"There were times when I just thought, 'Are you kidding me?'" - John Pfeil
The race I remember running with my dad, John, more than any other is one where he beat me.
I had to be 13 or 14. It was a 10K race in Colorado Springs. Might have been my first one. About two miles out from the finish line along a cement trail, Dad, then in his early 40s, blew by me. He uttered something like, “Good, Ry. Push” in between haggard breaths.
I still remember hating that he passed me. I’d start beating him in a couple years, never look back. But in that moment, he’d chased me with a predator’s savagery and blown past like a gust of wind.
It was key anecdotal evidence that when he had something in front of him, something to pursue, something he wanted, he wasn’t going to let it go quietly.
He’d hunt it down and kill it.
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Flash forward to 2002, the year I graduated high school. A controversial book about climbing, heroism and cowardice found its way into my dad’s hands. It was Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air”, a book where he, Krakauer, tagged along with a group of 1996 Mount Everest climbers and the tragedy that befell some of them. Krakauer was criticized heavily for being inaccurate in his recollections of the journey, which my dad understood.
But the book’s nitty gritty wasn’t what got to him. It was that big, death-dealing rock in the background.
“It amazed me that people wanted to climb up a mountain so badly that they would risk their lives,” Dad said. “They would risk their fingers. I do some things that are a little off, but my God.”
Still, somewhere inside him, a seed got planted. It took nine years to germinate and grow. Then, in 2011, it bloomed in full.
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Blake, my younger brother, was responsible.
He’d been in South Korea for a few months as part of a theater program he worked at. Not a bad gig when you’re fresh out of college. I rented cars to people. He went to South Korea to write plays and act in them to teach Korean children English. He wins.
Sibling rivalry defeat aside, he called my dad and said his friend had done the Gokyo Lake and Everest Base Camp Trek in Nepal. Travelers can see Everest the whole time. Dad checked into it and said he’d do it if they could also add Island Peak to their route. He wanted to climb over 20,000 feet. It was a JV-caliber hike when compared to Everest standards, but still extremely demanding. Blake agreed. They started planning for an early October trip.
My wedding sort of threw things off. I asked Blake to be my best man, and following that, he wanted to travel to New York to set up shop and start establishing himself as a performer, which he’s doing brilliantly, I might add. You can check out his website here.
Anyway, that was a bit of bad news for Dad. He’d already invested a quarter of his payment for the trip. He’d already started buying gear. Mentally, it was a done deal. Let’s do this.
He decided to go solo.
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His leg almost didn’t let him make the trip.
A countless number of marathons – Boston, Air Force, Eugene – finally took their toll. Plantar fasciitis took aim at his left foot, but went away after he backed off. Then his knee started to hurt. Like crazy. He limped everywhere for four months. Pride melted. He went to the doctor, got X-rays and MRIs. He had a tear in his meniscus. Surgery could fix it. He agreed and walked out of the ER that day, feeling fine.
A week later, he went running. No problems.
The trip was still a go.
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He arrived in Hong Kong before his final stop at Kathmandu. He shot an e-mail back to the dozens of worried people in the U.S. It rambles a bit, showing how little sleep he’d gotten.
“I’m reading a Nepal Trekking book and Steinbeck’s ‘Cannery Row’,” he wrote. “I feel somewhat related to Steinbeck, because I found he used to sign his name with an added logo/totem. He called his logo Pigasus; a contraction of the mythical Pegasus (flying horse) and a pig. I suspect this Steinbeck oddity might have had something to do with the American ‘when pigs fly’ phrase that came along later, but I don’t know.”
He touched down in Kathmandu Oct. 6 and spent the next day sightseeing.
“Kathmandu” is derived from the Sanskrit phrase “Kastha-Mandap”, which means “Temple Made of Wood.”
Cows roamed the streets, untouched. The traffic flowed with slow, impossible consistency.
“Cars miss colliding by inches, motorcycles weave among them and pedestrians are almost always mixed in with the traffic. I only saw one broken down vehicle, but I suspect that its horn worked perfectly. I do believe that drivers use their horns more often than they use their brakes,” he wrote.
He drank “Everest,” a premium lager beer.
His arrival time coincided with the beginning of Festival, essentially Nepal’s Thanksgiving. A priest approached him in the streets and blessed him by smearing a red powder across his head. Then he asked him to pay. Dad obliged. The same priest tried it again later, which he declined politely for nearly a quarter mile as they followed, trying to get him to reconsider. He saw the Kama Sutra Temple and the Temple of the Monkeys.
A cow took a seat next to Dad during a brief rest period. Maybe he looked like he needed company.
But his real journey, his real purpose for being across the world, began the next day. Kathmandu was a welcome calm before the storm, but the storm came just the same.
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Dad took off the next day and landed on a quarter-mile stretch of runway at Lukla Airport. Less than an hour after landing, the trek began.
He joined two other Americans, an Aussie, an Italian and a Filipino. Wobbly bridges lashed together with rope and ancient wood were a common occurrence.
“The first few were a bit scary, but we got used to them quickly,” he wrote.
His leg hurt a bit from surgery, but he pushed on. With each day that passed, the pain faded. He started losing weight despite the recommended 6,000 calories a day. In a few days, 10 pounds of weight disappeared. The treads on his cheap boots wore out in five days. He spent nights cutting new treads in.
They were bound for Island Peak on the Everest Highway. Everest finally came into view. For the first time, he saw a sight very few men had conquered.
“It was cool. I could see the summit, the balcony, the whole thing,” he said.
Villages were scattered down in valleys along the way. Water collects there. There’s also limited protection from wind storms that stab at the surrounding peaks. Villagers cook with dried yak dung they mash into pies and dry in the sun.
The real climbing began. Dad conquered two smaller mountains, Gokyo and Kalla Pattar, as part of the route to Island Peak.
Guides knew the terrain, could walk it with their eyes closed. They edged along cliff faces like billy goats and trotted over tightrope-thin bridges with ballet precision. Second-nature.
The Hollywood slow motion-worthy moments began.
During their trek, the group had to descend into a glacier. Dad heard cracking sounds as it shifted and dug deeper into the earth. A one-meter boulder fell from the slopes above. The group all jumped to one side in unison. Dad would have been one of the casualties had they not moved, him and the guy behind him.
“It would have cut down the middle of our group,” Dad said. “Two guys ended up pretty much on top of me.”
The long stretch of ice fields just past Cho-La Pass may have been one of the scariest parts, Dad said.
It was the only part of the journey the head Sherpa yelled. The surface of the ice started to warm. Cracks scissored through it. They sounded like explosions. One of Dad’s traveling companions was exhausted to the point of resting every few steps. The Sherpa kept screaming at the party to move, move, move.
“They thought we’d have an avalanche,” Dad said.
They made it. A breathtaking view of Everest awaited them at the other end.
Only Island Peak remained.The peak is a small mountain when compared to others in the regions, but still big, 20,000-feet big. The most difficult part is a 150-meter stretch of climbing wall with an 85-degree incline toward the top. Climbers have to use an ascender, crampons, an ice ax, rope and plastic boots.
Dad climbed it with two other party members. The rest opted not to. The last 15 meters juts out at a murderous angle. It took him maybe half an hour to navigate it. At some points, he was just hanging by a rope slung tightly through his waist gear.
“With the possible exception of the Dublin Marathon (where I got hypothermia, and ran by far the worst marathon of my life), climbing up that wall to reach summit ridge was probably the most difficult physical thing I’ve ever done,” he wrote.
He made it to the top and opted not to go the last 35 meters. The route was essentially a rock tightrope, requiring balance and poise. Dad’s legs were shaking. He stayed put. This was as far as he would go. He hadn’t come this far to slip and fall.
The group descended. Dad returned to Kathmandu and checked into a hotel.
“My room has a shower, heat, electricity, a flushing toilet, and about the same oxygen content as Colorado Springs,” he wrote. “All of these things were lacking for the last 20 days.”
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Dad got stateside Oct. 29, the same day as the Monster Dash race in Ashland. I’d just finished. It was my third race in four months. He called me from Los Angeles International Airport less than an hour after I crossed the finish line.
Best call I ever got.
Big Mac ordered, he soaked up the southern California warmth and waited for the final leg of his flight home. He was glad to be back in a place where he could order Big Macs.
“It’s fun to see the rest of the world, but I don’t want to live there,” Dad said.
There’s this flashback sequence in the “Green Lantern” movie where a young Hal Jordan asks his father, a stunt pilot, if he ever gets scared.
The dad’s response: “It’s my job not to be.”
Having a 57-year-old dad trot over the mountains of Nepal with a bum leg made that moment a little more personal for me. He’d respected the power that region has over man, but he faced it just the same.
Just like the race from my teen years where he rocketed past, he did what he went to do with focus, with courage. Maybe a dash of insanity.
All the other code words for passion.
Proud of you, Dad. Welcome back.
