A climber climbs to name things.
* * *
THE TEDIUM. The teeming space. The blazing sun. The incense smell of cedar from the heat off the trees so far down in the valley. The dihedral, the great open book of rock in front of him, hands and feet along the long crack that spines the parts into two and he creeping up and into it, moving forth, duteous, unquestioning. The geometry of the rock, the geodesy; beauty of a perfectly faceted diamond. The mechanical actions, the movements methodical: placing nuts, chocks, slivers of metal, clipping in, rappelling after the pitch, lifting the pig, removing hardware as he moved along, untangling lines, checking the harness knot and buckles too often but instinctively, preparing the next section to repeat the process again, time evaporating like the sweat on his flesh, talking to himself, talking to Amanda. Shadows on the wall across the valley made the shape of a large heart, dark and perfect. His swollen hands pulsed out each beat of his own hollowed muscle; closed-chambered and fisted as it was. He leaned back in the harness, suspicious. He saw her here. She had climbed this face. She had waltzed upon it. Now he pictured her down on the valley floor looking up at him. His Amanda. If only to fall to her. Fall with her. Wonderful. A wonder fall.
What if?
Wasn’t it the what if that made him climb? Made any climber climb?
It has to be real enough to kill you.
The final night. The dark slammed down on him. He slept in the hammock beneath the overhang, cradled thousands of feet in the air, a caterpillar in its silken girdle. The rock swelled into a roof that loomed above. He moved from one disagreeable position to another, bent and shifting continuously throughout the night to alleviate the numbness, the spasms and twinges. He was thirsty, but saved what water remained for the heat of tomorrow. He tried to think of pleasant things. If she were here. They could complain together, joke together, manage the night together in their way. He thought of her in her fall. He rarely did this. He wouldn’t allow it. But he let himself think of it now, imagining her in the outward arc she drew through empty space. Ten years ago, this day. He pictured the accident for just a minute—no, less—just for the time it took from beginning to end—the mere seconds it takes for a thousand-foot drop. He stopped just before she hit earth, as it happens in a terrifying dream.
He settled into the grateful ache of the need to be with her again.
He drifted into something near sleep.
“Why do the days pass by too quickly, when the nights can be so long?” he had asked her. “The nights are so long because the days pass by too quickly,” she had said.
* * *
THERE ARE climbers who climb primarily to enter a deepening mystery. For this woman or man, the long haul up the mountain contains the ecstasy of devotion. No seeker forgoes the slope.
* * *
THE PROFESSOR stood at the top of the mountain, no longer burdened by coils of ropes and racks of pitons and the weight of the haulbag. He was parched and chalked, dirty, thirsty, so very thirsty, his lips blistered, fingers bloated, the skin of his hands worn thin, feet swollen, toes gone numb. He lingered in the strange exhilaration that comes with exhaustion, feeling himself a giant now, with the cliffs and the meadows and the road all so very small below. He looked out to a passing cloud, seeing nature as the manifold, that which bestows and opens. A world of atoms and fire and flux: in it, we are all absorbed.
He turned to what was behind him, feeling suddenly accompanied.
A glove, picked up in a gust, blew past and down off the cliff.
2.
SARA TROY
Sarasvati Troy was seven years old the day her mother fell to her death from the face of the cliff. Sara remembers hearing nothing about the accident occurring near to the time that it did, though her father gave her the news only a few days after the tragedy. Professor Troy stood by his daughter at the washbasin as he monitored her climb to the top of the step stool—a fanciful trompe l’oeil platform painted by her mother to inspire a little Matterhorn—and watched as she was stooped over brushing her teeth, her father explaining the action of up and down rather than of back and forth. Sara was brushed and washed and led to her room, where at the threshold she stopped to gather herself for the nightly leap she made to the foot of her bed, so frightened was she of touching the floor and having hands belonging to who-knows-who the nightsprites were that lived in the down-below grab at her feet. Once she was landed onto the mattress, Sara’s father snugged her beneath the quilting, reshaped her pillow, and pulled a chair near to the head of the bed as he usually did. Tonight he had a faraway look in his eyes, with wires of fiery veins in the whites of them, as if he were too tired to read to her at all. She wondered if he would have another spell the way he had yesterday and the day before when he had gone into his room and closed the door and broken into a thunderous weeping. Could it be her mother had done something again to displease him, as she sometimes did being too many weeks away from home? Or might she, Sara, have done something upsetting, demanding more time and tending than what her father was able to give, her needs being the needs of an only child? She smelled the bitterness of coffee on his breath and the woodsmoke in his clothes as he bent forward to palm the hair away from her forehead. She lay still, settled by his touch, hoping for the usual portrayals of fairy-tale beasts and renderings of wild terrain.
Sara recalls nothing of what her father had said when he told of her mother’s fatal plummet, his words having dissolved like steam from the recesses of her mind. How would he even have spoken of such a thing? What verbs would he have used to explain: to die, to expire, to perish, to pass or slip away? But he would not have used language that was cliché. Her father was a teacher of philosophy, a man who quoted poets, and if anything he might have told Sara of her mother’s demise in terms too abstract for a young girl to understand.
* * *
PHENOMENA WITHIN the form of time we appear, a constant fluctuation of matter, fluid, volatile, fleeting, as are all things in nature. What was becomes that which is. What will be becomes that which was. As a wiser man once said, nothing divine dies.
* * *
SHE WOULD tour the penumbra of her memory. What might have been? Had her father been staring at the play of light on the wall or at the seams of the wood of the floor during his telling? Or had he been gazing out the window at the dark of the night as he spoke of her mother’s spectacular ending? And before he switched the lamp off, did he kiss the tip of her nose as he usually did, or was it a tender peck on the eyebrow or lips?
Angel of God, my guardian dear.
There are simple lines from verses learned early that Sara is convinced she will never forget. What she too is certain of always remembering, though the date of the reckoning is unclear, is the very afternoon she discovered, without question, and without her father or anyone else having to announce it: her mother had gone missing for good. The quality of the day, the wistful light of afternoon, the liveliness of the curtains billowing at the window; all this is imprinted in her. Though as to the given day, the month, or even the season—was it barely the beginning of spring, or was it nearly the end of the summer?—that is, as to exactly how much time had passed between her mother’s mortal plunge and the occurrence of Sara’s startling epiphany, she cannot truly say, for her mother had been an adventuress and was often gone on an outdoor escapade or backcountry feat for stretches of nights and days that kept her a long time away. One cannot always rely on exactitude, this Sara will tell you, for just as one may not be aware of the beginning of a thought before that thought arrives, so why then expect that she be held to apprehending the precise when of her mother’s evanescence? Even more puzzling is the amount of time that eventually passed before a second revelation would befall her; that is, her mother was gone bodily—this without a doubt—but she had not completely vanished or been muted. On the contrary, her mother was always and everywhere here these days, despite having decamped from her earthly existence. She was at her daughter’s side, or behind and hove
ring, occasionally ahead, vigilant and guiding, listening to what Sara was saying, studying what Sara was doing, approving, or not, of what and with whom her daughter was playing. She trailed the girl about the house, the yard, the neighborhood, followed her to the park, gave her a push down a slide or a prod on a swing, lifted her to a higher pull-up ring or monkey bar. She accompanied her to school, remindful of mittens in the cold and rubber boots in the rain, patrolling as they crossed the road, endlessly hiving in the foresight of safety and necessity. She peered over her shoulder as Sara sat practicing the scroll of an M or an S at her desk, and otherwise throughout the day she was encouraging, advising, suggesting, implying, simply mothering the way mothers will do. As the daughter grew older, Sara wished for less maternal proximity, wanting instead more autonomy and privacy. But she understood her mother’s deep need to remain close, being so very separate and ghostly alone as she was in that bottomless crevasse of timelessness.
As Sara neared adolescence, she concluded that the constant company of her mother was surely nothing more than her own childish invention, much like a Santa Claus or a guiding saint or an invented playmate. For didn’t Sara believe, at least for a period during her earliest years, that all dead people were constantly stirring about in the ether, floating around in the fore and the aft of existence, and so were able to see whatever you did, whenever you did it? Such notions, she realized, are naturally and eventually outgrown. But because she had become used to having her mother so near, and considered this more a blessing than an illness or a hindrance, then why should there be any harm in keeping on with her girlish beliefs? So as Sara grew into her teenage years and soon on to young womanhood, she continued to stay keen to her mother’s loving presence, understanding this numinous experience as a wondrous thing. Sara believed she had been bestowed a gift, an awareness of otherworldliness she accepted with utmost care and seriousness. Though of the unusual faculty with which she believed she had been graced, she told not a soul, not even her father. Especially her father. Professor Troy seldom spoke of Amanda, and the daughter learned to honor his wish.
As time went on, Sara heard stories aplenty from the mouths of others, reading too from the pages of magazines and old newspaper clippings of her mother’s dramatic passing. For her mother had been an admired climber and a mountain guide, spoken of and written about and photographed often. There was the large framed picture that Sara’s father had hung over the mantel, as well as the various journals and specialty books in which Amanda appeared.
Despite the loss of mother and wife, daughter and father carried on in near-perfect serenity. They lived in a Craftsman-style house at the top of a hill surrounded by water, and from this perch they could see mountains all about in the distance. To the east lay the craggy range of the Cascades; the wet forests of the glorious Olympics stretched directly west; Mount Baker rose a chieftess in the north; and to the south there appeared the glaciered volcanoes of Adams and Rainier, as well as the cloudy plume from St. Helens’s brewing fumarole.
Sara could likely find her father at work in the room he called Base Camp, hunched over his desk writing or tipped back in his chair pondering. Behind him were shelves of books, most of these readings on the subject of philosophy, spines embossed with the names of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Hegel and Kant, Hume and Locke, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Plato. There were also books that went beyond Western thought, some that ventured wildly into theosophy and theology, with authors such as Swedenborg and Milarepa, de Chardin and von Bingen, Professor Troy believing it a good thing to bend one’s thinking. Otherwise one could find on the shelves a plenitude of books about climbing, as well as numerous volumes of poetry. For nearness and safekeeping, Troy kept Amanda’s favorite books on the topmost shelf closest to his desk: The Book of Secrets, Faith in a Seed, and The Divine Comedy among the few.
Though Professor Troy rarely spoke of his deceased wife, the bedroom he had arranged for his daughter was adorned with climbing relics of all sorts, most all of them Amanda’s once-favored equipment. His wife’s backpack was doweled on the wall, gravid with a mummy bag stuffed deeply into its middle; her boots laced together and enshrined on a nail beside. Elsewhere covering the walls were various coils of ropes, loops of nylon webbing, brandishings of old crampons and stoppers and chocks.Ice axes and picks hung handsomely aslant.
Amanda’s wristwatch and glacier glasses had been placed on a silver tray beneath her photograph on the mantel, along with a necklace of cinnabar beads that had been blessed by a holy man in India.
Sara would poke at the fire, the picture in a molten glow above, her mother’s eyes cast down and glimmering upon those below. She tried to remember her mother as she was when she had been among the living, wanting to add color and lightness to the flickering stream of diminishing memories, and wishing to add warmth and breath and depth to the present company Amanda had become. Sara would watch the fire as it blazed, softening her focus to kindle precious images. She would see her mother out in the yard suspended from the uppermost boughs of one of the old madrone trees; harnessed and asway, a small power tool in hand, Sara’s father calling up from down below to please let me do that, Amanda! and her mother chortling amid the smooth red branches and oblong leaves. She was often penduled high above the rest of the world; whether in the far reaches of a tree while pruning or up on the tallest rung of a ladder as she painted the house, or up on the very top of the house itself in rubber-soled climbing shoes, armed with hammer and crowbar to pry loose any worn shingles from the roof. “Rock,” Amanda would holler when a piece of flashing or gasket or slate might be spilled to the ground. Even at the grocery store, her mother seemed always in need of what would be in the upper recesses of the place. Sara, legs dangling from the child seat of the shopping cart, neck craned back with eyes uplifted, watching as her mother studied the lower and middle shelves for handholds and footholds before proceeding to escalade the racks of cold cereals and condiments. “They always keep the good stuff out of reach,” she would say.
Sara clearly recalls too her mother’s stories of traveling through India, and loved most the telling of how she had been named. Amanda’s eyes would shine as she described her time as a newlywed, when she and Sara’s father had trekked through the hills of India. “The Garhwals were a dazzling chain of sparkling peaks, beautiful jeweled tabernacles among the Himalayas,” her mother said. “Most unforgettable was the heavenly mountain named for the blessed goddess Sarasvati. She was twin-peaked, sublime in form and pure of line, poised alone in her rise above the other summits. Your father and I stood there in awe and promised that if we should have a daughter someday, we would name her Sarasvati. And so you were invoked, Sarasvati, and soon enough appeared.”
* * *
IN THE framed photo on the mantel, Amanda stands on a rise of earth poised heavenward with a soffit of cloud overhead, the wind blowing strands of her dark hair wildly about. She has a great swelling of spherical belly, a downy-covered hillock that had been Sara at the time, a mound made grossly noticeable by the harness secured about mother’s hips and the backpack strap cinched snug above the breastbone.
Seven years later: She had not been securely tied in.
This had been her father’s proclamation, heard by Sara just once.
Her father was tall and lean and very strong, though his shoulders had begun to roll slightly inward, as much as his thoughts had—a widower’s change in him that his daughter had noticed—a withdrawal and a lessened awareness of her are what she saw. It is true he was often distracted, but he was as conscious and mindful of his daughter as he had been of his wife. Sara embodied her mother, and the girl’s presence was a continual and faithful renewal to him.
When not base camped in his study, the professor could be found busy in the kitchen preparing one of his many specialties, usually listening to a favorite piece of music, a clarinet quintet. He played it over and again, never tiring of its unsentimental tenderness and intertwining theme; the melody of cello as out of a cold h
ollow, the violins a series of rhythmic turns as in snow. The professor hummed to the long-breathed refrains, while Sara cleared away her sketchpad and pencils to set the table for dinner.
It was mountains that Sara loved to draw the most, learned first by copying from books as her mother had taught her. She went on to work from snapshots, and then eventually from memory, drawing a given peak that she and her father had seen on a particular hike or a drive. Lately she worked from imagination, her mountains turning into extraordinary masses of scoria and basalt and tuff. Morning sun in the background. Subalpine lupine in the foreground. A lenticular cloud above.
The mountain she had of course mastered most artfully was that of her namesake, Sarasvati, the pinnacle so titled for the goddess of Hindu and Buddhist myth. Mount Sarasvati, also known as Mysterium.
Its massif was shaped like the letter M. M as in mother.
A more secure type of knot has been named in her honor.
Sara drew what she could from descriptions of Mysterium’s configuration and from what she had seen in pictures; a double-pinnacled massif with a knife-edged ridge crest and an ominous rock buttress: the mountain for which she had been named. She was captivated by it, and felt it as part of her being. Eventually, renderings would not be enough, and so she made plans to travel with pen and ink, pencils and drawing pad, camera and wide-angle lens, intending to appreciate this home of the gods more deeply, to capture in a glance a mirrored reflection of herself.
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