The New Yorker - USA (2021-11-29)

50 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021

mountains I might not come back,” he
went on. “You try to control for every-
thing you can. But things happen. This
house is my life-insurance policy.” Liv-
ing with such an acute awareness of
mortality sounds painful, but Caldwell
doesn’t seem to experience it as such:
“At first, you’re trying to push the fear
out of your mind, but then you just get
better at it over time.”
Caldwell’s most frightening non-
climbing experience came in Kyrgyz-
stan, in 2000. Caldwell says that he was
there only because his girlfriend at the
time, a professional climber named Beth
Rodden, persuaded North Face, her
sponsor, to include him on the expedi-
tion team, as a rope rigger for the pho-
tographer. Rodden was twenty, tiny, and
a bit of a prodigy herself. She and Cald-
well got together in Yosemite. It was
his first serious relationship.
People were calling the Ak-Su Val-

ley, in eastern Kyrgyzstan, the Yosem-

ite of Central Asia. Four young Amer-

icans made the trip—besides Rodden

and Caldwell, there was a photographer,

John Dickey, and another North Face

climber, Jason Smith. They reached

the remote valley by Russian military

helicopter. Caldwell celebrated his

twenty-second birthday camped on a

portaledge halfway up a twenty-five-

hundred-foot wall.

The next morning, they were awak-

ened by gunfire striking the rock around

them. Three men in fatigues wanted

them to come down. The men were Is-

lamist rebels, from a movement asso-

ciated with Al Qaeda, which was bat-

tling the Kyrgyz military. When the

Americans reached the ground, the reb-

els took them hostage.

Horrors ensued. The Americans,

travelling with the militants, found

themselves trapped in gun battles. They

spent hours huddled behind a rock,

under fire, sprawled beside the corpse

of a soldier executed by their captors.

The militants, young and desperate

themselves, had no food, and for six

nights they drove the terrified Ameri-

cans on a forced march through the

mountains. They spent the days hid-

ing. During the frigid nights, everyone

was on the verge of hypothermia. The

Americans were starving, slowly and

then not so slowly. Dickey, at twenty-

five, was the oldest in the group, and

he did his best to buoy morale. He and

Smith whispered about overpowering

their captors, but they never acted. Fi-

nally, on a night when they were being

guarded by only one rebel, Caldwell

took the initiative. He crept up on the

guard, whose name was Su, and pushed

him off a cliff.

The climbers found their way to an

Army base. They had survived, but

Caldwell chalks up while assessing a rock face.“I don’t really have an emotional reaction to danger,” he says.