Chapter 55.
Mount Washington
The hike from Pinkham Notch along the Tuckerman Ravine took more than two hours.
They are allowed a brief rest when they arrive at the foot of the climb they’re about to make, at a side of the mountain known as the Pinnacle.
Reg’s lungs pull air like he’s been running. The exposure makes his stomach tighten, the world dropping away behind them in a way that has nothing to do with altitude and everything to do with possible consequences.
Tipton stands first.
Of course he does.
He adjusts his straps and looks up. “Listen,” Tipton says, and for the first time his voice is neutral, practical. “No hero moves. No lunges. You don’t ‘go for it.’ You place, you test, you commit.”
Reg watches him. Hates him. Respects him. Both at once.
Tipton adds, almost grudgingly, “If we had a rope, we’d simul. Four of us on one line. But we don’t. So we move like we are.”
A team without the thing that makes teams safe.
They slowly begin their ascent.
Reg stays close behind Tipton, Tipton reluctantly having become the group leader.
Insanity, Reg tells himself.
Pure insanity.
Tipton also tells them that as a boy growing up in England, he’d done a fair amount of climbing in what is known as the Peak District, not too terribly far from where he’d grown up in northern Derbyshire.
There is little conversation. They all just follow Tipton’s lead, focus on finding handholds and footholds in the schist rock in front of them.
Wyatt makes one dumb joke.
“Yeah,” he says when Reg asks if he’s climbed before. “I’ve done this exact route. At the Equinox Club on West Seventy-Sixth.”
No one laughs. Not even Wyatt.
Mostly the handholds and footing in the silver-gray rock are surprisingly good as they begin to angle to their right, not nearly as slick as Reg had expected. Occasionally they even find a slab long enough and sturdy enough to fit all of them, and they take a short rest.
They climb in silence for long stretches, broken only by Tipton’s clipped observations.
“Three points of contact.”
“Don’t trust the flakes.”
“Edge left—better friction.”
When they do take a rest, the view—especially to the east—is like nothing any of them have ever seen before. Reg wishes his fiancée, Kyra, could see it. Well, maybe with ropes. He remembers reading a book as a boy in which the main character is given the choice of being able to fly or be invisible.
For Reg there was no choice.
He’d always wanted to be able to fly.
Tipton, it turns out, really does know a fair amount about this mountain, occasionally reciting brief facts about the Mount Washington Cog Railway and how the temperature at the summit can drop to 50 degrees below and how winds up there had been measured as high as 230 miles per hour.
“The Cog Railway goes up the other side,” he says. “Built in the eighteen hundreds.”
Reg glances at him. “You’re chatty today.”
“Shut up and climb,” Tipton replies.
Reg thinks: I wonder if Tipton was given a heads-up before that they were coming here today, though Reg can’t imagine why anybody would think that would give him an edge, especially the higher they go.
He looks back at the two kids.
“What about you, Hannah?” Reg asks. “You ever do any climbing?”
Hannah’s eyes stay on the rock in front of her. Anywhere but down.
“I’m terrified of heights,” she says.
Wyatt flicks a glance at her—concern, unfinished business, swallowed words.
Hannah continues, voice calm, “I told them that in the red tent, but they sent me here anyway. Probably for their own sick amusement.”
No one speaks.
“But I don’t care,” Hannah says. “I’m going to show them.” She pauses. “Even if it kills me.”
Reg stops climbing for half a beat and turns enough to look her in the eye.
“That’s not happening,” he says.
He sees the fear in her. Real fear. Not drama.
“It didn’t happen after we ended up in the water that day, and it’s not going to happen here. We make it up,” Reg says. “We make it down. That’s the whole job.”
He adds, “We’re more of a team than ever.”
He believes that in his heart. He has always believed in the power of a team, the company of men when he was a rugby player, now the company of both men and women.
You didn’t have to love everybody on the team.
No one here loves Ant Tipton, and that might include Tipton himself.
But you had a common goal, and that won out over anything else.
You didn’t have to love everybody to still love the team.
Reg feels that now, especially with these two kids: Hannah and Wyatt. Probably in love already even if they don’t know it, or would never admit it. Reg can see the way they look at each other.
But the common goal is the same for all of them now:
Make it to the top of the mountain.
And then, God willing, make it down.
“I’m still scared,” Hannah says over her shoulder.
“I learned a long time ago,” Reg says, “the thing that scares you the most is the thing you have to do.”
Tipton, above them, mutters without turning. “Less poetry. More hands.”