Three Cups of Tea

  Back in the Bay Area, Mortenson called George McCown, and the two reminisced about the twist of fortune that brought them together on the other side of the Earth, on a trail through the Upper Braldu. McCown invited him to an American Himalayan Association event in early September, where Sir Edmund Hillary was scheduled to deliver a speech. Mortenson said he’d see him there.

  On Wednesday, September 13, 1995, Mortenson, in a brown wool sport coat that had been his father’s, khakis, and beat-up leather boat shoes he wore without socks, arrived at the Fairmont Hotel. Atop Nob Hill, the posh Fairmont sits at the only intersection where all the city’s cable car lines converge, an apt location for the evening that would tie together so many strands of Mortenson’s life.

  In 1945, diplomats from forty countries met at the Fairmont to draft the charter of the United Nations. Fifty years later, the crowd gathered in the gilded Venetian ballroom for the American Himalayan Foundation’s annual fundraising dinner featured the same multiplicity of cultures. Suavely suited venture capitalists and fund managers crowded the bar, elbow to elbow with mountaineers, fidgeting in uncharacteristic jackets and ties. San Francisco society women wearing black velvet giggled at jokes told by Tibetan Buddhist monks draped in cinnamon-colored robes.

  Mortenson stooped as he entered the room, to accept a kata, the white silk prayer scarves greeters were draping around all the guests’ necks. He straightened up, fingering his scarf, and let the tide of nearly a thousand animated voices wash over him while he got his bearings. This was a room full of insiders, the sort of place he never found himself, and Mortenson felt very much on the margin. Then George McCown waved from the bar, where he was bending to listen to something a shorter man was saying, a man Mortenson recognized as Jean Hoerni. He walked over and hugged both of them.

  “I just tell George he needs to give you some fund,” Hoerni said.

  “Well, I should have enough already to finish the school, if I can keep expenses down,” Mortenson said.

  “Not for the school,” Hoerni said. “For you. What are you suppose to live on until you get this place built?”

  “How does twenty thousand sound?” McCown said.

  Mortenson couldn’t think of any way to reply. He felt the blood filling his cheeks.

  “Shall I take that as an okay?” McCown said.

  “Bring him a cocktail,” Hoerni said, grinning. “I think Greg is about to faint.”

  During dinner, a dapper photojournalist seated at Mortenson’s table was so appalled by his bare ankles at a formal banquet that he left to purchase a pair of socks for him in the hotel gift shop. Other than that, Mortenson remembers little about the meal that evening, other than eating in a stupor, marveling at how his financial problems seemed to have been wiped out with one flourish.

  But listening to one of his personal heroes speak after dinner was an indelible experience for him. Sir Edmund Hillary shambled on stage, looking more like the beekeeper he’d once been than a celebrity knighted by Britain’s queen. “Ed from the Edge,” as Hillary often referred to himself, had shaggy eyebrows under a mop of flyaway hair and terrible teeth. At seventy-five, New Zealand’s most famous citizen had developed a slight paunch and no longer looked like he could stride straight up an eight-thousand-meter peak. But to this gathering of Himalayan enthusiasts, he was a living treasure.

  Hillary began by showing slides of his pioneering 1953 Everest expedition. They were tinted with the bright, unreal tones of early Kodachrome, and in them he was preserved in perpetual youth, sunburned and squinting. Hillary downplayed his first ascent, saying many others might have beaten him and Tenzing Norgay to Everest’s summit. “I was just an enthusiastic mountaineer of modest abilities who was willing to work quite hard and had the necessary imagination and determination,” he told the hushed crowd. “I was just an average bloke. It was the media that tried to transform me into a heroic figure. But I’ve learned through the years, as long as you don’t believe all that rubbish about yourself, you can’t come to too much harm.”

  Past the obligatory images of Everest, Hillary lingered on frames taken in the 1960s and 1970s, of strapping Western men and slight Sherpas, working together to build schools and clinics in Nepal. In one picture taken during the construction of his first humanitarian project, a three-room school completed in 1961, a shirtless Hillary strode catlike across a roof beam, hammer in hand. In the four decades after reaching the top of the world, Hillary, rather than resting on his reputation, returned often to the Everest area, and with his younger brother Rex, constructed twenty-seven schools, twelve clinics, and two airfields so supplies could more easily reach the Khumbu region.

  Mortenson felt so fired up he couldn’t sit still. Excusing himself from the table, he strode to the rear of the room and paced back and forth to Hillary’s presentation, burning between his desires to absorb every word and to get on the next plane that could take him toward Korphe so he could get right to work.

  “I don’t know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything,” he heard Hillary say. “I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest. But my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics. That has given me more satisfaction than a footprint on a mountain.”

  Mortenson felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around. A pretty woman in a black dress was smiling up at him. She had short red hair and seemed familiar in a way Mortenson couldn’t quite place.

  “I knew who Greg was,” says Tara Bishop. “I’d heard about what he was trying to do and I thought he had a great smile so I sort of sidled up to him.” Together, the two began the kind of conversation that flows seamlessly, unstoppably, each fork begetting another branch of common interest, a conversation that continues until this day.

  Whispering in each other’s ear, so as not to intrude upon others still listening to Hillary, they held their heads close. “Greg swears that I was actually laying my head on his shoulder,” Tara says. “I don’t remember that, but it’s possible. I was very taken with him. I remember staring at his hands. At how huge and strong they looked, and wanting to hold them.”

  Tara’s father, Barry Bishop, a National Geographic photographer, reached the top of Everest on May 22, 1963, part of the first American expedition to summit. He chose his path up the summit ridge by studying photos of the route provided by his friend Sir Edmund Hillary. Bishop documented his grueling climb for National Geographic. “What do we do when we finally reach the summit and flop down?” Bishop wrote. “We weep. All inhibitions stripped away, we cry like babies. With joy for having scaled the mightiest of mountains; with relief that the long torture of the climb has ended.”

  His relief had been premature. On his descent, Bishop would nearly slide off a ledge all the way to Tibet. He would run out of oxygen, fall into a crevasse, and suffer frostbite so severe that he had to be carried down to the village of Namche Bazaar by tag-teams of Sherpa, before being evacuated by helicopter to a hospital in Katmandu. At expedition’s end, Bishop had lost the tips of his little fingers, all of his toes, and none of his respect for the pioneers like Hillary who had preceded him to Everest’s summit. “In the quiet of the hospital, I [pondered] the lessons we have learned,” he wrote. “Everest is a harsh and hostile immensity. Whoever challenges it declares war. He must mount his assault with the skill and ruthlessness of a military operation. And when the battle ends, the mountain remains unvanquished. There are no true victors, only survivors.”

  Barry Bishop survived to return home to Washington where President Kennedy gave him and his fellow climbers a heroes’ welcome in the White House Rose Garden. In 1968, he packed his wife, Lila, son Brent, and daughter Tara into an Airstream camper and drove from Amsterdam to Katmandu. They moved to Jumla, in western Nepal, for two years, while Bishop completed research for his doctorate on ancient trade routes. George Schaller visited their home, on his way to and from treks to survey disappearing Nepali wildlife.

  Bishop survived to bring his family bac
k to Washington, D.C., where he became chairman of National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration. In Washington, Tara remembers, her father’s friend Ed Hillary would drop over for visits, and the two indefatigable climbers would spend lazy evenings sprawled in front of the television, drinking cheap beer, reminiscing about Everest, and working their way through rented piles of the old western movies they both adored. He survived to move in 1994 with his wife to Bozeman, Montana, and build one of the world’s finest private libraries of Himalayana in his basement.

  But Barry Bishop didn’t survive his drive to San Francisco. A year earlier, with his wife, Lila, on his way to speak at this same event, the annual American Himalayan Foundation fundraising dinner, Bishop’s Ford Explorer, traveling eighty-five miles an hour, had swerved off the road in Pocatello, Idaho, and rolled four times before coming to a stop in a sandy ditch. Tara’s mother was wearing her seatbelt and survived with minor injuries. But Tara’s father wasn’t wearing his. He was thrown clear of the wreck and died of head injuries.

  Tara Bishop found herself telling the entire story to the perfect stranger standing beside her in the darkened ballroom: How the Explorer had been full of Tara’s childhood artwork and journals that her father was bringing to her. How strangers at the crash site had gathered all of her treasured mementos, where they’d been scattered across the highway, and returned them to her. How she and her brother Brent had visited the spot, to hang prayer flags from the roadside shrubs and pour a bottle of their father’s favorite Bombay Gin over the blood still staining the sand. “The weirdest thing about it was it didn’t feel at all strange,” Tara says. “Pouring out my heart to Greg made more sense than anything I’d done in the year since my father had died.”

  When the lights came up in the Venetian Room, where Tony Bennett had once debuted his signature song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” Mortenson felt his heart tugging him toward the woman he’d just met. “Tara had been wearing high heels, which I’ve never really liked,” Mortenson remembers. “At the end of the night her feet hurt and she changed into a pair of combat boots. I don’t know why that killed me but it did. I felt like a teenager. Looking at her in that little black dress and those big boots I was positive she was the woman for me.”

  Together, they paid their respects to Hillary, who told Tara how sorry he’d been to hear of her father’s death. “It was incredible,” Mortenson says. “I was more excited about meeting Tara than about getting to speak with a man I’d idolized for years.” Mortenson introduced Tara to Jean Hoerni and George McCown, then joined the crowd filing out into the lobby. “By then Tara knew I didn’t have a car and offered me a ride home,” Mortenson says. “I’d already arranged a ride with friends, but I pretended I hadn’t and blew them off to be with her.” Mortenson had arrived at the Fairmont Hotel in what had become his customary state, broke and lonely. He was leaving with the promise of a year’s salary, and his future wife on his arm.

  Weaving through San Francisco’s financial district in Tara’s gray Volvo, through jammed traffic on the 101 freeway, and across the Bay Bridge, Mortenson told Tara his stories. About his childhood in Moshi. About the pepper tree, his father’s hospital, and his mother’s school. About Christa’s death. And then Dempsey’s. High above the black waters of San Francisco Bay, navigating toward the lights of the Oakland Hills, which beckoned like undiscovered constellations, Mortenson was building another bridge, spinning out events to bind two lives together.

  They parked in front of Dudzinski’s apartment. “I’d invite you in,” Mortenson says, “but it’s a nightmare in there.” They sat in the ticking sedan and talked for two more hours, about Baltistan, and the obstacles he faced building the Korphe School. About Tara’s brother Brent, who was planning his own expedition to Everest. “Sitting in the car beside him I remember having a very deliberate thought,” Tara Bishop says. “We hadn’t even touched yet, but I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to be with this person for the rest of my life.’ It was a very calm, lovely feeling.”

  “Would you mind if I kidnapped you?” she said. At her studio apartment, a converted garage in Oakland’s charming Rockridge neighborhood, Tara Bishop poured two glasses of wine and gave Greg Mortenson a first, lingering kiss. Tashi, her Tibetan terrier, ran between their feet, barking wildly at the stranger.

  “Welcome to my life,” Tara said, pulling back to look Mortenson in the face.

  “Welcome to my heart,” he said, and wrapped her in his arms.

  The following morning, a Thursday, they drove back over the Bay Bridge, to San Francisco International Airport. Mortenson was booked on a British Airways flight to Pakistan that was due to depart on Sunday. But together they told their story to an agent at the ticket counter, and charmed her into rebooking the flight for the following Sunday and waiving the charge.

  Tara was a graduate student at the time, finishing a doctorate at the California School of Professional Psychology, before embarking on her planned career as a clinical psychologist. With classes completed, her schedule was largely her own. And Mortenson had no more hospital shifts booked so they spent every moment of every day together, giddy at their good fortune. In Tara’s aging Volvo, they drove three hours south to Santa Cruz and stayed with Mortenson’s relatives by the beach. “Greg was amazing,” Tara says. “He was so comfortable sharing his life and his family with me. I’d been in some pretty awful relationships before and I realized, ‘Oh, this is what it’s like to be with the right person.’”

  On the Sunday Mortenson’s original flight for Pakistan left without him, they were driving back to the Bay Area, through tawny hills topped with green groves of intertwining oak. “So when are we getting married?” Tara Bishop asked, and turned to look at the passenger beside her, a man she’d met only four days earlier.

  “How’s Tuesday?” Mortenson said.

  On Tuesday the nineteenth of September, Greg Mortenson, wearing khakis, an ivory raw-silk shirt, and an embroidered Tibetan vest, walked hand in hand up the steps of the Oakland City Hall with his fiancee, Tara Bishop. The bride wore a linen blazer and a floral miniskirt. And in deference to the taste of the man who would soon be her husband, she left her pumps at home and walked to her wedding in low-heeled sandals.

  “We just thought we’d sign some papers, get a license, and have a ceremony with our families when Greg got back from Pakistan,” Tara says. But Oakland City Hall provided full-service weddings. For eighty-three dollars, the couple was escorted by a city judge to a meeting room and instructed to stand against a wall, under an archway of white plastic flowers that had been stapled to a bulletin board. A middle-aged Hispanic woman named Margarita, who was working in the judge’s secretarial pool, volunteered to serve as witness and cried throughout the ceremony.

  Six days after whispering to each other in the darkened Fairmont Hotel ballroom, Greg Mortenson and Tara Bishop took their wedding vows. “When the judge got to the part about ‘for richer or poorer’ Greg and I both laughed out loud,” Tara says. “By then I’d seen where he lived at Witold’s, and how he took the cushions off the couch each night so he’d have a soft place to put his sleeping bag. I remember thinking two things at the same time: ‘I’m marrying a man without a bed. And God I love him.’”

  The newlyweds telephoned several shocked friends and asked them to meet at an Italian restaurant in San Francisco to celebrate. One of Mortenson’s friends, James Bullock, was a cable-car operator. He insisted that they meet him on the San Francisco waterfront, at the cable-car roundabout by the Embarcadero. At rush hour, Bullock ushered them onto his crowded crimson-and-gold car, then rang his bell and announced their marriage to the other passengers. As the car clanked through the financial district, San Franciscans showered them with cigars, money, and congratulations.

  After his last stop, Bullock locked the doors and took the newlyweds on a private tour of San Francisco, ringing his bell the whole way. The car rose magically on its unseen cable, and crested Nob Hill, past the Fai
rmont Hotel, to the tony and vertiginous streets where San Francisco’s most mesmerizing view falls away to the north. Arm in arm with his wife, Greg Mortenson watched the setting sun kiss the Pacific beyond the Golden Gate Bridge, and paint Angel Island a rose color that he would forever after consider the exact hue of happiness. Feeling an unfamiliar fatigue in his cheeks, he realized he hadn’t stopped smiling for six days.

  “When people hear how I married Tara, they’re always shocked,” Mortenson says. “But marrying her after six days doesn’t seem strange to me. It’s the kind of thing my parents did and it worked for them. What’s amazing to me is that I met Tara at all. I found the one person in the world I was meant to be with.”

  The following Sunday, Mortenson packed his duffel bag, tucked his pouch of hundred-dollar bills into his jacket pocket, and drove to the airport. After parking on the departures ramp, he couldn’t make himself leave the car. Mortenson turned toward his wife, who was grinning under the spell of the same thought. “I’ll ask,” Mortenson said. “But I don’t know if they’ll let me do it again.”

  Mortenson postponed his flight two more times, in each instance bringing his baggage to the airport in case they wouldn’t let him reschedule. But he needn’t have worried. Greg and Tara’s story had become the stuff of romantic legend at the British Airways ticket counter, and agents repeatedly bent the rules to give Mortenson more time to get to know his new wife. “It was a very special two weeks, a secret time,” Mortenson says. “No one knew I was still in town and we just barricaded ourselves inside Tara’s apartment, trying to make up for all the years we hadn’t known each other.”

  “Finally I came up for air and called my mother,” Tara says. “She was in Nepal about to leave on a trek.”

  “After Tara reached me in Katmandu she told me to sit down. You don’t forget a phone call like that,” Lila Bishop says. “My daughter kept using the word ‘wonderful’ over and over, but all I could hear was ‘six days.’”