QUITO, Ecuador — Looking back, I'm not sure why I was worried about climbing the highest mountain in the world, even though the hardest thing I ever climbed was a flight of stairs.
Maybe I just got psyched out. In every group there's always one person you point to as you say to yourself, "If he can do it, so can I." As I waited in a pub here for the dozen others who would join me on this Andean expedition to Mt. Chimborazo, I kept expecting that guy to appear.
When we took our seats at the table, I looked around at all the well-conditioned mountaineers full of swaggering tales about traversing knife-edge ridges in howling winds, and the light began to dawn. I was that guy, the one everyone else would point to for reassurance, the only one who believed the brochure for this climb that said, "No experience necessary."
When they turned their attention to me, I tried to distract them by telling them of my recent high-altitude excursion to Lake Tahoe (6,200 feet) when, one night, I drank an abundance of vodka cranberries while playing blackjack. They laughed but remained focused. "No, really," they said. "What have you done?"
As I thought about it, I wondered exactly what I had done, and the voice inside my head began barking its own questions. What fate lay ahead in these mountains? Was one of those guys hatching a bestseller in which I played the starring but tragic lead? Could I get my money back?
I stayed, and in the days to come, the answers unfolded before me, like the vistas on that glorious day when I stood on top of the world in every sense of the word.
We've all read about those people whose lifelong ambition is to climb Mt. Everest. I was not among them. There are many places I want to visit, but Everest's not-so-subtly-named Death Zone held little charm for me. Its rate of safe return for climbers made Russian roulette seem more fun. I didn't want to pay $65,000 for the honor, nor did I want to spend weeks enduring the pain of acclimatizing to 29,000 feet. And I preferred to keep all my appendages free from frostbite and connected to my body.
Still, I wanted to stand on the summit of the tallest mountain on the planet and see the view I had imagined in my mind's eye. It was clear to me that until someone figured out a way to airlift me to the top of Everest in some sort of pressurized suit, my dream of standing on top of the world would remain just that.
