From the Book “Shambles” by Stephen Tait – A True Story
With the Kind Permission of the Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency – www.SBPRA.net
Names have been changed to match those in the official Journey Report by Steve Tait
Chapter 23 – Journey: Crevasse – Steve Tait
There was no response. I must have shouted twenty times but there was no response until, quietly, from the deep blue gloom of the depths of the crevasse, I heard a tired cry.
Moving carefully, I retraced my crawl to the remaining skidoo and regained my feet. Nige was still astride the machine and still looking straight ahead, waiting for me to tell him what I was going to do. He was still tied to his safety rope, so I extended it with another climbing rope and we retreated carefully to the remaining sledge.
“John’s alive.” I said. “One of us is going to have to go down, and I think it should be you.” I offered no reason.
Nige had never been in anything like this situation, but I knew he could rappel and jumar, and I knew that if there were to be any more trouble I could pull him out of the crevasse. I was not certain that he could have done the same for me.
“No way,” he replied. “I couldn’t do it. You’ve got to do it, it’s your job.”
He was absolutely right of course. It was my job; I was the one with the skills to do this. I would have to rappel down into the crevasse and try to get John and Rob out. But in the meantime, I needed to get Nige onto safe ground to operate the radio.
We unpacked the radio and set it up with a short aerial. My colleague was tied and secure, and although the temperature had begun to fall alarmingly, I could not waste time putting up the tent. Nige had to huddle down out of the wind while he started sending an SOS to the base. I think at this time it must have been around 4:00 p.m. and although there should have been a constant radio watch, we would be lucky to raise anyone, particularly as it was Saturday.
As I was preparing hurriedly to get into the crevasse, I could hear Nige, even at this early stage, beginning to get irritated with the nothingness coming back to him from his repeated appeals for help. He continued unrelenting for hours.
Ten feet from the lip of the crevasse, as I sorted ropes and equipment, I felt encumbered by my huge Russian wolf-skin bear paws; my progress was too slow. With a flick of each wrist the bear paws dropped into the snow on either side of me. Discarding this vital equipment was to cause me severe problems as I cut and battered my freezing fingers against the ice of the crevasse wall. In the years that followed and during my flashbacks, the insignificant movement of dropping my gloves played havoc with me as I relived the simple action time and again. I can still feel the cord that joined the bear paws together around my neck flick over the collar of my insulated jacket, and I can remember the cold on my hands as they were exposed to the elements. I can see the knot in the cord joining the bear paws together, and I can feel the warmth and the comfort they had provided. But most of all I can still see the bear paws lying at the lip of the crevasse where they fell, and I have tortured myself repeatedly, over the years, with the question of why I discarded them when they were attached and hanging around my neck. I do not know why I did not retrieve them from the scene later.
With my rappel device attached to the rope, I edged towards the lip of the crevasse again. My weight on the bridge, already damaged by the collapse, caused further fractures and crumbling as I put my feet onto its outer edges. The first stage of my descent was accompanied by the “whoomph” of more collapse as I fell through and dropped a few feet before the wrench of my rope brought me to a stop.
Shaking the snow out of my hair, I looked to left and right to survey the extent of this monster before peering down between my feet into the nothingness below. The two spare ropes slung over my shoulders were going to be needed as I shouted and rappelled.
Forty feet of descent later, I heard a response. My name was being shouted weakly and repeatedly now as I wondered how anyone could have survived this fall. Disbelievingly, I came to my first major problem—the rope was too short. I looked down past my boots to the figure of eight knot in the end of the rappel rope flicking around wildly only a few feet below me. Countless people have rappelled straight off the end a rope because they have failed to put a knot in the end of it—at least I had done one thing correctly.
I halted my slide and pulled up the rope end before knotting it on to the end of one of the spare ropes around my shoulders. Dropping the now extended rope downwards, I needed to secure my weight on the rope above the knot so I could move my rappel device from above to below the joining knot in the two ropes.
Crevasses do not get this deep surely, but I could just make out way below me the tangled mess that I was later to learn was the skidoo, wedged like a cork in a bottle against the crevasse walls.
More of the bridge collapsed in on me, the snow pouring down the neck of my jacket. But with the collapse more light filtered down, and I was able to make out the person who was calling to me. His position seemed wrong. Another collapse, more light, and more of the carnage became visible.
With the ropes now joined, I clipped into my jumar, above me on the top rope, and took my weight as I released and repositioned my rappel device for the continued descent. Retrieve the jumar, clip it in to my harness, and get going. Within seconds I was standing on the jammed skidoo, looking around in total disbelief that anyone could still be alive after such a fall and amongst all this wreckage.
I couldn’t take it in as I tried to avoid the thought of facing the injuries that I was now amongst. John was jammed between the skidoo and the crevasse wall at his lower left leg.
It was almost completely severed and I could here my voice involuntarily saying to him, “Your leg’s broken.” He had a massive head wound which had left streaks of almost black blood in a line down the wall of the crevasse, originating probably from the point of impact some ten feet above where he now lay. His right leg was contorted in an unbelievable way, and his femur was almost certainly broken, as was his pelvis, and probably much of his lower leg was in the same state. His breathing was labored, and he frothed at his mouth as he gasped in the freezing air to feed his so obviously damaged lungs. But he wasn’t ready to die at this stage.
I talked to him non-stop as he passed through a period of intense pain, which just as quickly as it had started, simply stopped and his lucidity returned. His technical expertise shone through the dim light as he tried to help me.
But I had to think. How the hell was I going to move the skidoo to get him out? How was I going to treat his injuries? I didn’t even have any decent painkillers to give him. I hated the man who decided to remove the morphine from our first aid packs, which had until then been affectionately known as suicide packs. But, I thank God every waking day I have that I didn’t have morphine, as it was obvious that there was only one outcome for this horrific frenzy taking place. In my wildest dreams I do not think I could have put my friend out of his contorted, pain racked misery.
I lay across the upturned skidoo and leaned over the rear to look underneath, but I was totally unprepared for the sight. Rob was there. Hanging quietly in his harness only a few feet from my face. His body was wracked and torn with the aggressiveness of the fall. Restrained by the safety rope he had been kept close to the fierce metallic frame of the skidoo as it shot downwards and subjected my friend to as much damage as it could inflict. I was appalled. The damage and the blood overshadowed any minute flicker of hope for life; the candle in that second had been snuffed out.
Even so, I leaned down and over, and pulled the inert body towards me to check for signs of life, praying that none existed. He was dead. Rob, my traveling partner, was dead. I gently released the rope and as Rob swung back into the position in which I had found him I realized his beloved black hat that he wore constantly was finally gone. My attempts to hide his hat over the previous months had reached a final conclusion and we would never see it again. As I continued to stare for what seemed an eternity, unknowing the sight burned itself into my soul with a hostile permanence. Had I known then what I know now, I would not have lingered, and perhaps I could have protected myself from the ravages of the long years that have followed as the memory haunted me wherever I was and whatever I was doing.
The weight of the sledge, hammering down the hole, must have snapped the tow rope that attached it to the skidoo with the massive impact, and it would have plummeted into the depths below. Although now, all these long years later, I am not certain, as I remember a dark mass further along the crevasse, which could have meant the sledge was also wedged in place. But I am sure there was no sign of the towrope that should have been attached to the rear of the skidoo.
I pulled myself back up onto the upturned skidoo and faced John. “How you doing?” I said rather without conviction.
“Is he dead?” was his response, and he knew from my silence that he was. “You’re going to have to cut Rob free to reduce the weight,” John said to me, and I reached into my pocket and took out my brown lock-knife with the damaged handle. I opened the knife, hesitated and closed it and replaced it in my pocket where it had come from, without using its razor sharp blade. I simply could not cut the rope and let the body of our friend Rob fall free into the bottomless depths.
The life was draining from John, but I could not give in; after all, he hadn’t. So rather pathetically, I spent some minutes chipping away at the iron hard ice of the crevasse wall close to his trapped left leg. I thought if only I could move the skidoo I could get him out. He wouldn’t fall any further, as I had attached him to my rappel rope. He had been traveling on his skidoo unroped—not that it mattered now or even then. Strangely he had stayed in contact with the machine on its fall. He hadn’t even had time to jump off when or if he had felt the machine going down through the fractured bridge.
My continued chipping hardly produced a mark on the wall of the crevasse. My tools were inadequate.
After a while I stopped my pointless activity and sat down on the upturned skidoo to talk with my friend. We looked at each other, staring into each other’s eyes in the deepening gloom of that crevasse. John was calm and totally accepting. There was no pain now.
“Look,” I said, “I’m going back up to rig up the winch and I’ll get this fucking thing off you and get you out, okay?” And I leaned over the back of the skidoo and attached the remaining rope to the tow hitch and the other end into the back of my harness. I would use this longer rope to pull the skidoo out of its position on my friend.
He smiled. He actually smiled and simply said, “If I’m going to die, this is a great place to do it in. Life’s been fantastic and we’ve had some great times.” He laughed and actually put his right hand over his mouth in the way he usually did when he laughed and he screwed up his eyes again as he usually did.
Probably, and I like to think so, some of the times we spent together with the others of our tight-knit community on the ship, had passed fleetingly across his thoughts. We had spent all those months together on the journey down through the Atlantic, and we had all been friends. Pulled closer together in the spirit of our adventures, Christ we’d done enough to raise a laugh.
We sat for a while not saying anything. We both knew it was hopeless.
I stood up, knowing that I had now lost two very dear friends and there was a third on the surface. I wasn’t going to let Nige die; I had to get back to him. But tearing myself away in these circumstances made me feel like a criminal.
As I turned to face the long climb out of the crevasse, John called me for the last time.
“I’m pleased it was you with me when I died. I know you’ve done your best. Thanks for being with me,” he said. We shook hands, and I noticed that the gaping wound on his head was not bleeding anymore. I turned from him and stepped into my foot sling.
After I did a few hellish minutes of climbing, only twenty feet or so above him, trapped and crumpled by that machine, John, my friend died. I would dearly love to say that John died peacefully in that crevasse, but he did not. He was fighting when he died; he was fighting to the very end.
I hope to God that he did not die believing that I could get him out of that crevasse. I hoped to God that he forgave me for leaving him on his own in that terrible place. I hope to God that he has forgiven me now after all these years. And I hope to God that Rob and John found peace in that crevasse beside an unnamed mountain on that shambles of a glacier in Antarctica.
Steve Tait