Widow finds her way to solid ground
Jim Haberl was already a legend in mountaineering circles when an Alaskan avalanche swept him to his untimely death. The first Canadian to summit K2, the world’s secondhighest and most difficult mountain, he was just 41.
Susan Oakey-Baker, his soulmate, fellow adventurer and life partner — their future together seemed golden — was at home in Whistler when the news she never wanted to hear came knocking at 1:30 a.m.: “Jim was killed.”
The terrible death sentence spread as speedily as that fateful avalanche among shocked family and friends. “It is like learning to speak a foreign language. I repeat the words but am unclear on their meaning,” Oakey-Baker writes in her eloquent, often excruciatingly candid account of love and loss — and love regained — Finding Jim.
A friend helps her to take a shower. In one of many brilliantly evocative recollections, she writes: “The reek of fear stings my nostrils. The hot water pelts my body, but I shiver. I caress my belly and plead: ‘Please, oh, please, let me be pregnant.’” Life is doubly cruel. She is not. Jim and Susan were preparing to lead a second Alzheimer Society of B.C. team ascent of Kilimanjaro when Jim died on April 29, 1999. Jim was the seasoned leader; Susan, at 33, was still coming into her own as the go-to person on a mountain, but her world was shattered and she could feel no solid ground beneath her well-travelled feet.
How to find her way back? Some nine years in the crafting, Finding Jim — as its title suggests — chronicles Oakey-Baker’s search for a lingering commune with the man she adored, but more importantly how she rebuilt belief in her future. Oakey-Baker is now married to another remarkable individual, Joe Baker, and mom to seven-year-old Sam, she hopes her story is as cathartic for others suffering loss as it has been for herself.
“People are defined not so much by the job they do as by how they dust themselves off and pick themselves up after a big fall,” she tells family and friends at her second wedding celebration. “I feel I took a big fall. And, as I’ve been picking myself up, loving hands — and one big paw (Joe Baker) — have reached out to me all along the way.”
Though most of Oakey-Baker’s world was jettisoned with that Alaskan avalanche, a thoughtful letter, 20 days after Jim’s death, from then-Alzheimer Society of B.C. chair Ian Ross, quickly persuades her to recommit to the 1999 team ascent of Kilimanjaro. Her commitment has continued through 15 annual fundraising and awarenessraising ascents that has channelled more than $1.5 million to the dementia cause.
Her mantra on Africa’s tallest massif and the world’s biggest free-standing mountain quotes the local Kiswahili dictum: “Pole-pole,” (polay-polay) or “slowly, slowly.” It also honours Haberl’s guiding principles:
The summit is optional. Descent is not.
You do not conquer mountains. They let you climb them, or they don’t.
Take care of your climbing partners. Know when to turn back. Be precise, be prepared, hone your skills and minimize the risk.
In an age of tell-all celebrities and the very public unravelling of a Toronto mayor, it still takes great courage to bare one’s soul for the world to read. Oakey-Baker retraces, in tentative, often tearful but frequently uplifting steps, some of the world’s most beautiful places where Jim and she were supremely happy.