Above All Else by Dana Alison Levy

Author:Dana Alison Levy [Levy, Dana Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen:

Tate

April 23

Everest Base Camp 17,600

feet above sea level

Everest Base Camp. Launchpad for hundreds of elite-level dreams and final destination for tens of thousands of tourists, who haul themselves up here to be within touching distance of the glory of Everest. I have no idea why they’d bother, unless they’re impressed by a giant garbage dump with oxygen canisters flung everywhere and dozens of tent villages. It’s massive, like multiple-football-fields massive, and we walk for twenty minutes through a city of snow and wind and tents to find our spot.

Altitude-wise, I’m rocking it. As always, altitude bothers me way less than most people. I barely have a headache, and unlike Rose, who lost weight she really couldn’t afford to lose, or my dad, who looks downright skeletal, my appetite’s all good. Ang Pasang, the head cook, loves me.

Still, even with the good food, loud music, internet, and party vibe Finjo and the other expedition leaders try hard to keep going, it’s freaking brutal here. Wind howls constantly, and a shitty icy fog swamps us every few days, blocking all views of the mountains and making it an actual legit danger to get lost between the main tent and our sleep tent. With temperatures way below zero with windchill, you could die of exposure trying to get to your tent, which is honestly not the way I want to go.

Over the next few days, I try so damn hard to make myself belong here. Rose is distracted, focused on the summit and the training: climb up to higher elevations to push our bodies to acclimatize, then descend again to sleep at lower altitude to recover. Then push higher the next day, then rest; repeat. Repeat again. Finjo’s schedule, like all the other guides up here, is pretty locked down: they’ve got a system of acclimatization, and we follow like breathless, exhausted sheep. But Rose has turned inward, talking less, and when we are alone, she curls against me in her sleeping bag, shivering and quiet. I get it—EBC isn’t what anyone would call romantic, what with the cold and the thin air and the stank. But it’s not only that we’re not jumping each other like sex-crazed monkeys. We’ve both gone into our own heads, our own thoughts too loud for much else to make sense. She’s super focused on the climb ahead, like she’s already halfway up the mountain, pushing forward against obstacles only she can see. And me? I’m stuck, every day making it clearer that I want to be anywhere else. It’s like a nightmare where something’s rushing toward me and I can’t move my feet to get out of the way, except I’m awake. And what’s rushing toward me is a once-in-a-lifetime climb that I used to want. But no matter how many times I tell my mind to shut the fuck up, to remember when I was so pumped for this, I can’t seem to convince myself to want it anymore.

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