Angels of Light Read online

  Then the wall was there.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  It erupted straight up from the hillside. "Jeez," expelled John, taken off-guard. One moment the muffled forest slope had him in a glaze, the next he was just above the cloud layer and this milky stone was rearing up, hard and cool, the color of a fawn's belly. With both hands he slapped at the stone and shook his head. It was exquisite, a monument of black-and-white speckled quartz monzonite. He'd been here before, on the zebra stripes of Tis-a-ack farther to the right, and twice across and over the

  Zigzag Cracks on the standard routes to the left. He loved this formation. Half Dome spun a different beauty than El Cap did. El Cap was all blond, sun-drenched and tawny and sprawled like a coral reef. Half Dome, though, was more like Liz. Here was the soul of a darker woman.

  The back of her rounded cowl gleamed in the sunshine, but even on the hottest August days the flat north-facing wall presented cool monochromes, contradiction and shadow. For between a Page 90

  few minutes and a few hours each day, depending on the season, the sun would angle in some rays right near the top. Otherwise all was cloistered blue tones up here, mute as an underworld.

  A half acre of snow clung to the foot of the wall. In the summer you could fill your water bottles with the melt, but as they'd suspected it was still too cold for that luxury. Good thing they'd humped their water in. Across and down the Valley, the low cloud cover paved over the forest floor, leaving John with floating islands of walls across the gap. This was how it looked, he knew, as the final glaciers retreated, a trough full of white quiet.

  "Hey, Tuck," he called, though not loudly. No need to break the peace. Tucker was nowhere to be seen along the base. Heavy as the pack was, he didn't want to off-load it yet, not when he could be finished with it at the foot of the route. That way it would be two thousand vertical feet—five, seven, eight days, however long it took—before he had to lug the bastard on his back again. A faint metallic jingling sounded farther along the wall. Running his fingertips across the stone, John walked sixty yards over to a canopy of pungent manzanita.

  Tucker was working away in a cave of dark manzanita, each leaf glassy with frozen dew. He was grinning like a mutt outside a Burger King, happier than John had ever seen him, all set to go.

  Both hands were taped with wide, white adhesive strips to protect against the jam cracks, and his old, ubiquitous pair of British climbing shoes was tied so tight he could barely walk. He had a pair of the new Spanish shoes with sticky rubber soles. But they were expensive and wore out quickly. Moreover, they had the properties of a top-secret weapon—the high-tech quick fix—and Tucker had decided to leave them in the haul bag until, and only if, he needed them.

  "You seen it?" he asked John.

  "Not yet." For weeks now there had been only one It. The Visor. Tucker was horny for the rock, nervous as a kid with his first foldout. Carefully backing up against a stone bench to unsaddle, John gave his camel groan as the weight eased off. He unbuckled the belly band and flipped off the shoulder straps, then stretched his back. A single

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light crack wormed out of the ground, too thin to wedge in so much as a fingernail. Fifteen feet up it gradually opened up to finger and then fist width.

  "This the start?" he asked. A typical Tucker selection. Desperate from ground zero.

  "Yeah."

  John trusted the boy. Tucker had been up here on lone-wolf reconnaissances a dozen times and more. Not even Kresinski could accuse him of not doing his homework.

  John started pulling gear and old taped Clorox bottles filled with water from his pack. They were starting thin, even for a climb demanding only four days. They'd talked themselves into believing four days because neither wanted to haul more weight. Four days was a lie, though.

  That would mean covering five hundred feet a day on territory that was unexplored, but that promised some interesting complexities. Still, figuring two quarts per man per day, their four gallons could be stretched to six, max seven days, by stopping down consumption. Water Discipline:

  No one liked it, everyone practiced it. Hauling it or doing without. One way or another, you suffered for your desires. At least the face was in shade, that was worth an extra day of water in itself.

  John eyeballed the crack to where it disappeared two hundred feet higher. He patiently hunted and found a crack that could be pendulumed across to, then lost that one, too, and sniffed. He was scared and excited and happy. They'd find all the answers once they got to the questions.

  That was the extra high you got in doing a new wall route, the opportunity to prod the unknown with a style all your own. No maps. No preconceptions. The one undeniable certainty was that however they got there, the Visor was waiting two thousand feet overhead. It had been waiting Page 91

  since the last Ice Age for him and Tucker. John bent to the gear, psyching up, psyching down.

  He was on the verge of adrenaline and didn't want to waste it. They were going to climb, he told himself. Keep it basic.

  Tucker had already converted his pack into a haul bag by unbuckling the shoulder straps. Now John made two padded rings on the interior with their foam pads, and on the floor of the haul bag carefully arranged items they would need least, last, or only at night, such things as an extra jumar ascender, some extra bolts, three outsize spring-loaded cams called Friends, and their ground shoes, John's pair of Nikes and

  Tucker's Reeboks, which they'd hiked up in. They were thin on water, but loaded for bear in the hardware department. Never could tell what you might need in the terra incognita. On top of the miscellaneous extras, he nestled their water bottles. One of the wall climbers' guaranteed ulcers is the water bottle that springs a leak, dooming an otherwise certain ascent to hasty retreat. Therefore John checked the tape sealing shut each of the Clorox bottles, and nested them inside the padding with a prayer.

  The next layer above the bottles held the hammock that one of them would be sleeping in and the collapsible Porta-ledge the other would use, eight pounds of food, more hardware, and waterproof clothing, and the layer above that their sleeping bags file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (108

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light and parkas. John's pack would be carried on the belayer's back and it would contain little more than a snack for lunch, a quart of water, John's big Pentax camera, a cagoule each in case of snow, and, bundled in plastic, their roll of precious toilet paper. He hefted the haul bag and grimaced. A hundred pounds, easily.

  Tucker was uncoiling their three ropes, two nine-millimeters for leading and one eleven-mil for hauling. The racks of pitons, nuts, Friends, hero loops, hooks, and carabiners were already neatly laid out beside a dozen red, green, and yellow runner-slings on the broken scree. John pulled on the legs of his harness and tied them to his waistband with a water knot, then squatted down to ensure a comfortable fit. Unless they hit a major ledge, the harness wasn't coming off until the summit. You climbed with it on, you slept with it on. It was a trick, but you even shit with it on. He pulled on his French climbing shoes with their bright-green tongue and leather panels, but didn't tie them. They were regulation gangrene-tight for "feeling" the rock with his toes, not exactly meant for leisure wear. Tucker obviously had this first pitch in mind for himself, and depending on the severity of the climbing any single pitch could consume hours. John stood up and exhaled with a whistle.

  "How you doin'?" he said.

  "I'm about ready," said Tucker. His harness was on, his shoes were tied, and the two nine-mil ropes were knotted at his belly with a figure eight. All he had to do was set the racks on across his chest. But John sensed something was stopping the
boy. At last, with a critical glance at John, Tucker turned around and pulled his sweater off.

  He was wearing a T-shirt underneath, and when he turned John's mouth almost fell open.

  Emblazoned across the front of the shirt was Katie's "This Ain't No

  *#!!**

  Wienie Roast." Indeed, it was

  Katie's T-shirt. It was tight across Tucker's barrel chest and the sleeves came almost up to his shoulders, but it fit well enough. Tucker defiantly waited for some comment. Obviously he'd lost his cherry, fallen in love, and found a broader biological purpose for his energies, all in one girl in one night. It made John miss Liz all the more.

  "Water?" John offered, careful not to bat an eye.

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  Tucker looked grateful. "Nah," he said. He scooped up one rack of gear, draped it over his head and under one arm, then placed the other rack under his opposite arm.

  Last of all he hung the orange, blue, gold, and green runner-slings over his right shoulder. The hardware crisscrossed his wide back like thongs of armor. John clapped his fist into his palm and nodded. They were on lock and load. It was time to move.

  "Okay?"

  "I'm on," said Tucker, meaning on belay.

  "You're off," said John, as in off to see the wizard. "Five, four, three, two..."

  Tucker stepped up to the wall. Right away something changed in his demeanor.

  Those thoroughbred nerves calmed. His fierce, nervous wanting became thoughtful, file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (109

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light more coherent. He scanned the rock and found something he'd probably spied on other forays up here, a tiny polished tab of stone on the outside of the incipient crack.

  Adjusting his fingertips to the hold—and that required stacking his thumb on the edge of his index finger—he gave a sample pull at it, then had second thoughts and dipped the hand into the chalk bag on his rump. His fingers emerged smoking with white gypsum powder. He found the hold again, located something even smaller for his other hand, and looked down between his outstretched arms for a foothold.

  From where John was watching and limply feeding rope ten feet away, there were no holds at all.

  But Tucker's specialty was walking on water. He wasn't the strongest climber around, even pound for pound, just the least saddled with what was and wasn't reality. Sometimes, if you watched hard enough and had the finger strength and believed, you could duplicate Tucker's imaginary holds. More often, the stone was blank. Tabula rasa. Tucker swiped the inner sole of his left shoe, particularly the inner toe, against his other calf to clean off any mud or moisture, and placed it on a minuscule wrinkle in the granite. One last ritual remained. He glanced over his shoulder at John and grinned and waggled his eyebrows.

  "Fire it up," said John. Lift-off.

  Tucker left the earth. His right foot released the ground, swiped against the opposite pants leg, and found purchase. He was in flight. Two new holds magically appeared overhead, and then another and another. Tucker exploited the illusion of a ladder and moved higher, fluid, at ease.

  Half Dome belonged to him this morning, him and his fingertips and go-for-broke imagination.

  Each move took him closer to where the crack widened. His toes smeared against—John looked—nothing, while his fingers paused, experimented, and pinched at tiny freckles of mineral. Finally with a gentle sweep of his arm, Tucker stretched up and touched the crack. He lodged the first digit of his little finger in the fissure, pulled up, found room for more fingers on his next hand, pulled up again. Forty feet up, he stuffed the toe of one shoe into the crack and stood on it as casually as he stood barefoot on the tops of door hinges for practice. He fished a batch of copperheads from his rack, sized one to the crack, undipped it, and slotted it with a jerk. Quickly, but not hastily, he clipped a carabiner through the wire loop now sticking out from the rock, turned the "beaner" gate outward, and snapped his lead rope through, effectively attaching himself to the wall so long as John held the rope or the protection didn't pull free.

  He climbed higher. The rope slid through the biner. Two hawks drafted across the Valley. The river of clouds lapped at his feet. John listened to his blood and smelled the cold coins of manzanita. The smooth plaited Perlon rippled across the white tape crisscrossing his palm. Here was a day for you. They say forgetting is an art, for unless you forget there can't be room for remembering. For that reason, as Half

  Dome enclosed them, John did much forgetting.

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light

  A week passed and still the Visor hung above them. The wall was elusive and tricked them again and again, sending them up false starts and dead ends or blinding them with too obvious answers or dangling mirror images of wrong choices in front of right choices. Sometimes there were complicated networks of fissures that radiated out from their hands in every direction, each as useful and useless as its neighbor.

  Other times there was just one crack, but the crack would dodge right and left or shift shapes. It would pinch down to the width of a razor's edge for as far as they could see, then suddenly balloon to off-width dimensions too large for a fist and too small to jam in a shoulder. At the most unlikely and frustrating spots, the crack would flower with wads of thick green and blue moss that the leader had to weed out with the pick on his hammer while hanging by one hand.

  At times there was no crack at all, and the climber was left staring at profoundly empty granite.

  On the fourth afternoon, they came upon a long, guttering, off-vertical tail of decayed sandstone that belonged in the Badlands somewhere, anywhere but here. Even Tucker, at 144 pounds minus the weight they were both losing, was almost too heavy to get them past. For seven delicate hours he coaxed holds from rock that had the substance of raw sugar granules, but he did it, opened the passage, moving them that much closer to the summit.

  Elsewhere John led a 165-foot flake so loosely connected to the wall that an old bird's nest got dislodged when he pressed his feet against the wall on a lie-back move.

  Every time he placed a nut, it fell out when he pulled on the flake. The spring-loaded cams were too large, and he was afraid a piton might pry the whole flake free and kill them both. As a result, he couldn't place any protection, which meant one slip and their connecting ropes would drag them both into the deep just as surely as if the flake detached. It was a harrowing lead, long on testicle, necessarily short on sanity, and all the while John kept imagining what would happen if the whole flake just all of a sudden popped free. A giant surfboard, he decided. And he didn't know how to surf. At the top of the flake, as a reward for his gritted teeth, he found a foot-wide crystal of transparent quartz embedded flush with the wall. He sat in his "butt bag," a triangle of nylon fabric, and enjoyed the rest of the day dangling peacefully beside that beautiful crystal while Tucker took his turn above.

  The higher they went, the more sunlight they enjoyed at the end of the day. This was both good and bad. It warmed them for the cold nights, but also it reminded them of how thirsty one quart of water per day can leave you. They got so thirsty it hurt to eat, but they knew better than not to and forced the dry gorp down. The haul bag turned Tucker's Famous Amos cookies into fine powdery crumbs and the sun melted their chocolate, but that was okay, anything sweet had gotten to be too sweet.

  Privately Tucker remained unsure if that was a curse or a blessing.

  On the fifth day they crept vertically across a sudden border onto enamel-white stone. Since the bottom they'd been handling black-and-gray monzonite speckled file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/HTML-Jeff%20Long%20-%20Angels%20of%20Light.htm (111

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  Jeff Long - Angels of Light with white. Now, suddenly, the world became a region of pure whiteness. It lifted their spirits
and John talked about the Carrara marble of Italy he'd once seen.

  They discussed what it would be like to climb the dome of St. Peter's, and that led to an anecdote about a wild Jewish-American climber who'd been shot by Israeli soldiers when he Page 94

  attempted a spontaneous ascent of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Tucker accepted the fiction as fact, and John accepted Tucker's acceptance. It was on this day that they passed within eighty feet of one of Half Dome's already established routes, the Northwest Direct. Over to the left, they could see a crack and three pitons, and knew that by penduluming across and following the relatively simple line up, they could exit from the wall next morning. A staircase made of cable and wood for tourists led off the rounded back of Half Dome, and there was a stream of clear water not two minutes from the base of the stairs. It was tempting, but they stayed true to the Visor, and soon the crack was far out of reach.

  On the sixth day the issue of retreat was raised again. John was "out on the sharp end," leading out, when he inserted his hand into a perfect, fist-size bottleneck and a startled fox bat sank its fangs into him. Without really thinking, already wired with adrenaline from the climbing, John grabbed the bat by one dry wing and smartly brained it against the wall. Then he stuffed the feather-light carcass inside his shirt and finished the pitch. An hour later, after Tucker joined him, they scrutinized the crooked little body and then, unable to decide if it had been rabid or not, tossed the bat off into the abyss. No odyssey can be complete without a monster, John reasoned. This could be his. And besides, they joked, hydrophobia wouldn't be such a hardship since they had next to no water anyhow.