The Wall (6 page)

It is a strange fact
that tourists never venture through the screen of trees between the road and El Cap. They park their cars and pull out their picnic baskets and lawn chairs and cameras and binoculars to watch from the meadow, always sticking in safe numbers to the far side of the road, never suspecting that the strip of forest separating one world from another is scarcely a quarter mile deep. The trees serve as a no-man’s-land.

On a sunlit day, the crowd might wait hours to see climbers start in like they were warriors going off to battle. They usually kept a distance, as if only the lost and disaffected dared come in here, and they weren’t completely wrong. Draped with ropes, sporting scabbed knuckles and the eyes of old-fashioned cross-and-sword
entradas,
the big-wall boys—and girls now—were either the chosen or the damned. They were poet-commandos, psychological riffraff, and rock and roll Galahads. In their boldness, they seemed to certify El Cap’s monstrosity.

Briskly now, Hugh switched on his headlamp and descended from the road. The autumn field was dry and brittle. At first, their passage went unencumbered. Shins and knees, Hugh threshed through the grass, leaving broken, dead stems. Overhead, the spotlight seemed to connect heaven and earth. The roar of the generator dwindled.

Draped with coils of rope, Lewis followed like a prisoner, a happy one, perfectly resigned to his fate. He was whistling. Rachel’s harangue had given him hope. She cared enough to be angry. He thought El Cap was working its magic once again.

Hugh wasn’t about to spoil his delusion. Rachel was angry because she was afraid. There was an irony to it. All three of them—she, Hugh, and Lewis—were creating a void, she by divorce, and he and Lewis by climbing. Now they had to survive their choices.

They came to the edge of the trees, and Hugh hesitated for an instant, long enough to glance up at the treetops forming a ragged blackness against the stars, and then back at the road and the ethereal figures manning the light. There was safe harbor among them, it was not too late.

“Lost already?” Lewis said.

“Just letting you catch your breath, dad.”

Hugh entered the forest. Shadows jumped ahead of his light. He clambered up a junk heap of talus that marked the beginning of the shatter zone. In this region girdling the base, rock from the summit landed in great explosions that smashed trees and mowed down the manzanita scrub.

He did not mean to revisit the accident site, but suddenly they were upon it. Bright orange tape marked the slab where she had landed. Trees were flagged to help the SAR people locate the site. All that remained of her was dried blood.

The place was empty. Not just empty of the body and the searchers and the crime-scene rangers with their cameras and vials and Baggies. It was empty of that presence he’d felt yesterday. Empty.

Lewis crossed himself. Hugh remembered receiving the baptism and first-communion announcements for the Cole daughters, and the Christmas photos and birthday thank-you cards that had always delighted Annie, but also saddened her. They’d never managed to get pregnant, but talked about adoption, and then it was too late. In her dementia, she’d made a baby out of towels and would hold it for hours.

The trees were feverish looking, cold and sweaty with glassed-over bark. The Spanish moss hung in strands. Except for the cold, they might have been in some dank bayou.

“What are we doing here?” said Lewis.

“I was trying to avoid it.”

“Yeah?”

“Believe me, I didn’t need to see this again.”

“You’re right. It’s not healthy, Hugh.”

Did Lewis think he had a morbid fixation? That he was joining one missing woman with another? “It has nothing to do with Annie,” Hugh told him. “I got turned around in the woods.”

They peered up through the opening in the trees, and that tube of white light was glued to the wall overhead. It had tricked the day birds into flight. Hugh could see starlings flitting in and out of the beam. From this angle, the body on the rope was hidden from view, and he was thankful for that. Days from now, by the time they reached that height on Anasazi and looked across, Augustine would have cleared El Cap of its prey.

Lewis said, “Let’s keep on truckin’,
compañero
.”

Hugh’s pack sat where he’d propped it. He’d told the searchers to slake their thirst with his water, and empty plastic jugs stood in a neat line. His water offering to the girl was still full, though. They’d guessed its significance. It sat untouched by the head of the slab.

Hugh and Lewis divided the remaining five gallons and continued up the slope. Their cache wasn’t far now. Things were almost familiar again.

Climbers’ garbage began to surface in Hugh’s light. A piece of black metal glinted in the pine needles. Lewis rooted it free with his toe, a rusted, pitted piton from the iron age, back before chrome-moly steel came into use. Empty, flattened cans glittered like tin and aluminum leaves. There was a hat, and a paper bag with human feces, and a mangled Pentax camera.

The pilgrims had been busy. Bits and pieces of sling hung in the limbs, red and green and peppermint striped. He spied an inexplicable lone ski pole, then suddenly, with a billowing huff, the torn remains of a parachute shroud. All in all, it spelled a crazy surge of events, whole generations of activity that he had missed out on since their last visit.

Very suddenly, Hugh’s light splashed back into his eyes, blinding him.

El Cap sprang straight from the earth.

He slapped his palms on the hard, slippery flank with something like joy. Black mica crystals glittered in the white granite. Its touch stabilized him.

He stepped away and craned back with his headlamp. His light faded to darkness about fifty feet up. There at the fifty-foot mark, by government decree, Yosemite’s walls officially became wilderness.

Lewis came up from the trees behind him. In the beam of his light, Hugh cast a huge shadow. They were in the land of giants now. But as Lewis approached, the shadow quickly shrank to mortal size.

“Oh, yeah,” said Lewis. He set down the water jugs and slapped the source, just as Hugh had, grinning. “Now tell me, heathen, dare I eat a peach?”

More ritual. “Should I roll my trousers?” Hugh dutifully supplied. Sometimes they would keep reciting right to the ropes.

Everything began here. They hurried along the stone root, following the trace of a path worn by countless climbers.

Their cache of gear was waiting where they’d left it, two waist-high haul bags carefully—scientifically, one might say—packed. The bags contained their life-support system for the vertical world. They hadn’t bothered with any elaborate camouflage to conceal the bags. Thefts happened, but so did vigilante justice. Anyone with brains knew better than to pilfer a fellow climber’s haul bags. But also, anyone with brains knew better than to leave anything of real value—like good ropes and expensive hardware—in a haul bag overnight.

Lewis checked the sailor’s knots he’d used to tie the haul bags shut. It was not a complicated knot, resembling a regular square knot except for the lay of the working end. For centuries sailors had used it in lieu of a lock, not as a security but as a seal. If a thief had tampered with the knot, you could usually tell at a glance.

“I don’t think he got us,” he said, meaning Joshua. “Too busy stealing a bride, the sick bastard.”

Dawn was still more than an hour away. Even when it came, direct light would take another two hours to reach the floor and heat the stone. But they acted as if the day were already slipping away. With little talk, they went to work.

They opened the haul bags and pulled out two old “beater” ropes that were past their prime, but were still good for hauling and fixing. These, plus their two new coils, would give them six hundred feet of reach the first day, and still let them descend to sleep on the ground a final night. Not that they would be covering six hundred feet today. The bottom section was going to be consuming. And the middle section, too. And the headwall. Seven days, easily.

While Lewis carted the rope to where their climb actually began, Hugh started the elaborate process of taping up. You could go through a lot of skin on a big wall. Lewis would be using cowhide work gloves with the fingers cut off. But Hugh, the better free climber of the two of them, and the one who would be handling the bulk of the leading, needed more freedom than gloves would allow.

First he painted a sticky tincture onto the bottom knuckles and the web of his hand. Then he taped each individual knuckle in special configurations to distribute the stress on each joint, and at the same time protect the flesh. Finally he joined the interlaced finger strips under broad bindings of tape across the back of his hands and palms. The finished product looked like a boxer’s fist, and, with some extra patching of more tape, would last for days. At the end of the climb, he would need a knife to cut away the shell of tape.

Hugh flexed his fingers. He slugged his fists into his palms, getting the tape job snug and stretched. The eastern sky was losing stars. Soon the black would ease to cobalt and then the pastels would mount. For now they continued using their headlamps.

Hugh pulled on his seat harness, and fanned the rack of gear apart to choose the few pieces he’d need on the first pitch, or rope length. Lewis laid out his stirrups and jumars for ascending the rope, and tied his shoes.

“I’m ready,” he announced. His voice was eager and antsy and scared. He wanted to get under way, and his tone pressed at Hugh.

“You can have the first lead then,” Hugh said.

Lewis snorted. “What, and steal your precious legacy?” The first pitch was beyond his abilities and they both knew it.

“Don’t be shy,” Hugh baited him. “Give it a shot. Miracles happen. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw a gorilla get up off his knuckles and walk? It was an amazing sight. Didn’t last long, of course. But what a gallant sight.”

“Yeah, you,” said Lewis, “you and the other stick people.”

Even forty years ago, when he wasn’t so strapped with gym muscle, Lewis had been too big for what he called the dainty moves. His veins would bulge as he grappled holds that thinner climbers—stick or bone people, or Biafrans, or Twiggies, all in his lexicon—danced up on with ease. He was like a circus strongman among high-wire acrobats. His specialties were brute hand-and-fist cracks, fearless hook moves, and the hauling of massive amounts of baggage from the depths.

“Still touchy, are we?” said Hugh.

“Have you seen them lately? Bulimic little twists, nothing but toothpicks for legs. Cut me off at the waist, I could climb what they do.”

“You’re saying I’m half the man you are?”

“Oh, not you, Glass. You’ve always been a kingly specimen. Except you have no calves. Or thighs.”

They bantered some more while they sorted and compacted what they had spread on the ground. There was a method to their collecting, though it required no discussion, not after so many climbs together. Every object had its exact place, small to large, front to back, and each man had it memorized.

Hugh had grown so used to being alone that companionship should not have come so easily. But as he and Lewis handled the ropes and slings and hardware, he realized he was still known by at least one person in the world. It made him glad to have turned away Rachel.

“What do you think, lad?” said Lewis, closing up the haul bags with his sailor’s knot. “Will we be better men after the climb?” It was always Lewis who asked, always the same words. Then Hugh was meant to reply aye, and quote Shakespeare’s Harry about once more unto the breach.

“We always were,” Hugh answered him quietly, “after every climb. You just forget.”

A wound opened in the night, a streak of purple low along the east. They both noticed it, and hurried. Hugh took off his approach shoes and trod in his socks up the slope, carrying his climbing slippers to keep dirt off the new sticky-rubber soles.

Lewis produced a scratched orange helmet. It surprised Hugh, because Lewis had managed to keep it hidden until the last minute, and because it was next to worthless on this route. The wall angled out so much that most debris would be falling well away from them, into the trees.

Lewis strapped it on with a sheepish look. “I promised Rachel,” he said.

Hugh knew it was Lewis’s promise to himself, though, the last of an illusion of love. He remembered whispering to pictures of Annie at night, whispering to the emptiness of his house in Dhahran, until finally, firmly, he had managed to put her away from him. Out with the pictures, out with her lemon marmalade and Nutella, out with her Joan Armatrading and Mozart tapes. He’d even bought new sheets for the bed. A clean sweep. A new beginning.

Again Hugh was glad to have chosen against Rachel last night. She was right in what she’d finally said. Through Hugh’s loss, maybe Lewis could learn how to live without her. Just now, in the darkness before dawn, that seemed worth more to Hugh than any beauty or excitement she could have brought into his life.

The purple sliver ran red. Hugh turned off his headlamp. The trees were gray. The stone was gray. His partner was gray. But over two-thirds of a mile above them, the summit reaches flushed the faintest pink.

Hugh pulled on his shoes and laced them tight. Lewis had already uncoiled one rope into a loose pile, and Hugh tied into one end.