When Razu first told me he had a headache and needed to go down, I was engrossed in the task of capturing a picture of Mt Everest in the mirrored reflection of my sunglasses. Just about any task you attempt when you first arrive above 18,000 feet strains the faculties, so at first it didn’t really sink in. I was checking the digital image to make sure the mighty Sagarmartha was properly lined up in my left eye and snapping another picture.

Razu, who I’d paid to guide me on the Everest trek, is not a Sherpa. He’s Newari, a Hindu from the flats around Kathmandu, but I was assured he has loads of experience. At first I was a bit alarmed to see that his outdoor gear consisted of a faded Chinese knockoff windbreaker, treadbare Reeboks, also of dubious authenticity, and some woefully thin polyester pants. Then I watched him smoke nearly a pack of Nepalese cigarettes a day (”Mountain diet,” he said in his limited English), and invariably I found him in the kitchen of each lodge after dinner where he sipped Chhang, the vicious homebrew millet wine that one of my hiking companions deemed “solvent abuse.” But then Razu regularly stayed ahead of me each day while I was making way on the trail for the smallest Sherpa boys carrying home appliances and construction supplies on their backs while wearing only flip-flops, so what did I know with all my Gore-Tex and Vibram.

But in the eight days it took us to hike to Gorak Shep, just a stones throw from Everst Base Camp, it was becoming less clear who was in charge of whom. I had helped Razu patch the Reeboks, taped his sunglasses (twice), shared my carefully metered supply of sunscreen, doled out my scarce Ibuprofin, and even given him the meds that the travel clinic perscribed for altitude sickness.

This confession of a headache from the top of Kala Patthar (5550m) was a milestone. Razu had been looking a little green the past couple of mornings and I’d had my eye on him, but he hadn’t been willing to admit that the altitude was getting to him, especially while I put away three platefuls of Daal Bhat and slept nine hours a night. (Most people experience loss of apettite and sleep disruption above about 12,000 feet. Whatever.) So I was actually proud that he had broken his stoic facade and admitted that the altitude was getting to him.

“Razu, thanks for telling me,” I said. The two European hikers that had been up on top among the tangle of prayer flags when we arrived had scambled down. It was an extraordinary still, clear afternoon, and I didn’t want to go down yet. “I’ll start down in about 15 minutes,” I told him.

Then it was quiet. The prayer flags stirred a little as I let my gaze sweep left to right: the multicolored sprawl of the tents at basecamp, the clear ridge of Everest protruding over Nuptse and then to the right, Lhotse and on down to Ama Dablam crystal clear in the calm, cold air. In that moment I felt with perfect clarity exactly where I was. I realized that in the cramped accommodations and along the trail, I hadn’t had a moments solitude in weeks, and suddenly I was alone, on top of the world, looking across the Kumbu Glacier at Mt. Everest, the highest point on Earth.

I recall a day in the summer of 1989 when I climbed my first real peak: Mt Dana, on the eastern border of Yosemite National Park, at 13,052 feet. It was also my first week as a dishwasher at the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge. Even on high school sports teams, I’d never exerted myself like that before, and the view, not just the view but the exposure, the sense of the elevation, the feeling of being on top was like nothing I’d ever experienced before: the jagged white granite of the Sierra unfolding north and south, the great pan of Mono lake glittering to the east where the Nevada desert seemed to curve away forever, and to the west, the meandering braid of the Toulumne River descending into the domed wonderland of Yosemite. I expended all my film and asked my friend Steve, an experienced mountaineer, to help me name the other summits we could see: Lyll, Conness, Hoffman, etc. I wanted to possess them somehow.

That experience stirred a passion, and in that one day, it seems, I committed myself to be in the mountains, embracing an ethos of devotion to mountains and being outside. I got out every chance I had to climb something. In my youthful zeal, I only wanted to be with people who wanted to be in the mountains, and from then on I was obsessive about climbing, memorizing peaks and their elevations like other people memorized sports statistics.

But Everest remained an abstraction. A superlative untouchable by weekend mountaineering, 8848 meters, it’s metric otherness wasn’t even tangible compared to places I’d been before. It was a glossy tooth on posters in gear shops.

But suddenly there I was, just a thin bit of atmosphere between me and the summit (alright, and another 10,000 feet). I don’t think I’ve ever harbored the desire to actually climb it (and after seeing the zoo of basecamp, I’m permanently convinced). But in that perfect moment of alpine solitude, I reckoned exactly what I came for, and I thought of some lines about the perfect, calm simplicity of summit moments from my favorite Gary Snyder poem:

I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.

A little bit later, I heard an avalanche come crashing down the sun-warmed southern slopes of Pumori behind me. I went to the ridge to watch the debris cascade over the icefalls. There were ominous clouds boiling down the valley, and the breeze was coming up. It was time to go down.

“Okay,” I said, breaking the silence. I looked at the prayer flags and loosed a little blessing to all those friends who are in cities, and I went back down to Gorak Shep for the warm Daal Bhat that was waiting for me, and I wondered what I would need to do for Razu.