Angels of Light
Jeff Long - Angels of Light
A N G E L S O F L I G H T
ALSO BY JEFF LONG
Outlaw: The True Story of Claude Dallas
Copyright © 1987 by Jeffery B. Long
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Permissions
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
Department, Beech Tree Books, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.
10016.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Long, Jeff.
Angels of light.
I. Title.
PS3562.O4943A5 1987 813'.54 86-32155
ISBN 0-688-07251-8
Printed in the United States of America
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
BOOK DESIGN BY JAYE ZIMET
The word "book" is said to derive from boka
, or beech.
The beech tree has been the patron tree of writers since ancient times and represents the flowering of literature and knowledge.
For Diane
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
"The existence of some terribly yawning abyss in the mountains... was frequently described to us by crafty or superstitious Indians. Hence the greater our surprise upon first beholding a fit abode for angels of light."
—L
AFAYETTE
B
UNNELL
, member of the Mariposa Battalion, on discovering Yosemite Valley in 1851
ANGELS OF LIGHT
CHAPTER 1
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Like that wild boy who flew too close to the sun, there was no way the climber was not going to fall. The difference was that John's wings were melting under the moon, and that for him ascent was not escape but captivity itself. It was too soon for him to file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (3 of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:51
Jeff Long - Angels of Light admit desperation, though, and so John Coloradas worried his hands—taped, raw, and smoking with a fresh coating of gymnastic chalk—tighter and higher in the cold granite crack, grimacing because there was no pain and there should have been.
There would be time enough once (he declined "if") he and Tucker hit flat land to thaw his fingers and check for frostbite. For now he bit a lungful off the night breeze, smelling pines so far below you couldn't hear them. Moonlight seared the wide, stark acres of stone, starving his shadow, beckoning him higher with its quicksilver. He could taste the chalk powder in the back of his throat, and from much farther away, perhaps a cave or a stand of timber on the summit, the scent of moss crossed his tongue, too. And beneath all the Valley's smells he smelled the storm.
It was going to snow. But not before it rained. And so he kept twisting and fusing his hands and feet into the indifferent stone, wrestling against the tyranny that hung on him like a monkey in heat. Nasty as it was, the threat of getting wasted by a Pacific cold front didn't astonish him. In the pantheistic order of things, it made perfect, dust-to-dust sense. If he could have spared the motion, he would have shrugged.
Maybe they'd make it, maybe not. Since departing the earth five short days and long nights ago, the climb had been freighted with miscalculation and fuckups: too little food, too much water, some important pieces of equipment dropped from numb fingers, a half day spent following the wrong crack. Any big-wall climb magnifies such venial errors. A big-wall climb in winter can make them downright carnivorous, and here it was Christmas Eve. The Duracell batteries in their blaster had given up the ghost, robbing them of Talking Heads and the Himalayan climbers' standard
Pink Floyd, and John's sole wish was for an end to this combat with gravity, one way or the other. He was, as they say, running on the little red E. When you pull off a close one, climbers call it an epic, as in radical. When you don't, you're stuff, so much meat for the chop shop of mountain lore. Sometimes you can swing in the wind for a full season before they get you down, meaning the superlong telephoto lenses come out of storage for ghoulish trophy shots.
John could feel the continent drifting all around him, and he wondered again about hypothermia.
His mane of thick black Apache hair weighed fifty pounds tonight, so it seemed every time he bent his head back scanning for sign of the summit. Summits are elusive things. Ever protean, they shift around, encouraging false hope, defying prediction. Sometimes they leak farther away even as you watch. Other times they suddenly drop away under the tips of your toes. You can fight a mountain almost to your coffin, lose fingers to frostbite, your mind to despair, and finally reach the summit only to find not a damn thing there, just a slag heap without a chin. Or top out with great élan, only to discover the true summit stands across and then up a ten-hour knife ridge. The temptations in mountaineering to cheat—to quit and lie—are abundant; as always in matters of faith, it's between you and yourself. Tonight there was no such temptation.
Since sharing a palmful of M&M peanuts for supper while file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (4 of 216)19-1-2007 22:42:51
Jeff Long - Angels of Light the sun went down and the wind picked up, John and his partner, Tucker, had been stalled on this final stretch of unyielding rock. They'd taken turns failing on it, Page 4
and now they were out of time for failure. First would come sleet perhaps a few degrees above freezing, then the temperature would show some real downtown hostility.
Soaked, they would lose core heat, turn foolish, get sleepy. By morning they'd look like two dragonflies shellacked with superglue. John had begun to hate the summit, which did precisely as much to bridge the gap as loving it would have. The galling thing was that it hung almost within reach. Just a half pitch above—forty, maybe fifty feet more as the rope stretches—the summit was radiant in a spill of moonlight. All that divided John's darkness from safe, flat haven was that silvery line. And all he had to do was touch it. Then he heard the noise. And again, elbows askew, hips dry-humping in close to the rock, he cowered from the monster.
It sounded like bones loosening as a huge, immaculate sheet of ice peeled loose from the summit. Ninety feet long, thirty wide, but only a few inches deep, the glassy slab glinted once in the moonlight as it drifted away. Like a fat man swan-diving, it sucked at the sky for six, then ten heartbeats. The free-fall was downright delicate.
Then a corner touched against the girdle of rock three thousand feet lower, and the ice exploded with a roar. Crystalline shrapnel scourged the spidery forest that crowds El Cap's prow, decapitating Jeffrey pines and mangling the manzanita that each spring and summer perfume rock climbers who dot the walls, indistinguishable at a distance from the wild blackberries few tourists dare to eat. The shrapnel would have been a killing rain, but no one and nothing was dying tonight, not yet anyway. Frogs, rodents, and fox bats living and hibernating in the granite cracks were slotted deep and safe; the peregrine falcons that nest on the dawn-facing wall weren't due to arrive for another five months; and what coyote remained in the Valley were off sampling mice in quieter coves. Except for John and Tucker, then, all was well.
Ironically, they were in danger for precisely the reason they were momentarily safe, because the headwall upon which they dangled was so severely overhung. The overhang meant that most of the falling ice, particularly the slabs and torso-thick icicles, whirligigged out and away fr
om them. Unfortunately the overhang also meant they could not retreat.
"Fuck," breathed John, a brief anthem of relief. His fingers were blown, and he was tiny, a slight creature willing itself up the hard space and colors that form the vertical boundaries of Yosemite. It didn't matter that no one belongs three thousand feet above the dark soil of California on Christmas Eve in the path of a blizzard any more than it mattered that John did belong because he'd chosen to leave the ground in search of dragons or in flight from the common mud or on fire with whatever else it is that propels ascent. He had a soul, he had his reasons, and he was frightened. All that really mattered was the Valley spread below—half a mile wide, half a mile high, gashed deep into the harsh earth by not-so-ancient glaciers. The Valley had its own
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light terms.
"Watch me," he groaned. Frost poured from his mouth. Ten stories below, Tucker couldn't quite hear the command, but he heard the groan and was already watching as best he could, a vigilance more of touch than sight. He was reading the rope's vibrations with his palms, listening to John's desperation. Tucker was scared and his wide white eyes stared blindly toward the summit. It's always worse waiting for disaster than fighting it, but he was patient. He loved John, although he was still too young to realize you could admit that about another man. That he was here on this wall in these circumstances was a testament of that love. John was the only friend he had, and when "the Mosquito" for Christmas had first been mentioned, Tucker accepted the invitation because it was John, not because it was the Mosquito Wall.
Agape has its limits, however. Tucker knew that if his partner fell, all their protection, including Page 5
the belay anchor, would probably rip, dumping them into forever pronto. In a way that only a white suburban American boy can be, Tucker was presently optimistic about their situation. He was optimistic for both of them.
Fervently optimistic.
John grappled his weight a body length higher. The hardware slung from his racks tinkled musically, the sound a horse makes shaking its bridle. He stuffed his fist into the rock and cocked the flesh against whatever flakes and crystals might catch it. The hand stuck with satisfactory firmness, and he pulled up against it, releasing with his lower fist so he could jam that, too. The smoothness of the move pleased him. If only the rest of the crack would go this well. He was taking things one inch at a time, and his frown ebbed. Except for the hunger and cold and impending storm, and those two fingernails he'd torn clean away yesterday morning opening a fisherman's knot, and the sapping ache in both knee joints, this was where he loved it most, on the far jagged edge of the world. True, you took more pain up here what with the sun and the wind and the god-awful sheerness picking you bare, but then again where else was everything so obvious? It wasn't so much easier to see—especially for John with his talent for finding the labyrinth in each and every event, even this straightforward, squared-off crack in the rock—as it was just plain easier to do. Up here it was like a Clint Eastwood movie, where the metaphors are always blunt. Physical. Where what you touch—and nothing but—that's what you get.
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 Tucker 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.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
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 Tucker. 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 Tucker 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 or 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 aborigine past. "Grandson of a Chiricahua Indian shaman, half Page 6
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 forty feet short. He eased upward, locking his taped knuckles harder inside the ungiving 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 cloudbank. 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 slide 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.
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light
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 into 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 hard-core, fat-free warrior set—the 5.11 boys with their streamlined lats flaring like vestigial wings, nineteen and twenty years old with tendonitis 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. This is what he heard.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It said nothing. It sounded like nothing, which, unless you're there 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 he understood his wings had Page 7
truly been clipped. One by one, the rusting old pitons, the pins that he'd clipped into, were failing. Every time a climber hammers in 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 body weight 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.