Love and Pancakes at the Top of the World
Photo by Kalle Kortelainen@custodiancontent on Unsplash
This was my entry for the second challenge in the 2020 NYC Midnight Flash Fiction contest. Writing prompts are assigned at midnight on Friday. You have until midnight Sunday to turn in a story that’s 1000 words or less. My prompts for this were romantic comedy (genre)/Mount Everest (location)/pancakes(object). I don’t fancy myself a rom-com writer, and these prompts really made producing a story of under 1000 words a challenge. Which, I suppose, is befitting for Mount Everest.
***
I have been to Mount Everest three times, but never to the top. Bad weather scrubbed my first attempt. A kidney stone did it next. I blame the pancake for the third time.
Getting to Mount Everest is an ordeal. If you want to follow in Hillary and Norgay’s footsteps along Everest’s South Col route, you fly into Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu. Then there’s a horrifying flight to Lukla, which is on a mountain and has a strip of tarmac that is more driveway than runway. It’s a wonder planes don’t routinely smash into or slide off that mountain.
From Lukla you hike to base camp. I contract with a Sherpa group, but do this pre-trek alone. These days of solitude are immeasurably valuable. Well, not quite immeasurably. I could show you receipts, and you’d want to set me on fire.
On the first day out of Lukla, I stopped at Namche Bazaar, a village considered to be the gateway to Everest. I stayed in a hotel for two nights as I made daily mini-treks.
On the second night, I sat in the packed hotel bar. Dorje, the Sherpa bartender, remembered me. I’d like to believe this is a testament to my charm, but it’s probably more due to my face being on the internet for a decade. A woman sat next to me and ordered a Jameson. Dorje told her he didn’t have any, but could provide a substitute.
“There’s actually an Irish Pub nearby,” I said.
She was a dark-haired woman in her early 30’s, who pulled off the look of the black sweater and down vest she was wearing.
“Oh, the one that everyone knows about?” she asked.
“I guess I’m mountainsplaining,” I said, proud of myself. I extended my hand. “I’m Richard.”
Dorje returned with her drink.
“You killed my father,” she said, walking away.
I guess that murder slipped my mind.
I left Namche for Everest’s southern base camp, located at an altitude of nearly 18,000 feet. It is set on the rocky Khumbu Glacier at the foot of Everest. Once you’re there, you can claim you’ve climbed Mount Everest. Just not a lot of it.
I found my tent and placed my backpack inside. The guide company set up a larger communal tent for the two-week acclimation period. You don’t show up at base camp and zip up Everest that day. There are multiple rotations to a series of camps and back. This gets your body used to the altitude, and hopefully keeps Everest from killing you.
Several climbers were inside the relative warmth of the large tent. “Are you following me?” the woman from Namche asked as I entered.
I sat in a camp chair beside her. “I’m sorry about the loss of your father,” I said.
“He’s not dead. You fired him five years ago.”
“Who’s your father?”
“No one you know. He was in your Boston facility.”
“I’m sorry. I probably didn’t make that call.”
“I know, but it felt good to call you a murderer. On principle. I’m Lisa Callan,” she said. “If we’re going to climb this mountain I need to be cordial, but I don’t have to like you.”
The next day, the group climbed for a couple of hours and descended. On the way down, I stopped to admire the scenery and catch my breath. Lisa had the same idea.
“Is this your first attempt?” I asked.
“It is. Is this where you ask how I can afford this? Just because you fired my dad doesn’t mean I don’t have a good job.”
“I …”
“It’s not as good as yours,” she interrupted. “But it’s ‘Climb Everest once’ good.”
“I had you pegged as making ‘Mount Hood’ money at least.”
She laughed, and we returned to camp.
I learned she practiced domestic law in Boston, and got divorced herself a couple of years earlier. I pointed out the irony, but she said my grasp on that term was as tenuous as Alanis Morissette’s.
She told me her father was fired because of an argument with a V.P. “It was probably his fault. He can be abrasive.”
“Family trait?” I asked, and she nudged my shoulder with hers.
We began our first rotation about a week after we arrived. We scaled the Icefall, with its ladders crossing deadly chasms, before reaching the flat icy spot where our crew set up Camp 1. We would stay there before returning to base the next morning. Exhausted, Lisa and I stood at the edge of camp and watched thin clouds that fluttered like flags from Everest’s white peak. We kissed. I knew then I never wanted to kiss anyone else.
A day before we were to begin our summit attempt, our crew made breakfast including rikikur, flour and potato creations commonly called Sherpa pancakes.
I grabbed one on the way out of the communal tent. I asked Lisa if she wanted it, playfully tossing it to her. She stepped back to catch it, and slipped on loose rocks. Her leg twisted and she fell hard.
Lisa’s leg was broken. People break bones on Everest routinely, but this had to be the mountain’s first pancake related injury.
We arranged for an airlift to Kathmandu. Lisa insisted I continue the climb. When the helicopter arrived, the crew loaded her in, and I put her backpack in beside her. I kissed her, and we looked into each other’s eyes for what we knew was the last time.
But it wasn’t.
I sat in the helicopter as it took off. Lisa smiled and happy tears filled our eye. Everest became smaller by the moment.
As Lisa recovered from her spiral fracture at home in Boston, I made a call, and her father had a job offer the next day. He declined, and told Lisa I was “a stinkbug.” I like him.
Our wedding is in July. Our honeymoon will be somewhere warm and flat. Everest can wait. Because, you know, it’s there.