Chapter 37

I hung around Kathmandu for a while after Bruce and Alan flew on to Europe to do some more climbing in the Alps. Mostly I was trying to recover from Everest and the Kathmandu Death March, but I was also trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.

One thing was clear in my mind – I wasn’t going to run quite that level of risk again. I still enjoyed mountains and climbing as much as I ever had, but there was such a thing as sticking my neck out too far and this time I’d barely gotten away with it. In the future, I decided, I would stick with easier things.

In the end, I decided to just go back home, back to Simsville, and see where Jonas wanted to send me next. I still wasn’t sure I wanted to hang out around home that long, so I thought I would see a few sights along the way, things I had missed in the past.

After several days I flew out to Calcutta, and from there to Jakarta. I had heard good things about the city, and it was fun to poke around a little bit, but after a few days I decided to move on. Tokyo was also a place I had missed in the past, except for refueling stops at the airport where I had only been able to visit the terminal, so that seemed like a possibility. If nothing else, I could join the crowds climbing Mount Fuji like Cat had done without me many years before.

After doing a little checking at a travel agency, I decided on a stop on Taiwan on the way to Japan – it was another place I hadn’t been and that I had heard good things about. If nothing more, it would kill a few more days before I got back to Simsville.

When I got on the plane I found myself in a seat next to an American guy about my age, clean-cut and good looking. He wasn’t much bigger than I am, and as I sat down I happened to notice a pair of elbow canes stashed between him and the side of the plane. “So how did you like Jakarta?” I asked by way of being friendly.

“Pretty well,” he replied. “It’s a much more modern city than I had anticipated.”

“Were you here on business?”

“No, purely pleasure. The main thing I wanted to do was to see Krakatoa, and I did. It was interesting.”

“Isn’t that the volcano that blew up around a century ago?”

“It is,” he smiled. “It was the largest explosion on Earth in historic times, several times bigger than the biggest nuclear explosion ever touched off. The volcano has rebuilt itself a bit since then, but it’s really nothing more than a cinder cone. Still, it knocked an item off my bucket list.”

“Bucket list?” I frowned.

“Things I want to do before I die. I was banged up pretty badly in a helicopter crash several years ago and I spent many months in a hospital bed. While I was there, I resolved that I wanted to wring as much out of my life as I could, so I spent a lot of time making a list of things I wanted to do. Some of them are impossible since I don’t walk as well as I would like, but this trip is intended to work on some of them. Do you have a list like that?”

“Well, sort of,” I admitted. “It’s nothing like a formal list, but I keep working at it. I’m on the way back to the States from Kathmandu. I was trekking and climbing in Nepal.” For various reasons I didn’t want to mention Everest; it seemed like boasting to me, and by now I had realized that there was no formal record of my having actually gotten to the top.

“That’s one of the things on my list that I probably will never be able to do,” he sighed. “I know I can’t do everything on it, but I’m going to do what I can.”

“So what’s next on the list?”

“There is a mountain in Taiwan I want to climb. I don’t know if I’ll able to get all the way up it, but at least I can climb on the mountain.”

My curiosity was aroused a little. “Is it a mountain I might have heard of?”

“Possibly. Do you know much about World War II?”

“Probably not as much as I should, but I’m a history and French teacher in international schools, so I’m familiar with it.”

“Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Climb Mount Niitaka?’”

That one sent my brain scratching a bit before I answered, “Isn’t that the code phrase that was sent to the Japanese carrier force to order them to attack Pearl Harbor?”

“An apple for the teacher!” he smiled broadly. “I’ll bet there isn’t one American among a thousand who could have answered that one. It’s the tallest mountain on Taiwan, and went by that name when the Japanese held Taiwan before the war. It’s now known as Yu Shan, or Jade Mountain in English.”

“I didn’t know that, and I know my way around mountains pretty well. Is it difficult?”

“Probably too difficult for me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try anyway. It’s just shy of thirteen thousand feet, and is no big deal for most people.” He let out a sigh, and went on, “When I made that list, I hadn’t realized some of the limitations I would face, but I’ve done my best to overcome them.”

“I take it this crash was a bad one.”

“Yes, but in a way I don’t know how bad. Some people today are still sensitive if I mention that it was in Vietnam. You’re not one of them, are you?”

“Not hardly,” I replied, beginning to wonder a little. Something about this guy was tickling my memory, and I didn’t mean my Joe memories, either. “But I agree, it still is often a sensitive topic. So what happened?”

“I still am not quite clear on that. We were flying along when we must have been hit by something, when there was a huge explosion and the pilot was killed, I think. The chopper was all but uncontrollable, but I managed to get it on the ground before I passed out. I woke up days later in a hospital bed in the States. I’m not sure how much of what happened to me came from the original explosion and how much happened from the crash.”

My God, it couldn’t be!

Well, yes it could. “Dave,” I said slowly, “was this crash about eight klicks south of Phan Loc in February of ’69?”

“Yes it . . . how did you know my name? I never mentioned it.”

“Because you saved my life when you managed to get that wrecked slick down between two trees.”

He looked at me with his eyes opening wide and his jaw dropping. “My God!” he managed to finally say. “You’re JoJo!”

“Just Joan, or Jo these days,” I smiled. “I thought JoJo was a name I ought to leave behind in Vietnam.”

“But . . . but . . . I never even knew you survived!”

“Chuck was killed in the explosion, but Moose and I were just banged up a little, only minor cuts and bruises. I patched you up the best I could, and Moose carried you to a clearing where we were all picked up by Chainsaw Dombrowski.”

“I never even knew that,” he shook his head. “Nobody knew anything about it in the hospital.”

“Dave,” I said, taking his hand. “I know something else about you that you don’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“You are going to climb Mount Niitaka. You’re going to the top if I have to put you on my back and carry you there. I owe you that much and a hell of a lot more.”

“You . . . but . . .” he stammered for a moment, still lost in the surprise of who was sitting next to him. Well, I was too, but I had it a little more under control. Not much, but a little; this was still pretty amazing to me, too. “JoJo . . . er, Joan . . . I appreciate the thought, but . . .”

“Only thirteen thousand feet, and heavily visited? No big deal for me.”

“Joan, what are you saying?”

“Dave, at least in part thanks to you I’m one of the better mountain climbers in the world. Probably not among the best, but I’m pretty darn good. I’ve been to the tops of the tallest mountains on six of the seven continents. If you’re too heavy for me, I’ll damn well rent a sedan chair and some porters, but I’ll still be one of them carrying you. Like I said, I owe you.”

“Joan, you’re amazing. I appreciate the thought, but you don’t have to do anything like that.”

“But what if I want to?”

“It sounds to me like you’re a person who is used to having her own way. What does your husband think about that?”

“I’ve never been married,” I admitted. “I’ve lived with guys briefly from time to time, and it’s never worked out. Mostly they’ve been climbers like me, but in general they’ve never quite accepted that I’m as good a climber as they are. We’ve always parted friends, but I think we’ve always been glad that we parted. How about you? What does your wife think about your bucket list?”

“I’ve never been married either,” he smiled. “There are a number of reasons for that, but the big one is that I live in a pretty liberal area and most of the women around my age I’ve met in the last few years used to be hippies or anti-war activists. Add the fact that I’m a Vietnam veteran and a cripple together and they usually don’t have much use for me.”

“Sounds familiar,” I agreed. “I usually don’t tell people I was a donut dolly, since they wouldn’t have a clue about what I was doing or why I did it.”

“I only saw you a couple of times in the canteen and on that one trip, but you were pretty memorable. It struck me that it was pretty nice of an American girl to be willing to do something like that for us guys. Most girls back then would have just as soon spit on us.”

“It happened to my brother when he came back from Vietnam,” I sighed. “I had already made up my mind to go to Vietnam with the Red Cross when that happened, but that just reinforced it. My friend Cat, you’d have known her as Kittycat, was there when it happened and it made up her mind to come with me.”

“I think I remember her. She was always laughing and smiling. So were you, for that matter.”

“One of the rules we had was ‘keep smiling.’ There were times when we cried our eyes out when we got back to our hooch, but we always tried to keep the good side showing for the troops.”

Dave and I didn’t talk much more about Vietnam after that, but we talked about a lot of other things. He was impressed with many of the things I had done, the places I had seen – and some of them were even on his own bucket list, like seeing the wildlife on the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. I got the impression that if he hadn’t had his legs so banged up when that Huey went down, he’d have been a climber, or at least an alpinist.

I have to admit that his bucket list was pretty wide ranging. He’d already done a good many of the items; among them was driving a modified Corvette at over two hundred miles an hour on the Bonneville Salt Flats, for example. It proved that he was about as much a car nut as Dad was, although not quite as good a mechanic – but he was perfectly willing to hire someone to help him build a special car. He was still a pilot, too. He hadn’t flown a helicopter since the crash, which was perfectly understandable to me, but he’d flown across the country in a Cessna 172.

It was a spirited discussion, and I found that I liked him. He was intelligent and gentle, with a nice smile and pleasant, non-demanding attitude. He wasn’t interested in showing off how male he was by his actions, which was the case of all too many male climbers I knew. Though his body limited him, he was still something of an adventurer, and I found it admirable of him that he wasn’t going to let his legs hold him back any more than he had to.

Our discussion lasted all the way to Taipei. Since it was a through flight to Tokyo, only a handful of people got off the plane, and we were among them. Up until that time I hadn’t actually seen him moving, but I realized that while he was still dependent on his canes he actually moved pretty well. “If I keep it slow and careful, I can go quite a ways on my feet,” he explained after we got off the plane. “I can get around without the canes for a short distance but my balance and control are bad, which is why I use them.”

“How far is quite a ways?” I asked.

“Several miles,” he said. “That’s why I figured that I could make it at least part of the way up Jade Mountain.”

“I guess we’ll have to see if that’s good enough, but like I said, if I can do anything about it you’re going to the top.”

We got a cab to our hotel – somehow we had reservations for the same one, except that it turned out that he didn’t; his reservation had been messed up. This was before the days of computerized reservations, but that showed that it was still possible to mess things up without a computer.

That was an easy one to solve, and I’d already made up my mind about the heart of it anyway. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Come stay with me. We were only going to need one room anyway, so there’s no point on wasting money on another one.”

“Joan, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“I could be a little more plain about it, but I don’t think I ought to say it in public. It’s been a while for me, Dave, but you won’t be my first man. I’m not exactly a shy little virgin, and what’s more, I haven’t been for a long time.”

“Joan, you don’t have to do that.”

“Maybe, but like I said, what if I want to?”

It was several hours before we were actually alone in our room, and by that time we were both pretty anxious. Our first time was a little awkward, mostly because there were things Dave couldn’t do with his legs banged up, but with a little experimentation we made it work. He would never be a sexual acrobat, but that didn’t keep him from being a darn good lover. As I had told him, it had been a while for me, and this was one of the best times I’d ever had in bed with a man. We didn’t go late, but we both fell asleep quite contented with ourselves.

The next day we rented a car and headed for Jade Mountain. It is a couple of hundred miles from Taipei, and the roads don’t run directly. It took us all day to drive to Chiayi, where we found a small Chinese hotel that was much more comfortable than it looked from the outside. I had stayed in many worse places on my rambles around here and there, and so it proved had Dave. The next day we got up, had breakfast, and drove up to the headquarters of Yu Shan National Park.

There was a permit system in place for Jade Mountain, and it took us a while to work our way through the paperwork and reservations, so we weren’t able to get started that day. However, I had a good look at the mountain and even went a short distance on the trail, just to see what it would be like. It was better than I had expected, but I suspected it would be near Dave’s limits. It is quite a beautiful mountain, though, with some interesting relief; it’s not just a rock pile.

The next day, with all the paperwork in place – unlike my trip to Everest a few months before – we started up the trail. We started well before dawn since I knew by now Dave would be slow. I hadn’t brought anything in the way of mountain gear from Nepal but my rucksack and climbing boots, but then I never went anywhere without them. I had my rucksack filled with all the gear and warm clothes we would be taking. It was a pretty hefty load even with making an effort to minimize things, but I figured Dave would have enough problems without the extra weight.

The first part of the trip up to the actual trailhead, is about a mile on a paved path, but after that it’s another five miles or so to Paiyun Lodge, where we had reservations to spend the night. The trail isn’t terribly steep in my book, and mostly runs through a cool forest, nice on a hot day on the edge of the tropics.

Because of Dave’s speed we were all day making it up to the lodge, and he was tired when we got there. He told me later that it was the longest walk he’d ever attempted since he was injured, but that he wasn’t going to let me down.

Paiyun Lodge is actually a bunkhouse, and we were glad to reach it. Dave was hurting by then, and I had to spend an hour or more massaging his back and legs before we went to sleep. I figured he might be reluctant the next day, but when we got up around dawn he was game as all hell.

By a couple of hours later we had climbed out of the forest country, and were even leaving the grassy slopes behind; it was now bare rock. The last part of the walk, only a couple hundred yards, is pretty steep, and it was very slow going for him, but with a little bit of help from me he made it! “By God, Joan!” he exulted when we were on top. “That’s one I never thought I’d do. I couldn’t have made it without you!”

We took pictures at the stone marker on the top of the mountain to prove we’d been there, and we got another tourist to take a photo of both of us.

The first bit of going down was difficult and even slower than coming up, but once past that it was easier going, mostly downhill. We stopped at the lodge again for the night, and once again we could see that we were near his limits. Really, it wasn’t that difficult; if it had been me by myself, I would probably have gone from the parking lot to the top and back in a single day and had some time left over, but this climb wasn’t for me.

The next day we went back to the car. Since it was downhill it went a little bit more quickly. We stayed at the hotel in Chiayi again, and the next day we drove back to Taipei.

All the way back to the city there was an unspoken question hovering around us; neither one of us wanted to ask it, because by then I think we both already thought pretty highly of each other. Finally, Dave asked it obliquely: “Joan, where do we go from here?”

“I was originally on my way to Japan with the idea of hiking up Mount Fuji,” I told him, understanding what he really meant but not really wanting to confront the issue myself. “I really don’t know much about the climb but it’s something you ought to be able to manage. It probably wouldn’t be as bad as Jade Mountain was.”

“That one is on my list, too,” he admitted. “I think I could do it another time, but I think I’d better give my legs a few days’ rest.”

“No reason why not,” I shrugged. “I’ve got time, and I know there are plenty of things to see in Tokyo.”

“I’ve been there before,” he said. “It would be fun to show them to you.”

“I think I’d like to let you show them to me.”

“Fine, let’s do it,” he said. “But Joan, I guess that really wasn’t what I was asking. We’re coming up on the first of August. How soon do you have to be leaving to go wherever you’re going next?”

“Good question. I’m technically on leave between assignments, and my time in Nepal was as a substitute. I’ve been thinking I ought to call up my contact at American Schools Worldwide and see where they want me next, because wherever it is, it’s going to be starting in the next month or so.”

“I was thinking it had to be something like that,” he said, the disappointment evident.

“It’s getting close,” I agreed. “But Dave, I keep telling myself I don’t really want to do it. I’ve been doing it for years now, and while it’s been very good for me and I’ve made good money doing it, I keep thinking that it’s getting to be the time in my life where I should settle down and get on to the next thing in my life.”

“I think I’ve been hearing you say that, without actually coming out and saying it.”

“It’s hard to admit, even to myself. Let’s face it, Dave, I’ve been a globetrotter ever since I was a freshman in college. For several years Cat and I did it together, and we had a ton of fun with it, but ever since she decided to get married and start a family I’ve been doing it on my own, and it just hasn’t been as much fun. I don’t want to give up travel, and I don’t want to give up climbing, but . . .”

“But what?”

I thought for a moment. This was even harder to say than I thought it would be. Now, finally, after many years, I thought I understood the decision that Cat had faced in our last year in college. While she and Steve appeared happy, she’d paid a big price to do it; she was no longer a climber, no longer a traveler. I had wanted to avoid that at all costs, but now . . . “Maybe I’m ready to take the next step,” I admitted reluctantly. I would have liked to say more than that, but somehow I couldn’t quite get the words out of my mouth.

“Jo, you’ve been very, nice for me the last few days, and I don’t want them to end. What’s more, I think we’ve been good for each other. How would you like to come home with me for a while, and maybe we could see if we can make it work? I can see we’re both pretty hardheaded individuals, so we’re going to have to learn to give each other plenty of space. But beyond that, no promises, but we could give it a try and see what happens after that.”

That pretty well said what I wanted to say. “Dave,” I said slowly, “I can’t think of anything I would like better.”