Pecked to death by ducks (43 page)

The wall, it seemed, was a kind of psychological vacuum. I could feel the heat of the sun on my back, the cold of the glacier on my chest, and I began paddling in, fast, dodging the icebergs. Too close: I felt helpless, as if I could not stop. I paddled closer. A chunk of ice roughly the size of a baseball landed on the eighteen-wheeler that had fallen earlier. There was a sharp crack, like a rifle fired at close range, and there was no delay between sound and event. I was moving very fast, but that rifle crack was like a slap in the face—one of those "thanks, I needed that" deals—and I dipped the paddle, holding it hard on my right side to swivel around an iceberg and race back to a sane distance.

At about a half mile I stopped and turned to face the ice again. It sounded as if electricity were crackling on all sides of me. My hands were shaking, and my heart was thudding out of all proportion to the effort expended. All else was silence. Nothing was falling from the wall. It stood blue-green in the shadows, blinding white in the sun. "C'mon," it seemed to be saying, "you wanna try me, c'mon in."

An interior voice, smart and civilized, suggested to me that playing chicken with a glacier is a losing game and no great measure of intelligence to boot. I saw Dix making his way down the talus slope to the beached kayak. We'd had enough. Enough stupidity. I felt both exhilarated and mildly ashamed.

That night we camped at Wolf Point, several miles south of Mc-Bride Glacier. Occasionally, the ice called out to us: a faint booming that rumbled down the wall of rock known as White Thunder

Ridge. The sky was clear, as it had been in Juneau and at Muir Glacier. Once again pale green ghostly lights pulsed across a vast expanse of sky. Somewhere, far off in the thickets below the high point where we were camped, wolves yipped and howled in the darkness. I lay on my back, in my sleeping bag, watching Eskimo TV on the big screen. Traces of red were dancing at the leading edge of the green curtains that swept across the sky. The wolves did not sound much different from the dogs of Juneau.

There was, I recalled then, something wild, wolflike, in the howling of those dogs that one glittering night in Juneau; something that had nothing to do with millennia of domesticity. The same odd, uncivilized impulse, I thought—in my exhilaration and shame—exists in human beings as well: the dumbly atavistic urge to put the body at risk in the face of the simply awesome, to connect with it somehow. It is the way people bark at the northern lights.

below Tepee Glacier to the east, and to the west, the Lower Saddle, the shoulder of land that joins Grand Teton and Middle Teton. Andy Carson, our guide and the director of Jackson Hole Mountain Guides, was up already, crouched out of the wind in the shelter of an overhang, where he was firing up the stove.

We drank numerous cups of hot coffee, ate several bowls of lumpy oatmeal—carbo-loading for a climb we expected to take a minimum of thirteen hours—then checked over the ropes, carabi-ners, and harnesses, as well as the gear and food in our summit packs. The wind suddenly died—no doubt due to Father Michael's special connections—and we walked out into the high frozen night.

Actually, our mode of locomotion was more like boulder-hopping than climbing. The slope above us rose to the saddle on a carpet of boulders that ranged in size from beachball to Toyota to two-family duplex. The waning moon was three-quarters full overhead, and most of the rocks rolling underfoot were white or light-colored. We didn't actually need our headlamps. There was something hallucinatory about the moonscape that rose and fell on all sides, something pristine—pure—about the glaciers draped from the summits of half a dozen visible peaks. Spectral spires flanked some of these summits, and it was possible to see all that soaring rock as rampart and remnant of an ancient and alien culture. The night's wind had swept the sky clear of clouds so that bright stars glittered insanely overhead, and the moon's luminescence fell on the glaciers in a way that set them aglow. Summit winds, blowing high above, rumbled down the couloirs in thrumming bass tones, as if played softly on a cathedral organ.

The climb promised to be, as a perceptive critic recently told me, a walk directly into the rarefied realm of mindless adventure, to the heights of self-indulgence, to the summit of athleticism without value. I was guilty as charged, and I had a priest with me to boot.

The Teton Range rises abruptly out of the flat floor of the Snake River Valley, otherwise known as Jackson Hole. These young mountains are a good deal more spectacular than most because they erupt out of the earth in full-blown splendor, without the

niggling bother of surrounding foothills. You can see them from good roads in Wyoming, from the north-south interstate in Idaho, from highways in Montana.

Father Michael, who grew up in Butte, Montana, and Lander, Wyoming, had seen and been fascinated by the Tetons since childhood. (In point of fact most American rock climbers eventually make a pilgrimage to the Teton Range: The rock is excellent, the snow and ice moderate. The range is wonderfully accessible, and, given good weather, most properly prepared climbers can leave from the trailhead and reach their chosen summit in two days.)

Although Michael had little experience in technical climbing— and there is no way up any one of the Grand's twenty or so routes without running into some technical pitches—he wanted to climb the mountain. Other peaks were safe: It was only the Grand that beckoned him.

Father Michael had been a runner, but a couple of years ago he laid off the sport, and in the way these things happen, a bout of respiratory illness promptly put him in the hospital for several weeks. "So I hadn't run in a long time," Michael told me, "and I was feeling flabby and ineffectual and thought that if I didn't climb the Grand this year, I might never do it." Michael was in his mid-thirties, a dangerous time to let dreams die.

I agreed to come along on the climb—to horn in on my neighbor's lifelong dream—because of a conversation I had recently with a magazine editor in New York who wanted me to do some "significant" reportage. He said, "Those other things you do, climbing and trekking and all, aren't they really just mindless adventures, self-indulgence? What's the value in them?"

"They pay me," I said.

But it wasn't a very good answer, and the thought of climbing the Grand with Father Michael, a man with a degree in philosophy and a master's in divinity, was attractive. Yessir, I'd get to the bottom of this business about values.

Moving up the Talus above the Lower Saddle, just below the spot where the climbing would get technical, there was a loud crack followed by the thunder of a large rockfall. We crouched under a ledge, though the rocks were clattering down a couloir several

hundred yards to our left. Only the day before, a man had been killed in a rock slide on nearby Mount Moran. "He was hit with several refrigerator-sized boulders," a climbing ranger told me. I think we were all a little rattled by the size of this rockfall. That short burst of terror and the perceived proximity of death combined to produce a positively spectacular sunrise.

A little farther on we passed a well-equipped couple on their way down the mountain ... at eight in the morning; clearly, they had been forced to bivouac. They were climbing several yards apart, in silence, as if they had been arguing.

"Nice morning for a walk," I said.

"Humph," the man replied.

"Gaa," the woman said.

Later, Andy Carson guessed the couple had probably started their ascent at dawn the previous day, rather than 4:00 a.m., as we had. "It's very common to run out of light on the Grand," he said. "I mean, you can just re-create the conversation. They're shivering up there on some ledge, and he says, 'Whose idea was this?' 'It was your damn idea. You wanted to come.' And by now they're half-frozen and the wind's blowing and maybe they've got sleet and the conversation has degenerated into 'I hate you, I hate you, get off my ledge.' " Nothing like a little physical adversity to test the strength of a relationship.

We roped up and did a few technical pitches with Andy leading on good hard rock with plenty of handholds and footholds. The climbing was nothing much more difficult than 5.5—we had spent the previous day warming up on 5.6s and 5.7s—but there were several pitches, one following the other, so that looking back, one felt a pleasant sense of accomplishment. It was a good workout. In places, running water had formed a thin veil of ice over the most obvious holds so that one had to stretch a bit to overextend and muscle the body up a few of the more treacherous sections. I had never quite realized that my climbing style, at such times, is fueled by foul and continuous curses in those places where the fun becomes most intense. It's a good habit to think about with a long, hard fall below you and a priest holding your lifeline above.

We topped out on the second-highest point in the Tetons, a

spire that stands guard to the west of the Grand, a place called the Enclosure. Arranged in a perfect circle at the highest point on the Enclosure were several thin, three-foot-high slabs of rock that stuck up out of the ground, as if reaching for the sky. It was a distinctly man-made arrangement. "The first white men on the Grand found this up here," Andy Carson said. "The Indians did it, but no one knows why or when. There's no history."

I looked down toward the dizzy splendor of Lake Solitude, more than four thousand feet below. There was a vertiginous sense of being large and small all at the same instant. It was that tipsy, timeless feeling of awe a man might translate into a dozen different philosophical constructs. Clearly, the Enclosure was not a blind: There was no game at the summit. This place was a vision quest site, a place where men had come to listen and learn from the spirits. You could hear them up there, calling in the howl of the wind; you could see them in the moving shapes of the clouds. I thought a bit about those damn Indians and their mindless athleticism. Did they draw lessons out of danger, adversity, and personal courage, out of a rockfall sunrise or a bad bivouac? Sure they did.

We reached the summit of the Grand several hours later, and Father Michael said a short prayer, thanking God for delivering us safely to the summit and asking Him to provide us with a safe descent. He asked the Lord to bless those whose physical handicaps prevented them from climbing this mountain, and went on to ask a blessing for those who—for whatever reason—would never climb the Grand. He asked the Lord to let those people experience what he, Father Michael, was feeling in his heart at that moment.

On our descent, we had a hundred-foot rappel with what looked like about two thousand feet of exposure below us. Andy checked the anchor and belayed Father Michael on a second rope. My neighbor—who had rappelled precisely twice in his life —backed up over the lip of the wall without hesitation, putting his faith in the anchor and Andy and the Almighty. Probably not in that order.

"You know," Andy said when Michael was out of earshot, "when I first saw him, I thought he might not make the summit. He didn't seem like a climber, and he wasn't in the best shape at all. But he's got some talent on the rock, and he's determined."

"You see the way he took that rappel?" I asked. "I mean, for a man of God, the guy's got a pair of brass ones."

"And on the summit," Andy said, "that prayer was ... I don't know, I'm not very religious, but it was . . ."

"It was not without value," I said.

"Yeah," Andy said. He looked up toward the summit of the Grand. "It was a good prayer."

3 77 A AUTHOR S NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

rejected by every editor on earth, without exception. Friends and lovers hate it. Casual acquaintances pick fights over it. The story is universally loathed. Its inclusion here is an example of an author exercising ego rather than judgment. The reader is advised to skip right over this one.

"Lechuguilla" is an expanded version of a story that appeared in National Geographic.

"Baja by Kayak" is previously unpublished, a story written for this book.

The peculiar amusement institution detailed in the story "Fly Away" is now defunct.

"Antarctic Passages" appeared in Travel Holiday.

"Rope Tricks" appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, as did "Marquesas Magic."

The story "Chiloe: An Island Out of Time" appeared in Islands Magazine.

"Taquile" appeared in The Discovery Channel Magazine.

li Sanghyang in Bali" appeared" in GEO, in Germany, and has never before been published in the United States.

Most of the other stories, including the piece on Kuwait, appeared in Outside magazine and were assigned by John Rasmus or Mark Bryant, both good friends, both great editors.

And once again, thanks to Barbara Lowenstein: the only agent I've ever had or ever needed.

Thanks also to David Rosenthal, who knows that good things are worth waiting for.

Beverly Sandberg is responsible for keeping my office in order. I'm no help at all. Thanks, Bev.

Gloria Thiede has typed up transcripts for most of my interviews. As far as I know, she seldom makes fun of me behind my back. Thanks, Gloria.

-\

V I X T A G L l> 11 P A 11 T U It E S

The Emperor's Last Island by Julia Blackburn

The story of the deposed emperor Napoleon holding court amid the shabbiness and paranoia of an isiand prison is interwoven with a history of St. Helena itself and with a personal account of the author's own voyage in search of Napoleon's ghost.

"Dazzling...a compelling meditation on Napoleon's exile...Blackburn has brought her startlingly imaginative sensitivity to bear on a vanished time."

— The New York Times Book Review History/Travel/0-679-73937-8

Among the Thugs by Bill Buford

"An unflinching look into the festering soul of England...a great read."

—David Byrne

From a vandalous ride on the English railway to full-blown riots in Turin and Sardinia, the editor of the prestigious literary journal Granta gives us a terrifying record of his passage through an alternate society: that of England's soccer thugs.