K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [59]
Exhausted though the men must have been after their effort on K2, they regarded the retreat from the Karakoram as simply the final stage in a three-month lark. For all six of the “sahibs,” the expedition had been one of the greatest adventures of their lives. In the last pages of Five Miles High, Burdsall sums up the team’s sense of satisfaction:
Behind us were unforgettable days—days on the march, and days on the peak, whose memories we would not exchange for anything. No harm had come to us or to any of our helpers. In a few days we must say farewell to our Kashmiri and our faithful little Sherpas…. Later we sahibs too must part to go our separate ways, but we knew that our bond of friendship would last as long as life itself.
Alas, the aftermath of the 1938 expedition to K2 would turn out not to be quite so clean and pure. It’s always seemed to me that one of the saddest things that can happen in mountaineering is for teammates to get along well during an expedition, only to have a falling out afterward. One of the best-known examples is the partnership of the Austrian Peter Habeler with the Tyrolean Reinhold Messner. During the 1970s, they set the climbing world on fire, with such astounding deeds as the ascent of the Eiger Nordwand in a then-record time of ten hours. In 1978, Habeler and Messner pulled off their greatest feat when they climbed Everest without bottled oxygen, despite widespread predictions that climbers would die or suffer irreversible brain damage in such an attempt.
Messner and Habeler apparently got along fine on Everest. The trouble came afterward, in the discrepancies between the books the two men wrote about their adventure. (Messner, who always had an outsized ego, seems to have resented the fact that Habeler would write a book at all.) The media seized upon the conflict, and the two former best friends began a feud that lasted a quarter century. To their credit, these two great mountaineers finally patched up their quarrel and even climbed together again.
After K2, Paul Petzoldt stayed on in India for several months. His initial intention was simply to sightsee, but he soon fell under the spell of a very odd duck named Dr. Johnson. The man was a retired physician from California who had come to India as a Baptist missionary, repudiated his faith, and set himself up as a guru of a mystical Buddhist cult. Petzoldt was so taken with Johnson (whose first name he could not later recall), that he arranged to have his wife, Patricia, join him at Johnson’s compound in the village of Dera Baba Jaimal Singh.
On January 25, 1939, gathering tensions within the Johnson household exploded. The only published versions of this bizarre event appear in the two biographies of Petzoldt, and they disagree in many details. Since the first biography, On Top of the World, was written by Patricia herself, who was present at the time, it may be suspect, because her agenda would have been to exonerate her husband of any wrongdoing. But even the more reliable account, in Raye Ringholz’s 1997 On Belay!, depends entirely on Petzoldt’s own story of what happened.
In this telling, Johnson’s wife, who is portrayed as a depressive paranoiac, suddenly seized a shotgun and tried to shoot Petzoldt with it. Petzoldt grabbed the stock of the gun, struggled with her for several moments, wrenched the weapon out of her hands, and threw it out a window. In the melee, Dr. Johnson had hurried into the room. As Petzoldt fled into the courtyard, he accidentally knocked Johnson down. The guru’s head struck the stone floor and he was instantly killed.
(In the 1960s, in climbing circles, the scuttlebutt told an utterly different story. In this version, Petzoldt had ended up in a fistfight with a porter on some sort