by Jeff Long
There are objects so large and forbidding they become benchmarks, giving scale to the world. El Cap was like that. The closest thing to it that was man-made, that wasn’t a force of nature, was war. But when all was said and done, war seemed to Hugh mostly a matter of failed imagination, and El Cap was just the opposite.
Abruptly, a big meadow opened to their left. The meadow lay stark and frigid, like a bad Polaroid shot. Autumn grass poked up, white and reedy. There was a cluster of people and vehicles up ahead. From a distance, they looked like another team preparing to embark.
“So much for solitude,” Lewis muttered.
“It’s a big rock,” Hugh said. There were dozens of routes spread across the face of El Cap, and the odds were slim these others were heading for Anasazi. But it would be a mess if they were. Even the idea of competing for his own route soured Hugh. He hadn’t come from around the planet to dodge dropped gear and share ledges with strangers.
Then Hugh recognized the green park trucks and some of the faces. “It’s the SAR crew,” he said. Rachel slowed to a halt along the gravel shoulder.
“They’re still looking?” she said.
They got out and walked ahead. There were a couple of National Guard troops among the rangers. Hugh could tell which ones were the eighties hires this morning. They weren’t wearing guns and Sam Brown belts.
“Glass?” said a short, sturdy man, one of yesterday’s rangers. He had a pair of binoculars, which Hugh thought curious. It was pitch-black out there.
“Morning,” said Hugh. They shook hands. “Still nothing?” He smelled fuel. They were tinkering with an engine back there.
“Bastard hid her body good,” the ranger said. “But some tourist called in a sighting.”
Rachel edged closer. Lewis tried to block her.
“So you’ve found her,” Hugh said.
The ranger shook his head no. “This would be another one of them, on a rope. A couple from Florida spotted it last night leaving the park. They thought it was normal, just another climber up there. Then they heard about the accident on the late news. We got their call about midnight. It took until now for the guard to bring up one of their big guns.”
“Try now,” someone said. A generator roared to life.
The soldiers tugged at a canvas shell, unveiling a trailer-mounted spotlight. They flipped a switch, and it was as if a false sun had suddenly landed among them. Hugh’s night vision blew to pieces.
They swiveled the machinery around. White light hosed the meadow and trees like a Flash Gordon death ray. In the really old days, rangers would push flaming logs off Yosemite Falls to entertain the tourists. Lewis had toyed with the idea of using the walls for a giant drive-in movie screen. He wanted to show climbing movies, what else. That was in the pre–Eiger Sanction era, when the pickings were slim: Walt Disney’s Third Man on the Mountain, and the Spencer Tracy movie The Mountain, and a sci-fi flick about the yeti. On slack nights, he said they could do slide shows about El Cap on El Cap.
The beam made a round circle on the stone above. It made the hulk of rock seem even more enormous. Hugh heard several eighties hires trying to direct the soldiers’ aim. The soldiers told them to keep their hands off. The circle of light wandered aimlessly for a minute, crisscrossing features famous to climbers, but meaningless to the layman. At last they got oriented, and the beam crept higher, a few feet at a time.
The ranger lifted his binoculars. All eyes focused on the circle. It was like looking through a giant, ungainly microscope.
As best he could, Hugh followed the women’s line of cracks and dihedrals. But without binoculars, and probably even with them, the route kept disintegrating into great blank patches devoid of cracks. Twice the rescuers lost their bearings in the blankness and had to scour the rock for cracks to restore the logic of the women’s ascent.
There was no missing her, once she appeared.
She was dangling upside down at the tip of a rope. The SAR team called back and forth to one another, compiling their individual observations. She looked too still to be alive. They followed the thin thread of rope higher to where it sank into Cyclops Eye. They splashed light into the depression, but saw no sign of the third woman. Maybe she was lying in the woods somewhere.
The ranger lowered his binoculars.
“You mind?” asked Hugh.
Through the binoculars, he saw the woman entangled with rope. A slight breeze rocked her gently back and forth. Her body was less distinct than her shadow, stark black against the brilliant white stone.
“I don’t understand,” Hugh said. “How could I have missed her yesterday? Right underneath them and I didn’t see a thing.”
“None of us did,” the ranger said. “Maybe they tried to evacuate themselves after dark. Maybe they had a second accident.”
Someone flipped on a megaphone and began throwing names at the wall. “Cass. Andie. Cuba.” Three names, not two.
Then it struck Hugh that they still didn’t know whose body he had found yesterday. The megaphone repeated the litany over and over, each monosyllable distinct.
“The meadow’s going to be jammed today,” the ranger said. “One corpse missing, another on a string. A thing like this beats the hell out of reality TV.”
Hugh looked and Rachel’s face was metallic with anger.
“How soon can you get to her?” Hugh asked.
He knew the park service would be swift about it, as much for image as humanity. In one notorious incident on the Eiger, a German alpinist had dangled out of reach on the Eiger for almost a year. But it had been notorious only because it was so public. High peaks, particularly Everest, could be like open graveyards, with bodies and snapped-off parts scattered on both sides of the mountain. On one expedition, Hugh had watched climbers from a half dozen countries pass a dead Frenchman sitting in a perfect throne of ice beside the trail. He’d been there so long he’d become a landmark. At those altitudes, it cost too much time and effort to bury any but the ones that blew down to the flats, usually many years later.
“We’ve got a team on the way to the summit,” the ranger said. “They’ve been going all night. Once day breaks, Augustine will lower down to her.”
“The man we met last night?” Rachel said.
Hugh studied the situation. The shadows were useful, a way to gauge how far the body hung from the wall. Ten feet, he guessed. But above the hollow of the Eye, a brow of stone jutted out still farther. Even if Augustine could line up his descent just right and hit the dime, he’d still be facing a gap of twenty or thirty feet to the body. “It’s going to be tricky,” he said.
“Augustine’s the best we’ve got,” the ranger said. “Meanwhile we’ll keep searching the floor. It’s going to be slow going. There are niches and crannies all over, and we’re shorthanded. After nine-eleven, half the rangers got pulled from Yosemite to help guard dams and bridges.”
It was an invitation to join them. But Hugh saw the Kirk Douglas dimple in Lewis’s chin tighten. His vote was no. Hugh handed back the binoculars. “We’ll keep our eyes peeled from above,” he told the ranger.
The ranger didn’t beg. “Good enough.”
“The season’s getting late,” Lewis explained. “Every day counts.”
“There’s always next season,” the ranger said.
“No there’s not,” Lewis said.
“Oh, they’ll quit,” Rachel told the ranger. “But first they have to go through the motions for the sake of pride. They’ll come down. They’ll sneak out from the forest when no one’s looking.”
The ranger smiled at her little joke, then realized it was no joke. No one spoke for a moment. The generator roared, pouring light into the darkness.
“You’ll be close to the rescue team’s fall line,” the ranger finally said. “Watch your heads.”
They walked back to Rachel’s rental car. She was in a quiet fury. “You’re not going to help? You’re obsessed.” She was close to crying. “They could be your daughters.”
“Rachel,” said Hugh. “If there was a chance anyone might be alive, we’d join them in a heartbeat. But you saw for yourself. It’s over for them.”
She glared at him. He was the traitor, not Lewis. She’d given him a chance at her last night. He could have chosen romance. Instead he was going off toward death. She was trembling. “This is so ugly, I can’t tell you.”
Hugh had wanted things to be all right between them, to get her blessing, or a simple good-bye. That wasn’t going to happen. He felt momentary panic, an old nightmare, the lizard king rearing up from the desert. You’ll lose her forever. Did he dare?
He forced himself to breathe. You go forward. That’s why he’d come, not like Lewis, who wanted to go back. Searching for the dead…he couldn’t do that anymore.
Lewis started to change his mind. He saw an opening with her, or thought he did. “I could stay, if it means so much to you,” he said.
Rachel pointed at El Cap. “Go,” she said, “just go.”
Hugh slugged his rucksack onto one shoulder and stepped back to let Lewis say his good-bye. Without another word, she climbed into the car and closed the door and left them standing by the road.
SEVEN
It is a strange fact that tourists never venture through the screen of trees between the road and El Cap. They park their cars and pull out their picnic baskets and lawn chairs and cameras and binoculars to watch from the meadow, always sticking in safe numbers to the far side of the road, never suspecting that the strip of forest separating one world from another is scarcely a quarter mile deep. The trees serve as a no-man’s-land.
On a sunlit day, the crowd might wait hours to see climbers start in like they were warriors going off to battle. They usually kept a distance, as if only the lost and disaffected dared come in here, and they weren’t completely wrong. Draped with ropes, sporting scabbed knuckles and the eyes of old-fashioned cross-and-sword entradas, the big-wall boys—and girls now—were either the chosen or the damned. They were poet-commandos, psychological riffraff, and rock and roll Galahads. In their boldness, they seemed to certify El Cap’s monstrosity.
Briskly now, Hugh switched on his headlamp and descended from the road. The autumn field was dry and brittle. At first, their passage went unencumbered. Shins and knees, Hugh threshed through the grass, leaving broken, dead stems. Overhead, the spotlight seemed to connect heaven and earth. The roar of the generator dwindled.
Draped with coils of rope, Lewis followed like a prisoner, a happy one, perfectly resigned to his fate. He was whistling. Rachel’s harangue had given him hope. She cared enough to be angry. He thought El Cap was working its magic once again.
Hugh wasn’t about to spoil his delusion. Rachel was angry because she was afraid. There was an irony to it. All three of them—she, Hugh, and Lewis—were creating a void, she by divorce, and he and Lewis by climbing. Now they had to survive their choices.
They came to the edge of the trees, and Hugh hesitated for an instant, long enough to glance up at the treetops forming a ragged blackness against the stars, and then back at the road and the ethereal figures manning the light. There was safe harbor among them, it was not too late.
“Lost already?” Lewis said.
“Just letting you catch your breath, dad.”
Hugh entered the forest. Shadows jumped ahead of his light. He clambered up a junk heap of talus that marked the beginning of the shatter zone. In this region girdling the base, rock from the summit landed in great explosions that smashed trees and mowed down the manzanita scrub.
He did not mean to revisit the accident site, but suddenly they were upon it. Bright orange tape marked the slab where she had landed. Trees were flagged to help the SAR people locate the site. All that remained of her was dried blood.
The place was empty. Not just empty of the body and the searchers and the crime-scene rangers with their cameras and vials and Baggies. It was empty of that presence he’d felt yesterday. Empty.
Lewis crossed himself. Hugh remembered receiving the baptism and first-communion announcements for the Cole daughters, and the Christmas photos and birthday thank-you cards that had always delighted Annie, but also saddened her. They’d never managed to get pregnant, but talked about adoption, and then it was too late. In her dementia, she’d made a baby out of towels and would hold it for hours.
The trees were feverish looking, cold and sweaty with glassed-over bark. The Spanish moss hung in strands. Except for the cold, they might have been in some dank bayou.
“What are we doing here?” said Lewis.
“I was trying to avoid it.”
“Yeah?”
“Believe me, I didn’t need to see this again.”
“You’re right. It’s not healthy, Hugh.”
Did Lewis think he had a morbid fixation? That he was joining one missing woman with another? “It has nothing to do with Annie,” Hugh told him. “I got turned around in the woods.”
They peered up through the opening in the trees, and that tube of white light was glued to the wall overhead. It had tricked the day birds into flight. Hugh could see starlings flitting in and out of the beam. From this angle, the body on the rope was hidden from view, and he was thankful for that. Days from now, by the time they reached that height on Anasazi and looked across, Augustine would have cleared El Cap of its prey.
Lewis said, “Let’s keep on truckin’, compañero.”
Hugh’s pack sat where he’d propped it. He’d told the searchers to slake their thirst with his water, and empty plastic jugs stood in a neat line. His water offering to the girl was still full, though. They’d guessed its significance. It sat untouched by the head of the slab.
Hugh and Lewis divided the remaining five gallons and continued up the slope. Their cache wasn’t far now. Things were almost familiar again.
Climbers’ garbage began to surface in Hugh’s light. A piece of black metal glinted in the pine needles. Lewis rooted it free with his toe, a rusted, pitted piton from the iron age, back before chrome-moly steel came into use. Empty, flattened cans glittered like tin and aluminum leaves. There was a hat, and a paper bag with human feces, and a mangled Pentax camera.
The pilgrims had been busy. Bits and pieces of sling hung in the limbs, red and green and peppermint striped. He spied an inexplicable lone ski pole, then suddenly, with a billowing huff, the torn remains of a parachute shroud. All in all, it spelled a crazy surge of events, whole generations of activity that he had missed out on since their last visit.
Very suddenly, Hugh’s light splashed back into his eyes, blinding him.
El Cap sprang straight from the earth.
He slapped his palms on the hard, slippery flank with something like joy. Black mica crystals glittered in the white granite. Its touch stabilized him.
He stepped away and craned back with his headlamp. His light faded to darkness about fifty feet up. There at the fifty-foot mark, by government decree, Yosemite’s walls officially became wilderness.
Lewis came up from the trees behind him. In the beam of his light, Hugh cast a huge shadow. They were in the land of giants now. But as Lewis approached, the shadow quickly shrank to mortal size.
“Oh, yeah,” said Lewis. He set down the water jugs and slapped the source, just as Hugh had, grinning. “Now tell me, heathen, dare I eat a peach?”
More ritual. “Should I roll my trousers?” Hugh dutifully supplied. Sometimes they would keep reciting right to the ropes.
Everything began here. They hurried along the stone root, following the trace of a path worn by countless climbers.
Their cache of gear was waiting where they’d left it, two waist-high haul bags carefully—scientifically, one might say—packed. The bags contained their life-support system for the vertical world. They hadn’t bothered with any elaborate camouflage to conceal the bags. Thefts happened, but so did vigilante justice. Anyone with brains knew better than to pilfer a fellow climber’s haul bags. But also, anyone with brains knew better than to leav
e anything of real value—like good ropes and expensive hardware—in a haul bag overnight.
Lewis checked the sailor’s knots he’d used to tie the haul bags shut. It was not a complicated knot, resembling a regular square knot except for the lay of the working end. For centuries sailors had used it in lieu of a lock, not as a security but as a seal. If a thief had tampered with the knot, you could usually tell at a glance.
“I don’t think he got us,” he said, meaning Joshua. “Too busy stealing a bride, the sick bastard.”
Dawn was still more than an hour away. Even when it came, direct light would take another two hours to reach the floor and heat the stone. But they acted as if the day were already slipping away. With little talk, they went to work.
They opened the haul bags and pulled out two old “beater” ropes that were past their prime, but were still good for hauling and fixing. These, plus their two new coils, would give them six hundred feet of reach the first day, and still let them descend to sleep on the ground a final night. Not that they would be covering six hundred feet today. The bottom section was going to be consuming. And the middle section, too. And the headwall. Seven days, easily.
While Lewis carted the rope to where their climb actually began, Hugh started the elaborate process of taping up. You could go through a lot of skin on a big wall. Lewis would be using cowhide work gloves with the fingers cut off. But Hugh, the better free climber of the two of them, and the one who would be handling the bulk of the leading, needed more freedom than gloves would allow.
First he painted a sticky tincture onto the bottom knuckles and the web of his hand. Then he taped each individual knuckle in special configurations to distribute the stress on each joint, and at the same time protect the flesh. Finally he joined the interlaced finger strips under broad bindings of tape across the back of his hands and palms. The finished product looked like a boxer’s fist, and, with some extra patching of more tape, would last for days. At the end of the climb, he would need a knife to cut away the shell of tape.