by Jeff Long
"Yeah," Bullseye said to himself. He had his hand up by his face and was sighting along his index finger at each section of the column, linking the possibilities visible from the ground. "There," he muttered, "over to there. And there."
John and Tucker skated over to a flat table of rock and took off their skis. It was best to leave the sorcerer to his divinations. Bullseye was reaching for that calm part of the pond where all the circles open up, where Heidegger and Nabokov and Picasso
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light and others like them say yes. Here. Now. Closer up now, while he unfurled the one coil of rope they'd brought in, John examined the ice. It was so intricately fluted that it looked like stale, filigreed gingerbread, and promised about the same solidity. It was going to be like climbing on Wheat Thins up there, provided Bullseye even got off the ground.
The pointed bottom of the ice hung eight or nine feet above the ground. Bullseye was going to have to stretch on his tiptoes just to get a tool in. From there, if the whole thick spear of ice didn't detach and impale him, he'd have an opportunity to decipher thousands of false and true codes frozen in the water. Ice is strange stuff. It can look like shit plastered on stone and yet feel like a million bucks.
Or a nice fat curtain of perfect turquoise glass can suddenly delaminate and there you go, down among the plate-glass shards. With ice you take your chances. Ice screws aren't like ordinary rock protection; like ice itself, screws seem to have a mind of their own. Indeed, technology is the crux of the problem with ice climbing. On rock you can feel your relationship with the wall through your fingertips. If a fall is imminent, usually you know it before the fall. On ice, each hand holds an ax or a hammer, each boot is encumbered with a crampon. You're climbing on, at Page 54
best, a half inch of sharpened metal at each point of contact. If the tools fail, you fail.
Bullseye joined them and took off his skis. From his pack he pulled a pair of black Chouinard crampons with wine corks stuck onto each sharp tip, twenty-four in all.
He unstrapped a fifty-five-centimeter-long French ice ax from the rear of his pack and reached inside for a wicked-looking hammer called a Hummingbird. Side by side on the table of rock, the tools gleamed. Like Tucker, when he bought, he bought the finest. For protection, he drew from the pack three hollow ice screws, plus a handful of knotted slings. Tucker watched in awe.
He'd never climbed ice with Bullseye, though everyone said you hadn't lived until you did, and so every move, every tool, every piece of pro was a part of this graduate course in extremism.
He waited for
Bullseye to extract more protection. Bullseye didn't.
"Did you bring the rest of the pro?" he asked John.
Bullseye looked blankly at him. "John brought more?" he said.
"I was supposed to bring something else in?" asked John.
"I just thought..."
John looked at Tucker, then at what the boy was staring at. He remembered the first time he'd climbed with Bullseye, too. "Oh. The pro. No, we're talking skinny here.
Skinny means happy, right?"
"Right," said Bullseye. He wasn't smiling, though. The ice had him spooked. With the authority of Shane loading his handguns, Bullseye methodically pulled the wine corks from each tip on his crampons, exposing much-sharpened and resharpened points. He strapped them on to the bottoms of his boots, flexed his foot up and down, and tightened the straps some more.
Instantly Bullseye seemed different to Tucker, dangerous instead of frivolous. With the crampons on his feet and an ice tool in each
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light hand, he was dangerous. When ice climbers fall they're the proverbial loose cannon, everyone's worst nightmare including their own. Every flailing limb turns into an uncontrollable weapon, and the belayer can end up looking like a sawmill disaster.
On rock you get abrasions. On ice, lacerations. It's the difference between sandpaper and surgical knives. Sitting among the shadows blue as Dresden chinaware, Bullseye grimaced at the high blue column. Already he was in love with it. He tied one end of the rope to his harness and stood up. He hyperventilated, then exhaled altogether and flapped his arms. He loosened his knees with a deep bend and tossed his head from one shoulder to the other.
"Want me to belay?" asked Tucker. In truth he didn't want to. He wanted to watch the unfolding masterpiece.
"Better let John," said Bullseye. "He weighs more." To a climber the remark was succinct; if he fell, he expected to fall far and hard. The heavier your belayer, the greater your chance of getting caught. Borrowing one of the three-foot circles of sling, John lassoed a rock and clipped himself to it. Tucker noted that John had positioned his belay spot well away from the fall line, that imaginary path straight down from up. Bullseye reached into his pack one last time and brought out his trademark, a badly scratched fiberglass helmet with a red and white bull's-eye painted on the very crown. As a general rule Valley climbers disdained helmets as pussy ware. Only Bullseye got away with a helmet, and only on ice. His brain meant a lot to him, though not to the exclusion of his pride. On rock he was like everyone else, gray matter vulnerable to the tides of war. He tightened the strap under his jaw and worried on his fingerless gloves, and finally put a hand through the strap of his ax and hammer. He looked at John, who nodded his readiness, and delicately stepped across a scattering of rocks sticking up from the river ice. No more wisecracks.
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Tucker didn't wish him luck: too bush. Not a cloud in the sky, it was a good day for hanging out your balls.
With all that metal on, Bullseye sounded like a robot. His crampon points squeaked on the flat river ice, his ice screws clinked. Eyes high, he walked around the hanging tip of the column and studied the odds of getting off the ground and staying off. With the blunt end of his ice hammer he tapped at the column to sound its firmness. It sounded just like it looked. Like a very fragile, elongated chandelier that didn't want to be climbed. He didn't dare hit it again. Best save any concussions for real tool strikes. At last he found a piece of the column that, to Tucker, was indistinguishable from any other piece. On his toes Bullseye reached high and swung his hammer, this time its sharp tubular pick end, against the ice. Immediately the bottom twelve inches of the column fractured straight across and dropped to Bullseye's feet with a thud, then scuttered away down the frozen river. "Hmm," he appraised.
He stretched high again and, because his hammer would no longer reach, tried the ax pick. With a flick of his wrist he tossed the pick against the ice, and perhaps a quarter file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (65
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light of an inch stuck with a dull tick. Bullseye cautiously lowered his body weight onto that arm and it held. He exhaled once more and then slowly pulled himself up with one arm, no feet. His crampons dangled down, his opposite hand poised in space. All he was holding on to was the vertical handle of his ax, and all that held his ax was a dime's edge of frozen water. As soon as he rose within striking distance, Bullseye wasted no time and coolly flicked his other tool, the hammer, into the plastic surface of ice. Now able to employ both arms, he pulled himself still higher and then did what gymnasts call a lock-off, holding himself chin-high to one hand while letting go with the other. He locked off on his hammer hand, and that allowed him to quickly, but carefully, pry loose his ax. Just as quickly he clapped the ax pick back into the ice, only this time another full arms' length overhead. He pulled up on that, locked off, and then repeated the same process with his hammer.
His technique was fluid, perfectly suited to the medium. He'd been climbing ice for so long that the mechanics had all been smoothed out, leaving John and Tucker with a clean, virtuoso p
erformance that had no seams. Repeating his trick with the one-arm pull-ups and lock-offs four more times, all within the span of maybe two minutes, Bullseye reached the level where his feet touched the bottom of the ice. He held on to both tools and gingerly kicked one of the two bucktoothed crampon points into the ice. It was less a kick actually, than a nestle. With the toe of his boot he slid the filed point into an air bubble beneath the surface that he'd committed to memory while passing upward. His toe stuck. A bit higher and to the side, he copied the motion with his other foot. Now he was really in heat. He eased his body weight down onto his feet and rested first one arm, then the other.
"Niiice," he breathed to himself, and down on the ground they heard him distinctly.
Tucker watched the red and white bumblebee crown of Bullseye's helmet as the climber plotted his next series of moves. The rope looped down into John's hands, a thoroughly useless appendage until Bullseye decided to place an ice screw. He didn't because it was much too soon.
There were only three screws, for one thing, and besides he didn't trust the little bastards. He had no reason to. It wasn't that he didn't believe in protection. He'd gone through such motions of faith thousands of times, placed more screws in his career than any man alive. But he'd never fallen and hoped he never would. In his opinion, a tube of threaded airplane metal was about as useful on long screamers as a puppy treat with rabid dogs. If you were going to get bit, you were going to get bit.
The next fifty feet went quick and easy for him. Anyone else would have balked bug-eyed at the hazards, but Bullseye scarcely even looked to see that his tools were sticking. All Page 56
Tucker could figure out was that he climbed by touch. Like listening to a tuning fork, maybe, Bullseye must have felt the vibrations of metal in ice and known which to go with. "Interesting,"
Bullseye commented at one stage, though it didn't look interesting to Tucker at all. Gripping and manky was more like it. As ice will do,
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light the column changed character partway up, spreading into brittle honeycombs that looked good for three pounds max. Bullseye just slotted his ax and hammer points in the fragile pockets and kept on trucking. Now and then bits and pieces of his progress came raining down, tinkling like fragments of a broken champagne glass.
And still he didn't place an ice screw.
"Thin?" John hinted up to him, hoping he might place a screw.
"A little."
"Feel good?"
"Uh," grunted Bullseye, concentrating. That was that. You don't tell climbers how to climb, particularly high priests of the art like Bullseye. He reached an overhanging ceiling loaded with foot-long icicles. Instead of clearing them away with a sweep of his ax, Bullseye maneuvered over and around them. Not one of the icicles came loose.
Where the ice thinned down to a scanty plastering of clear lacquer on rock, Bullseye paused.
He'd reached the verglas and there was no place to screw in pro even if he'd wanted. The sun was coming, the ice would warm. What little covering the rock had up there would melt away.
He had to move. Had to move.
He started to move, then balked. His hand tightened on the hammer handle. "Golly,"
he said, reaching for something deep inside. There wasn't a thing Tucker could do except watch, and only one thing more that John could do and he did it. He let go of the rope and very quietly undipped from the belay anchor, then backed away to where Tucker was sitting. Tucker understood. With no protection between himself and the ground, Bullseye was unbelayed anyway. By sitting any closer to the column than he was now, John would simply be a target. He wasn't abandoning ship, because Bullseye hadn't constructed one to abandon.
Bullseye's hand tightened on the rubber handle again and then loosened the hammer tip from its icy seat. He had second thoughts again, though, and pocketed the tip back in. His left leg quivered ever so slightly, betraying muscle fatigue and a crack in his mental armor. Sewing machine leg, it's called. Bullseye straightened his legs and locked the knee back. The quivering stopped. John and Tucker heard him hyperventilate with three fast bursts. Bullseye was going to go for it.
He freed the hammer from its bite and, scrutinizing the surface higher up, set the tip against a patch of verglas. With the softest of hits, he tapped at the patch. But instead of sticking, the hammer bounced off the rock and the verglas fell into pieces. His leg quivered. He straightened it out. He found another patch farther right. This time he didn't strike with the hammer. Using it like a carving knife, he whittled a minute notch in the verglas with the hammer's pick. Then he set a pencil point's worth of pick on the notch and pulled down on it. It held. Like a curator brushing dust from a pre-Columbian pot, Bullseye exacted an equally tiny hold from another patch of verglas with his ax. Between patches, the granite was slick and bare. Tucker had begun shaking. He was transfixed, face empty, and seemed unaware that his whole file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (67
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light body was trembling. It wasn't the cold. John turned his attention Page 57
back to Bullseye.
Every climber carries with him the memory of certain special climbs. They aren't necessarily the most difficult, but for one reason or another they speak to the climber with an unusual accent.
Each move is there to be revisited: the smell of the rock, the type of rock, the stretch of your limbs, where the pro set, where the sun hung ... all of it echoes. This climb was one of those for Tucker, John could tell. Tucker wasn't down here, he was up there. Bullseye was his wings.
A New Wave splash of sunlight suddenly lit up across the highest reaches of the column and stone. Bullseye's helmet bent back. He saw the sunlight and returned to the business at hand.
There was nothing to do but climb. He went on shaving little niches for his tools and crampon points. A patch of verglas near the very top let go in the warm sunlight, broke up, and tinkled into the deep. Pieces of ice sparkled on
Bullseye's shoulder. He kept on going. Another dish of verglas peeled off, victim of the gathering heat. First Bullseye's hand, then Bullseye himself emerged into the sunlight. Time was fast unfreezing. Twenty feet more, all glistening with light, and Bullseye would be home free. He worked his tools and kept his nerve. He was no longer climbing just an object; he was climbing on the surface of time itself. Twenty feet translated into twenty minutes at this rate. At this rate twenty minutes was too long. He kept on climbing.
John and Tucker quietly recalculated the fall line and moved back farther. From where they sat it looked like Bullseye was climbing on wet rock. But finally he made it. His ax disappeared over the top edge, then his hammer. He'd reached the upper streambed. Too tired to say anything, Bullseye pulled up and over and off the face, and that was it. He was gone from sight.
Tucker quit shaking. He was safe.
"There you go. Bullseye on ice." Even as John said it, he knew he'd be seeing this same bravura performance again and soon. Only next time it wouldn't be Bullseye sculpting his way up ice, it would be Tucker remembering on the far ragged edges of the Visor, climbing the way mythical heroes climb.
"Intense."
"Olly olly oxen free," rattled down a shout. They looked up and there was Bullseye, legs cocked wide like a sailor's, leaning out over the edge. "I'm off." The tools were gone from his hands, replaced by a firm grip on the rope, which was tied off somewhere behind him. By off, he meant off belay. John could quit tending the rope.
"You were never on," John confessed with a shout.
"I know," said Bullseye. "Wild."
"You want to haul the packs up?"
They weighed practically nothing. Five minutes later all three packs and the skis and poles were up with Bullseye. "See anybody?" called John.
"Not a fucking soul."
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
"How about the lake?"
"It's foggy up here. Come on up. I'm gonna look-see." Bullseye's head popped out of view. End of communication.
"You want to go first, or me?"
"Go ahead," said Tucker. The final barrier had fallen and they were committed to the lake now.
He had to arrange his bravado.
"Don't worry," said John. He clipped a pair of jumar ascending devices onto the rope and wiggled sling stirrups over the toes of his boots. "The feds aren't coming. I doubt if there's anybody even left. We'll see the lake, ski out, and be home by dark." He slid his right jumar up Page 58
the rope. Small teeth in the spring-loaded jaw jammed on the downstroke and the jumar held tight. John stood on the stirrup attached to that jumar, then did the same with his left jumar and foot. He stuck his hands through the jumar handles and, rhythmically raising right hand and foot, left hand and foot, walked up or "jugged" the rope.
"No problem," murmured Tucker.
Nearing the top, John entered the sunlight and started sweating. The difference in air temperature was so emphatic it took him by surprise. He finished off the remainder of the pitch, a matter of two or three more minutes. The patches of verglas had already melted or fallen away.
For the final thirty-five feet his boots scraped over wet rock. Had Bullseye paused any longer, the column would have foiled them. The gateway would have remained locked, at least until another cold night had frozen the melt and given Bullseye a second chance on new verglas. As he jugged the rope, John investigated Bullseye's route, trying to extrapolate from this wet trickle of water and that button of stone where the climb had unfolded. But already the climb had vanished. The ice had changed. Metamorphosis had hijacked them. The past and present were nothing more than liquids on the hard rock of the world. You go. You do. No poetry to that, thought John. He shook the sweat from his long black hair.