Chemistry of Fire

by Laurence Gonzales

  As we looked north, I commented, “Looks like a front.” In fact, I said that the fast-moving cloud deck looked like a prelude to precip, but no one was listening.

  I found a sheltered spot about two hundred meters west of camp on the edge of a cliff, where a depression of soft earth with overhanging pines made a perfect bed about the size of a bathtub. I laid out my pad and bag and returned to camp, where Bobby and Julia were fighting, appropriately, like brother and sister, over why the MSR stove wasn’t working. We polished off a bottle of Coppola white and a half-pint of Dewar’s before we even got the water boiling.

  Then Julia was standing on a lone spire on one foot hundreds of feet from the ground, arms outstretched against the evening, singing at the top of her lungs, “High on a hill stood a lonely goatherd” and then yodeling into the distance. The rock walls answered, “Yodel-ay-hee, yodel-ay-hee, yodel-ay-hee-hoo!”

  It might have been nine o’clock when we said good night. The weather was still good, though the overcast had moved in. We could see the lights of Custer far below.

  I bundled myself down in my bag, and Sue followed me and laid her bag out next to mine, saying, “Mind if I join you?”

  We talked for a while of imaginary climbs and adventures far from home, dozing now and then. At one point, I awoke thinking that my face was being attacked by insects. I sat up. There was enough moonlight filtering through the clouds that I could see my pack, covered in white. It wasn’t insects, it was ice pellets. “IPs,” I told her.

  I woke Sue, and we decided that it wasn’t really happening—denial, that primal killer. Moving farther up under the pines ought to solve the problem, we agreed. Jake, of course, was sleeping with us and moved accordingly so that he was almost on top of my head. That’s okay, I thought. He’ll protect me from the IP hornets.

  Then we fell into a dead sleep. We woke hours later with a start. Everything was glowing white with several inches of ice and snow. Our sleeping bags were soaked through. Our packs and shoes were encased in ice, and the long way back over steep rock was gleaming with a new and slippery surface. The drop to the next level was nowhere less than a hundred feet.

  “Oh boy,” Sue said. Given her penchant for understatement, that alarmed me. Sue has a very matter-of-fact way about her, which conceals a wealth of knowledge and experience. She is qualified in high-angle rescue, emergency medicine, and wilderness medicine and is a first responder for search and rescue, including cave SAR. She has climbed all over the world. I suspect, too, that the world has climbed all over her.

  “Welp,” she said breezily, “let’s get in the tent, I guess.”

  She had her new Black Diamond Moonlight with the four LEDs, and it was a good thing, too, for as we scrambled over the icy rock, I could see that it would be a very long way down if I missed a step. The wind was driving IPs parallel to the ground, and they dug into my face and hands as I followed her, both of us dragging our pads, our sleeping bags blowing freely in the wind behind us. Jake bounded happily ahead.

  We made our way around the last spire and shouted to wake Bobby and Julia in their tent. Then began the agonizing process of wedging ourselves into the space meant for two. By the time we got settled, I couldn’t feel my fingers, and Sue had to zip the fly of the tent for me.

  Jake turned in circles and found a spot to settle down on top of my legs. During the half hour of agony while my hands thawed, we all turned and squirmed, kicking and grunting, trying to find a position in which to sleep, until at last, exhausted, we fell into a sort collective coma and listened to the wind-driven ice attack the tent.

  In that fashion, the night passed, while I took mental inventory of what we hadn’t brought, thinking about what it would be like trying to traverse the iced-up rocks to reach the trail off this godforsaken mountain.

  Even Julia could tell that something was dreadfully wrong when, at first light, she unzipped the fly to look outside. “Oh my God,” she said. We all looked out. There were many inches of new snow on the ground. The wind was blowing spindrift off the cliff edge just inches from the tent. Beyond that we saw nothing except white. Praeter solitudinum, nihil video. And all our gear lay scattered out there beneath the snow and ice.

  That was first thing in the morning, when Bobby began screaming, “We’re all gonna die!” and we all practically wept with laughter, because it was just so stupid. What are we doing up here in October without winter gear, victims of a classic rookie blunder? We deserved to die.

  “Forget dying,” Sue says. “What about my Juneberry pancakes?” She brought pancake mix for breakfast.

  “Yeah,” Bobby says. “Hell, we have to have some misery, or else this isn’t a real trip.”

  Groping through the snow outside, I find my shoes filled with snow. Then slowly, painfully, we get ourselves organized, fetch shoes and vests and camera parts. Soon we begin emerging into the howling wind, one by one, to jam things at random into our packs, cook pots scummed with marinara sauce, dirty coffee cups, frozen underwear. Bobby suggests leaving the empty Dewar’s bottle, which he calls a “summit register,” but I take it anyway.

  Then we’re trudging off across the icy rocks, climbing toward Harney Peak in pain and mortification, cursing and laughing by turns—because we have to go up again to get down. Bobby is in the lead, calling back at me to be heard above the shrieking wind: “Hey, you’ve got to come ice climbing with me in Wyoming this winter!”

  “Are you insane?” I ask.

  Two days later the weather has cleared, and I return to the first boulder that Bobby put me on. I find that I can walk effortlessly up it. Has something changed in me, or has the rock simply decided to accept me?

  I know something changed in me over my days in the Black Hills. I was taken by the haunting quality of the place, the crystal towers carelessly placed against the backdrop of these old forests, dark and strange, and the eternal twilight of their Hansel-and-Gretel world, and the blackness beneath the earth so intense that it could seem almost luminous. As I make my way out of the Black Hills, I know that I will find only one location off this trail: lost. And I feel the damp and drizzly November lifting in my soul.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Bobby and I exchanged emails and decided that we would work together again. But that same year he moved to Nairobi to photograph in Africa. He had another sister, named Faith, there. In 2007, she was driving him to visit friends when a great chunk of concrete came through the windshield. He was severely injured and suffered traumatic brain injury. No fall from a rock face, no launching of a bicycle off a trail. No freezing to death on a mountain. He was moved from hospital to hospital in South Africa, New York, then Denver, and it seemed that he might recover as he returned to his hometown of Cody, Wyoming. Then in September 2009, he fell ill and died shortly thereafter. No one ever learned where the chunk of concrete had come from. He was thirty-six years old.

  6

  The All-Seeing Eye

  MY FATHER TAUGHT me how to use a camera and a darkroom when I was about eight years old. He was a scientist, and he loved things with lenses, such as cameras, microscopes, telescopes, and even magnifying glasses. ZEISS loupes. We always had a selection of cameras in the house that anyone who was interested could use, along with a few microscopes in various stages of collapse and eventually a big six-inch telescope that my father had made. Late at night I used to watch him as he sat hunched over the kitchen table, grinding the lens by hand with jeweler’s rouge.

  The medical school where he was a young professor had bought an electron microscope the year before. It had the most amazing lens in existence at the time, made of powerful magnets instead of glass. The magnetic lens focused a beam of electrons rather than photons. While a light microscope could magnify something up to two thousand times, the electron microscope could enlarge something two million times. Magnifying something two million times is a dazzling achievement. An aspirin tablet magnified two million times would be more than twelve miles in diameter. To me and my father, th
is concept was as exhilarating as being told that we were going to be able to see creatures walking on other planets in distant galaxies. Yet no one else at the medical school seemed remotely interested in this new wonder. It drove my father crazy. These were scientists: Where was their curiosity?

  So he decided that he’d be the one to use the new scope. He applied for a grant to go to Harvard and learn electron microscopy. When we returned from Boston, we rushed to the lab. The gleaming Siemens scope from Germany had a room all to itself. It was tall, reaching to the ceiling (or so it seemed to me). It looked like a great steel espresso machine. A bundle of cables issued from its domed top, and dozens of knobs, lights, and switches adorned it. At the base was a thick glass window a few inches square, and above it was a binocular microscope for viewing images on a phosphorescent screen inside.

  There in the darkness with the screen glowing green, my father showed me the inner workings of a cell for the first time. I was astonished to learn that what I’d thought of as an irreducible blob of jelly was actually filled with molecular machinery, pumps and shafts, bearings and conveyor belts, all working at something. There were creatures walking to and fro, bearing zeppelins of materials, and assembly lines putting together exotic creations like fantasy towers in a cityscape. My concept of protoplasm would not survive that revelation.

  A few years later when my father had finished grinding the lens for his telescope and finally had it assembled in the kitchen, we went out into the backyard on a frosty winter night. Stan Getz played jazz saxophone in the background. After what seemed like endless adjustments of the tripod and twiddling of knobs, he beckoned me to look. The image swam into view, and suddenly it was as if I’d fallen into a pool of light. As my eye adjusted to the brilliance of the surface, I saw that the moon was not the simple and vaguely white ball that I was used to seeing in the night sky. It was a devastated landscape in which a monumental battle must have taken place, a busy tapestry of bomb bursts and defiles, mountains and barren arroyos, an unimaginably complex design, the ancient record of countless violent events.

  In between those two extremes of scale was the small magic box that I could hold in my hand to capture at will an instant in time that would never occur again, no matter how many galaxies came and went in the universe. My father, born in 1921, was a member of the first generation in which anyone could have a camera small enough to carry around. My own generation became the most well-documented group of people in the history of the world. And the members of my children’s generation are literally growing up viewing the world through a lens or on a luminous screen.

  At a recent family wedding, as the bride and groom arrived at the altar, all the people in the crowd, as if by a secret signal, raised to their faces a device for capturing what was about to occur—a camera, a phone, a video recorder. Even the children took photos with their phones. And I thought: Oh no. They’re missing the moment. They must be planning to catch their own lives on the postseason reruns, because nobody’s seeing this couple get married.

  But I understood the lure of the lens. When I was very little, perhaps only three, one snowy winter day in Saint Louis, my grandmother showed me her stereopticon. She slid a transparency into it and then let me hold it to my eyes against the light of a window. An entire three-dimensional world came to shimmering life. I could smell the flowers and feel the sun on my face, the grass between my toes. I understood the lure of the lens: if you look through it long enough, you can vanish into it.

  The lens could reveal the hidden truth in our world, but it could also deceive. Whole books have been devoted to the question of whether the reflection in the mysterious shiny orb in the painting Allegory of the Catholic Faith (ca. 1670) by Johannes Vermeer is actually a concave mirror that he used to project the images he painted onto the canvas, giving his paintings their dazzling realism. The fact that most of Vermeer’s paintings are quite small lends credence to the idea that he used a so-called “burning mirror,” which can project only small images. The British painter David Hockney convincingly demonstrated that Jean Ingres, the nineteenth-century French neoclassical painter, used a camera lucida to make his work both fluid and lifelike. We may have to come to a new understanding of visual art since the early Renaissance. Surely it is the grand upwelling of passion and talent that historians tell us it is. But at various times throughout history, it has also been a passionate love affair with the lens. Maybe it was really the earliest form of photography. And in fact, some scholars argue that photography “hijacked” the lens and led artists to turn away from realism toward more impressionistic and abstract forms. After all, if you were an artist painting nudes, how could you compete with, well . . . Playboy?

  I was the articles editor of Playboy magazine in the 1970s and saw for myself the transformational power of a Schneider lens in the hands of a master like Pompeo Posar. The great wooden Deardorff camera could take a rather small, shy, and ordinary-looking teenager, project her onto an eight-by-ten sheet of Kodachrome film, and turn her into a mysterious ten-foot-tall celestial goddess with rays of light shooting off of her as if she were in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

  We have so many different kinds of lenses today, I’m not quite sure we understand yet what the implications are for the future. Ever since Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon and returned with photographs of our blue planet, we have been reinventing what it means to view ourselves and our world through a lens. That image of the earth, floating like a single living cell in the cold blackness of space, contributed more to the environmental movement than any legislation or polemic could have done. And it opened up a new world of lenses through which to view ourselves and our universe. The exotic lenses of the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, have given us the ability to look at objects whose light began traveling toward us thirteen billion years ago, not long after the moment when our universe was born.

  There are even lenses that are made by nature rather than by people. The Hubble scientists used the gravitational field of a very large cluster of galaxies known as Abell 1689 to focus the light from thirteen billion years ago so that Hubble could detect it.

  Today, the internet is a vast lens of infinite scope. And programs such as Google Earth, through which anyone with a computer screen—another type of lens—can fly up the Nile River from Khartoum or descend into the Australian outback, are changing the way we regard one of our most primary senses: the ability to see. We have become an all-seeing eye.

  In every major city of the world now—and soon in every minor city—cameras are mounted in public places and on the dashboards and even on the chests of police officers, recording everything we do. When American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into Belle Harbor, New York, in November of 2001, a camera at a tollbooth snapped a picture of the event, which otherwise would have passed without any visual record. Lenses are now so cheap and small and competent that we can scatter them like seeds of corn.

  But a lens is more than just a way of viewing and manipulating our interior and exterior worlds. A lens embodies one of the deepest mysteries in the universe: How does light know where to go? That may seem like a trivial question, but it’s not. If you’ve ever placed a spoon in a glass of water and seen the way it appears to be broken, you have witnessed this mystery. The light travels from its source to its destination at one speed as it moves through the air. But when it hits the water, it slows down. To compensate for its slower speed, it changes the angle at which it travels just enough that it takes the least amount of time to get where it’s going. Any other path would take longer. But how does it find that perfect path? No one knows.

  Since light travels slower through glass than through air, it’s possible to fashion a lens by making the glass thick in the middle and thin at the edges. Light traveling from all angles then passes through just the right amount of glass to slow it down so that all the light rays arrive at your eye at the same instant, resulting in a clear, focused image.

  Because of that, a lens can be thought o
f as a time-shifting device. But it is a time-shifting device in many other ways as well. The Hubble Space Telescope can look back to the beginning of the universe, shifting our view across billions of years. But even an ordinary camera can take us back decades, and Vermeer’s lens projected his images centuries into the future.

  In that sense the lens is an extension of our memory and language. (The marvelous American photographer Sally Mann said that photography robs us of our memory, because all of our memories become memories of photographs.) Memory has been around as long as creatures have been around. It stores images of past circumstances and experiences to compare with the present to devise a strategy for survival. In humans, memory took on vastly more complex forms that included not only comparing past and present but also imagining a future that did not yet exist. When symbolic language came along—especially written language and art—it gave us an unprecedented ability to project the past into a future that could span countless generations. The great variety of lenses through which we now view our world has extended that ability further than ever before, giving us a view that ranges in scale from the cosmos down to the subatomic structures that lie beneath the surface of our solid-seeming world. No wonder my father was fascinated by them.

  I now have a house of my own. It is littered with cameras and microscopes and clever devices for viewing the heavens. And with them, I’ve been teaching my children and grandchildren the wonder and mystery of the world of lenses.

  7

  The Blowdown

  THESE FORESTS STRETCH from central Minnesota to the Canadian line, and then they keep on going, all the way to Hudson Bay and across toward Alaska. On a map, the million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), between Lake Superior and Canada, looks like a postage stamp against the vast field of green that is the Superior National Forest, which blends unbroken into the George Washington State Forest and the Chippewa National Forest and does not pause at any of those imaginary boundaries on its way west.