by Jeff Long
The wind robs her lungs. It just sucks her empty. It makes her deaf, that or the blood roaring in her head.
She commands herself to see. She keeps her eyes bared. This is for keeps.
The ground does not rush up at her. If anything, it opens wide, growing deeper and broader. She is a pebble tossed into still water, except the ripples precede her in great concentric expanses of earth.
Swallows make way for her.
The forest becomes trees.
Out beyond the road, the river runs black through the white autumn meadow.
Such beauty. It fills her. It’s like seeing for the first time.
She knows the blood chemicals must be taking her away. How else to explain this sense of being chosen? Of being received. Of being freed. She’s never felt such rapture. It’s glorious. I’m going right through the skin of the world.
And yet she fights paradise. The glory is too glorious, the abyss too welcoming. It means to kill her. That quickly she despairs.
If only she could catch her breath. There is no in between. Fear, ecstasy, anguish: each extreme, all amok. Death. She keeps that word at bay. She tries.
And yet here is the sum total of every climb and every ambition and every desire she’s ever felt. Stack them end to end and they reach to the moon, and for what? It strikes her. She has wrecked her life. Her barren life. A fool’s trade. All for nothing.
It is then that she spies her savior.
The trees part and there he is, a tiny, lone figure moving along the valley floor. He is approaching EI Cap. But also, impossibly, and yet absolutely, he is making a beeline for her.
Everything changes. Her fear dissipates. Her wolves lie still. A great calm pacifies the storm.
I’m not alone.
It’s so simple. Whoever he is, he’s coming for her. Nothing else explains it. Random chance does not exist for a woman with no chances left.
From high above, settling through the air, she watches him labor between the trees, bent beneath his loaded pack. He’s a climber, plainly, and well off the main trail. In forging his own path, he is marrying hers. It’s deliberate. It’s destined. There is not the slightest doubt in her mind. Whoever he is, he’s traveled the earth and followed his dreams and timed his days exactly to receive her.
If only he would lift his head. She wants his face. His eyes.
Above the trees, she opens her arms. She arranges herself like some beatific creature. The air sings through her fingers. The feathers of her wings.
And still he is unaware of her. She wants him to look up and see her. She wants him to open his arms and embrace her. With all the love in her, she loves this man. Every memory she contains, all her being, lies in his hands now.
Her heart swells, her giant heart. Oh, she loves this life. There was so much more to do. Even one more sunset. And children, God.
She pierces the forest, thinking, Forgive me.
Revenge
“Time itself had been revealed as a predator. My youth seemed to have been devoured.”
Author Note
A quarter of a century ago, Rock and Ice magazine published “Revenge” as nonfiction, because that’s what I thought it was. Except for changed names, it’s all true. Events occurred the way they are written, with the same weather, the same ledges on the same route, and the same terrible conspiracy to get our pound of flesh. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s fiction, at least for me.
Nothing got less real. I don’t want a redo. The facts stand. I was so sure that assembling the facts and writing it carefully would bring me peace. But it reads differently than when I wrote it. Now I can see on the page the darkness in the eyes in my mirror: one afternoon a quarter of a century ago, bathed in sunshine, I fell from grace. It took a second read in recent weeks to grasp the unpleasant fact that my belayer bailed or cut the rope, or else that it’s a very long rope and getting longer. All these years later it’s suddenly plain that the nonfiction still hasn’t caught me. That’s because it can’t. It would be unnatural. It lacks the imagination.
I’m encouraged. My hope no longer lies in fact alone, but among the invisible mountains and subterranean rivers deep inside my heart. Somewhere in there, I planted the seeds of amnesty. This is going to take some exploring. It’s not just a matter of renaming an apple, an orange. Reading it as fiction when I finally became ready to see it as more than nonfiction is exactly how I must have written it.
But that’s just me. If this works better for you as nonfiction, that’s fine because it is all as true as the day it happened.
Revenge
That first time, I came to the Valley alone and at midnight on the cusp of winter. I was bent on storming El Cap, a teenage conquistador in search of pagan wilderness. My climbing career had begun scarcely three months earlier on a chalk-marked boulder. But my partner Joseph had declared the summit entirely attainable. I trusted in our combined imagination.
In my pack lay four coiled ropes, and in the belly of their coils, forty pounds of begged and borrowed pitons and steel carabiners. Because I didn’t know Yosemite and because it was Christmas break and because I was stuffed with myth, a pair of red plastic snowshoes projected above the pack like a weak punchline. There were, of course, no deep drifts to breach. There was no snow to battle, no march to make, not so much as a hike to reach my destination. My thousand mile hitchhike from Boulder ended quietly at a Conoco gas station, the Camp 4 landmark.
Mine was that classic entrance—in pitch darkness, no moon, no stars, even—and I woke cold in the dirt to the Dream. Every pilgrim remembers it forever, that first view, that chalice of granite and sunbeams. I lay there, paralyzed by so much beauty rearing so high above the giant trees.
It seemed in all that light there could be no room for darkness.
Of course I would think that. I was eighteen. Tall, with a sun bleached mane long enough to pass for a Berkeley radical but with eyes much too innocent, I believed in everything back then. Spirits in trees. Infinite rock. Byron’s edict—to light the sky like a comet, then take the snuff in full glory. I’d already vowed an early death. Joseph had made a similar vow. Before 30 there would be nothing left of us but echoes and Taoist poetry. Need I say we were students? Yes, college sophomores. We shared authors—Mishima, Kazantzakis, Borges—like hits of opium pitch.
Joseph arrived two days later with his girlfriend. He was a year older than I, she a year younger. He was nearly my height, with longer hair than mine, hand scars, and an infectious pantheism. He had once freed a panther from the San Diego zoo, he said. I didn’t believe him. His girlfriend did.
The three of us set camp at the base of El Cap, beneath an overhang under what later became the Pacific Ocean Wall. It was cold and we kept a fire going. Our woodsmoke married the clouds at our feet. Until midmorning when the sun melted off the mist, we got to pretend Eden belonged to us. There was nothing to see but the ocean of fog and the islands of stone. We were happily marooned.
This was in the days before boom boxes and satellite dishes, before there were lightbulbs in the john at Camp 4 (when it was still called Camp 4) before those daylong revolutions of tour buses with amplified voices. There wasn’t even transistor radio reception, so the Valley was absolutely silent. You could think.
I made notes for a novel. Joseph prowled the forest. His girlfriend sang and painted watercolors. Every now and then sheets of ice loosened on the summit rim and the scree beds got strafed with glass rainbows.
On the fourth day we picked a line to the left of the Nose. The crack in the white granite leaked into heaven. Joseph said it was the Salathé and that ours would be its first winter ascent.
On the fifth morning, Joseph took me to one side. “I don’t think we should climb today.”
This was the third morning he had said it. I had yet to reply. Today I did. “We have to start the route,” I said. “We should have begun days ago. We could be partway there already.”
Joseph was adamant. He had the authority of more climbi
ng and of “knowing” Yosemite. “This weather,” he said offhandedly. And besides, he added, his girlfriend needed more time with him. Surely I understood.
I didn’t argue, but my hunger was stark. As a sop, Joseph spent an hour showing me how to self-belay on aid. He wished me well. I started off alone.
It was a wild and woolly day. Bits of ice bombed down from the sunlit girdle on top. A gust of freezing updraft blew my own piss into my face. I placed the cold pins with aching fingers and drove them like ten-penny nails. The ropes whipped around at my feet with the agitation of foxes. I fell in love.
At the end of many, many hours, it seemed like I had risen halfway to the summit. The trees had grown small between my feet. The sun had wheeled around the Nose and turned the blue rock gold. In fact, I’d ascended barely 300 feet.
Near dusk I clipped my heavy racks of gear to the high point and rapped down. A hot meal was waiting for me in camp. Joseph’s girlfriend fussed over my barked knuckles. She was awestruck by my soloing. So was I, now that my feet were back on the ground.
To my relief, Joseph now declared himself inspired. He confessed that the cold rock and hot love had started to erode his will to climb. But watching me battle partway to the sun, he had regained his desire. Furthermore, he’d talked to two other climbers hiking up the base that day, and they had all agreed the route could conceivably go in winter.
It was settled then. First thing in the morning, Joseph and I would jug the fixed lines and leave the earth. His girlfriend would wait for us in Camp 4. We figured it would take five or six days to finish. We were so excited that Christmas Eve passed completely forgotten.
Long before dawn we were up and bustling. We wanted to get a jump on the short day and hit the ledges before nightfall. Verglas coated the scree—it was very cold. By headlamp, we packed our haulbag, cinching it tight. Joseph’s girlfriend stayed in her sleeping bag as he kissed her goodbye. We headed off to our destiny, lugging the fat haulbag between us.
We promptly got lost in that inky darkness, or so it seemed. Slipping and struggling up the scree slope, we swept our lights back and forth across the rock for our fixed green rope. Finally, breathless, we accepted that we’d bypassed the rope.
We turned around and started down, hunting among the multitude of crack systems for our genesis. We descended all the way to the Nose start without finding the rope. This was not auspicious. Mystified, we parked the haulbag and slowly clambered upslope again.
Not until dawn were we able to pinpoint the Salathé crack with complete certainty. All we could figure was that the wind had somehow deposited our rope out of sight. We backed into the trees, scanning the wall for it. There was the anchor... but no rope.
Our first reaction was relief and, for my own part, embarrassment. One of us could have been climbing on that rope when the anchor knots unraveled. I muttered something about getting my knots right the next time around.
But even as I made my apologies, Joseph erupted with curses. For above the anchor, our next rope was gone, and above that the final rope, too. At the highest point, where I had left all the hardware and our fourth rope, the rock was bare.
The truth crashed upon us like a wild animal.
We had been ripped off.
We stood there flatfooted. Our wings had been torn away, our odyssey squashed. There would be no ascent. There would be no trying. There would be no failing. This was something different than failure. I had journeyed to the furthest edge of my imagination, and someone had trespassed to shit on the Dream. For the first time in my life, I felt dirty.
Not one single piton had belonged to me, not one inch of rope. It was bad enough that I would have to get a job in order to replace what we’d borrowed. Worse by far, Joseph identified our thieves as the two climbers he’d spoken with yesterday.
It was clear. In nearly a week, they were the only other climbers we’d encountered in the entire abandoned park, and obviously only climbers could have accomplished the theft. They alone knew of our plans. They had waited for me to rappel down for the night and then cleaned us out.
As we rampaged through the woods following boot prints in the frost, we found two carabiners wrapped with our red duct tape. At the roadside, the footprints vanished. “I never knew their names,” Joseph said, “but I will never forget their faces.”
Innocence is not something lost or given away. It is something taken. And you don’t understand what it is until it’s gone. What hurt the most was that the myth had betrayed me. The fraternity of ascent was nothing, after all.
Fifteen years passed. I traveled. I climbed. I loved. I lost. I loved again. Business brought me to California, and I pressed a rendezvous with Joseph, who was now in the film industry. Despite our separate vows to exit before the age of 30, we were both still alive and kicking.
We met at the base of El Cap for a day climb. Inevitably, for old time’s sake, we selected the Salathé crack. While we shook out the rope, we paddled through a few memories of the camp beneath Pacific Ocean.
Nearly summer, the Valley was jammed, the sun hot. To my eye, Joseph had changed very little, while I had changed entirely. The feeling was highlighted by this vast tombstone to my innocence.
Over the years, I had learned that life is filled with insult and outrage and deception. I had lost climbing partners to big mountains on the far side of the world. I knew women who had been raped and beaten, who, with their children, had been abandoned. On a lesser scale, I had spent months in Kathmandu jails for a fellow climber’s smuggling and duplicity. Thieves—climbers—had twice more stolen gear from me in Yosemite. As a writer, I had seen my stories and articles plagiarized. Men in cars had spit on me and a bottle had been heaved at my bicycle spokes.
But even without those incidents—without the death and injustice and betrayals and ugliness—time itself had been revealed as a predator. My youth seemed to have been devoured. I had crow’s feet now. My hair had thinned. My knees crackled and ached. And I no longer believed in the infinity of granite and sunbeams. There had been a time when my creativity knew no boundaries. Now it did.
It was a strangely bitter arithmetic that I applied to my past, strange because it didn’t feel entirely deserved, stranger still because the afternoon was so glorious. I had never tallied up the injuries and trespasses like this, and wasn’t pleased to be doing so now. Certainly I had many more triumphs and joys than losses. But Joseph’s company at this place unlocked a door. It brought the ghosts swarming.
As it turned out, Joseph was thinking similar thoughts. For a few minutes we made dark jokes about the rip-off fifteen years ago, and what it had meant to us. Joseph said things had gotten so bad in the Valley that climbers had taken to rigging booby traps to protect their property. We agreed that no fate was too bad for a thief.
And then something occurred that was more extraordinary than the wildest fiction. It is my proof that this story is true.
We had just uncoiled the rope and were tightening our shoes, when a man walked up and asked to join us. His partner had bailed on him and he craved a few final pitches before driving home to the Bay Area. Would we mind a third in our party? He said he was strong and quick and wouldn’t hold us up.
He had an Oriental face that looked Hawaiian. His shoes were worn, his hands scabbed with jam abrasions. He had his own rope. I glanced over at Joseph, who was oddly speechless. I took the initiative and said, “Sure, join us.”
Without a word, Joseph cast a crazy look at the stranger and started up the crack. He seemed to attack it with his hands and feet. When I reached him at the top of the first pitch, he spoke. “Did you see him?” he said.
I looked down and watched the Hawaiian start off the ground. Just as the man had claimed, he was strong and quick.
“That’s him,” Joseph said.
“Him?”
“The thief. Our thief.”
I exhaled my “No” as half a laugh.
“I’m serious.” His frown pronounced it.
“
Of course it’s not him,” I said. The coincidence was too exquisite. Things like that didn’t happen in real life. But Joseph insisted.
“There were two,” Joseph said. “But I remember this one best because of his eyes. It’s him all right.”
“It can’t be,” I clung to my skepticism.
“I swear it,” Joseph said. “I talked to him for an hour. He sat beside me right down there. It was cold in the shadows. We watched you solo. He was the one who asked all the questions.”
“Impossible.”
“I know,” Joseph whispered. “But it’s him.”
“I’ll ask him,” I said.
Joseph shrugged. “He’ll lie,”
The more we talked—the closer the Hawaiian got—the more I accepted that destiny had just handed us our thief. The man’s face was unique and the population of Polynesian climbers was small. He appeared to be our age.
We quit talking about the Hawaiian as he approached. He joined us at our stance, grinning despite our cold sobriety. I took the rack from Joseph and led on.
The climbing forced me to concentrate. It didn’t allow any confusion. By the time I reached the next stance, I wasn’t confused at all. I was angry. Joseph climbed quickly, as if the moves were more a distraction.
“What do we do now?” I said. He could see that I had converted. This was the bastard who had stolen from us. The same one who had broken my spell of innocence. And suddenly he was also the bastard who had raped and beaten my female friends, who had killed my partners, who had cost me again and again. Here was the vandal, the backroads terrorist, the lightning bolt, the violence waiting to happen. I had come to believe you never catch the bastard, but here he was.
“He fucked with us.” Joseph’s sunniness was in total eclipse. I had never seen him this way. Even his voice had changed.
“Now what?” I asked.