by Jeff Long
Over his shoulder, the distant storm was boiling to a soft crescendo. You could see lightning glittering like hungry eels in the snow clouds, but not a sound escaped the roiling violence. Since three o’clock that afternoon, he and Tink had been monitoring the slow black tidal wave of clouds that now engulfed half the sky. What had begun as a bud on the west of what an ice climber named Bullseye liked to call ‘Our Video,’ was now bending to flood the moon, his only source of light. In Islam, the new year cannot begin if the moon is covered. So it was for this orphan of the Jesuits. Forty feet more to 1987.
Two ropes were knotted at John’s waist. One bellied out into open space, arcing down and then back into the wall where the far end was tied to Tink. The second rope fed through a series of rusting pitons and nuts fixed into the wall. It was this second rope that was supposed to catch John if he fell.
He pinched a slight granite flake and shifted his weight from the toe of one foot to the other. It was a wintry motion, slow and brittle. The moon, carved white, hung beside his feet. Forty feet more, he coaxed himself. Forty feet into midnight and he’d be up. There he would anchor the ropes and haul their gear up one line while Tink ascended the other. Forty feet to reentry to the horizontal planet where trees grew upright and he could stand without clinging, where he could forget the aggravations, the paranoia, the stink of old human shit waiting on the ledges, the community dandruff in his lukewarm Cup-a-Soup.
He’d been here before, muscling against the elements, hugging close to big walls while exhaustion or fear of storms or the mountain itself conspired to dislodge him. He’d always survived, sometimes just barely, but never stupidly. Sports Illustrated or People or The Chronicle, one of those, had made much of this obstinacy after his haunting fiasco in the Andes on the South Face of Aconcagua, attributing his ‘barbarian survivability’ to his aboriginal past. “Grandson of a Chiricahua Indian shaman, half Indian and magician himself, Coloradas can stick a finger or toe to almost any surface—granite, brick, or the sandstone of his native desert spires—and it will stick like a spot weld. One of the nation’s premier rock climbers, a natural-born mountaineer....” A grim, cold cuate, shivered John. Beat, froze, and 40 feet short. He eased upward, locking his taped knuckles harder inside the unforgiving fissure. The way it felt, the movement it invited, the very smell—all were echoes of a thousand similar cracks. There were other echoes, too, other dimensions as he pulled higher and edged the inner toe of each worn rubber sole against new crystals. Not all were as immediate as the bite of stone against his fist or the urgency rearing high in the cloud bank. Some of the resonance was so old and persistent that it was next to silence. There was, for instance, no ignoring the Chiricahua advice that no one is your friend, not even your brother or father or mother; only your legs are your friends, only your brain, your eyesight, your hair, and your hands. My son, echoed the void gaping under each of John’s heels, you must do something with those things.
He fell.
It was that sudden.
As if skinning off a glove, John felt his hand sliding from the crack. His toes lost their granite purchase. He gave a reflexive slap to the rock. Then he was off, flying toward the ground far below. Again the wall’s exaggerated angle was a blessing, allowing him to drift mute and free, full of fear. He hit nothing. The air was clear. The emptiness seemed to buoy him up. I’m falling, he registered. It was a soft moment, which allowed him thoughts.
Climbers call long falls screamers, but rarely scream when they fall. Their lives don’t flash before them. They have no special grip on their fear, no mystical insights of self-control. They drop like quiet, ripe fruit, which is not to say they aren’t terrified. Their rib cages vapor lock. Their eyes see. And they hear a voice. Not always, but sometimes. Even among the hardcore, fat-free warrior set—the 5.11 boys with their streamlined lats flaring like vestigial wings, 19- and 20-year-olds with tendinitis in their overtaxed knuckles—even among the fanatics, the voice is usually nothing more than adrenaline babble. It’s easy for climbers to confuse the wild surge of biochemicals, tape deck tunes, and naked risk with the song of being. When the abyss sweeps up to devour them, they vainly believe themselves tagged by the hand of God, when in fact ‘flushed’ is more like it. But sometimes, rarely, a falling climber really does hear the voice.
He listened, and heard nothing. Absolutely nothing. It said nothing. It sounded like nothing, which, unless you’re dying, may sound like the proverbial, one-handed Zen cow patty.
Twisting sideways, then backward, John glimpsed the cadaverous moon rocking all out of kilter. This shoulder, he predicted without question, this hip. They’ll hit first. Shit, John, you’ve done it now. Even so, he wasn’t particularly concerned. For one thing, his arms instantly felt as if he’d gone to Cancun on vacation. The lactic acid let go. His lungs quit laboring. He felt great. All his heroic struggling to be elsewhere was suddenly a moot point. Cascading past the glowing stone, John felt like Zeno’s arrow, the one forever caught between source and end point. He was at peace.
And then he heard a thin, metallic pop. It was an inconsequential noise, a mere kernel of popcorn exploding. But it was followed by a second pop, and the bottom dropped out of his gallows. John gritted his teeth. Dread deepening, he realized he was unzipping. He had time to think, Shit, the pins. And then his brain mainlined the fear because his wings had truly been clipped. One by one, the rusting old pitons, the pins he’d clipped into, were failing. Every time a climber hammers a piton or wedges a nut into the rock, he customizes and expands his own health insurance policy. The idea is that each piece of protection (or ‘pro’ in the abbreviated surfer-climber patois) is capable of catching your bodyweight times the velocity of your fall. The size of the pro is less significant than the physics of its placement, but since no one can see inside the crack, no one can state with certainty what will or won’t hold. Matters of faith. As John climbed the crack, he had attached his leading rope to seven ‘fixed’ pitons placed on sunnier days by earlier climbers. Because he was in such a hurry though, he’d neglected to back up the old pro with some of his own setting. Now it was truth or consequences. The weathered old pins were jerking loose from the crack like machine-gun slugs. Pop, pop, pop. It sounded like breakfast cereal. Climbers call it a zipper fall for the way you unzip the pro. Having nothing else to do as he unzipped, he counted the pops.
He passed Tink. He saw the moonlit teenager as an instant of mercy. Spare me, thought John. Catch me, Tink. Please. But not a sound passed his lips. It would have done no good anyway. He felt the rope tighten at his waist and counted two more pops. With each pop the rope relaxed again. Gone, he realized. Gone away. The wind poured into his ears and he began to drown in the waves of his inner ocean. Panic began to unpiece him. His graceful, unending breaststroke from here to nowhere began to take on a frenzied, ridiculous tone, which set off a deeper alarm. Climbers still talk about one of their own who erred near a summit and was heard to calmly sigh “shit” as he sailed past a lower ledge, trying to keep his balance. John was on the verge of losing all balance. He’d lost control of the big picture; now he was losing control of the little one, himself.
And then he heard the voice. It said nothing. Absolutely nothing. It calmed him. The tempest in his ears suddenly abated. His clenched jaw relaxed. The shout in his soul faded. Everything became acceptable.
Just as suddenly he stopped with a long, dreamlike bounce. The rope stretched elastically snatching him away from the abyss, and then he was slammed pell-mell into the wall, his shoulder and hip striking first. His lungs emptied with a frosty whoof.
Tink had caught his fall.
He felt pain, but it was a distant, unflowered sensation. John didn’t care. Like a supplicant, he reached both hands above his head and grasped the rope, gasping. He touched his forehead to the rough Perlon line. “Padre nuestro,” he started to chant, then gave into his adrenaline and simply sat there. Still clutching the rope, he dangled above the inky forest floor. He raised his head t
o what stars were left. He heard the abrupt, macho burp of a faraway frog. In a slow noiseless spin, the world began to accumulate around him again. The same moon was gleaming across the same cold acres of vertical granite, illuminating his long, black hair and the sparse whiskers on his wide jaw. It was like him to watch himself dangling there, tied to a puppet string, far too close to God.
At an even six feet, he was barrel-chested, with legs that were longer than Apache but slightly bandy all the same. He didn’t have to wonder what his vagabond mother had looked like; one glance down his hybrid body told all. Besides the long legs, she’d carried narrow feet and small hands that looked too delicate on him. He was self-conscious about those hands. They seemed so inadequate for all the gripping and grabbing and pinching that climbing demanded. Yet they’d pulled him across land no one had ever touched or seen, and that was something. So many scars had laced their flesh and then sunk under new scars that now and then he forgot their service.
Certainly his hands seemed less than true to the desert savagery that was his other half. The Indian in him was prominent: straight hair, black eyes, and huge Mongolian cheekbones. On an expedition to the Chinese flanks of Everest two years ago, Tibetans had regularly addressed him in their native tongue, convinced he was one of them. What he most often recognized in the mirror, though, was neither the Anglo nor the Indian. What he saw was the overlay of one culture upon the other, something quieter than intercourse, the mark of history all over his face: smallpox scars. To his eye, the pockmarks ruined his wide, angular cheeks. He saw himself as a bad invention, the product of too fierce a seed or a not-quite-certain matriarchy. The pitting scars were proof that his mother had vanished into mystery marooning him and his brother with a dusky nomadic man who knew roughnecking and bars and a thousand stories of his father’s fathers and who could track bobcat from horseback and cut water from cactus and braid rope from yucca and coax crude oil from the barren earth—a man who’d struggled like a hero to be both father and mother to two dusky sons but never quite got it down. His father had forgotten to get John immunized, and by the time he’d remembered, the disease had finished with his younger son’s face. John didn’t blame his father. That was part of the fatalism that carried him so brilliantly across the stone walls and kept him a prisoner of the Valley.
He’d even quit blaming himself for the scars he found so ugly. He could look in the mirror these days and touch the pockmarks and accept that he was marred, but it wasn’t his fault. With a sort of reverse vanity that had infuriated his Jesuit high school teachers, he carried everywhere with him a sort of pet humility. Sports Illustrated had loved it (“a captivating modesty”). He was reticent in crowds, shy around strangers, and girls in school never quit teasing that he must be retarded or mute. The pockmarks gave him a vigilance. When he looked at people, his dark eyes always saw them looking first, studying his face, his skin, his fallibility. Actually he suspected that handsomeness is almost never generic, that maybe people were intrigued, not repelled, with his face. That wouldn’t be the first admission he’d put off. Too many years had gone into feeling marked. Maybe, he sometimes smiled in the mirror, maybe he carried penitente blood in him along with the Chiricahua and Anglo. Maybe he just enjoyed tormenting himself. Sort of like climbing with knees he could scarcely bend some mornings and hands plagued by arthritis. Or hoping for Harvard someday when Berkeley had proved too confining after three short semesters. One thing John had learned was to travel light. Buttoned in the left-hand pocket of his corduroy shirt was a folded Polaroid of Liz, his girlfriend, and a tube of wild cherry Chap Stick for the windburn. Four ounces of luggage, that was it.
Only a few years earlier an American ornithologist on sabbatical had discovered a well-preserved corpse in a Swiss valley. Dressed in tweed clothing and hobnailed boots, the body was lying where it had been disgorged at the mouth of the Zermatt Glacier. No one could figure out who it was until the local climbing club laid claim to the young man, identifying him as a certain alpine soloist of the 1880’s. Like John, he had been carrying next to nothing in his pockets: a round-trip train ticket only half-used, some sprigs of edelweiss, three coins. There’s something about human beings in mountains, they seem to care less about the anchors that other folk require. The result is that they take on a curious lightness. How else to explain, for instance, the middle-aged Spaniard strapped in 14th century armor who was similarly resurrected at the foot of a pass in the Pyrenees in 1937. Climbers had a way of eluding gravity, even climbing out of their graves.
The moon floated perilously close to the billowing storm clouds. Frost poured from John’s nostrils. He suddenly felt like taking a nap, just a short one.
“John?” Tink’s voice fluttered down and prodded him. John looked up toward the paltry cobweb of nylon slings and ropes that anchored both their lives to El Cap. For the moment he didn’t bother to answer. Somewhere in that mess of ropes hung the silhouette of the world’s best climber, at least for the past six months. Tink was up there somewhere, stoically holding John’s 180 pounds through a makeshift pulley system. The boy had been stationary for the last two hours, dangling from the rock while feeding out rope as John deciphered the crack. Belaying could be very cold work. It could also be punishing, especially when your partner took a screamer the length of a football field. Belayers had been known to lose teeth, break bones, and burn their hands to the ivory catching falls half that distance. All the same, John luxuriated in the glory of his own survival for a moment longer.
“John?” Tink repeated, more urgently. John was tempted to let him wonder a bit longer, not because he was sadistic but because he could. He’d earned a minute’s rest down at the end of the rope. But he roused himself.
“You OK?” John called up, stealing the initiative. His voice quavered a little, which annoyed him. It annoyed him, too, that he would be annoyed. Machismo was not one of his ambitions.
“Yeah.” He could hear the boy’s relief, and then a philosophical “wow.”
“Nice catch, Tink.” The wind spun John in tiny circles, back and forth.
“What?”
“You caught my ass.”
“What?” Climbers use a small but efficient vocabulary of monosyllables for communicating in wind and around corners. None of John’s compliments were making much sense to Tink.
“Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim,” John tried again.
Though it didn’t belong in the vocabulary either, Tink understood this time. They’d been kicking that old dog all climb long. Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim, to the last of their red-and-yellow M & M’s. Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim, to each other during the morning pee, to an unsafe belay anchor on the 14th pitch, to the end of their good weather.
“Yeah.” Tink was no longer amused. Nor was John.
It was cold, he was exhausted, and the summit was a whole lot more than 40 feet away now. He’d have to climb the pitch all over again. Glittering overhead, liquid in the moonlight, hung the icy summit. The holy fucking grail. He sighed. He had memorized most of the moves up to where the rock had spat him out, but even so it would take another hour to get to the top, maybe two or three. He doubted the storm would wait that long. John moved his limbs one by one, checking his shoulder and hip for damage. Bruised, he knew. He studied his taped hands as if they were traitors. He felt old. Ten months into his 28th year, he was old, at least by Valley standards. It was high time to quit climbing, but difficult to let go. More than the lifestyle of a rock jock tiptoed in the balance, it was also a heritage, a full-blown past rooted in centuries of simple lust for the mountains. On both sides of his family Anglo and Indian ancestors had loved and coveted their abrupt landscapes. At least he liked to think so. More than anything else, the defiance of gravity guided his thoughts about heritage and gave him license to think of himself as a mountain man. The thought of leaving these walls and mountains caused him pain—pain, he sometimes rhapsodized, like the fur trapper Hugh Glass must have felt, grizzly-scarred and lame, bidding adios to his people
at the 1824 rendezvous in Jackson Hole. Like Maurice Herzog, the great French alpinist, must have felt as he watched the doctor snip off frostbitten joints in the jungles below Annapurna. Echoes. The thought of turning his back on the mountains and never returning was as terrible to him as it was romanticized. That was all part of it, though. The over-blown melancholy. The power and the glory.
“You got me?” he shouted. The wind opened a window for his words. Tink heard.
“Take your time.” Tink didn’t really mean it. He sounded weary and frozen.
John let Tink wait just a little longer. He knew this wasn’t the time and place, but he wanted to rest and digest the adrenaline, draw in the moment all the same. Once the climb was over, he’d forget these thoughts about aging or, better yet, fish the thick spiral notebook out of his gear box down in Camp Four and jot down his confessions under the heading ‘Mosquito Wall.’ The notebook was dense with similar ramblings filed under such names as Muir Wall, North America Wall, the Shield, Bonatti Pillar, Super-Couloir, Walker Spur, Everest North Face, Ama Dablam, and all the other major routes he’d done or attempted. Finger paintings, Liz called the journal, the stuff of his never-ending childhood. His eyes followed a lone set of headlights creeping along the Valley floor. An orange satellite cruised up beside Taurus, then sank into storm clouds.