by Jeff Long
John knew they were adapting to wall life when he started enjoying more than an hour of sleep at a time. The biggest ledge they encountered was a three-inch-wide slat cut into the middle of a pitch where they couldn't really use it. No ledges meant their nights were longer than real time.
No ledges meant the hammock and the Porta-
ledge. John's was the one-point-suspension hammock, in which sleep ordinarily comes in delirious, half-hour snatches, no longer. No matter how you rig it, a hammock will sling you tight against the cold rock all night long, pressure-bruising your rock-side shoulder and hip. It takes so much wrestling to get into and out of a climber's hammock that a midnight piss requires more misery than it relieves. That problem solved itself with John before long; by midweek one scanty piss was all either one of them could force out daily anyway. John adapted. He began to sleep. To dream. One trick to sleeping better was sleeping less. Each evening, for as long as he could stretch it out, he sat with Tucker on the Porta-ledge. Not much different from a two-by-six-foot trampoline, this lightweight platform could be set up in a matter of minutes to form a springy, comfortable frame for sleeping and sitting. As night chewed away the final light, the two climbers lounged side by side on the platform, backs to the wall, both roped into the anchor, feet dangling over the black void. They
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light kicked around a lot of things—the day's highlights or mistakes; Snake Lake, greed and poverty; TV and the Himalayas; their lives; the origins of the universe—common wall talk.
"Reno," Tucker broached one evening, his voice a dehydrated croak. The plaque of stone at their backs had gone the color of gold and lemons from the setting sun. John passed him their allotted after-dinner pint of water. Tucker sipped a thimbleful from it, smacked his chalky lips, and passed the bottle back. That was part of the game, pretending barely anything was plenty.
They were both good at it.
"What about it?" rasped John.
"Reno was okay."
John kept on looking at the thin, magma-bright line of sunlight on the horizon.
Already stars were chasing on stage. "Thought you said it sucked."
"I mean," said Tucker, driving to the heart of it. "Liz."
"Yeah."
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"Too bad Liz doesn't climb. She belongs here."
"Probably not," sighed John. He had scrupulously eliminated any talk of Liz from his conversations with Tucker. He couldn't get free of her, though. Tucker missed her, too. He missed the chance to even hear her name.
"She'd like it up here."
"Nah. Too scary up here."
"She's scared down there."
John quit talking. Tucker knew something.
"I saw her." The wall was losing its blush. Not long and John would have to swing off the Porta-ledge onto one of the ropes and descend to his hammock underneath. Not yet, though.
"I couldn't find her," said John. "Her cabin's all locked and shuttered up."
"She's in there," said Tucker. "You just got to sit there until after dark. She comes out."
John scored himself for not trying harder. "How's she doing?"
"I wish we didn't go to the lake." Not well.
"I know."
"She ought to cry and get it over with. But, Liz, you know."
"Yeah."
"I make myself sort of sick sometimes."
"It wasn't our fault." But what did blame have to do with Liz suffering? "You tell her we were going up here?"
"I told her I wish it was still Reno. She said me too."
Me too, thought John. Damn. "She's scared?"
"They're kicking her out."
"No way." But that had to be the truth of it, John knew. The thought had never file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (113
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light occurred to him before this. But why not? he wondered.
"You think?" Tucker asked hopefully.
"What did Liz do? Nothing."
"I said, you want us to stay with you? She said no. She said go on up there. Touch the moon."
But there was no moon visible, just the Visor rock-steady among the stars.
Regardless of the topic or the pain in his hands from the climbing or his thirst, every evening John forced himself to fill in his topo, the topographical map of their unfolding route. Because this was such a complicated and esoteric route, the Visor topo was especially important, otherwise later climbers would get lost and have to retreat or else damage the wall with bolts to bridge sections not fully explained. An ink line showed where each belay point was, how difficult which sections were, the length of different pitches, the need for which kinds of extraordinary equipment, and the names applied to what and where. On old maps of the Nose of El Cap, for instance, a crack bears the name Stovelegs for the only hardware that could be found back in the 195O's to fit the off-width crack: iron legs sawed off of old stoves. The El Cap maps show Stovelegs as three and a half pitches of 5.10 or A2 climbing, which are entered on pendulum and exited at Dolt Tower. Here, on John's germinating map of the Visor Wall, beside the twelfth pitch, a cryptic addendum declared "Time bomb, 5.12, A4." To a climber it made perfect, chilling sense. A time bomb is made by balling aluminum foil around the head of a wired nut and is used when the rock becomes so barren of features that clean ascent is effectively at a standstill. A last-ditch, kamikaze effort can be made, though few make it, by custom-designing a time bomb from your candy bar foil, setting the aluminum ball against the rock, and then pounding it flat with your hammer. If all goes well, the aluminum will temporarily stick to small crystals or Page 96
temporarily shape itself to rugosities in the stone.
Temporarily. You clip a stirrup on to the wire loop jutting from the aluminum mash, ever so gently stand on it, and instantly begin setting your next higher piece of protection. The device is called a time bomb because you have, at most, twenty to thirty seconds to place your next piece before the aluminum unsticks and you self-destruct. Time bombs shouldn't work, but sometimes they do. On the twelfth pitch, for the first and, he prayed, last time in his life, John fashioned and used a time bomb. Tucker filed the awesome feat as one more example of the primacy of will.
John's Visor Wall map, like all maps, was more than a blueprint for others following in their footsteps, it was also a history of the first ascent and a biography of its pioneers. It was a testament to their courage and imagination and all the other forthright virtues, but also it was a mark of their personality. In the future, climbers who'd never known John and Tucker would have poignant insights into this pair just by reading their map. By the fact that Tucker had named the powdery, rotting sandstone pitch Oreo Crumbs instead of, say, Tucker's Treat or Tiger's Delight, they
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light would know that Tucker had been a modest, gentle man with a sweet tooth. The crack where John was bitten, here designated the Belfry for its bat, would inform climbers that John took his dangers with a grin. These first climbers on the Visor Wall, the topo would inform people, had humor and poetry and whimsy. And the complete absence of bolts—which require drilling and thereby scarring the rock—
meant they had an aesthetics with guts. A first ascent on a big wall that shunned bolts meant you loved the rock almost more than yourself, that you had taken extraordinary risks to keep it pure and clean. And resorting to a time bomb set you square at the high right hand of John Muir.
Each night John worked on his topo map. Each day they explored fresh territory.
Before the sun wheeled around to heat them for the final hour or so, the wall with its dark, beetling overhangs reminded John of Anasazi cliff dwellings just before dawn.
Now and
then, far over to the left, they caught sight of small white handprints like primitive signatures that had survived the elements beneath small roofs of stone.
Tattered green and orange slings hanging from pitons and nuts quivered in the breeze like brightly colored snares. Other times the wall reminded John of his oil-rig days. At night, especially, he'd look up at the stars and remember those tiny islands of artificial light in the barrens of Wyoming and Colorado and New Mexico. He'd feel very small and yet big because to roughneck you have to be obsessed some, like a climber. There wasn't much difference between the effect a big wall has on you and the effect of working a rig. You sleep little, lose weight, bond with your crew, and the ground from high off the deck looks far, far away. Things seem larger than life, what with those Cat and GM motors that can power a submarine and those five-hundred-pound block and tackles and giant pipe fittings. What with the enormous wall. The difference was that on a rig there is no subtlety. None. But on the wall, your capacity to be delicate, to finesse a move, to perform, is your sole hope. Without that, you might as well stay on the ground and pump iron in front of a mirror. Or jog. Or, as
Bullseye put it, "just hang out and beat off with all the other lilliputes."
The Visor Wall was a vast, fantastic landscape, and like fifteenth-century sailors they struggled across places so forbidding the effort came to lose meaning and they were just there, in motion above the still green sea. The wall became their whole world, or half of it anyway, the other half was air. By the end of the week they looked like mere survivors, hard-core fools. Mangy beards, torn clothing, scabs oh their elbows and hands. Thirst gnawed at their synapses. Their fingernails Page 97
had begun to ulcerate, their gums hurt, and their teeth felt loose. Neither one had shit in days.
John's tube of cherry Chap Stick was old history, and their lips split and bled anytime a joke got told, even a bad joke. Tongues swelling, their voices corroded into hoarse mutters. "I know it sounds like effeminacy to complain of hardships," an early alpinist once complained.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
Alps. But you must draw the line somewhere, and I draw it at fleas." There were no fleas, but John and Tucker would have understood. It was the minor discomforts, not the dramatic ones, that were so taxing from minute to minute. John recorded it all.
Then, on the seventh day, John's pen ran out of ink.
On the afternoon of the eighth day, taped, dusted with chalk, bruised and raw from two thousand feet of mean endless crack, John stacked two fingers against two others and pulled. He stemmed his feet out on disparate toeholds, rose up, and tossed his free hand overhead, groping for more crack. But there was no more crack.
The rock turned to air. John grunted his surprise and nearly slipped while fumbling with the open space. And then he had a handful of crystal-white glacial sand and realized they'd reached a ledge. John levered himself over the curved lip, and there was a whole wide trough of white beach sand, a Hawaiian oasis. It had been so long since he'd stood upright on his feet that his first attempt to walk dumped him flat to his knees. He knelt there, hands clasped in his lap. The sand was soft and yielding.
John looked out over the edge to call the good news down to Tucker, but had no voice for it.
Tucker was stapled to the blank, infinite stone far below, watching some birds, not even aware that John had disappeared from sight. On every side of the boy the architecture fell away in all directions, up, down, left, right. But now they had their bearings. For just above the ledge hung the Visor.
Eighty feet up, the wall took an abrupt bend and turned into a huge, wide ceiling. A single crack fed thirty feet out across the underbelly. Then it bent sharply upward again along the squared-off front of the Visor and aimed for the summit. John knew from looking that the front of the Visor was another thirty feet high. By the time
Tucker arrived at the ledge, John had decided the crack was impossible. He'd begun looking for some other way to exit off the wall, but there was none. None that was quick. None that would slake his thirst by nightfall. They'd either have to retreat all the way to the ground or rappel down and across to the Northwest Direct, then follow the Zigzag Cracks up, and that would take another full day. He didn't say any of this to Tucker. It was better to let the boy come to his own conclusions.
"How you feel?" John asked.
"Good," croaked Tucker, examining the Visor's ceiling.
"Dry?"
"Nah."
"Liar." John dipped into his pack and came out with a pint bottle. There were three swallows of water sloshing around at the bottom. He'd been saving this surprise for two days. "Here," he said. Tucker drank it down, presuming John had taken his share.
"It'll go," said Tucker. John didn't answer. They'd come a long damn way for this ceiling. If Tucker wanted a shot at it, that was what they'd do. "I think I should wear my Fires," he said.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light and found them. While he tied them on, Tucker was careful to keep the sticky soles off the sand.
"I won't need much pro," he commented. John studied the crack. It was less that Tucker wouldn't need the protection than that he wouldn't be able to use it. The crack was off-width and upside down. He watched Tucker sort through the racks and select the few pieces large enough to possibly fit. Tucker was quick about it and kept his head down. The ceiling pressed down upon them with a strange, oppressive weight.
"Guess that's it," said Tucker, draping a streamlined rack over one shoulder. It held three of the largest spring-loaded cams, two extra-large tubular chocks, and a five-inch bong for hand placement. Along with five or six carabiners, his rack weighed maybe two pounds. That was important. "You're on," said John. Tucker was wasting no time. He was nervous.
The bottom eighty feet were 5.10-ish and presented no difficulty to Tucker. He dispensed with the lower, vertical crack in just a few minutes. And then he was there.
His head was bumping up against the ceiling of the Visor itself. Tucker touched the rock overhead, and John heard him clear his throat. He tried to place some protection out behind him in the overhanging crack, but nothing was large enough to stay in place. What that meant was that Tucker's best and possibly only protection was going to be in at the base of the ceiling.
And that meant that if he fell, he'd swing down straight into the wall. So be it, thought John.
Tucker dipped his hand into his dusty nylon chalk bag. Chalk dust fluttered earthward, disturbed here and there by soft eddies of breeze. They'd been lucky. The weather had held all week. At dawn they'd awakened to see the western mouth of the
Valley choked with storm clouds, and for hours since then the wind had been toying with them, gusting, then hiding. John wiggled his bare toes in the sand and breathed in the height. The trees were small. Mirror Lake was no bigger than a penny. People, if any were down there, were invisible. Only rarely did people come to snap pictures of climbers on Half Dome, because it entailed too much of a walk. El Cap was different. Look down from the Captain's walls on a sunny day and you saw spread beneath your feet a gridlock of cars pulled over for a telephoto shot. The privacy up here all week had been well worth the sunless cold and the extra gruntwork up to the base. More chalk drifted by—Tucker changing hands.
Tucker prodded the crack with bone dry fingers, ferreting out a brief edge that might combine with an opposing knuckle to form a jam. Padding higher with his feet, he felt farther out beneath the roof.
"How're the holds?" John finally said.
"Off-width... smooth..
. funny...." The wind gusted and stole the rest of his words away.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light jammed them to the heels, and moved out. And there he hung, dead parallel to the ground half a mile below, glued to the flat ceiling. John fed him a foot of rope.
Tucker's sorcery had begun. For well over a year now, he'd been training for this roof, imagining it, disciplining his fears. With taut confidence he explored the fissure and wormed the worn toe of his shoe farther along the crack. Not a motion, not even a sideways glance, was wasted. The crack was impassable and dangerous, but Tucker made it look easy. It looked so easy that no sooner had he started the ceiling, than he was almost half finished with it. Upside down, chalk bag and gear rack dangling backward to the ground where he could barely reach them, Tucker Page 99
flashed the first fifteen feet out under the wild roof. He didn't balk or dally or second-guess his holds, because he couldn't. There wasn't the least hurry in his movements, but there wasn't the least pause, either.
He seemed a little dazed, either by the rock or his performance or the marriage of the two. His green eyes were lit bright, lungs barely working under Katie's T-shirt. Not a quiver in his zebra-striped Lycra legs. No fear. No exhaustion.
John was dazed, too. Not a single other human alive could have repeated what Tucker was doing. Every time a record is shattered, of course, people say never again, only to see a sub-sub-four-minute mile run the next week. A longer jump, a farther throw. And given the Dodge City atmosphere of Camp Four, every other climber would be out gunning for Tucker's latest terror pitch. But John couldn't shake the feeling that something unique was happening up on this ceiling. Maybe someday some trainoid with a clean spirit and transparent eyes would appear on the scene and get it right and smooth and clean like this. Only another Tucker could repeat what