by Jeff Long
Hugh flexed his fingers. He slugged his fists into his palms, getting the tape job snug and stretched. The eastern sky was losing stars. Soon the black would ease to cobalt and then the pastels would mount. For now they continued using their headlamps.
Hugh pulled on his seat harness, and fanned the rack of gear apart to choose the few pieces he’d need on the first pitch, or rope length. Lewis laid out his stirrups and jumars for ascending the rope, and tied his shoes.
“I’m ready,” he announced. His voice was eager and antsy and scared. He wanted to get under way, and his tone pressed at Hugh.
“You can have the first lead then,” Hugh said.
Lewis snorted. “What, and steal your precious legacy?” The first pitch was beyond his abilities and they both knew it.
“Don’t be shy,” Hugh baited him. “Give it a shot. Miracles happen. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a gorilla get up off his knuckles and walk? It was an amazing sight. Didn’t last long, of course. But what a gallant sight.”
“Yeah, you,” said Lewis, “you and the other stick people.”
Even forty years ago, when he wasn’t so strapped with gym muscle, Lewis had been too big for what he called the dainty moves. His veins would bulge as he grappled holds that thinner climbers—stick or bone people, or Biafrans, or Twiggies, all in his lexicon—danced up on with ease. He was like a circus strongman among high-wire acrobats. His specialties were brute hand-and-fist cracks, fearless hook moves, and the hauling of massive amounts of baggage from the depths.
“Still touchy, are we?” said Hugh.
“Have you seen them lately? Bulimic little twists, nothing but toothpicks for legs. Cut me off at the waist, I could climb what they do.”
“You’re saying I’m half the man you are?”
“Oh, not you, Glass. You’ve always been a kingly specimen. Except you have no calves. Or thighs.”
They bantered some more while they sorted and compacted what they had spread on the ground. There was a method to their collecting, though it required no discussion, not after so many climbs together. Every object had its exact place, small to large, front to back, and each man had it memorized.
Hugh had grown so used to being alone that companionship should not have come so easily. But as he and Lewis handled the ropes and slings and hardware, he realized he was still known by at least one person in the world. It made him glad to have turned away Rachel.
“What do you think, lad?” said Lewis, closing up the haul bags with his sailor’s knot. “Will we be better men after the climb?” It was always Lewis who asked, always the same words. Then Hugh was meant to reply aye, and quote Shakespeare’s Harry about once more unto the breach.
“We always were,” Hugh answered him quietly, “after every climb. You just forget.”
A wound opened in the night, a streak of purple low along the east. They both noticed it, and hurried. Hugh took off his approach shoes and trod in his socks up the slope, carrying his climbing slippers to keep dirt off the new sticky-rubber soles.
Lewis produced a scratched orange helmet. It surprised Hugh, because Lewis had managed to keep it hidden until the last minute, and because it was next to worthless on this route. The wall angled out so much that most debris would be falling well away from them, into the trees.
Lewis strapped it on with a sheepish look. “I promised Rachel,” he said.
Hugh knew it was Lewis’s promise to himself, though, the last of an illusion of love. He remembered whispering to pictures of Annie at night, whispering to the emptiness of his house in Dhahran, until finally, firmly, he had managed to put her away from him. Out with the pictures, out with her lemon marmalade and Nutella, out with her Joan Armatrading and Mozart tapes. He’d even bought new sheets for the bed. A clean sweep. A new beginning.
Again Hugh was glad to have chosen against Rachel last night. She was right in what she’d finally said. Through Hugh’s loss, maybe Lewis could learn how to live without her. Just now, in the darkness before dawn, that seemed worth more to Hugh than any beauty or excitement she could have brought into his life.
The purple sliver ran red. Hugh turned off his headlamp. The trees were gray. The stone was gray. His partner was gray. But over two-thirds of a mile above them, the summit reaches flushed the faintest pink.
Hugh pulled on his shoes and laced them tight. Lewis had already uncoiled one rope into a loose pile, and Hugh tied into one end.
“No headlamp?” Lewis asked. He had backed against a rock and anchored himself there. The rope ran from him to Hugh.
“It wouldn’t help. Either I remember or I don’t.” Memory was everything. Without it there was nothing.
Hugh faced the wall and began tracing his fingertips along the blank surface. This morning, especially, he required the Braille approach. He needed to feel for the secret passageway.
Even in full daylight, the holds defied ordinary sight. That had been part of Anasazi’s notoriety. The creation had no rational origin, no crack or dihedral or obvious flakes. It had freaked people out. He’d spent days just sitting and watching the mute stone, even fasting, at one point, to force a vision. The changing shadows had finally revealed a fold at one hour, a seam or a crystal knob at another hour. Like in a fairy tale, once you touched them, they turned real.
He went on touching the rock, hunting for holds, hunting for himself. His body was balking. Both feet felt shackled to the ground, like some instinct warning him away. It would have been unnatural not to be frightened. He told himself that. The naked ape had bred itself out of the trees. Humans didn’t belong up there. Ordinary humans. He had this argument with himself often.
But the fear was stronger this morning. He kept his back to Lewis, who waited, rope in hand. His fingers continued searching. Speak, Glass, or forever hold your peace.
It wasn’t the primal fear that bothered him, though. This was different. A voice—not even that, a sensation—was pulling at him. It came from up there, or from within the stone. He felt sung to. Beguiled. Lulled, even. That troubled him.
A swelling in the stone stopped his uneasiness. After all these years, it was still there at shoulder height, a quiet, subtle bulge among all the thousands of creases and risings that textured the base. It cued him.
He slid his fingertips across the stone and found a hidden wrinkle. His left toe nestled upon a rounded nubbin, exactly where he’d left it. El Cap had kept it all just so for him. High above, dawn touched the wall, spilling light everywhere, soaking the stone with illusions and false offerings and glory.
He pulled. The toe held. He left the ground. Hugh had hold of the ladder now. They were in.
EIGHT
Below him, off to one side where Hugh couldn’t fall on him, Lewis started whistling Bach or the Trinity Session or some such. It used to drive other climbers batty, but Hugh had learned to live with it. Lewis had a gap between his front teeth and claimed it gave him the ability to whistle a harmonic fifth. Listen to this, he’d say, and would whistle a note.
Hugh would lean close, pretending to really study it. Nope, he’d say, that’s just air on teeth.
Hugh went on leaving the ground.
The first pitch of Anasazi was roughly a hundred and thirty feet from the ground to a small perch that was completely invisible until you reached it. Over the years, the pitch had gained the status of a test piece, and had come to be known as Broken Glass, both in honor of its creator and its victims.
Aside from its difficult, unorthodox moves, Broken Glass only offered what climbers now called psychological protection. There were just three threadlike fissures on the polished slab, opening and closing like little wounds spaced far apart. When Hugh had first climbed this pitch, he’d managed to place a single piece of protection in each fissure, a knife-blade piton, a wired copperhead, and the tip of a baby angle. Not one of the pieces would have held a real fall. A number of aspirants had learned that the hard way, breaking arms, legs, spines, and heads while trying to repeat the
cryptic moves of a man named Glass.
Apparently the casualties, year after year, had become too much, though. As Hugh worked higher, he came upon bolts, not just a few, but many. Chicken bolts, they were called, the work of pretenders to the throne.
During the golden age, a period of intense discovery that began with El Cap’s first ascent in 1958 and ended in the early seventies, the drilling of even a single bolt had been considered an event very close to statutory rape. Many climbers had backed off from routes rather than despoil them with a bolt, preferring to leave the rock pure for those with more talent, or even to never be climbed. Bolts opened new territory, but they could also be used to dumb down the rock. It had mattered very much back then. They’d been reverent as hobbits.
In his entire climbing career, Hugh had placed only five bolts, though not one on all of Anasazi. Now as he climbed higher, Hugh found nine, then ten, on this first pitch alone. He would have been disgusted if he hadn’t been so relieved to have the bolts to clip into. Each bolt could hold an elephant. It was nice to have death or mutilation removed from the equation.
But each time he clipped his rope to a bolt, Hugh heard Lewis’s whistling slide off-key. Lewis had always been more of a purist than even Hugh. To him, bolts weren’t just an eyesore, they were evil. They were the Machine, the paving of the American frontier, the cowardice of urban weaklings. And they killed your karma.
At the third bolt and the third sour note, Hugh called down, “Problem?”
Lewis stopped his whistling. “Something wrong, Harp?” he said.
The “Harp” was another dig. Long ago, Hugh had become known as Harp, for Harpoon. Only the insiders got a nickname. Harpoon stood for what the younger generation now called a rope gun. A rope gun was the guy you fired at the Great White Whales. They were the ones with steel nerves and titanium balls.
Lewis started piping away again like one of Snow White’s dwarves.
Hugh clipped again at the next bolt. Lewis skidded into a sour note. Hugh ignored him. If Lewis wanted the purity of their original ascent so badly, then he should have taken the sharp end of the rope. In which case, they’d still be puttering around on the ground.
For the next two hours, Hugh worked the rock. Sunlight moved down toward him as he moved up toward it. The slab lost its night chill. His tendons warmed. His hips and shoulders gained more flex. His forearms got hard as gourds from handling thin holds.
He never broke a sweat. That was how slowly he moved, deliberate as a reptile. He took his time, resting on the larger facets, a two-inch cube of white quartz here, a ripple there. His memory returned in inches.
There was a wide stem between two nubbins, as wide as he could stretch his legs, so wide that he’d worried the years might have ossified his abilities. But he managed. Elsewhere he crouched on flakes, like a cat, and pounced for a “sloper,” and the rounded bulge held his palm and fingers, if only barely.
His anxieties—not just yesterday’s omens of death and madness, but a month of bad dreams—all the warning lights quietly self-corrected. Except for the bolts, every hold was right where it was supposed to be. All felt right and good with the world. He belonged here, he really did. He could do this thing.
The little belay perch appeared. Hugh got one foot on the ledge, and anchored himself, and shouted down. “You are the one,” Lewis called up to him.
Lewis bustled about, a miniature man down there. While he waited, out of habit, Hugh tied knots using a bit of slack rope.
The Italian hitch, as it was known, hadn’t been invented until 1974, six years after Hugh and Lewis had established Anasazi. But Hugh had quickly added it to his repertoire and used it on his trips to the Alps, and his expeditions to the Ahaggar range in southern Algeria and to Makalu in Nepal and Everest in Tibet and Cho Oyu straddling the divide.
Down below, whistling away, Lewis was loading on the rack of extra gear and ropes, getting ready to jumar, or “jug,” the line. While he waited, Hugh went through his gamut of various knots.
Most climbers were content just to memorize the basic rope craft. Hugh was a true student, though, forever searching out the history of ropes and knots, talking with sailors, weavers, and fishermen, even using a magnifying glass to examine museum relics. As far back as the Stone Age, mankind had been using knots to hold itself together. Square knots had been found in rawhide cords used by Cro-Magnons.
There were special knots for tying prisoners and hanging them, for passing messages on Incan trails, for binding freight to a yak, for closing wounds. The highwayman’s knot was used for hitching horses for a quick getaway, the blood knot for flogging soldiers and sailors and for weighting the belt cords of monks. In medieval times, the figure eight, a climber’s standby, signified faithful love because of its symmetrical embrace.
Hugh leaned back against the anchor to soak up the heights. Soon enough they would have the valley spread below them. For now, the better view sprawled overhead in a canvas of bright colors and dark water streaks.
The rope tugged and vibrated along Hugh’s thigh. Lewis’s jugging had the cadence of a march. He slid the jumars up, one at a time, high-stepping in the stirrups that dangled from each handle. Slide, step, slide, step. The jumaring saved time. More important, it conserved their pool of strength. Lewis would arrive rested, ready to take the next lead. Hugh would belay him, then jug up, and they would switch leads again, leapfrogging.
A crow cawed in the trees. It was a quiet morning. He heard the hiss-click of Lewis’s jumars sliding up, and the tap of his toes against the stone, and the slight jingle of hardware.
Lewis reached him in a burst of white teeth and orange helmet and wide shoulders, all tiger quickness. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He’d told Hugh he woke at four-thirty to hit the gym with the red-eye crowd. Twice a week, rain or shine, he rode his bicycle to Estes Park, thirty-five miles each way.
When they were young, the obsession and mountain mania had seemed almost holy. Lewis liked to damn the herds in the valleys and flatness, stuff cribbed straight out of Nietzsche and Kerouac. We’re their saviors if they’ll just open their pig eyes. Fuckin’ saints, you and me, Hugh. The last of the holy men. This is important. God’s hiding up here. We’re the only ones with a prayer in hell of finding Him. Drunk or stoned, or cold sober, it had been too high and mighty for Hugh’s taste. But it used to be fun to wind Lewis up and let him rant like a prophet.
The two men crowded side by side and sorted the gear. They were in no huge hurry. Today was their shakedown cruise. Tomorrow they committed.
They sat back in their seat harnesses and helped each other piece together the heights. Much of El Cap had been virgin when they blazed Anasazi in 1968. Now everywhere they looked, grand paths tracked across the broad, towering expanse.
Off to the right loomed a vast, charcoal-colored stain shaped almost identically like the North American continent. Like Spanish missionaries, the first climbers through that region had climbed the Baja stain and along the California “coast,” dubbing ledges Mazatlan and Big Sur, and, near the summit, the Igloo. They’d christened their route the North America—or NA—Wall. Later teams had remained faithful to the theme as they conquered the surrounding territory: Pacific Ocean Wall lay to the left of NA, Atlantic Ocean Wall to the right, with Wyoming Sheep Ranch and New Jersey Turnpike branching up through the dark interior.
Lewis reveled in the poetry of it all. “We’re among the people now,” he said.
To their left, in the direction of the graceful profile of the so-called Nose, the historic first climb of El Cap in 1958, an assortment of routes threaded up through very steep country. Mescalito had been pieced together during the psychedelic seventies. The Wall of Early Morning Light and New Dawn served as catch basins for the first rays of sunshine each morning. Next to South Seas was Tempest.
Anasazi rose between these beautiful monsters. The one route that Hugh couldn’t see was the closest one, the unfinished first ascent that had taken the lives of at least two
young women yesterday. He craned out, but couldn’t spy the dangling body, nor any landmarks of the women’s path, not even the vast roof of Cyclops Eye.
By now, Augustine had probably lowered to his girlfriend’s body. As a first responder, the man had surely handled death before. But this one was going to scar him in ways he could not imagine. Hugh knew. Love is never lightly lost.
“So what are my chances?” Lewis suddenly asked Hugh.
Hugh thought he was talking about the coming pitch, or their week ahead. Hugh waved his arm spaciously. “Nothing but blue sky,” he said.
There was not a cloud to be seen. The cliff swallows were soaring and dipping, reveling in the sunlight. It was another excellent day in paradise.
Lewis didn’t smile. His eyes were shielded behind a pair of thin, very hip sunglasses. Too late, Hugh realized he was asking about his conversation with Rachel last night. Hugh let the moment pass. There would be ample time in the coming days to contemplate their lives. And to bury their women.
“The day’s wasting,” Lewis said. He rolled his head and shoulders like a boxer about to enter the ring. Hugh checked the belay and tapped his shoulder. Lewis continued up.
As the day went on, they made mistakes, crossed ropes, dropped gear, and mixed commands. The mistakes frustrated Lewis. “We’ve got to move this dog,” he said.
Hugh was more forgiving. He wasn’t concerned about their slowness. It was Day One. They were still getting their heads back into the bigness of big-wall life.
The two of them had not climbed together for over three decades. The more circumspect approach would have been to climb day routes for a week or so to fine-tune their teamwork. Instead, as if throwing themselves off a cliff, they were throwing themselves up it.
Around four, they called it quits for the day. They’d gotten a start. Four hundred vertical feet wasn’t much to brag about. But they’d penetrated Anasazi’s defenses and regained some of their old rhythm. It would have been nice to run a pitch higher before sundown, but that risked a descent in the dark.