by Jeff Long
His choice. Just so. Like that, with all language washing clear from his mind, John mechanically followed Tucker's lead. He followed the ropes. He descended.
CHAPTER 10
There is a place on every mountain that climbers must pass through before their descent is truly complete. On the bigger mountains, this zone between earth and summit is distinct and physical.
As a younger man, John once climbed Aconcagua in
Argentina; what began as a descent through a dead-white landscape of broken stone that reeked of sulphur fumes had quite suddenly turned into a green meadow filled with wild-flowers. There had been grass to his thighs, bird song, the rich smell of flowers and animal dung, and a brook.
The earth had softened under his boots, the transition like a dream. Just as suddenly the meadow had ended. He had awakened from the dream and the ground had leveled out. A dirt trail bracketed with trash and rotting potatoes had suddenly led off into the distance where a train sounded, and he'd found himself on the outskirts of one of those high-altitude Indian slums with dogs yapping and illiterate barrel-chested men and doomed children, all the realities he'd left behind. But at least between heaven and earth there had been that meadow.
Even on smaller mountains, even descending from a crag, there is usually a river climbers cross or a field of blueberries and larks, at least a first sip of water, a moment below the power and the glory, beyond the pain of any injuries or
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light disappointment or arguing, before renewed responsibilities, a moment within the moment.
John arrived at Camp Four still walking in this middle zone. It had taken him nine terrible hours to rope down across the black, stormy face of Half Dome, mouth open to catch the sweet rain that ran down his cheeks like tears. Had he thought to stop and rest on the wall, he would have died. Lightning would have search-and-destroyed him or the sleet would have glazed him fast against the black-and-white granite. He didn't stop. He didn't think. By the time his foot touched ground, he'd used up all but a few pieces of protection for rappel anchors and the batteries in his headlamp were extinct, leaving him blackness with which to negotiate the steep forest leading down to the Valley floor. With light he might have found the remains of their haul bag somewhere among the trees, maybe even a sleeping bag or parka for warmth. But then he would have risked finding Tucker, and that above all else was unthinkable. He didn't consider the options, didn't regret or thank the dark state in which he touched ground, didn't stop. There was no more use for the ropes, so he simply left them hanging from the first pitch, undipped himself, and continued fleeing the giant wall.
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For the next few hours he ran amok, crazy and yet obedient to the path of least resistance, which was Down. The forest reached out its fingernails and raked his flesh and clothing, but he didn't really feel the insults to his body. Every time a root fouled his stride, he picked himself up. The chili-red headband that kept his long hair out of his face ripped loose on a branch. Part of one sweater arm unraveled like in a cartoon. He should have lost at least one eye to the stabbing tree limbs, but didn't.
Luckily his hands were still taped for the climb, so his palms were largely spared.
Somehow, without benefit of so much as starlight, he threaded a way down through the complex of cliffs and gullies and brush thickets, and at five in the morning stepped onto the flat floor of the Valley. To this point his escape from Half Dome had for its direction the pull of gravity.
Now he let himself be lost on the park trail that led to the paved road winding past campgrounds with well-lit bathrooms and the roar of Yosemite Falls and the Conoco gas station. That he followed the road didn't mean he wasn't lost. Indeed it was the largest proof that he was. He might have kept walking right out of the Valley past El Cap through the vineyards and fields to the ocean, except just then the sun came up and there he halted, stock-still in the middle of Camp Four. The squall had passed overnight. The ground was damp down here, not flooded like after the serious autumn downpours that swamp tents and drown fires and snakes.
People had retired early and were sleeping late. New tents showed everywhere, and only one unfortunate, who had been climbing in south California at
Joshua Tree and thereby missed the Gold Rush, was ensconced beneath a plastic-draped picnic table. Through the tent walls you could hear someone snoring, someone turning the pages of a book, someone waking with a moan, and a couple file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (125
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light making quiet love. Privacy was an art here, an etiquette built on eyes diverted and ears closed. They might be rock and rollers, dopers, gossip-mongers, car thieves, and kamikazes, but they weren't Peeping Toms. A squirrel tap-danced across the metal roof of a van in the parking lot. Here and there, solitary pine cones dropped from high branches. A bluejay floated in on a sunbeam and started exploring around the picnic tables. A minute later three nutcrackers drove the jay away with raucous squawking. A tent door unzipped in the distance, another elsewhere. From one of the ripstop, waterproof nylon caves, a climber crawled upward in wild disarray. His hair was fantastically misshapen from sleep. All he wore was a pair of gray gym trunks and rubber and canvas thongs. The veins on his inner thighs surfaced above the trunks as veins on his stomach and rib cage. He stretched, worked the stiffness out of his back, squatted down at his tent entrance for his toothbrush, and then set off for the bathroom.
Five minutes passed. Someone else rose. A van door slid open. The fiery hum of a Bleuet gas stove kicked on: morning tea. It was a while before they found John in their midst.
He was standing there, stunned by the dichotomies. It had been dark and now it was light. The tremendous danger on the wall was now this ordinary dawn. He had fought a storm and the verticality and forest, and here was this amazing calm. Sailors who have been cast ashore in tempests know this daze. Hermann Buhl, the great
Austrian alpinist, was like this after his solo of Nanga Parbat. The sum total of John's knowledge just then was that he had survived.
His arms hung limp, clothing shredded, blood everywhere. His scalp had been lacerated by sharp branch tips and his hair was matted with blood and burrs and pine needles. A trickle of blood had forked at the bridge of his nose and run down from his eyes to his sparse black mestizo whiskers. Beneath both eyes, dark circles bruised the sunburn, and his lips looked like something out of a spaghetti Western.
As he stood there steaming in the sunlight, a crowd gathered around the deaf, mute, crazed Page 106
climber. But no one dared to touch him, uncertain what might happen if they did. In whispers and murmurs, people attempted to assemble clues. He was still wearing his climbing shoes, which meant he'd either lost his hike-in tennies or else lacked time to put them on. The pack still on his back looked to be empty, which was odd because surely there'd been gear to carry down from Half Dome. And where was
Tucker? John's harness was still tied on, and only immodest rookies parade around with their climbing harnesses on. His hands were still taped. His chalk bag, dangling from his butt loop, was even still open. John looked like he'd stepped straight from the wall directly into Camp Four, and it frightened people more than any novel or movie could have. Something about his state—the smallness of his lapses, their banality—was especially terrible and foreboding. The fact that John wouldn't speak was horrifying.
Kresinski arrived, but he was no bolder than anyone else. John struck everyone still file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (126
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light with his stillness and the carelessness of his cuts and blood and torn clothes and his eyes. At last someone thought to get Bullseye.
"Johnny?" said Bullseye when he got there, stepping in
closer among the ring of people. "What's wrong? Where's Tuck at?" And then it struck Katie, who was standing near the mouth of the crowd, that Tucker was not coming down. She let out a wail of anguish, and it was that which cut John free from the wall. In that way they laid John down in his tent and found, in his pack, his map of the Visor Wall that traced their route from bottom almost all the way to the top. The one and only blank on his intricate map was that final pitch where Tucker had taken wing and disappeared into the sky.
John came awake later, hungry and sore. His pants and shirt, even his Jockey shorts, were gone, and the tent was hot from the sun. It felt good to lie on his back on the flat ground, listening to the camp's motions and watching motes of dust drift in the rosy light. He wondered whose tent this was, then remembered it was his, he'd bought it right before the big party. It seemed very long ago. He kept his thoughts close and tight and bearable. Over the years, he'd developed a private ritual for depressurizing after a wall climb and reentering the world. It was this that he turned to now. First he needed to wash. A hot shower with Ivory soap. Shave. And in his truck there were a pair of clean blue jeans and a fresh, long-sleeve chamois shirt and clean socks. But his shoes were gone. Gone with the haul bag, he started to panic, gone with... but never mind that. Never mind the socks either, he could wear thongs. There were other needs too, mind them, he instructed himself. For one thing it would take lots and lots of water to rehydrate his system. Plain and simple water, no need for vitamins and electrolyte powder now that he was back on the ground. Gradually, at his own pace, he'd get around to a hot meal at the Four Seasons, and without moving he set to imagining that first meal. He would eat slowly. There would be salad with blue cheese and fresh ground pepper. Then he'd have their twelve-ounce steak rare, and a baked potato with sour cream and crumbled bacon. Afterward he might stroll across to the drugstore and pick up a
Time or one of the San Francisco papers. There were variations on the ritual, but essentially that was it—a shower, shave, and meal.
By nightfall his urine might actually be a clear yellow again instead of thick gold. In a couple days he might even shit. Everything else would fall into place. No problem.
John lifted his head. Except for the tape still binding his palms and knuckles, his body was jaybird naked on top of someone else's clean sleeping bag. He was surprised. It looked like someone else's body with all those cuts and bruises and caked dirt and blood. He lifted one arm, and it was so heavy it felt almost tied to the ground. Every muscle was tender. The abrasions and gashes on his hands looked familiar, but the rest was beyond recall. He made a point of not Page 107
trying to remember.
He grunted involuntarily as he sat up. "God," he muttered. There was a big knot on his forehead, some torn muscles on the inside of his right thigh, a cut on one forearm file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (127
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light that was still weeping and might want a few stitches. He was a mess.
"A fucking mess," he whispered. A tired fucking mess. Maybe it wasn't worth moving quite yet.
To the right lay his notebook opened to the Visor map. He closed it shut. Someone had left a pair of white karate pants—Sammy's, no doubt—and a red-and-white-checkered flannel shirt. And a pair of black hightop Keds, Bullseye's college "hoop"
shoes. An unopened candy bar poked up from the top of one shoe, and by the door stood a bottle of water and a lukewarm can of Bud. John felt like a flood victim. Bad losses, good neighbors.
He guzzled the water. He pulled the clothes on and unzipped the tent door. Despite every effort not to show his exhaustion and pain, it took a minute for him to climb to his feet. He was sick and tired. Sick and tired of sleeping on the cold, heatless earth like some animal caught out in the open. Sick and tired of worming out of a cocoon and meeting with this three-foot-high ghetto slum of tents and picnic tables. Sick and tired of sticking his fingers and toes and heart and mind to these granite slabs like a leech on pigskin. It was absurd that he couldn't seem to think beyond the reach of his hands, much less the vertical corridors of the Valley. He was sick and tired of Yosemite. Sing your swan song, he silently bitched at himself. Get on. Grumbling and wincing, every joint and muscle balking, he finally managed to straighten up on his stiff knees. Camp was largely empty. He heard the rattle and tinkling of climbing hardware at another site, someone returning from a day climb. It sounded like goat bells. A guitar was being strummed off in one direction. In the other two boys and a girl were playing Hacky Sack to the sound of Windham Hill—"limp-dick music,"
Bullseye liked to scorn it. Whoever wasn't off and about was preoccupied. Nobody paid John any attention. It was deliberate, and John knew it. They'd passed the word among themselves—let John be. He was thankful for that and limped over to his table to sit and rest, just for a minute, that's all it would take. His head ached. The rest of him felt like throwing up.
He propped his skull against his hands and tried to arrange his next step. Suddenly he knew the post-wall ritual wasn't going to be adequate. He was too hungry to make it to the showers, too fatigued to eat, and too desperate to sleep. When he closed his eyes the Visor was waiting for him. When he opened them, Half Dome was looming in the east. It was hard to breathe. He felt small and lonely. At last he stood up and hobbled over to lower his food sack from a tree pulley. Inside was a bag of roasted peanuts. Back at the table he cracked and shelled and ate peanuts and tried to figure a way out of the brittle present. The sunshine crowded him. Oddly, he remembered Whymper. He discarded the legend as too abstract, but it came back. Every climber can recite the details like a catechism lesson: In the spring of 1865, Edward Whymper conquered the Matterhorn. On the way down, Whymper's team was struck with disaster. Their youngest member slipped and dragged three others off into the abyss. The rope between those unlucky four and Whymper's lucky three miraculously, suspiciously snapped. Europe's most file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (128
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light dramatic ascent ended with death and scandal. Instead of knighting the intrepid climber, Queen Victoria considered banning all Englishmen from the sport. The burghers of Zermatt called for an investigation of the tragedy. All eyes turned toward Page 108
Whymper and that frayed, snapped rope. Now, sitting at the bare picnic table cracking peanut shells, John wondered if this was how Whymper had felt. They were watching him all right, waiting for his story. His answer to the question. Where had Tucker gone? "Fuck you," John muttered at the peanut shells. Hadn't he seen what he'd seen?
Tuck arguing with the wind. Losing. Killed. His fingers froze around a peanut. Who would believe Tucker had been killed? Not just that he'd fallen and dropped and died, but that he'd been murdered. By who? And why? You saw it?
they'd say. And he'd say no, but I know. And they'd say, how? And he'd say, I just know. And they'd look at him. And why should they believe a wild, sick thing like that? Murder? In their Valley? No way. It would lack the resonance of truth. There'd been rapes and beatings and robbery and even, yes, homicide, in Yosemite, but never among climbers. The Valley as they knew it was a place beyond the world of other people. In this gash of earth fear bought beauty, and beauty was epiphany, a thousand transformations that orbited what was natural and what was human. Like the old Roman poem about metamorphosis—it was no wonder that upon the jutting, serene architecture of El Cap and Half Dome and the Leaning Tower and Sentinel and Mount Watkins and all the other walls, men and women turned into animals and trees and rocks, and that those things in turn took on the aspects of man. No wonder that Tucker had become a bird and soared off. He was gone, maybe forever. That's what they were going to say. Dead, maybe, but not murdered because what did that mean? Now, as the sun shone and animals fed their springtime broods and the
Hacky Sack popped back and forth from foot to foot, John brooded at the picnic
table that had served him for so many seasons as a writing desk, kitchen counter, and shop table, and suspected that, just so, Whymper too had brooded about the wondrous crossing of man with mountain.
There had been fatalities among the Camp Four tribe before. Not often, but memorably, climbers had returned from their walls and mountains spent and dazed and alone and reeling with visions of their partner's fall, all too ready to equate their own survival as a sort of failure, a fall from grace. Time healed, though. John had seen that. He'd been through it himself after Tony died on Aconcagua. The survivors got what they needed. From Whymper on down, climbers had been dealing with their ghosts. Either they sold their gear off, or else they recomposed a style and attitude toward the rock. Now, all over again, it was his turn. No one was going to bother him for a while. No one was going to visit. No one would pester him to eat or cry or talk. He'd been closest to the event, and for now it was his to make sense of.
John sighed. They would never believe him. He didn't believe himself. This time it was different.
No act of God or nature had stolen Tucker. Something indecent had file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (129
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light trespassed against the give and take of ascent. Something evil. It made no sense. No, he decided, he was never going to make it over to the showers. All that could wait.
John slept and slept. Camp was quieter than usual. Now and then, when he surfaced from his dreams and lay in the tent, he tried to discern if camp had always been so quiet or if perhaps people were tiptoeing around on his account. As it turned out, the camp was half vacant. On the second twilight, still unshaved, unwashed, bloody, hungry, and thirsty, John struggled out of his tent, more delirious than ever. He felt ill and feverish. His head was throbbing, and all day long, as the sun heated the tent walls, he'd been sweating and mumbling. Whoever the Samaritan was kept replacing his empty water bottles with full ones. Small packages of food had begun to appear at his feet, too, but he had little stomach for food. The packages were there throughout Page 109