All Elevations Unknown An Adventure in the Heart of Borneo

CHAPTER 1 Fall 1998 FOR SOME REASON which I will never bother to ascertain, European phones make different noises when you call them compared to American phones. I sat in my office and listened as bleeps and honks came over the Atlantic in pairs, waiting for my German friend Volker to pick up his end. It was seven o'clock in the evening at my home in Wyoming, but some ungodly hour in Germany, so Volk was taking a while to answer. I had important news that couldn't wait, and since he is a doctor he would have to answer the phone. For all he knew I might be a sick person needing a bleeding or something. Suddenly the honks stopped. "What?" He said in a startled tone. "You can't answer the phone that way," I replied. "How do you know I don't have a bratwurst stuck in my larynx or something?" "I know because if this were a medical emergency, my handy would be ringing." He paused long enough for me to remember that a "handy" is what people in civilized countries call a cellular phone. "Only you call me at three a.m. on this number." "Well, you should be more polite," I responded. "Project Misty Mountain has just cleared its biggest hurdle." "You found The Tower?" "Yes I did," I replied. "Now suck up to me for a bit or I won't tell you where the thing is." Volker Schoeffl and I had originally met while on independent climbing trips to the coastal rock spires of Pha Nga Bay in southern Thailand. Volker had been there a month before my climbing partner, Mark Newcomb, and I arrived. He had established a number of climbs on the steep limestone pinnacles with his brother Gerd and another German mountaineer named Frank Dicker, but had just sent Gerd home with a medical emergency. While they were climbing a three-hundred-foot vertical wall on a remote island, a small stalactite had detached seventy feet above Gerd and speared him through the kneecap. Volker was only in his first year of medical school, but even Germans have the education to realize that a twelve-pound chunk of limestone through the femur is a bit of a handicap, so he shipped Gerd off to be pieced back together, minus the extra geology, in Frankfurt. Mark and I stumbled onto him and Frank just days afterward, and we all wound up climbing together for the next few weeks. Meanwhile, orthopedic surgeons, clean linen, and probably a geologist helped Gerd to recover nicely, and I was later introduced to him while visiting Volk in Germany. The three of us have since traveled across the US and Europe, through South Africa, Zimbabwe, Laos, and the Philippines, all in a quest for good rock climbing in places that were exotic and unexplored by most of the world's climbers. Our shared passion for the sport of rock climbing, and the exploration of countries whose names we can't correctly spell, had made the late-night phone calls excusable, if not expected. "So where is the mountain?" Volk was now decidedly more energetic. He went on, "Wait, are you still in Malaysia?" "No, I'm back in Wyoming," I said. "Now go get a map." He dropped the phone and went off searching. I could hear this and that being thrown around as he cursed in German, and it occurred to me how amazing it was that Volker could slip back and forth between languages. He spoke English fluently, which was a good thing since my German was barely sufficient for ordering a beer. When we were off traveling together he made a constant game of correcting me in my mother tongue. It is embarrassing to have a foreigner correct you in your own language, but it was something I had to get used to when socializing with an overachieving German. Volker had been somewhat of a child prodigy on the twelve-string guitar, and he and Gerd, who was a pianist, used to entertain at parties by playing their instrumentLightner, Sam, Jr. is the author of 'All Elevations Unknown An Adventure in the Heart of Borneo' with ISBN 9780767907750 and ISBN 0767907752.