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THE EVEREST CHRONICLES #6
HELPLESS PHONE CALLS
It's one of the toughest phone calls I've ever read
about. Caught up near the top of Everest during a freak storm, guide Rob
Hall's life was about to end. He was out of oxygen; he'd already been
exposed for two days and a night to the elements and a hundred-mile-an-hour
wind, creating a wind-chill of a hundred below zero. And the two Sherpas
who'd tried to come up from Camp Four to rescue him had been forced to
turn back because of the elements.
Already once he'd been patched through to his wife, Jan Arnold, who was
thousands of miles away in Christchurch, New Zealand. An avid climber
herself, she'd been to the top of Everest with her husband back in 1993,
but was now seven months pregnant with their first child. And when she
heard his voice coming through on the radio, it just killed her. Here's
how she describes her feelings after the first call:
"My heart really sank when I heard his voice.
He was slurring his words markedly. He sounded like Major Tom or something"
— that's from an old pop song about a lost astronaut — "like he was
just floating away. I'd been up there; I knew what it could be like in
bad weather. Rob and I had talked about the impossibility of being rescued
from the summit ridge. As he himself had put it, ‘You might as well be
on the moon.'"
There had been previous triumphs where Rob Hall had
communicated from the very peak of Everest to a listening world. In 1990,
when he first got to the top in an expedition including Peter Hillary,
son of Sir Edmund Hillary, the two young climbers made a live radio transmission
back to New Zealand, and received congratulations, also beamed live back
up to the roof of the world by Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer.
But now it was life and death. And when the two Sherpas, Ang Dorje and
Lhakpa Chhiri were forced back by the snow and the hurricane winds, Rob's
chances for survival basically ended right there.
All that day, May 11, friends below begged him over the radio to try to
move down the hill on his own. But with the hypothermia, the frostbite,
the lack of oxygen, and his weakened condition holding him back, he simply
couldn't move. He was pinned to that spot up on the South Summit just
a few hundred feet still from the top.
Finally that evening, the people at Base Camp had his wife on the phone
again. It was 6:20 in the evening now; Hall had been up there for nearly
48 hours. His voice was almost gone, so he told them, "Don't patch
her through yet; I want to eat a bit of snow first because my mouth is
dry." And then they had a last conversation, one they both knew was
the final one.
"Hi, my sweetheart," he said to her. "I hope you're tucked
up in a nice warm bed."
And she tried to give him some encouragement despite the ache in her heart.
"Don't feel that you're alone. I just know you're going to be rescued.
I'm sending all my positive energy your way."
His last words to her were these: "I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart.
Please don't worry too much."
And then he basically turned off the radio . . . and died. Twelve days
later, when another climbing group got to the South Summit, they found
his body in a shallow ice drift.
Well, it makes all of us ache to think about this story, which we're doing
for this two-week series. It's very sad, isn't it — and we'll have some
more to say about Rob Hall and how he heroically gave his life for others
up at the top of Everest. But our thought for today has to do with the
fact that a man on the top of the world's highest mountain could talk
by radio down to the Base Camp at 17,600 feet, and then be patched through
by satellite telephone to his wife in Christchurch, New Zealand, so many
thousands of miles away.
Earlier in the expedition, author Jon Krakauer, who wrote this story in
his new book, Into Thin Air, expresses his amazement that at Base Camp,
they had this satellite phone and fax which, if his wife in Seattle dialed
a 13-digit number, could put them in touch with each other . . . even
at five bucks a minute. And by patching through via radio transmission,
climbers could communicate from the mountain peak itself to loved ones,
reporters, and even to one of five Internet web sites tracking the Everest
expeditions.
As Jan Arnold tearfully observed later, it was almost like communication
between two different worlds. She was in that living room in Christchurch,
New Zealand, and her beloved husband was at the peak of Mount Everest
straddling the borders of Nepal and Tibet. And yet she could speak to
him and say those final farewells, those last words of love.
And you know, even in the darkness of this story, there shines a beautiful
message to each of us. Because we feel a long separation today from our
Savior and from our God. Different worlds, different galaxies, different
universes — and yet we can speak and our Father in His home hears us.
We can be patched through to the Kingdom of heaven; through the miracle
of prayer, there's a kind of satellite transmission and our cries for
rescue are heard by our God.
Maybe that sounds like just a poetic metaphor, but I can tell you this:
the writers in the Bible didn't see it that way. An Old Testament prophet
named Jonah cried out to heaven from the ocean deeps — in fact, he wasn't
just in the deep, he was inside a fish in the deep. And yet here's his
testimony:
"In my distress I called to the Lord, and
He answered me. From the depths of the grave I called for help, and You
listened to my cry."
Another Bible man who went on a few failed climbing
expeditions, so to speak, was King David. Here's what he writes about
satellite phones to heaven, in his 139th Psalm:
"Where can I go to get away from the Presence
of the Holy Spirit?" (Not that he was trying to.) "Where can
I go that You're not already there? If I were to launch out into space,
You'd be there. If I were to tunnel into the depths of the earth, You'd
be there."
Maybe you recall the poetic rendering of the King James:
"If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there."
And bringing it right down to 1999, I have to confess
my amazement that there's a God in heaven, so many millions and billions
of miles away, who hears my prayers each day. Some of them spring out
of desperation; I'm surrounded by the high winds of temptation and the
thin air of spiritual deprivation — my own fault, of course. But the satellite
transmission of prayer always gets through; God always hears. Sometimes
we get letters from listeners expressing that same amazement: "I
was in such a mess, but God answered my prayer!" Exclamation mark
exclamation mark.
Did you see on the news a few weeks ago when that Pathfinder spacecraft
touched down on Mars? Not only could the folks at Pasadena, JPL — Jet
Propulsion Laboratory — communicate by radio with the spacecraft, but
they could also drive, by radio remote control, that little two-foot-by-one-foot
robot jeep: Sojourner. From 119 million miles away, Brian Cooper drove
that little rover around on the Martian surface, allowing for the ten
minutes it took signals to flash up there from earth. But there's no such
delay from heaven to my heart or yours, friend, and God is able to direct
our lives with perfect precision.
I have to tell you one more spiritual truth that thrills and comforts
me even as I consider a story like this Everest tragedy. This New Zealand
guide, Rob Hall, made those last radio calls down to his friends. He was
in great peril there on the South Summit: alone, no oxygen, no shelter,
no food. And as it turned out, no rescuers. The Sherpas' heroic effort
simply was not enough. There was no way any human could get up to Rob
Hall and bring him down. His wife Jan Arnold knew it; the fellow climbers
just a couple of thousand feet below at Camp Four knew it; Base Camp knew
it, and Rob himself knew it. He knew it was over.
So the miracle of communication doesn't overcome our human limitations,
our inability to save ourselves and others. Two weeks after Hall died,
a South African team made it to the top, but one climber, Bruce Herrod,
was lagging far behind. It was 5:15 in the evening, dangerously late,
when he finally got to the top. And there, at this planet's highest point,
he talked by radio to his girlfriend, Sue Thompson, who was in London.
But as she looked at her watch and calculated the time difference, she
was gripped by fear as well. Five-fifteen already? Her boyfriend was all
alone on the top of Everest with the sun going down and no one else around?
She could talk to him clear as a bell, but there was no way to help, no
way to send assistance. You can have a million bucks to charter a helicopter,
but choppers don't fly up to 29,028 feet, and Sue Thompson knew it.
Sure enough, that was the last radio transmission from Bruce Herrod. By
the next morning, when the South African team hadn't heard from him again,
they realized they had lost him. Bruce Herrod, presumed dead, the 12th
climber to die that May.
But friend, here's the point. Our God is a rescuing God! When He hears,
He not only answers, He comes to the rescue! We may call up to a loved
one on Everest, and all we can say is "Goodbye." But when we
speak to our God, we hear instead: "I'm on My way! Rescue is coming!"
That's a phone call worth making, isn't it?
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