Anxiety on Everest

I was already terrified when I became suddenly aware of my palms heavily perspiring inside my insulated gloves. This realization seemed to accentuate this feeling. My buff wrapped tighter around my neck and I began taking deep forced breaths, almost willing my heart to slow down. The harder I did, the harder my heart pounded until I could actually hear it. I could not feel the cold anymore. I remember there being a heightened sense of realization that this was about to become a defining moment; that I would describe incidences from then on as one’s who had occurred before or after it.

I took the first step onto the ladder, stepping away from the safety of the ledge. The metallic crampons attached to my boot hit the ladder producing a sound so persistent that it seemed to echo around me. The ladder shook violently and its tilt made staying balanced a challenge. Instead of being totally fixated on my feet, I found myself distracted by the black labyrinth that lay beneath and how the myst became so dense that it seemed to blend into the darkness below. The Sherpas joke of climbers falling all the way down to America in such crevasses didn’t seem funny anymore; and this is when you panic I thought. Before I could fathom the profoundness, or lack thereof, of this realization, my crampon front points jammed into the aluminium ladder a fraction of a second longer than it should have, hurling me forward and down. I don’t want to die I thought. Even people who want to go to heaven, don’t want to die to get there. The irony in falling to my death minutes before safety is so cliche that it’s hard to believe any other scenario is feasible. I’m so far behind that if I shout, the winds will drown my voice.

I fell to my knees so hard that I almost banged my head into the ladder, then I began to fall sideways so slowly that it seems deliberate and fake. In one final, it now seems overly dramatic moment, I extended my arm and grabbed the ladder step with the tip of my two longest fingers and pulled myself just enough to be able to clench the whole thing with my fist. Slowly, I gathered myself back into a kneeling position and began to stand up slowly. When I finally became upright once more, my knees were shaking. I looked across and realized I had gained a few inches on account of my set back and was now only one big step from safety. I took a deep breath, looked ever so slightly at the heavens and jumped across. I’d made it and with that came the realization that only minutes from now the celebrations would begin and never again would I be back to that same world, during that same era, feeling the same things. My heart sank but I managed a smile. Finally before walking to safety, I turned back one last time, closed my eyes and committed the experience to memory.