Pecked to death by ducks (34 page)

As it happened, Nick's bladder was the least of our problems. The fact was, neither of us should have been on the rope. We were out of shape, I was using borrowed gear, and Nick's gear

had been damaged during his last outing. We made some repairs on it at Camp Four using channel lock pliers and an ax head. These facts began eating away at our confidence two hours into the climb.

We were climbing fast—hadn't paced ourselves well—and soon we were doing thirty steps at a crack rather than forty. Then we were doing twenty steps, fifteen, ten. Halfway up the rope, a quarter of a mile above the surface of the valley floor, a stiff wind sprang up. It sounded like every documentary you've ever seen about Antarctica up there. We were taking long, disconcerting air rides, swaying one hundred feet one way, then one hundred the other. It was unpleasantly difficult to climb the swinging rope. Worse, these jolly little swings seemed to emphasize the uncomfortable fact that we had several more hours until the summit. The phrase "lives hanging by a thread" kept ringing through my mind. It was like some idiot TV jingle you can't shake: How do you spell relief, lives hanging by a thread, what am I doing here?

On the rope sometimes, impossibly, the wind seemed to come directly off the cliff face itself. Then we'd take air rides of sixty or seventy feet directly away from the rock out into the indifferent sky. Since I had started on the scree facing out, toward the valley, and since the rope didn't twist at all, I couldn't see the rock. It was possible, however, on these swings into space, that the gust-ing wind would suddenly stop and that I'd come crashing into the cliff wall like some ridiculous comic-strip character trying to emulate Tarzan: splat, then the slow slide down the rock. Consequently, I stopped climbing at these points and turned to face the wall. This was accomplished by a silly swimming sort of motion.

"God, this is fun," I told Nick. I like to think I'm a master of ironic understatement.

At this point there was a snap from above, from Nick's hastily repaired gear, and a jolting vibration ran down the rope. "I'm in trouble," he said.

I had a vision of Nick falling past me—flash certain death— then another of him just sliding twenty feet down the rope and landing on my head. Certain death or a broken neck. It felt as if something inside my belly wanted to get out through the navel;

something in there was punching at me, and I began frantically climbing the twenty feet to Nick.

It was his chest roller. Thankfully, the chest roller is not extremely important: It is a matter of comfort rather than safety. Nick would have to climb using hands to hold him into the rope. If he let go, however, he would fall over backward and end up hanging by his feet, upside down, unable to climb. He would become a tourist attraction: the body hanging from the rope on El Cap.

'Tm getting a real bad attitude about this," Nick said.

I felt I should say something to buck him up. Get his mind off our problems. "Gee, what a view! Look at that. Wow. Pretty soon we're going to see the sunset of our lives. ..."

And then I stopped talking because we didn't want to see the sunset at all. It was a glorious mid-October day, 70 degrees or so, but when the sun went down, the temperature would drop to about 30 degrees. We were wearing T-shirts and carrying light windbreakers. A man who didn't reach the summit by nightfall could easily freeze to death. We'd be a pair of popsicles on a rope.

We set about racing the sun, wearing ourselves stupid with fatigue. Nearly a dozen cavers had already climbed the rope, and the slowest of them had taken six hours. We hit the summit at twilight, seven hours after we started—the new record, and one that lives in infamy.

It really doesn't seem fair, but there is a pretty tricky move to be made in order to climb over the lip onto the safety of horizontal rock. The rope is anchored in several places far back from the lip. To keep it from abrading on the rough granite of the lip itself, the SRT group had fashioned a roller at the very curve of the cliff. The rope passed over a large soft plastic wheel set in a metal frame, and the whole affair rested at the very edge of El Cap.

The problem has to do with the weight of the rope. At a little less than six pounds per hundred feet, the rope below weighed about 150 pounds. Wind drag along its half-mile length probably doubled that figure. In order to reach the summit, you had to lift your upper body over the lip, do a push-up capable of lifting

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 294

three hundred pounds to get the rope-holding devices over the roller, and walk forward two feet, on your hands. The better solution is simply to change ropes. A short rope hangs next to a long one, and with a good deal of caution, you can snap the rope-holding devices off one rope and onto another, then cruise up over the lip.

Except that on the scree slope below I had fastened myself into the long rope with extra care. Extra knots. Extra carabiners. It was only smart. Now, I found that I couldn't change ropes. The only way to move from one rope to another—given the idiot rig I'd tied—was to take off my seat harness. Which was the most essential safety device I wore. To make matters more irritating, it had gotten dark. And cold.

Now, at times like this, a fellow ought to be able to say, "Okay, time out, I quit." Unfortunately, you can't quit without getting in trouble with the law: the laws of physics, the law of gravity. A caver named Jim Youmans, a high-rise contractor from Atlanta, had been camping on the summit, watching the rope, and he hooked himself into a short rope, sat at the lip, and tried to help. We were using headlamps in the darkness, trying out different ideas. About an hour later I was still hanging there, shivering, half on one rope, half on another, with all our failed efforts at rescue—a confusing maze of new knots and ropes— bulging at the front of my seat harness.

And I thought, not for the first time, Why am I doing this?

After two hours of infuriating and terrifying nonsense involving spare ropes and carabiners, Youmans came up with an idea. I'd hook into the short rope with my left foot and put my right into a loop of rope Youmans had made and hung just under the roller. I should, Youmans felt, be able to lift three hundred pounds with my legs. I had some mental reservations about this after seven hours of climbing. "Give me a chance to rest before I try," I said.

Two British climbers, Rob and Brian, had walked up the back way and were sitting close to the lip, discussing rescue techniques. "This is dead serious," one of them said.

"Dead is the operative word," the other replied.

I kind of wanted to get over the lip and physically discuss matters with them. Turning fear and fatigue into bright, hot anger did the trick. I came surging up over the roller in a burst of sheer fury that lasted perhaps five seconds. Then I lay there, flopped over on my back with the stars whirling overhead. A small crowd had gathered around me, and no one spoke at all. It was a time for some somber reflection on the meaning of life. That sort of thing. I was thinking about perceived mortality and the last time I had been to church, when someone in the crowd passed wind in the silence. Rob held a hand to his ear. "Ah," he said, "the shouting of distant Frenchmen," and we all laughed at that. There were tears in my eyes, I was laughing so hard and for so little reason.

Getting back on the rope the next day was like getting back on the horse that threw you. It had to be done. If I didn't rappel off El Cap, I felt I might never do any more rope work ever. "What a good idea," a small silent voice suggested.

Still, the alternative was to walk eight miles down to camp. And rappelling, after all, is the entire point of this kind of climbing. It's supposed to be fun. There's no effort involved: Just sit in the seat harness and slide down the rope. It's so much fun that every other recruitment ad you see for the armed forces has guys sliding down ropes. We'll make a man out of you, boy. Teach you to slide down ropes.

On the other hand, if you've recently spent over two hours trying to get over the lip of a cliff with a half-mile drop below you, the idea of voluntarily hooking your life onto a thread loses some of its appeal. Making the first move—backing over the lip of the cliff—becomes an ordeal of indecision.

I put on my seat harness and clipped my rappel bar into it. An ordinary SRT rappel rack is a narrow horseshoe-shaped affair. Steel bars slide back and forth on the horseshoe frame. The rope is threaded over one bar and under the next. Your rate of descent is controlled by sliding the bars. Separate the bars and pick up some speed. Close them to create more friction and slow down.

The rack I would have to use was almost two feet long and had

been specially designed for the descent of Mount Thor. It was huge, and it was called a Thor rack. I geared up, then walked around for a full four hours. I was working up my nerve and contemplating both the nature of fear and the iron laws of physics when a female trekker who had hiked up the back way made some remarks of a Freudian nature concerning the Thor rack dangling from my belt.

And I thought, No, you're wrong. That's not why I do it. I spent nine and a half hours on the rope yesterday thinking about it, and there's more to it than that. I thought, I hate this fear and I love this fear, and I'm tired of apologizing to myself or anyone else for the impulse.

And then there I was, hooking into the short rope at the lip. I backed out into space, thinking: If I fell here, I'd have nearly fifteen seconds to think about it, before . . .

But there was work to do. I had to switch from the short rope to the long one. And then I was sliding slowly down the rope, feeling like a scuba diver descending against a coral wall. The granite face of the cliff glittered pink in the sunlight. There was a sensation of dream flight. The valley floor seemed somehow brighter, harder-edged, and the colors vibrated as in a vision. There was something otherworldly and wondrous and innately spiritual about the experience. There are folks who can tune in the sensation sitting cross-legged on a pillow in an empty room, or so they say. Others of us need a little harder bump. That is what I thought sliding down the rope.

In thirty minutes, I knew, I'd be down on the valley floor. And when people asked me about El Cap, I'd tell them it was a thing that had to be done, this second-longest rappel in the history of mankind. "Did it 'cause it's there," I'd tell folks. Make it all tnuy macho. That's another thing you have to do. Otherwise you sound like an evangelical sap.

seven feet of bright green parachute material was laid out behind me, and I was connected to the preposterous device by a demented proliferation of ropes. The paraglider, in flight, looked rather like a larger version of a standard rectangular parachute. It was nothing more than my old red cape writ large; the ancient fancy expressed, once again, as laundry.

Or so I thought, standing atop a steeply sloping hill twenty-five hundred feet above the Salmon River about eighteen miles south of the town of Salmon, Idaho. The wind was blowing uphill, coming in irregular cycles, sometimes blowing ten miles an hour, sometimes hissing down to a stage whisper of two or three miles an hour. Just above me, the hill rose to a summit ringed by a fifteen-foot-high brim of rim rock. Water flowing down into the Salmon took its name from this formation: Hat Creek.

"This," it occurred to me standing below the brim, "is about fifteen hundred more vertical feet worth of adventure than I currently crave."

Launch, for instance, is always an opportunity for disaster. The pilot grabs the ropes in a prescribed manner, runs forward, throws his hands high over his head, and, if God is merciful, the glider inflates— floopf. A brief downhill run and the pilot feels the earth dropping away under him. He is flying. Unless, of course, he crashes and burns.

Mark Chirico, my instructor, was a tough, compact man who owned and operated a paragliding school—Ecole Parapente An-necy—in France. The sport, in Mark's opinion, has some exciting possibilities. In contrast to hang gliding, paragliding is relatively easy to learn. A complete novice, trained by experts, can expect his or her first flight on the first or second day of training. The gliders can be stuffed into a day pack and weigh less than fifteen pounds.

Paragliding is booming in Europe. Mark believes that America is in for a similar boom and has established an American school, Parapente USA, out of Seattle. Andy Long, a hang glider with over a thousand hours in the air, has been working with Mark for several months. In general, Andy would launch from some steep hillside, land, pack up his glider, and flip on his radio transmitter. Mark, at the launch site, would prepare a student, check

the harness, the rigging, the radio receiver inside the student's helmet, and then—as Mark put it—he would "hurl' the unfortunate student "off the mountain."

'Three, two one, GO, run, run runrunrun," Mark's voice commanded inside the helmet. And then you'd fall down and go scraping through the sagebrush and bouncing off rocks.

Since the launch site is not a cliff, but a steeply sloping hillside, a blown launch results not in instant death but merely excruciating scrapes and bruises, the kind of injuries skateboarders call "a road rash." "Pick up that wreckage," Mark would say, "and get ready for another try." And you'd do it, muttering and cursing and bleeding out of spite.

Frankly, the landing zone had not been entirely kind to me either. I had, on my five previous flights, been so concerned with my launch that I had failed to consider the vicissitudes of touchdown. I had suffered, to date, four crash landings out of five flights. There were half a dozen of us learning the art of paraglid-ing, and we videotaped several launches and landings for instructional purposes.

In the evening, after the flights, we'd watch videotapes of the day. A particular favorite was a calamitous landing by a woman who became known as Crash 'N Splash. The video showed her screaming down to the ground and failing completely to engage the brakes, a pair of ropes, one held in each hand, that pull down the back edge of the chute and stall the glider. In a proper landing the pilot turns into the wind and lifts the ropes, disengaging the brakes to gain speed. At about six feet the ropes are pulled down past the knees, the glider stalls, and the pilot steps to the ground as from a stair step.