by Jeff Long
Joseph hesitated, then passed sentence. “I say he doesn’t leave.”
My silence forced him to clarify.
“We ask him to untie for a minute,” Joseph said. “Then we kick him loose.”
“Kill him?” I said. But my shock was less than authentic. “You can’t kill him for stealing.”
My caution only served to fan Joseph’s fire. He was testing his own limits by testing mine, and seemed relieved by my answer. It allowed him to speak more graphically and violently, for now he knew his words were just words, not part of a murder plot. “We say he slipped,” Joseph said. “His knot failed.” He paused. “Fuck him.”
Picturing the thief’s face at the instant he would lose his balance and fall, I felt a radiant, barbaric pleasure. But then I pieced together the consequences. We would have to rappel into the blood and bones. For our single moment of revenge, we would have to live with a nightmare. “No,” I said. “No.”
“What? Let him go?”
“Don’t worry,” I told Joseph. “I have a plan.” By now the thief was at our feet, winded but marveling at the perfect day and the perfect crack. This granite was like a masterpiece, he remarked. We ignored him. I led up.
This was our final pitch. It was as high as I had climbed on Salathé on that cold blue day long ago. It was as high as this thief would ever go again.
Joseph swarmed up the crack. We stood side by side on the ledge and watched while the thief climbed towards our justice.
“Tell me,” Joseph said.
“He stole our ascent,” I said. “We steal his.”
“Take his rope?” Joseph scoffed. “No way. I say we hang him by his neck.”
Now it was my turn. In coldblood, I struck at Joseph’s overheated fantasies. “We break his hands.”
With a whisper, Joseph’s voice lost its backbone. “His hands?”
“We take a rock. We smash his hands... by accident.” I gave it the same pause Joseph had. “Fuck him.”
Joseph turned pale beneath his sunburn. And suddenly, with all those years between, I understood why he had turned me loose on El Cap that winter morning. It had been to solo my energies away, to exhaust my ambitions. He had never intended to climb this wall with me. For the first time I realized that Joseph had never taken me seriously. In a sense my long-ago dream had been stolen even before our thief had manhandled it.
Now I declared my own revenge.
It would not be Joseph’s cartoon retribution. No more play-acting. This would be real and bloody and filled with screaming and agony, and it would involve us—all of us—to our cores. I could hardly believe my own hard resolve. Yet, face to face with Joseph’s charade of ascent fifteen years ago and with this thief’s burglary of that, I could hardly deny myself the atonement.
Joseph was stunned.
“Is he the man or not?” I demanded, alive to Joseph’s slightest dodge. I made this his responsibility.
Joseph took his time. His blue eyes lost their voltage. At last he nodded his head, slowly at first, then faster. “Yes. He’s the man.”
“That’s that, then.”
Grimly we cast around for a chunk of rock heavy enough to drop on the thief’s hands. I wanted to cripple the thief so that he could never climb or steal again. In Saudi Arabia criminals still get one hand lopped off in public squares. This was for real. It was for good.
But even as I rehearsed the deed in my mind, an unpleasant certainty hounded me. If Joseph could promote his fictions once, why not twice? No doubt he’d believed himself capable of a winter ascent, too. It was he who’d showed me that faith, like imagination, has limits.
“I’m going to ask him,” I said. I want to be sure.”
Joseph straightened up. “It’s him, I tell you.”
“I’m going to ask him anyway.”
“Don’t. He’ll just say it wasn’t him. He’ll blame his partner. He’ll beg.” Joseph was afraid. Was he afraid I would learn the truth? But that suggested he knew the truth. More likely, I decided, Joseph was afraid that if we confronted the thief, he would beg. We had gone beyond forgiveness, though, and Joseph knew it and was terrified.
It occurred to me that if I asked the thief, then dropped the rock, we lost our “accident.” The mutilation would stand as what it was, punishment. So be it.
“I want him to know why it happened,” I said. What I meant was that I wanted to know why it happened. Maybe I would even get an answer.
“Don’t ask him,” Joseph pleaded. But I was going to.
We had selected a thirty-pound block with squared edges for the job. Each of us hefted it. It was easy to see how it would go. The thief would place his hand on the ledge. One of us would distract him. The other would drop the rock flat on the thief’s hand.
It all depended on timing. We had to trigger our assault the moment he gained the ledge. Too soon or too late and we would have lost our perfect revenge. If I wanted to have my answer, it had to come before the thief reached us.
As the Hawaiian worked his way up the final twenty feet, I talked to him. I complimented his footwork.
He modestly gave the credit to sticky rubber. I remarked on the piton scars-that fifteen years ago the scars had not been so deep. So ugly.
Joseph looked at me. The trap was set. We were caught now, all of us. There was no escape. The thief was just five feet away.
“That’s what they say,” the man replied. He was resting on his foot jams.
“It’s true,” I said.
“Oh, I believe you,” he replied. It’s just I wouldn’t know.”
“No?”
“First time,” he smiled up at us. Written on his face was a joy I suddenly recognized from long, long ago. “I’m a virgin. First trip to the Valley. I just started climbing four months ago.”
“No.” Joseph groaned it. For my part, a nausea took over, and I have had it ever since.
“Yeah, really.” The man’s pride was impeccable. It was as authentic as the stone we now laid back upon the ledge.
The stranger finished the crack. He got to his feet between us, exhilarated. “I’ve got to thank you. That was the best climb of my life.”
Down at the base again, we coiled our ropes. The last thing the stranger did was shake our hands.
“You guys...” he paused. He became hesitant, a little bashful, even guilty. Here was his confession, I knew. We all have one.
“I’m new,” he stammered. “But if you guys ever feel like climbing all the way....” We looked up at the golden summit.
Once upon a time I believed that in a chalice of light there could be no room for darkness. I was wrong. As the stranger disappeared into the forest waving his goodbye, as I glanced around for any last bits of gear, and the afternoon turned phantom, I saw the single thing that anchors my presence beneath the sun. Birds and angels may disown the darkness they cast far below.
But this one dark shadow is my own.
In Gentle Combat with the Cold Wind
“He looked like the end of the world - dark, empty and wordless.”
Author Note
So long as Tioga Pass was not snowbound, I could make the twenty-hour drive from Boulder to Yosemite in a single shot. With luck, there might be a single radio station to sing me through the desert leg. On this trip the Hank Williams disintegrated into static around midnight, leaving me alone with my imagination on the so-called Loneliest Road in America.
The headwind was eating my gas budget. I caught myself dozing three times, but didn’t dare pull over. I had just finished Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan, and knew its sly Yaqui shaman, talking lizards and ruthless desert demi-gods were poised to swarm my car. (Published as non-fiction anthropology, the book had been attacked as blatant fiction by critics, a distinction hounding mountain literature, too. For what it’s worth, this introduction is all true.)
The hitchhiker was standing along US 50 where the cathouse double-wides twinkled like sniper fire. His skin was stained that earth
color of permanent transients. “I’m only going as far as Lee Vining,” I shouted. “Where’s that,” he said. It didn’t matter then, he was heading wherever he ended up. “Let’s go,” I said.
There used to be a popular bumper sticker: Ass, Gas, or Cash: No One Rides for Free. This guy paid in story. His tale started somewhere in Montana or the Badlands, a credible geography. One hot day in August, he said, he quit his job pumping gas and scraping bugs off windshields, and hit the road. In short order a hitchhiker robbed him, even taking his food stamps, and then his car threw a rod. He paused and looked at me. “I ain’t him,” he said, “that robber.” “I appreciate that,” I said, but kept one eye on his hands.
The story resumed. Now afoot, he happened upon a rancher who needed help butchering a cow. He stopped himself to qualify matters. The rancher might not have been a rancher, but instead one of those dead-end buckaroos who turn to rustling. Authenticity mattered to him. Hours later, clothes bloody, he walked away from the work with ten pounds of raw beef wrapped in rawhide.
The man was no Homer, but his story had a spirit and direction that stood on his rock solid faith in it. It shocked me. I had been writing stories since first grade, but was brand new to formal publication. The Soloist’s Diary had just come out, and struck me mute. Seeing my words typeset on a magazine page, no longer mine but the world’s, had paralyzed me. The inside of my head was suddenly, unbearably naked. My lockjaw had been going on for months. By contrast, this stranger was pouring out his story with all its warts and wrinkles, risking my scorn or eviction back into the wind, and yet joyful and excited to be bringing it alive. Was this my Don Juan, a shaman to help guide me to my path?
Wandering into the countryside, my passenger found himself on the wrong side of a high fence with concertina wire and Do Not Trespass/Bomb Range signs. He cooked some of his meat on an open fire, and hung the rest on sticks to dry to jerky. “Doesn’t that take days or weeks,” I asked. “I wouldn’t know,” he replied, “the meat was gone in the morning. There were tracks, big ones.”
This was getting better, his telling as much as the tale. He knew how to cast the fly and when to sink the hook. A few minutes ago, I had been my own river. Now I was his fish.
The tale got taller, and stranger, and finally insane, and that was fine because he belonged to the story as much as I did now. An animal with claws for feet had stolen the meat while he slept. He tracked it, came to a canyon with cages, and saw eyes glittering through the feed slots. “Dinosaurs,” he stage whispered to me. It was a crux moment. He paused for my judgment. Had he taken it too far too soon? Had he just lost me?
“Dinosaurs,” I said. “I know,” he said, “totally nuts. I didn’t believe it either. So I looked in more cages and that’s what they were, dinosaurs. And then I remembered at least one was loose with my chunk of steak in its belly. And I might be next.” Again he paused, this time to get my reaction. “Man,” I said, wrestling with the wind. He decided that meant a green light, and the pace picked up.
There were more narrow escapes, one from a biker gypsy lady who changed his voice to a dog bark, and another from a truck stop where long haul drivers ate children with barbeque sauce. He passed among coyotes, their legs severed by lasers. Not the whole leg, he qualified, more like the paws.
By the time we turned south on US 395, the man had fallen head first into his make believe. Dinosaurs and highway fiends had become his reality. He was no longer speaking to me, but the story. I glanced over. His eyes were too bright. He was counting with his fingers, taking inventory, trying to stay one step ahead of disbelief. He’d escaped all right, just not from dinosaurs. He was crazy and getting crazier by the syllable, a window on obsession and art. Did you have to be out of your mind to be a storyteller? Is this what a writing life did to you? And if he believed it was real, did that make it non-fiction? Was the dividing line with fiction just a state of mind?
Then he saw my ropes on the backseat, and the whole thing seemed to implode. “You ever been to the Himalayas,” he asked. The air leaked out of me. We had just crossed into my reality, where I could not forgive his incredibility. Me, the fiction writer, standing on my non-fiction. “My dad took me when I was a kid, ten,” he said. “Around about 1956, I guess.” I could not help but locate it on the map: Hillary and Norgay had been 1951, the first American ascent, 1963. The Peace Corps didn’t yet exist. There were no tourists in Nepal. End of story, I thought.
“We drove to Everest,” he said. “We had a jeep with 4-wheel drive.” “You climbed it, too,” I sighed. “Are you kidding,” he said, “It’s like 40,000-feet high. No, we went to find a body.” “A body,” I said. “A mountain climber,” he said, “some British guy, I’ll remember his name.” I tried to recall any casualties on the ’51 climb. Bullshit, I thought, all bullshit.
This was my fault. I had let myself believe a lunatic. My eyes looked at me in the rearview mirror. Where was the sin? The first story had drawn me, wasn’t that good enough? This second one had died in trespassing on my reality. Or had it? Had reality trespassed on the story? It wasn’t a story yet anyway, he had hatched it on the spur of the moment after seeing my ropes, straying from his world to try and meet mine. I was being a snob. Give him a year and some books or take him up a mountain, and I would be following him and his dad up Everest in a Jeep. And then another thought: who was I to condemn his tall tale? If anything, The Soloist’s Diary had begged far more blind faith than his stories.
We reached Lee Vining as the first snowflakes shot past. By morning Tioga Pass would be shut, but I had just made it under the wire, in large part due to the hitchhiker. “Mono Lake,” he read from a sign. “That’s the place I’m going to.”
We wished each other good luck, and he started to climb out into the wind. “Mallory,” I spoke to his back. It wasn’t a test, just a name to retire so I would never have to wonder about it again. As expected, he kept right on going. The door shut. And then it opened. “That’s the one,” he said, “George Mallory.” “Wait a minute,” I said. Where had the George come from? But the door shut. He was gone. A few years later I tried to repossess that night by turning the hitchhiker into my guest in this short story. It was perfectly logical that he might have read Mallory’s first name in a book. No matter, he was a fiction now. That was that.
But then, years later, the Chinese opened the Tibet-side of Everest, and as we all know you get there by truck and Land Cruiser. Back in the 50s, Tibet was closed to the world and under invasion, and there was no road on which to drive a Jeep to Everest. His tall tale had described something that didn’t then exist. I still don’t know what to do with that.
- JEFF LONG
In Gentle Combat with the Cold Wind
It was bitter that Halloween midnight, near Nevada. Across the entire desert there was only one movement not at the mercy of the north wind: a small and battered Volkswagen was feeling its way through the night, its passage marked by the wavering beam of its headlights. Even the stars had succumbed to the approaching blizzard, having vanished in cloud.
Peter Guerre, the car’s sole occupant, ignored the building storm. Preoccupied with his thoughts, he drove on toward Lee Vining. He was glad, now, that he hadn’t told the tale of his solo on Washington’s Column. The Column hadn’t been difficult, he decided: one long reach above that bolt on the fifth, that was it really, and he’d been faster than ever. Peter Guerre, better known as P.G., the Kingsbury Magician, fast, flashy, taciturn. Globe-trotting from Baffin Island to Patagonia, from Australia to Chamonix, he’d seen some of the best rock on the planet. Youngest climber on the Dhaulagiri expedition in ‘73, and one of the two lads topping out Lhotse on a Dutch invitation two years later, he’d gone on to cap it all with a staggering two-week solo of Pumori, for which he was still being lionized. At the age of twenty-four, his name was known, his legend inseminated. Ambitious and physically powerful, P.G. was renowned as a master craftsman who tamed stone and ice to his own devices. And, though the accolades left th
eir mark, P.G. had discovered that he could afford modesty, that in fact it enhanced his reputation and gave him an air of intelligent gravity.
He recalled a large film-showing in Aspen last spring. Without a word as to his identity, he had politely introduced the film by title before addressing a softly spoken “please” to the projectionist who waited to engineer the lights. The room had hushed black, then lit up with stormy, antipodal sunshine. On a whim, P.G. had slipped from the room and left, his silhouette marring the screen momentarily then vanishing. After the film had run for several minutes, a common murmur amongst the audience showed that they had recognized one particular celluloid figure—a young man garbed in a wind-blown, rock-torn clothing, sporting a livid scar down one cheek and brandishing his ice axe like an educated demon. It was only then that they connected this bellicose Kingsbury Magician with their tall, gentle master of ceremonies. An hour later, when the Himalayan sun sank like a red diamond into the night and the auditorium lights flashed on again, everyone looked around eagerly for the paradoxical Magician. But the hero was gone, the podium empty. The audience, he learned later, had groaned. In his quiet way, P.G. found that very gratifying—existing as a silhouette faster than reality. The mountaineering itself was automatically satisfying, but it took on a double sweetness when he considered that each new climb was also one further appendage to his reputation. He had no idea where the wheel of fame would deposit him, he didn’t think about it. It was a hobby as much as a lifestyle. Some people collect butterflies, some collect knives, P.G. collected mountains, though more precisely he collected anecdotes about himself climbing mountains. Often his climbs yielded nothing in the way of kudos. His solo on the Column had been a complete bust in that sense, upstaged by Byrd’s solo on the Shield and by some unknown gymnast’s ascent of a 5.11+. But, as had become habit by now, P.G. had said nothing when, earlier that evening, he’d strode into camp, dumped his gear and gone over to stand by a campfire. For an hour he listened to the other stories: how Byrd was muttering to himself when friends found him on the summit edge, how the gymnast had overcome the final knob, stood up, and speechlessly dropped his hand in retrospective surrender. P.G. hadn’t bothered to mention his own bold sortie of the past few days, because by comparison it wasn’t so bold. The tale would come out some other time. And by then he would have vanished again.