by Jeff Long
Matters of faith. As John climbed the crack, he had attached his leading rope to seven "fixed"
pitons placed on sunnier days by earlier climbers.
Because he was in such a hurry, though, he'd neglected to back up the old pro with some of his own setting. Now it was truth or consequences. The weathered old pins were jerking loose from the crack like machine-gun slugs. Pop, pop, pop. It sounded like breakfast cereal. Climbers call it a zipper fall for the way you unzip the pro.
Having nothing else to do as he unzipped, he counted the pops.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
He passed Tucker. He saw the moonlit teenager as an instant of mercy. Spare me, thought John.
Catch me, Tuck. Please. But not a sound passed his lips. It would have done no good anyway.
He felt the rope tighten at his waist and counted two more pops. With each pop the rope relaxed again. Gone, he realized. Gone away. The wind poured into his ears and he began to drown in the waves of his inner ocean. Panic began to unpiece him. His graceful, unending breaststroke from here to nowhere began to take on a frenzied, ridiculous tone, which set off a deeper alarm. Climbers still talk about one of their own who erred near a summit and was heard to calmly sigh "Shit" as he sailed past a lower ledge, trying to keep his balance. John was on the verge of losing all balance. He'd lost control of the big picture; now he was losing control of the little one, himself.
And then he heard the voice. It said nothing. Absolutely nothing. It calmed him. The tempest in his ears suddenly abated. His clenched jaw relaxed. The shout in his soul faded. Everything became acceptable.
Just as suddenly, he stopped with a long, dreamlike bounce. The rope stretched elastically, snatching him away from the abyss, and then he was slammed pell-mell into the wall, his shoulder and hip striking first. His lungs emptied with a frosty whoof.
Tuck had caught his fall.
He felt pain, but it was a distant, unflowered sensation. John didn't care. Like a supplicant, he reached both hands above his head and grasped the rope, gasping. He touched his forehead to the rough Perlon line.
"Padre nuestro,"
he started the chant, then gave in to his adrenaline and simply sat there. Still clutching the rope, he dangled above the inky forest floor. He raised his head to what stars were left. He heard the abrupt, macho burp of a faraway frog. In a slow, noiseless spin, the world began to accumulate around him again. The same moon was gleaming across the same cold acres of vertical granite, illuminating his long, black hair and the sparse whiskers on his wide jaw. It was like him to watch himself dangling there, tied to a puppet string far too close to God.
At an even six feet he was barrel-chested, with legs that were longer than Apache but slightly bandy all the same. He didn't have to wonder what his vagabond mother had looked like; one glance down his hybrid body told all. Besides these long legs, she'd carried narrow feet and small hands that looked too delicate on him. He was self-conscious about those hands. They seemed so inadequate for all the gripping and grabbing and pinching that climbing demanded. Yet they'd pulled him across land no one had ever touched or Page 8
seen, and that was something. So many scars had laced their flesh and then sunk under new scars that now and then he forgot their service.
Certainly his hands seemed less than true to the desert savagery that was his other half. The Indian in him was prominent: straight hair, black eyes, and huge Mongolian cheekbones. On an expedition to the Chinese flanks of Everest two years file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (9 of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:51
Jeff Long - Angels of Light before, Tibetans had regularly addressed him in their native tongue, convinced he was one of them. What he most often recognized in the mirror, though, was neither the Anglo nor the Indian. What he saw was the overlay of one culture upon the other, something quieter than intercourse, the mark of history all over his face: smallpox scars. To his eye, the pockmarks ruined his wide, angular cheeks. He saw himself as a bad invention, the product of too fierce a seed or a not quite certain matriarchy. The pitting scars were proof that his mother had vanished into mystery, marooning him and his brother with a dusky, nomadic man who knew roughnecking and bars and a thousand stories of his father's fathers and who could track bobcat from horseback and cut water from cactus and braid rope from yucca and coax crude oil from the barren earth, a man who'd struggled like a hero to be both father and mother to two dusky sons but never quite got it down. His father had forgotten to get John immunized, and by the time he'd remembered, the disease had finished with his younger son's face. John didn't blame his father. That was part of the fatalism that carried him so brilliantly across the stone walls and kept him a prisoner of the Valley.
He'd even quit blaming himself for the scars he found so ugly. He could look in the mirror these days and touch the pockmarks and accept that he was marred, but that it wasn't his fault. With a sort of reverse vanity that had infuriated his Jesuit high school teachers, he carried everywhere with him a sort of pet humility.
Sports
Illustrated had loved it ("a captivating modesty"). He was reticent in crowds, shy around strangers, and coeds had never quit teasing that he must be retarded or mute. The pockmarks gave him a vigilance. When he looked at people, his dark eyes always saw them looking first, studying his face, his skin, his infallibility. Actually he suspected that the handsomeness is almost never generic, that maybe people were intrigued, not repelled, with his face. That wouldn't be the first admission he'd put off. Too many years had gone into feeling marked. Maybe, he sometimes smiled in the mirror, maybe he carried penitente blood in him along with the Chiricahua and
Anglo. Maybe he just enjoyed tormenting himself. Sort of like climbing with knees he could scarcely bend some mornings and hands plagued by arthritis. Or hoping for Harvard someday when Berkeley had proved too confining after three short semesters. One thing John had learned was to travel light. Buttoned in the left-hand pocket of his corduroy shirt was a folded Polaroid of Liz, his lover, and a tube of wild cherry Chap Stick for the windburn.
Four ounces of luggage, that was it.
Only a few years earlier an American ornithologist on sabbatical had discovered a well-preserved corpse in a Swiss valley. Dressed in tweed clothing and hobnailed boots, the body was lying where it had been disgorged at the mouth of the Zermatt glacier. No one could figure out who it was until the local climbing club laid claim to the young man, identifying him as a certain alpine soloist of the 1880's. Like John, he had been carrying next to nothing in his pockets: a round-trip train ticket only half used, some sprigs of edelweiss, three coins. There's something about human beings
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light in the mountains, they seem to care less about the anchors that other folk require.
The result is that they take on a curious lightness. How else to explain, for instance, the middle-aged Spaniard strapped in fourteenth-century armor who was similarly resurrected at the foot of a pass in the Pyrenees in 1937. Climbers had a way of eluding gravity, even climbing out of their graves. John wasn't there, but two summers past at a base camp in the Patagonian range, near the fang called Cerro
Torre, a party of Yosemite climbers had recovered another such Lazarus or at least part of him.
To everyone's horror and titillation, one Matthew Kresinski had shaken hands with the desiccated arm extending from a flank of ice, then snapped the entire arm loose to use as a backscratch.
The moon floated perilously close to the billowing storm clouds. Frost poured from John's nostrils. He suddenly felt like taking a nap, just a short one.
"John?" Tucker's voice fluttered down and prodded him. John looked up toward the paltry cobweb of nylon slings and ropes
that anchored both their lives to El Cap. For the moment he didn't bother to answer. Somewhere in that mess of ropes hung the silhouette of the world's best climber, at least for the past six months. Tucker was up there somewhere, stoically holding John's hundred and eighty pounds through what amounted to a makeshift pulley system. The boy had been stationary for the last two hours, dangling from the rock while feeding out rope as John deciphered the crack.
Belaying could be very cold work. It could also be punishing, especially when your partner took a screamer the length of a football field. Belayers had been known to lose teeth, break bones, and burn their hands to the ivory catching falls half that distance. All the same, John luxuriated in the glory of his own survival for a moment longer.
"John?" Tucker repeated, more urgently. John was tempted to let him wonder a bit longer, not because he was sadistic but because he could. He'd earned a minute's rest down at the end of the rope. But he roused himself.
"You okay?" John called up, stealing the initiative. His voice quavered a little, which annoyed him. It annoyed him, too, that he would be annoyed. Machismo was not one of his ambitions.
"Yeah." He could hear the boy's relief, and then a philosophical "Wow."
"Nice catch, Tuck." The wind spun John in tiny circles, back and forth.
"What?"
"You caught my ass."
"What?" Climbers use a small but efficient vocabulary of monosyllables for communicating in wind and around corners. None of John's compliments were making much sense to Tucker.
"Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim," John tried again.
Though it didn't belong in the vocabulary either, Tucker understood this time. They'd been kicking that old dog all climb long. Merry Christmas Tiny Tim to the last of file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (11
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light their red and yellow M&Ms. Merry Christmas Tiny Tim to each other's penis during the morning pee, to an unsafe belay anchor on the fourteenth pitch, to the end of their good weather.
"Yeah." Tucker was no longer amused. Nor was John.
It was cold, he was exhausted, and the summit was a whole lot more than forty feet away now.
He'd have to climb the pitch all over again. Glittering overhead, liquid in the moonlight, hung the icy summit. The holy fucking grail. He sighed. He had memorized most of the moves up to Page 10
where the rock had spat him out, but even so it would take another hour to get to the top, maybe two or three. He doubted the storm would wait that long. John moved his limbs one by one, checking his shoulder and hip for damage. Bruised, he knew. He studied his taped hands as if they were traitors. He felt old. Ten months into his twenty-eighth year, he was old, at least by Valley standards. It was high time to quit climbing but difficult to let go. More than the life-style of a rock jock tiptoed in the balance; it was also a heritage, a full-blown past rooted in centuries of simple lust for the mountains. On both sides of his family, Anglo and skin, ancestors had loved and coveted their abrupt landscapes. At least he liked to think so. More than anything else, the defiance of gravity guided his thoughts about heritage and gave him license to think of himself as a mountain man. The thought of leaving these walls and mountains caused him pain—pain, he sometimes rhapsodized, like the fur trapper Hugh Glass must have felt, grizzly-scarred and lame, bidding adios to his people at the 1824 rendezvous in Jackson Hole...
like
Maurice Herzog, the great French alpinist, must have felt as he watched the doctor snip off frostbitten joints in the jungles below Annapurna. Echoes. The thought of turning his back on the mountains and never returning was as terrible to him as it was romanticized. That was all part of it, though. The overblown melancholy. The power and the glory.
"You got me?" he shouted. The wind opened a window for his words. Tucker heard.
"Take your time." Tucker didn't really mean it. He sounded weary and frozen.
John let Tucker wait just a little longer. He knew this wasn't the time and place, but he wanted to rest and digest the adrenaline, draw in the moment all the same. Once the climb was over, he'd forget these thoughts about aging or, better yet, fish the thick spiral notebook out of his gear box down in Camp Four and jot down his confessions under the heading "Mosquito Wall." The notebook was dense with similar ramblings filed under such names as Muir Wall, North America Wall, the
Shield, Bonatti Pillar, Super-Couloir, Walker Spur, Everest-North Face, Ama Dablam, and all the other major routes he'd done or attempted. Finger paintings, Liz called the journal, the stuff of his never-ending childhood. His eyes followed a lone set of headlights creeping along the valley floor. An orange satellite cruised up beside Taurus, then sank into storm clouds.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light something new and separate. It was a faint, irrelevant buzz, like the drone of a gnat.
Just as suddenly it was gone, next to imaginary. The noise was an airplane, off course and sliding to its doom. Though John didn't give it a second thought, he would remember this moment several months later. He sniffed the air and wondered how
Tucker had put up with his stink for so many days. He smiled, just barely, then grabbed the rope. Up, he commanded. Up so you can go down. Up. Down. The no-exit, alpine circle game. Sisyphus never had it so good. He pulled hard.
"Fly or die, Tuck."
The salute came right back down at him. "What?"
"Fuck this whale."
"Yeah, John. Fuck it."
John started all over again.
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CHAPTER 2
On the night before Christmas the Sierra Nevada set in motion columnar inversions over lakes that served as constant temperature sources. Through such whirlpools of air, an aging Lockheed Lodestar, off course, tried to thread the mountain range. Near the crest a fierce and sudden battle of physics ensued, during which the aircraft sacrificed its right wing in order to maintain the temporary equilibrium of its whole.
Minutes later the greater part of the plane came to rest at the bottom of Snake Lake, an oval tarn so named for neither its shape nor the presence of serpents thereabouts.
It was one of those elapsed and dusty facts that a trapper with Jedediah Smith's expedition in the early nineteenth century had so christened the lake after his favored Hawken buffalo gun, which had a way of snaking its lead balls around barriers and into the heart of things. Nomenclator forgotten, there it lay, an insignificant body of water coiled upon itself just below the tree line at ten thousand feet. There was nothing spectacular about the lake, which made it doubly irrelevant in this spectacular geography. Bullseye once argued (on mushrooms) that God must have been in His SoHo phase while creating Yosemite and the higher Sierras, how else to explain the weird domes among dinosaur forests, the rioting colors and slashed, sculptured valleys? The area was wild with an egotist's vision. Towering above Snake Lake was just such a sculpture, the East Face of Bowie Peak, a study in
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light tan-and-black severity, all sharp right angles and cut-up space. If Bullseye was correct, then Snake Lake—so mild with its stooped basin and quiet blue gentian that even people who'd been here could never quite place it—was an act of divine omission on the psychedelic blueprint. Had the access been shorter and more sober, elderly couples might have enjoyed picnicking by the docile waters.
The dismembered plane struck at 210 miles per hour, hanging a geyser beneath the stars that lasted all of a few seconds. As if closing one contented eye, the lake slowly froze over in the following weeks, covering the dead machine with a thick sheath of ice, snow, and pine needles.
The cold sediments would have kept
the secret perfectly except for one item: Seven telltale feet of the tail section jutted above the lake's surface.
On February 28, more than two months after the crash, a party of snowshoers discovered an airplane wing with the obituary N8106R emblazoned on its metal skin.
On their way back out of the forests high above Yosemite Valley, they forgot exactly where they'd found the wing, but that was all right. For the time being, the call letters were quite sufficient. The Federal Aviation Administration was first. Contacted by one of the snowshoers, it pieced together a background report on the plane. N8106R
was a Lockheed Lodestar with a five-thousand-pound load capacity, registered to a fictitious person in Albuquerque and purchased with cash in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Beyond that there seemed to be little information: No flight plan had been filed, no distraught relatives had called for help. The news of an unknown plane crash puzzled the FAA only mildly.
The existence of a flight over the Sierra in a snowstorm at night was odd, but not so odd that the Page 12
plane's purpose was a complete mystery. Smugglers rarely file flight plans.
The FAA contacted Customs. The presumption that drugs were involved was automatic; therefore Customs contacted the Drug Enforcement Agency. What exactly was being smuggled, how much, and where it was at present remained unanswered questions. But three agencies were now involved, and that, the respective authorities felt, was a good start. Had the crash occurred in warmer weather and closer to the highway, representatives of the three agencies no doubt would have examined the site themselves. But given the fifteen-foot backcountry snows, it was deemed wise to contact the National Park Service, which was essentially in deep hibernation until the tourist season kicked off on Memorial Day. Seldom is the NPS called upon to bolster national security, and provided with this twenty-four-carat opportunity, it was not found wanting. With what amounted to a snappy bureauwide salute, the Park Service jumped to life, and on March 10 ten rangers on its Yosemite winter staff were dispatched to pinpoint the wreckage. The rangers were rebuffed once, then twice, by blizzards. Finally, on March 27, a young ranger by the name of Elizabeth Jenkins unlocked the mystery of N8106R.