WHEN THE WOMAN in the cantina set the plate
down in front of him, we could only stare. Nine count `em nine
tacos, stacked in threes like cord-wood. Even Phil, who after
all had only ordered a double portion, was taken aback. Amazement
gave way to appetite, however, and he went at them one by one
with the same mix of relish and determination we'd seen as he
led us up the mountain.
Just twelve hours earlier, four of the five guys around the table had been on the summit of Pico de Orizaba, the highest peak in Mexico. At 18,701 feet, it had been the literal high point of all of our lives all except Phil's. At thirty-four, mountaineer and adventurer Phil Buck had already been along the roofbeam of South America, hitting most of the 20,000- foot high points along the Andes' spine: Huascaran in Peru, Ojos del Salado in Chile, Aconcagua in Argentina. "That's my mountain," he said once of Aconcagua, not boastfully but with the kind of affection reserved for an old flame. At 22,835 feet, Aconcagua is the highest peak in the western hemisphere, and he's summited it three times: once starting from 14,000 feet in an eighteen-and-a half-hour, non-stop climb that no one had ever made before.
While Phil ate his tacos we tended to our own substantial appetites, born of a day that began at midnight last March 27 on a cold mountain in southeast Mexico and was winding down almost twenty-four hours later in the town of Coscomatepec at the mountain's base. For Kevin O'Neil `78 and his seventeen-year-old son Brendan, the past week had been the adventure of a lifetime. Less adventurous with his food than with his holidays, Kevin was sticking with hotcakes, while Brendan went through the local Pepsi supply. The senior UMass guy on the trip, Phil's dad, Charlie Buck `58, hadn't made the climb, but after a week of camp slop and the three-hour truck ride down the mountain, he was happy enough to tuck into his Mexican equivalent of a ham sandwich with the ubiquitous side order of beans.
I met Phil about five years ago when he came into my office at the Springfield Union News for an interview. He was just starting to get some press for his quest to climb the highest peak in each of the thirteen South American countries, a feat no one had yet accomplished. There was plenty of story material in the challenge of the high peaks: freezing winds, suffocating altitudes, blinding snows. Intestinal problems and bad weather turned Phil back four times on Sajama, the 21,458-foot volcano that crowns Bolivia. On the fifth try he made it. But the best adventures and some of the hardest climbs, according to Phil, were the jungle peaks. Relatively small mountains in tropical countries like Suriname and Guyana, they make up in remoteness what they lack in size. To climb Juliana Top in Suriname, a mountain about the size of Killington in Vermont, Phil and a friend hired a local to take them 150 miles up a jungle river in a motorized dugout. They built a raft only to be stymied by a waterfall. They bought another canoe, but were subsequently ordered out of the area by villagers who believed they'd come by it dishonestly. Phil went back later that year with a canoe he'd designed to take apart and bring on the plane as check-in luggage. Paddling a different route, he made it up the mountain.
By the time I crossed paths with Phil, he was finishing up South America and setting his sights on Central and North America. Phil's "23 Peaks Expedition," which he completed last summer, included a website through which schoolchildren back home could participate in the record-breaking summiting of the tallest peaks in every country in the Americas. For a fee of $550, schools got lectures and visits from Phil along with educational and documentary materials and cyber-access. Classes logged on, for instance, as Phil sailed from Florida to Honduras in a friend's thirty-five-foot sloop in 1997. (A devoted family man, Phil took his wife Eli and their ten-month-old son Mark on that trip. Eli nursed the baby through rough seas. Everyone got sick but Mark and Phil.)
Phil met Elizabeth Rodriguez in Santiago when she and some friends tried to sell him tickets to a party. His Spanish wasn't the best at the time and neither understood what the other was saying. By chance, he saw her riding by on a bus later that day, and waved for her to get off. She did. Now, back in Shelburne Falls, Eli is studying to be a Spanish teacher, and she and Phil occasionally paint houses to supplement their income from expeditions and guiding. Charlie, who started this Buck family sideline during summers off from teaching high school, claims Eli is fearless, tackling cupolas and weathervanes from the top rung of the ladder.
She left the climbing to Phil in Central America, though, staying in hotels while he slogged around in the jungle. In Nicaragua, the expedition nearly came to a dead end when Phil learned that Pico Mogoton, a short climb of 6,913 feet, was studded with land mines from the country's long war. But for $600 the climbers were able to hire a mine-sweeper named Juan to precede them up the mountain at a crawl. Juan uncovered twenty-two live mines along the way. Phil kept the last, deactivated on the summit, as a souvenir.
My own mountaineering feats were modest compared to Phil's, but he wanted to hear all about them. When I told him there was this one volcano in Mexico I'd always wanted to climb, he lit up. Pico de Orizaba. It was on his list. "Why don't you come?" he said.
Another amazing thing about Phil: He loves to bring friends along on his adventures, the more the merrier. More often than not, they drop out before the top, but no one complains much. Who could pass up being chased by wild pigs or chopping through miles of jungle with a machete?
I T ALL SOUNDED GOOD to Kevin
O'Neil when he attended a slide show Phil gave at the Greenfield YMCA in1996. As a plant and soil science major at UMass, Kevin had thought he was headed for a career in the outdoors. Upon graduation, he and his wife Elizabeth Reid, an animal technology major at Stockbridge, moved to Kansas for graduate work in soil science, but Kevin soured on grad school and ultimately found himself juggling invoices as president of his wife's family's business, Wilson's Department Store in Greenfield.
When the youngest of their five kids was old enough to carry a pack, however, the O'Neils started getting some serious fresh air: Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park. Brendan, the oldest, handled the trails with ease, and Kevin read books about alpine adventure and dreamed.
Kevin and Brendan were ready to push the envelope when they ran into Phil. They were thinking about Mount McKinley in Alaska, but weren't sure they could handle 20,323 feet of mountain. `'I called Phil to see what would be a good test to see if someone could climb at high altitudes, and that's what I'm doing here,'' Kevin told me. Phil agreed to take Kevin and Brendan up Orizaba, and invited me along as well.
Charlie was a last-minute enlistee. With his full head of jet-black hair, Charlie was the envy of the two forty-something guys on the trip. A science major at UMass, he headed the science department at Hampshire Regional High School in West-hampton, before he retired a few years ago. Like Kevin, Charlie took his family outdoors early and often. Phil, the youngest of four, took to it right away. `'Even when he was five he'd always be out in front on family hikes,'' Charlie says. (Another UMass alum among Charlie's children, Deborah Buck Denton `89, was not so overtly physical, he says. "Runs marathons, though," he adds.)
It was Charlie who gave Phil his first taste of adventure, taking him on long canoe trips on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in Maine. He wondered if he'd regret it when Phil, at seventeen, decided to take off across country on his bicycle. `'It was kind of a funny feeling watching him go down the driveway and knowing he was going to California,'' he admits. But Phil's adventuring obviously appealed to something in Charlie. He drove to California that time to pick up Phil and his bike. He applauded when Phil and another friend made a 5,000-mile canoe trip from Oregon to Washington, D.C. Years later, when Phil had some cameras stolen in Equador, Charlie flew down with replacements and stayed at base camp while Phil climbed Chimborazo.
This time around, Charlie mainly wanted to dry out a bad cold in the Mexican sunshine. As it turned out, the nights were cold and his hack never went away. Moreover, his foot, shattered twelve years ago when he fell from a ladder while painting a church, makes even a walk through the airport a chore for him now. But Charlie never once complained and was our moral support. Kevin, seeing that Brendan might get the adventure itch, asked Charlie once how he handled the parental anxiety. Charlie shrugged. `'Phil's always had good judgment,'' he said.
B UT WHILE JUDGMENT is critical in
mountaineering, the sport contains an element of risk you can't ignore. In 1991, Phil lost his best friend, Mark Fogarty, on Mount Rainier in Washington state. The two had been boyhood friends and UMass classmates; they'd climbed McKinley together and made plans to climb Gasherbrum II, a 26,360-foot peak in Pakistan. It wasn't to be. On the way down Rainier, Mark decided to ski the glacier while Phil and another friend descended on foot. Phil found his body the next day at the bottom of a 600-foot cliff. He and Eli named their son after Mark.
But Phil never showed the least anxiety about climbing Orizaba, and I do believe he felt none. The same couldn't be said for the rest of us. Kevin and I agreed later that we'd thought about the climb every waking hour for months in advance.
The mountain was hidden in clouds when we arrived in Coscomatepec. We didn't get our first glimpse of it until the following evening, after a thirty-mile truck drive to the cabin that would serve as our base camp in the high pine forest. There, as the last light of day drained away, the gray mat of sky began to dissolve, whisking away in veils until it bared a massive dome of rock and ice that disappeared almost at once into the dark.
Orizaba was out in all its glory the next morning, and it loomed over us all week as we took long acclimatization hikes. The O'Neil boys were hard to keep up with. Brendan, a track star at Greenfield High, was especially tireless. Bright but quiet, he didn't say much except `'I'm hungry'' for the first few days, and earned my undying respect by eating no fewer than five sandwiches one afternoon. This from a kid with maybe one percent body fat.
By the fourth day we were ready for high camp, a patch of rock and grass at 14,000 feet where we planned to spend thirty-six hours resting and adjusting to the altitude before the summit push. The plan hit a serious snag when Rogelio, a man we'd hired to bring our gear up on a packhorse, got lost. Rushing back, we spent the last night back at the cabin, and the five-mile hike to high camp became part of the summit climb.
We rose at midnight, gulped down some peanut-butter sandwiches, and started up by the lights of our headlamps. On the ridge, the wind hit us in forty-mile-an-hour gusts, freezing our water bottles shut. At three a.m. my headlamp went out. Brendan's died about an hour later, then Kevin's. We huddled against a boulder and waited for the sky to lighten.
We reached the Jamapa Glacier at about 6:00 a.m., as the sun was rising out of the Gulf of Mexico. For the next four hours we followed Phil up a forty-five-degree slope of rotting ice that broke under our crampons like ribbon candy. By the time we got to the rim of the crater I was struggling to keep mind and body together in the thin air of 18,000 feet. At one point Phil offered to pull me up on the rope.
There's a weird nest of poles and crosses on the summit, memorials to climbers who have died on Orizaba. We stood next to it in the dazzling sunlight on the rooftop of Mexico and shook hands, hugged, snapped pictures, and called our wives on a cell phone. Then we started the five-hour descent. On the way down I fell a lot and started seeing men with donkeys.
Charlie was out to congratulate us as we straggled back to camp in the dark. No one wanted to spend another night at the cabin. Enticed by visions of tacos and hot showers, we rode down to Coscomatepec in the back of the open truck under the Mexican stars.
Back at the cantina, I ate my two chicken tacos and watched Phil eat his nine. I figured the waitress brought him such a big helping because he was Phil. It only made sense. The rest of us would sit back and savor this day for months to come, but in three weeks Phil would head for the Yukon to climb Mount Logan, a 19,525-foot monstrosity of ice and wind, the highest point in Canada and the last of the twenty-three peaks. Then he'd turn his full attention to his "Inca Project," which involves treks and climbs throughout western South America and during the first six months of 1999 a 3,500-mile voyage to Easter Island in a fifty-foot reed boat.
In other words, he needed the fuel. As usual, Phil finished what he started. Then his eyes strayed toward Charlie's plate.
`'You gonna eat those beans?''
