by Don George
Connections:
A Moment at Notre-Dame
After I became Travel Editor at the Examiner, my first trip was a pilgrimage to Paris. That was a glorious re-immersion in and celebration of poignant places from my past, and the most poignant of all was Notre-Dame Cathedral. Notre-Dame is one of the planet’s touchstone places for me, and this essay was, in a sense, an attempt to stop time: to focus on a remembered moment in a place, and to dive archaeologically into the imaginative and emotional layers of that moment. I was intensely surprised and stirred by the layers that excavation revealed.
NOTRE-DAME FROM THE OUTSIDE IS MAGNIFICENT, monumental, solidly of the earth and yet soaringly not. But for all its monumental permanence, its context is clearly the present: Visitors pose, focus, click; portable stalls sell sandwiches and postcards; tourist groups shuffle by in ragtag formation.
Walk through those massive, humbling doors, though, and suddenly you breathe the air of antiquity. Let your mind and eyes adjust to the inner light, and you begin to realize that there is much more to Paris than the life of its streets, and a small sense of its magnificent and moving past comes back to you.
When I entered Notre-Dame on my most recent trip, I was overwhelmed by the solid, soaring arches and columns I had forgotten, by the depth and texture of the stained-glass windows with their luminous blues and reds and greens. I thought of how many people had worked to build this magnificence, and of how many people since then had stood, perhaps on the very same stones as I, and marveled at it. I thought of all the faith and hope and sacrifice it manifests.
I walked through the fervent space, awed by the art and the hush that seemed to resonate with the whispers of centuries, and just when I was beginning to feel too small and insignificant and was getting ready to leave, I saw a simple sign over a tiny stone basin of water, on a column near the doors.
The sign said, “In the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit” in seven languages, with pictures that showed a hand dipping into the water, then touching a forehead.
I touched my hand to the cool, still water, then brought it to my head, and as I did so, chills ran through my body and tears streamed into my eyes.
Somehow that simple act had forged a palpable contact with ages past, had put everything into startling focus: the ceaseless flow of pilgrims to this special place, the ceaseless procession of hands to water and fingers to forehead, all sharing this basin, this gesture.
I felt a new sense of the history that flows with us and around us and beyond us all—of the plodding, tireless path of humankind and of the sluggish, often violent spread of Christianity through Europe and the rest of the world—and a new sense of the flow of my own history, too: my Protestant upbringing, a pastor whose notions of Christian love have had a deep and abiding influence on my life, the old and still inconceivable idea of God.
For a few moments I lost all sense of place and time—then a door opened and a tourist group entered, looking up and around in wonder, and I walked into the world of sunlight and spire again.
I stopped, blinked at the sandwich stalls and postcard vendors, then turned back toward that stony symmetry and thought: Sometimes you feel so small and insignificant in the crush of history that you lose all sense of purpose and self. Then something will happen to make you realize that every act and every encounter has its own precious meaning and lesson, and that history is simply the sum of all these.
Sometimes it comes together, as it did for me that moment in Notre-Dame; sometimes the world is reduced to a simple sign, a stone basin, the touch of water to head—and the vast pageant of the past and the living parade of the present take on a new, and renewing, symmetry and sense.
Conquering Half Dome
In the mid-1990s, I left the Examiner and joined Salon, a feisty, bright, and ambitious web magazine that had been started by friends and colleagues from the Examiner. The founders’ goal was to produce a site distinguished by intelligent commentary, excellent writing, and groundbreaking journalism, and within that context, they asked me to create the travel section of my dreams. I christened the section Wanderlust, and we launched in 1997, with the passionate mandate of publishing unvarnished dispatches and soul-stretching narratives. “Conquering Half Dome,” published in 1999, was my own attempt to write a soul-stretching narrative about an adventure not far from my Northern California backyard, in Yosemite National Park, but threaded with far-ranging themes of frailty, family, and overcoming our fears. When I read this now, I can’t help but compare the narrator of this piece with the heedless young man who ascended Kilimanjaro on a whim. . . . And I think: Our mountains also evolve over time.
SOMETIMES WE KNOW A JOURNEY WILL BE a grand adventure—the three-week expedition I made along Pakistan’s avalanche-laden Karakoram Highway to enchanted Hunza comes to mind. Other times we know it will be a little one—on a recent quick business trip to Paris I was content with stumbling upon a wonderful ancient restaurant and a precious new park I’d never known about.
But sometimes our trips surprise us.
In the summer of 1999, my family made a five-day excursion to Yosemite. It was supposed to be a little camping lark, but it turned out to be a much grander—and much more terrifying—adventure than I’d ever imagined.
The trip seemed innocent enough: Our plan was to drive to Yosemite on a Saturday, spend the next three days camping and hiking to the top of Half Dome, then hike back to our car and drive home on the fifth day. This would require three days of four to six hours of hiking. The only moderately troublesome part would be the final ascent of Half Dome, that iconic granite thumb that juts almost 9,000 feet over the meadows and waterfalls and lesser crags of California’s Yosemite Valley. But I had seen pictures of the cable-framed walkway that leads to the top of the mountain, and it didn’t look too difficult. My wife and I felt confident that our eight-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter could handle it.
So off we went. We made the winding drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to Yosemite National Park in about four hours. It was a splendid day, all cotton-candy clouds against a county-fair sky. Eating carrots and apple slices in the car, we sped through the suburbs and into parched golden hills, and before we knew it we were off the main highway and passing hand-painted signs advertising red onions, fresh-picked tomatoes, almonds, peaches, and nectarines. Our eyes lingered on the weather-beaten stands, where we could see shiny red mounds of tomatoes and green mountains of watermelons, but we pressed on.
We reached Yosemite as the sun was setting, picked up our trail permit, pitched our tent, cooked a quick camp supper, and went to bed.
Our plan was to get up early, hike more than halfway up—to the highest source of water on the Half Dome trail—and camp, thereby minimizing the distance we would have to cover the next day before making our assault on the peak. If you’re young and strong, or old and foolhardy, you can hike from Yosemite Valley to the top of Half Dome and back in a day. In previous trips to Yosemite we had met people who had done just that; they would leave at daybreak and plan to get back around dusk. But we wanted to take it easy on ourselves. We also had built in an extra day so that if for any reason we couldn’t make Half Dome the first time, we would have a second chance, so we weren’t in any hurry.
The next day took longer than we had planned—as it invariably does. By the time we had gotten the kids rousted and had packed up our tents and ground covers and cooking gear, it was about 10:00 a.m. and the sun was high and hot in the sky.
We set off along the John Muir Trail, winding into the rocks and pines. The first section of this trail is still a little like Disneyland, and you pass people in flip-flops and even occasionally high heels, sweating and puffing and swigging fresh-off-the-supermarket-shelf bottles of spring water.
After about a half hour’s stroll you reach a picturesque bridge with a fantastic foaming view of the Merced River cascading over the rocks—and a neat wooden bathroom and a water fountain that is the l
ast source of water that doesn’t have to be filtered. The flip-flops and high heels turn back with a grateful sigh at this point, and the few people you do pass hereafter on the trail exchange friendly nods and greetings and the smug satisfaction of getting into the real Yosemite.
Then you walk and you walk and you walk, stepping heavily over rocks, kicking up clouds of dirt that settle on your legs and socks and boots. Occasionally you’ll be cooled by a shower of water trickling from high rocks right onto the trail, or by a breeze blowing unexpectedly when you turn a corner. But for the most part you step and mop your brow and swat at mosquitoes in the patches of shade and take swigs of water, careful to roll the water in your mouth as your long-ago football coach taught you, until you’re surprised by a dazzling quilt of purple flowers or a tumbling far-off torrent shining white and silver and blue in the sun, and you stop and munch slowly on granola bars and dried apples and nectarines and notice how the sunlight waterfalls through the branches of the trees.
After four hours we reached the halfway point at Little Yosemite Valley. It’s a popular camping spot with loosely demarcated camping areas—framed by fallen tree trunks, with rock-outlined fire circles and tree stumps for tables and stools—plus a resident ranger, an outhouse, and easily accessible water in the form of the Merced River fast-flowing by. We hadn’t really prepared for the trip physically, and were already grimy and sweaty and exhausted. On top of that, we had received conflicting information about where exactly the last source of water on the trail would be, so rather than press farther up, we decided to stop there for the night. Tomorrow we would rise early and climb Half Dome.
We had planned to get up at 6:00 and be on the trail by 8:00. Again, reality intruded, and we got up at 8:00 and set out for Half Dome around 9:30. This was not wise. We had never hiked this trail before and didn’t know how long it would take or what obstacles it would present; besides that, we’d been told that the best time to climb Half Dome is the morning, since clouds tend to come in by the afternoon. Weather changes quickly in the mountains, and you don’t want to be anywhere near the summit when the clouds come in, rangers had said. The mountain is a magnet for lightning. All Half Dome hikers are explicitly told that if they see rain clouds on the horizon, they shouldn’t attempt the ascent. Lightning strikes the dome at least once every month—and at least a few careless people every year. Even the cables that run up the final 800 feet of the slope are lightning magnets.
So we wound up through the trees as fast as we could. We passed through deep-shadowed, pine-needled stretches of forest path like places in a fairy tale, and we emerged onto sun-blasted stretches of rock that offered amazing views of the surrounding peaks—and of Half Dome towering precipitously into the sky.
We reached the base of Half Dome, after a final, extremely arduous half-hour zigzag trek up a series of massive steps cut out of the stone, at about 1:00 p.m. Clouds were massing to the east and to the west, but we pressed on. A motley pile of gloves left by previous climbers lay at the spot where the cable walkway began. We chose gloves we liked, grabbed hold of the cables, and began to haul ourselves up.
This is when our little lark turned into a grand adventure.
In the pictures we had seen before the trip, the cable route didn’t look all that daunting. Basically, they showed a gangplank-like walkway with thick steel cables running along either side that stretched up the slope of the mountain. In the pictures, hikers with daypacks strode confidently up the slope as if they were out for a Sunday stroll.
Somehow the pictures hadn’t prepared me for the reality. The cables are set about four feet off the ground and are about three feet apart. As a further aid to climbers, wooden planks connected to the posts that support the cables are set across the mountain-path at an interval of about every four to five feet. This is not as comforting as it sounds.
I’d read before the trip that the path slopes up at an angle of about sixty degrees. In my mind I had pictured that angle and had mentally traced a line along the living room wall. That doesn’t seem too steep, I had said to myself.
Beware estimates made in the comfort of your living room. From the plushness of my couch, with a soothing cup of steaming tea in my hand, sixty degrees hadn’t seemed too steep—but in the sheer, slippery, life-on-the-line wildness of Yosemite, it seemed real steep. I looked at the cables, and I looked at the sloping pate of the mountain—and I thought, This is a really stupid way to die.
Why, I continued, am I consciously choosing to risk my life like this? What’s the point? All it would take would be one slip, a hand loosened from the cables.
I could already see myself sliding down the face of Half Dome, grabbing frantically at the smooth surface, thudding-scraping-bumping along the rock until, if I was really lucky, I managed to grab a bloody finger-stub handhold on the rock face or, if I wasn’t really lucky, I just slipped off the face of the rock, with all the assembled climbers gasping and screaming and my wife and kids yelling not knowing what to do, how to prevent my fall, and then it would be a brief free-fall flight before bone-crushing oblivion. Hopefully, I thought, I will pass out before contact and die relatively peacefully.
All this flashed through my mind as I stood at the base of the cables.
“What are we waiting for?” my daughter asked impatiently.
“We’re waiting until we grow wings,” I wanted to say.
But she was ready—ah, youth, that hath no fear—and began to scramble up the slope. And then my wife went. And then my son started—a little apprehensively, being eight years old and all. But he was on his way. None of them seemed to understand that what we were doing was inherently suicidal!
Still, they were gone, and there really was nothing to do but grab hold of the cables and start to pull myself up this suddenly stupid and hateful mountain.
The whole thing seemed so absurd. Hadn’t I evolved beyond this kind of macho risk-taking decades ago?
Somehow the fact that all kinds of people, from baseball-capped teens to silver-haired seniors, had scrambled up that day and were now headed down the very walkway I was staring up, and that numerous others were perched on the face of the mountain in mid-ascent a dozen yards above me, scrambling up even as I quaked—somehow this was of no comfort.
I was scared. I wasn’t exactly convinced I was going to die—I thought I probably had a chance of making it alive—but I felt I was consciously subjecting myself to an experience that could really kill me.
But so we started. My first few steps were leaden. My hiking boots kept slipping; my arms, which hadn’t done anything all day, suddenly felt dead-tired and couldn’t haul up the dead weight of my body. In a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy, I kept slipping and sliding, just as I thought I would. I was utterly miserable.
One thing you should never do—or at least one thing I should never do—when climbing Half Dome is look around at the view. The view is what can kill you. You stop and brush your brow with your sleeve and your eyes steal a look to the left and—whoa!—it’s a long, long way down. Your view drops right off the side of the cliff to green trees the size of matchsticks and postage-stamp meadows. You don’t want to see this and you definitely don’t want to think about it. I swayed and held onto the cables and stayed frozen, letting other climbers brush by me, until the dizziness and the wave-swells in my stomach stopped. My mouth was drier than I could ever remember it being. My arms ached.
After about fifteen wooden planks, my son and I paused. My wife Kuniko looked down from a perch a few posts ahead. “How are you feeling, Jeremy? Do you want to keep going, or do you want to stop?”
Say you want to stop, Jeremy, I prayed. For the love of God, tell her you want to stop!
He was undecided. I was probably green in the face. “How are you doing, honey?” Kuniko asked, concern creasing her face.
“I don’t know,” I said.
We looked around and saw bulbous black clouds blowing swiftly in.
“Maybe
we should head down,” Kuniko said.
Yes! Yes! a little voice inside me said.
“I want to keep going!” Jenny said.
“No, I think we should head down,” Kuniko said.
“I think so, too,” I said, whining with as much authority as I could muster. “I don’t like the look of those clouds.”
So, much to Jenny’s loud disappointment, we slid down—which was almost as terrifying as hauling up, except that now your body was helping gravity pull you to your death.
At one point I really did completely slip—my feet just went out from under me, I landed with a sacroiliac-smacking thud and before I knew what was happening I began to slide down the face of the mountain. Luckily I managed to stomp the sole of one boot squarely against the iron post that supported the cable, thus stopping my fall. Mortality had never seemed nearer.
I lay on the side of the mountain for a few minutes, trying to slow my heart, waiting for my arms to stop shaking.
“Are you all right?” people asked as they stepped gingerly by me.
Then I said to myself, Just go down slowly, one by one, and I did. And suddenly I was at the bottom, stepping off the last plank onto level rock, and I was sitting down and sluggishly taking off my gloves and Jenny was asking, “Dad, are you OK?”
The hike back to camp seemed about ten times longer than the morning’s walk. My head was black-clouded with doubts and fears about attempting the climb again the next day. What a stupid way to die, I kept thinking.
But at the same time I felt that I had to do it. The kids were going to do it, everyone was doing it—I couldn’t say, “Gee, I think I’ll just stay down here and watch.”
