I don’t know where to jump in.
Maybe I should start by saying I am the last person you would expect to find on Mt Everest measuring men’s erections to see if they can get it up and keep it up. First of all I am terrified of heights. You would be amazed how many serious mountain climbers have that fear. Second I am not a very good climber. Third, and far more importantly I am fascinated by women’s sexual performance not men’s.
This diary is full of what you may think of as vulgar and crude remarks and a certain ribald humor. One of the things I don’t get about Americans is from my perspective it seems like you have some weird love affair with porn but won’t talk frankly about sex. Or about sex at all. If you are among the easily offended I suggest you read no further.
Also, just so we are clear I am a very average person and in many things I am well below average.
But I have always pushed myself to do things I wasn’t comfortable doing or even terrified of doing. I have a severe speech impediment but I have spent much of my life teaching and speaking in public. I have dyslexia but I write and work with numbers for a living. I am truly terrified of climbing but have climbed mountains all over the world and once spent over a year living high up on the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalaya (around 5,000 meters) traveling with Tibetan Nomads who herd Yaks.
So how did I end up measuring erections on Everest?
There is this classic song called What a Difference a Day Makes. It was written in Spanish as Cuando vuelva a tu lado by Maria Grever the first female Mexican composer to become an international star. It was recorded in 1959 by Ruth Lee Jones who was much more famous under her stage name Dinah Washington. If you have never heard Dinah Washington sing What a Difference a Day Makes here is a link. Trust me, it is well worth it. Washington, prior to her tragic death at 39 was a major superstar and with good reason.
genius.com/…
One of the hardest things when I write dialogue, and there is some coming up here, is to actually capture the way the people speak. As you will probably understand better later in the diary I have keen hearing and tremendous memory for the sounds I hear but because of my Asberger’s I often miss the true meaning. At a certain point in this story one of the most important people in my life will put on a bootlegged record of Dinah Washington singing some of her hits including the x-rated ones and in the middle of the record there is What A Difference a Day Makes. At that moment she looks at and says, “We need to talk,” That conversation determines the course of the rest of my life. I have never been able to forget the way she said it, softly, like she was ashamed, and worn out, and yet excited. How the heck do you convey that in a few simple words of dialogue. And if that penetrated my Asperger’s she probably was telegraphing a lot more than that.
I am going to start with J2, whose name is Jo and it isn’t short for anything. When I was 17 Jo tired to kill me.
Jo is a very serious hunter and ridiculously competitive. Which actually leads to how she almost killed me. We went duck hunting, though this if before we were a couple. By this time, I was 17, I was no longer interested in hunting anything but I happily ate what she shot because she has always been a fabulous cook.
We are in a small boat near the west end of Moberly Lake. I should pause and say Jo’s mother`s mother was a Dunne-Za from the West Moberly First Nation. Jo is swinging around in this little boat following ducks and blasting away with her pump action. She got so caught up in shooting she swung around and pointed the gun right at me.
I bailed out. Moberly Lake is very cold, high up in the mountains of Northern, B.C. It is not that I can’t swim or that I can’t drown proof. But that water was super cold and I was freezing and trying to climb back in the boat all the while remembering that the Dunne-Za claim the lake has no bottom. Jo kept whacking me with her shot gun because I was disturbing her aim.
I got hypothermia and nearly died. Jo would tell you I am exaggerating. I probably am, but only slightly. I did get hypothermia floating in that freezing lake. Then I realized we were in the shallows and I swam and walked to shore and back to her Gran’s place. Now I have to admit the fact the Dunne-Za have a very compelling Loch Ness Monster legend of their own and in it the monster always ends up eating people in the shallows gave me the energy to get the hell out of the water. So don’t tell me learning mythology is a waste of time. Gran gave me dry clothes and hot tea and plunked me down in front of the fireplace.
When I stopped shivering Gran said, “Crazy white man. Stupid, stupid. My people they know smart man does not get in boat with crazy girl with shotgun. I can’t believe my Jo thinks you are an Indian.”
About then Jo shows up with a bag full of ducks. She looks at me and goes, “So this is where you got to. I should have known. You are so soft. Here come and help me pluck these.”
Jo made this amazing stuffed duck dish. She stuffed them with saskatoons and blueberries and coated them in what I think was a chokecherry sauce. With it we had wild rice and wild mushrooms. I ate it happily, said Good Night and got in my old beater Vauxhall and drove home. I also vowed to never have anything to do with Jo again.
A few weeks later I discovered my girlfriend, my best friend 的简称, which in English is usually translated as, you guessed it, Jo though it is really Josephine, was pregnant. Now as crazy as this may sound we were trying to get pregnant so this was good news. Life altering but neither unexpected or unwanted.
Skip forward 2 years and 6 months. My life is falling apart. I and Jo 1 have twin girls and are both in our third year of university at the University of Alberta. In fact, we are in final exam season. Jo is flying through her physics and math courses (double major). I am continuing along managing not to flunk out. We are living in Pembina Hall on the Quad in the center of campus. It was then married student housing, specifically for married students with kids, most of whom are in grad school of course. We are living on her academic scholarship and my ability to make a living dumpster diving and my stipend from the Canadian Military for belonging to ROTC.
But our daughters are having a great time. It takes a village and our village is grad students from around the world. The girls were thriving despite what I am going to say next.
Neither of us had any idea what we were doing as parents. I was pretty good with the basics and did most of the primary child care. But I was also a total pushover and toddlers are terrific little manipulators. And we had major financial stress. Jo was impossibly unhappy for reasons I couldn’t figure out, she wouldn’t tell me when I asked, and my Aspergers wasn’t helping. I could see Jo was angry and at me but I had no idea why.
I assumed it was because we were poor and I was in constant danger of flunking out and really had no idea exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I was totally wrong on all fronts. But it was stressing me out to a point I wasn’t making smart decisions.
The morning of my last final I and the girls were “visiting” my parents. It had gotten so bad with Jo 1 I had simply had to get away. Nothing I did was right. And she was yelling at the girls all the time. My parents lived on the east side of Edmonton and were delighted to see their granddaughters who were, for a fact, cute as all get out. Little hellions but cute ones.
That morning I knew I was in trouble. I was sick in every way possible. Overnight I had come down with a horrible cold/flu. I should simply have gone back to bed but I was too busy catastrophizing. Even though I knew full well I could get a medical deferment and take the exam later I couldn’t make myself believe that. I just had to take this test or my life was going to end. By this point my Dad had gone to work and my Mom didn’t drive anymore and they only had one car. I tried to call a cab. They told me it would be 3 hours.
The delay was because overnight Edmonton had been hit by a massive spring snow storm. Buses were running hours behind. Despite this I went outside, all bundled up and stood waiting. Eventually a bus came and I got on it, but I don’t remember much of anything until we arrived at Hub Mall on campus. I walked to the Physical Education Building.
For big classes (and Biochem 300 was a huge class) the final exams were held in the Main Gym which is on the second floor of the Phys Ed building. I struggled just to get up the stairs. A little piece of trivia. If I had turned right rather than go straight into the gym I would have run into the facility one of my favorite professors, a guy named Bob Stedward had built. It is a specialized training center for handicapped athletes. It was an incredible accomplishment and very cutting edge. But Bob didn’t stop there, he helped found something you have probably heard of, the Paralympics. And one day he helped get a young man in a wheelchair started on an epic journey in which he would wheel himself around the world. His name is Rick Hansen. But Bob and Rick will have to wait for a later diary.
I walked in to the gym and the Senior Proctor took one look at me and tried to convince me to take a medical deferment. I said no, several times. He told me, not very kindly, that he thought I was out of my mind. Then he handed me a test and walked me to the very far Southeast corner of the gym, as far from other people as he could manage. If you had told me then that deciding to take that test was arguably the most important decision of my life I would have said you were crazy, or completely flipped out.
Now to understand the rest of my life what you have to know is two things. At the time the University of Alberta used the Stanine System. Students got a mark from 1-9 depending on where they were in the distribution.
I was a solid 5. The thing is 5 is not what you need to be a Honors student, and go to graduate school, and get into medical school. Which were the things I was telling myself I was working towards.
Coming into the exam, which was in Biochemistry, I was carrying a 5.5 average for the year. So I had gone 5.0, 6.5. 5.5 you can see I was not exactly tearing the academic world apart. I had just two courses I didn’t have marks for, what was then Biochem 300 and Independent Research 400, but they made up 60% of my course work for the year. A normal course load was 10 3 credit classes. Biochem and IR were each full year 9 credit classes so 18 of 30 credits.
My problem was I was getting a 4 (a conditional pass in Biochem). The final was worth 50% of the years mark so if I aced it I could still dig myself out of a very deep hole but the test was based on the entire years work and I had buggered that up once so my chances of improving looked slim. I hadn’t studied like I should have. Things kept getting in the way.
I opened the test and didn’t know a single answer. Not one.
I was in a panic. And then I saw the bonus questions. They were essay questions not multiple choice and short answer and I figured maybe I could BS my way through some of them.
The one I started with was “Discuss the biochemistry of high performance athletics.” Not something we had ever covered in class. But I started writing at 2:05.
At 2:15 I was still working on that first short essay but was running out of room on the exam paper. The Proctor walked by and gave me a blank notebook to use and dropped off a bottle of orange juice. At 3:00 I was still working on that first essay. Another notebook arrived along with a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup.
At 4:00 the Proctor stopped by with another notebook, a toasted sub, and to tell me that even though the exam was over because I was an hour late I could keep going until 5. At 5 precisely the Proctor sat down in the desk beside mine and held out his hand, I gave him the notebooks filled with the one and only question I had answered.
He sat there and read it while I waited. It took him almost 30 minutes. Then he took a red pen and flipped to the front page of the exam and wrote a 9, and then he circled it about five times. I was a little stunned.
“You are giving me a 9 on the exam? I only answered 1 question.”
“No,” he said. “I am giving you a 9 in the class. Your answer covers everything we have been trying to teach all year and goes way beyond that. All the algorithms, the graphs, the charts, the drawings, the fact it is all a cohesive whole. I have given people PhDs who didn’t understand this material as well as you do. I guess you just aren’t very good at giving simple answers to simple questions. Your mind is horribly baroque and some of this is probably wrong but you young man, I am guessing you just found your thing.”
I was giddy as I left the Phys Ed building to head home. But some how I didn’t want to go home. I headed over to BioSciences on the excuse I wanted to check out my Research 400 mark. It was finally posted and I admit I checked it half a dozen times because I couldn’t believe it. Another 9. Suddenly I had first class honors and my plans for my life were back on track. Now I went 5.0, 6.0, 7.6 which actually suggested some positive progression.
I still didn’t race home but at least I thought I was finally making some progress on my life. Jo 1 was waiting for me. She was actually very happy for me when I told her my news. She had made one of my favorite dishes for supper, carrot dumplings and free of children we had a great time celebrating my success. I am, and have always been, a fan of the blues, and Jo 1 had gone to enormous lengths to find me a new record to listen to, a bootleg copy of the jukebox hits of Dinah Washington. In the middle of the record she lifted the needle and said, “We have to talk!”
Jo 1 was upset because she wasn’t a good mother and hadn’t bonded with our daughters. She wanted me to bugger off for the rest of the spring and summer and let her do all the parenting. My first thought was hell no, my second thought was that I could see she was serious and it was eating her up. I agreed to see what I could do.
The next morning, early in the morning, with no girls and no exams I could have slept in, the phone rang.
“Hi, its John,” he said.
“John, I don’t know any John, you must have the wrong number,” I said.
“John Colter, we met yesterday, I proctored your Biochem 300 exam,” he said.
He had phoned to offer me a job. Well to offer me a job on behalf of a friend of his whose technician had quit on it at the last moment. I asked what the job was.
“Measuring men’s erections. In some of the world’s greatest athletes.”
Even I could hear the hesitation in his voice.
“What’s the catch?” I asked.
“You will be doing it while they climb Mt. Everest.”
Normally I would have hung up on him. I didn’t yet know that you didn’t hang up on John. He is one of the legends of virology, some of you probably have seen illustrations of what a virus looks like. That is one of the two great accomplishments of John’s life. The other is making real progress on figuring out how viruses transcribe themselves into human cells. He has been described as cunning, cruel, ruthless, hard as nails, demanding and unforgiving. But he has also been called a great friend, warm, loving, supportive, and caring. I think I can fairly say all of that is accurate.
Four days later I arrived in Kathmandu. I don’t know how many of you have ever been. I think the best description would be the vortex of chaos. And nobody met me. Which left me with the tricky problem of getting myself and my gear to Base Camp on Mt. Everest. In the end I put the 120 pound pack on my back and hiked there. Where nobody met me.
I’d probably have given up right there but the first person I met was this bouncy blond dynamo, she held her hand out and said,
“Hi, I’m Lydia.” Now if you are going to get introduced into the culture of high altitude mountain climbing there are no better guides than Lydia Bradey. Today I think there is near total agreement that she is the greatest female climber of all time and with the exception of the legendary Reinhold Messner I’d argue she is the greatest high altitude climber of all time.
You need to know, because it is going to matter, that Lydia was what in scientific speak we refer to as a highly attractive sexual partner. Probably still is for that matter. Anyway she introduced me around and I discovered any friend of Lydia’s was the friend of every person on the mountain.
This got me nowhere because I had no idea how to say, “Guys, I’d like to measure your erections.” Knowing the culture of elite climbing all I had to do was tell a few guys I wanted to do this and I would have had dozens of volunteers right of the bat. You don’t put up new routes and climb without oxygen on the world’s biggest mountains unless you have more than an average ability to place your self in space.
We call that proprioception. Back then we had no idea how it worked but we knew it was somehow genetic and we ever referred to it as a sixth sense. Today we are finally starting to figure out how it works and it is fascinating.
www.vox.com/...
With that uncanny ability to know where you are at all times comes an extraordinary awareness of you own body. And climbing the big mountains is exceedingly dangerous and that fact leads most serious climbers to have a heightened emotional awareness as well. The two combine to make them incredibly open about topics like life, death, after life, and yes, sex than what one great climber called “the people who live in the valley”. Or as my eventual climbing partner would say after climbing Mt. Everest 7 times, “Everest is like a nude beach in Sweden if all the Swedes were drunk and sure they were going to die the next day.” You know how they say “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. What happens on Everest is secret and to be taken to your grave.
But gossip, juicy gossip, is the life blood of Base Camp.
Getting inside that community was not easy even with Lydia as my introduction. Maybe I should say feeling like I belonged wasn’t easy.
My breakthrough came when I offered to help move some gear up the mountain. Each member of a team would carry a pack, usually around
Thursday, Dec 5, 2019 · 5:39:59 PM +00:00 · Nonlinear
I hadn’t actually intended this to publish. I thought I had removed it from the que. It is a draft of what was meant to be a multi-part series. There will be more but I guess now I am stuck with this draft. I can’t help thinking that this funny because you are all getting a chance to see who baroque my mind actually is without editing. I spend way more time editing than I do writing. But I will pick up here in Part 2.