. This is a labyrinth of a man.
Perhaps you know some of Beck Weathers's story. It's not the usual once-upon-a-time spiel from the summits. Big mountaineer gasps up big mountain because it's there and because he must. Big mountaineer contemplates life from the top. Big mountaineer comes down again.
One day in May 1996, Beck Weathers, running from depression, got to within 1,000 feet of the summit of Mount Everest. He could go no further and while the rest of his party completed the ascent, he dawdled on the ridge below. By the time they were supposed to come back down a storm had enveloped Everest. Eventually, with a Japanese woman, Yasuko Namba, and five other climbers (four from another expedition), Weathers began the descent.
The storm worsened. The wind chill factor was 100 below, Weathers had lost his sight at altitude, but with the blizzard whipping up, visibility was like "looking out from the centre of a bottle of milk."
It was a day of chaos and crisis on the mountain, a day when people found out who had iron in the soul. Noting that there was no morality at 26,000 feet, two Japanese climbers yomped past a couple of dying men on their way up and yomped past them again on the way down. A South African expedition refused to share oxygen with dying climbers. One expedition leader scooted down the mountain hours ahead of his clients who had paid $65,000 a turn for his expertise. Eight people would die before the storm ended.
Coming back down the mountain, Beck Weathers's group strayed dangerously off course. Twenty-five more steps and they would have walked blind over a 7,000-foot drop. Sensing the danger, somehow they opted to stop and the three fittest from the group set off for high camp to get help. Duly alerted, Anatoli Boukreev, the Russian who had come down the mountain ahead of his party, climbed the mountain again, locating the ailing group at a critical time. He rescued the three who were members of his own expedition. Yasuko Namba and Weathers, both in critical condition, were left to die.
And die they did. A cardiologist, Stuart Hutchison, and three sherpas came out later to find them. They found Namba and Beck Weathers lying beside each other buried in snow and ice. They were both frozen rigid, eyes dilated. Hutchison had no choice but to leave them there.
It was a day of cruel heartbreaking decisions, drastic errors, painful mistakes. One climber was misidentified crawling into camp, and his family informed that he was back and safe only to hear the next day that he had perished. Rob Hall, the leader of Beck Weathers's expedition, clung to the summit in the storm freezing to death despite the pleas of his friends to begin descending.
He made a final radio call to his wife. "I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don't worry too much." And then all they could hear on the airwaves was his quiet sobbing.
Yasuko Namba perished quickly. Beck Weathers wandered a little in a state of altitude delirium and passed from consciousness not long afterwards, slumping facedown on the ice of Everest, another body to be hidden until the light thaw of the following spring. His wife, Peach, and his two children Meg and Bub were informed of his death.