THE Lowly Peon

'My Heart Hurts' 
14 November 2010, 12:00am

A little over a year ago, I found myself in Chengdu, Sichuan, for work. I declared that I would climb a nearby mountain, and my colleagues & Daisy were welcome to join if they were up for the task.

A few years earlier, I flew up from Kunming with simonite and our friend Masha to climb this mountain, a famous Buddhist mountain called Emei Shan. At that time, it took us about two and a half days to climb, and was anything but easy. We spent over ten hours each day climbing stairs, in the cold, until we got to the top. But once we were on the top, I nearly cried it was so beautiful. To this day, the night we woke up at 3:30am because we couldn't breath, a little hungover from the foolish drunken celebration we had at 10,000ft a few hours before, when I went outside to catch my breath and saw the stars above me, and the clouds rolling below me like an ocean, is one of the most beautiful moments I've ever experienced.

I warned my three fellow travelers — a beautiful girl in good shape, a slightly overweight guy about our age with nothing but energy, and an upper-middle aged woman who has been on a diet for the last ten years but has maintained her excess weight — that this was not a walk in the park. I warned them that the last time I climbed it, I was in my youth, my peak physical condition, and it still hurt. I warned them that going too slow, as I was forced to the time prior, can be even more exhausting, and that I was planning on keeping my own pace this time, whether it left others in the dust or not. I warned them that it would be far from comfortable, but even a minute at the top, at sunrise, would be worth any pain endured.

Sure enough, all three jumped at the opportunity. We took a three hour bus ride from Chengdu after leaving early from work, and arrived in time for dinner. We found a nice place to stay seated at the foot of the mountains and chatted with someone we met, a PhD from San Francisco, in China looking for suppliers for WiMAX, the next generation of wireless technology, for which he was a lead developer. I slept like a stone on the rock hard bed, we ate rice porridge for breakfast, and set out on the trail early.

Having just purchased an iPhone with GPS, I wanted to track our hike. (However, since iPhone GPS apps were still in their infancy, it didn't work so well, and I only managed to get parts of the first day before my battery died.)

Maybe twenty minutes after we began climbing, my heart started moving faster. We had barely passed a small resting area, familiar to me, that marked the beginning of the upward journey, when my elder colleague started to look tired.

"How're you holding up?" I asked.

There was a long pause as she used the railing to pull herself up the stairs.

"My heart hurts," she replied.

In the instant after hearing something so unexpected, my mind raced for possible responses. Her heart hurts? How can anyone respond to that? An aching leg is easy — walk it off, you'll feel better. Or a blistered foot — do you want to stop a minute and bandage it? Or a headache — want some asprin or water? Or even stomach problems, as my friend Masha had so many years before — let's take a break at the next restroom (meaning, of course, the next private place you can poop off the side of the mountain). But heart? That's serious business.

So while Daisy, our friend Mike, and I tried to contemplate how anyone would accept this challenge when their heart had a chance of hurting less than an hour up a two and a half day journey, we tried to think of possible solutions. Not long after, we found a couple of porters who would take her up the mountain on a stretcher for a nominal fee. They took her up the mountain while we watched from above. And it was a long way up the mountain.

The second day, everyone did fine. We had stayed the first night on the mountain in the same monastery Simonite, Masha, and I stayed in years before, monkeys and all. And eventually we made it to the top, and saw the sunrise, and survived until the bottom.

But I still don't know how I should have responded when, at 600ft, with a 10,000ft mountain ahead of us, she told me her heart hurt.

(Check out photos from our 2009 hike here, or from our hike years prior here)