by Don George
So even though I knew I was putting my life unnecessarily at risk, I also knew I had to make the climb.
I tossed and turned for hours that night, thinking about that blasted slippery-slope cable walkway. I knew it was virtually all mental, that I was psyching myself into failure. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t magically find the switch in my mind.
After a fractured sleep we woke up and retraced our path of the previous day. I wish I could say that everything had changed, that I had come to peace with the idea of climbing Half Dome and had found a deep pool of confidence in myself, but I hadn’t. I had made up my mind to climb Half Dome, but I was fundamentally unsettled about it all.
Still, everything seemed a little more propitious this time. We got an earlier start and so we were passed by only a handful of day-hikers, which felt good. The sky was a broad expanse of blue, with only a few puffs of white here and there. I was hiking strongly, and we covered the same territory in about an hour less than the previous day. We reached the arduous rock-steps at about 10:30 and were at the glove-heaped base of Half Dome by 11:00. We paused to take some deep swigs of water and eat an energy bar, and then we were ready.
Jeremy and Jenny set off first, fearlessly. Kuniko and I had decided that I would go up next, so that if I slipped, she might be able to help me. I swapped the thick leather gloves I had used the day before for lighter cloth gloves that permitted more feeling in my fingers. That seemed to help some.
I knew it was all mental, but that knowledge wasn’t helping much. It was still terrifying. But this time I thought: If you just focus on each step, you’ll be OK. Don’t think about the slope to the left or the right. Don’t think about what’s beneath you or how much more you still have to go. Just focus on each step, step by step.
I took my first step and pulled myself up by the cables. Took another step and did the same. Took another step and I was at the first wooden plank.
I repeated the process, planting my foot slowly, making sure it was secure on the rock face before using my arms, then pulling myself up to make the next step. Three steps and I had reached plank No. 2.
It seemed easier than yesterday.
Gradually my body relaxed. The tension left my arms and they didn’t ache. The fear left my legs and they were more flexible; I was finding secure sole-holds in the rock. I didn’t slip, and I was learning to focus my breathing and energy in discrete spurts of arm-pulling.
The trick, I thought, is to restrict the world to the small plot of rock in front of me and the cables on either side, to extend my arm about ten inches up the cable, like this, grab tight hold of it, secure my grip, like this, say “OK, now!” and pull—ugh! and up!—and then pause a while to catch my breath and coil my energy, and then repeat the process, hauling myself up, step by step.
I reached the point where we had stopped the day before and dimly recorded that it had been much easier so far. If I could just focus on each rung.
I kept pulling myself up, foothold then handhold, plank by plank. At one point, with a quick glance up, I realized that Jenny and Jeremy, who seemed to have sprinted up the slope, had disappeared. They were already running freely around the broad summit. Somewhere inside me, I registered the fact that I was going to make it, too.
There were still a few tricky places—places where a two-foot fissure appeared between the part of the slope-trail I was on and the slope where the trail continued. Here I had to simultaneously pull myself over the displacement and up the slope, a doubly difficult and slippery task.
But by focusing precisely on what I was doing—plant the foot there, make sure it’s secure, OK, now pull yourself up on the cable, move your other foot forward, pull yourself up again—I was able to make it without slipping.
There was one particularly steep step where I felt my arms begin to falter and in mid-stride I felt my body begin to sway backward, as if my arms weren’t going to be able to pull my body up. Death flickered in my brain and in a millisecond I thought, You’ve GOT to pull yourself up, and the adrenaline zapped through my arms like lightning and I forced myself—brain and arms pulling together—to the next rung. The prospect of death had glimmered, but it hadn’t paralyzed me as the day before.
After about twenty-five minutes I reached the point where the summit begins to taper off and the angle eases. Another ten wooden planks and the end of the ascent was in sight.
I almost ran the last few steps, so exhilarated to have made it to the top. Jenny and Jeremy saw me from their post at the peak and came jumping over the summit. We gave each other big bear hugs.
“You made it, Dad!” they said.
In another few minutes Kuniko came to the top, grinning widely.
We explored the summit, took in the extraordinary 360-degree panorama of snow-capped peaks, piney slopes, glistening waterfalls, and green meadows far below.
And we felt on top of the world.
We shared a celebratory chocolate bar I had stuffed in my pocket, and after a half hour snapping photos and walking to the extreme compass points of the peak, we heard thunder to the east and saw black clouds massing, moving with deceptive speed our way.
We shared a huge family hug and set off.
Jenny and Jeremy fairly skipped down the slope—or at least that’s the way it seemed to me. I slipped and slid—three times I slowly let myself down on the seat of my pants from one rung to another—but never lost control and within about a half hour I was standing again on level rock, tossing my gloves into the heap, my heart pounding wildly and my head splitting-spinning with the triumph.
I had done it! I had overcome all those fear-boulders that we throw up in front of ourselves, that keep us from doing the things we are capable of doing.
We had climbed Half Dome, and from now on, whenever we looked at that stunning granite jut from afar, we would have the joyful and astounding knowledge that we had once stood on that very peak, looking down on the whole world around us. We had conquered the slippery slope of Half Dome, and we would have much to celebrate that night.
It seemed symbolic of so many things in life, and I was just beginning to enjoy the light-footed walk back to camp and to feel the success suffuse my body from the top of my head to the tips of my fingers and toes, when Jeremy turned to me and said, “Dad, can we do this again next year?”
Impression: Sunrise at Uluru
At the beginning of 2001, I left Salon to become Global Travel Editor at Lonely Planet, thrilled to be working with founders Tony and Maureen Wheeler, longtime heroes of mine who had also become close friends. My duties at LP were marvelously multifaceted: editing one literary anthology a year; representing the company to the media and the public as spokesperson; and writing a weekly column for the website. In synch with the company ethos of mindful exploration of the wide-ranging world, I was encouraged to write about anything I wanted and to be as personal as I wanted to be. Soon after joining the company, I was called to the Melbourne headquarters for planning meetings, and I was able to tack on time afterwards to realize one of my longtime dreams: to visit Uluru, the red rock monolith in the Outback, sacred to the Aboriginals. I thought Uluru would be a powerful place, but I had no idea it would affect me as profoundly as it did. When I set out to write about this experience, the account poured out of me in the second person rather than the first person, “you” instead of “I.” This was unusual for me, but looking back, I think that I somehow subconsciously sensed that writing in the second person would allow me to make an intensely personal experience more universal; I wanted to break down the barrier between me and the reader, precisely because my encounter with Uluru had been so deeply subjective, and sacred.
THE FIRST TIME YOU APPROACH ULURU, the world is still dark. You are rolling through the pre-dawn desert in a minivan when the big black monolith looms suddenly through the side window. It is difficult to judge how far away it is, or how close you are, because the whole world is monotone and flat. Yet you feel the power.
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nbsp; You have been wary of your preconceptions about the place—the accumulation of iconography and clichés, photographs seen and descriptions read. You don’t want to feel exactly what you know you are supposed to feel. You want a raw connection with the thing. You want to wipe your brain clean, approach the rock like the first human ever to take it in, stumbling incredulously toward it like some red sun-trick on the horizon that doesn’t disappear, but only grows larger and larger until finally all you can do is fall on your knees before it.
And then you see it, and suddenly your wariness falls away. You are drawn to the dark immensity purely, simply, irresistibly, and with a power that comes from the thing itself and not, as far as you can tell, from your own desire to feel the power. Because it catches you by surprise and because it is such a strong, pit-of-the-stomach pull, you trust it.
As you get closer, you creak and crane your neck to see as much of it as you can, until you notice—because you’d been so obsessed with seeing the rock, you’d missed this—that you are passing other minivans and buses and dozens upon dozens of people. They wear jeans and warm jackets and hold steaming cups of coffee in their hands; some stamp their feet, others set up their cameras. They have come to see exactly what you have come to see, and you realize there is no point in trying to feel better than them or different from them. You have to share Uluru with them.
Your minivan parks and you emerge, brushing off the cobwebs of some conversation about kangaroos and dingos. All you want to do is concentrate on the rock itself: Uluru.
You position yourself at one of the barriers beyond which visitors are not allowed to step, less than a kilometer from the rock, and you look. The rock is a smooth, sloping burnt-orange rise against a deep gray-blue sky. Before it are dark waves of vegetation, which surprise you; somehow you imagined the rock standing solitary in a vast flatland extending red and cracked-dry to the horizon.
For the next half hour, as the Earth slowly tilts toward the sun at your back, you watch.
The rock gradually grows more orange, more bright, and you begin to see the fissures and pocks in its side, shadowy sluices where rainfall must flow, deep gouges sculpted by wind and water and time.
The sky lightens from dark blue to a pastel peach-pink, the bushes and trees in the foreground take a silver-green shape, the rock’s orange brightens, and pocks darken like caves in its side.
The sky grows lighter and lighter, the rock face brighter and brighter; more veins and pits emerge in relief.
And then, in what seems one miraculous moment, birdsong bursts from the bushes and trees and the sun fires up the face of Uluru and it is as if the rock is glowing from within, pulsing, breathing, one huge burning ember. And then it is like nothing you’ve seen before and you simply don’t have the words to describe it. It is alive with some kind of earth energy of its own. It pulses. It gathers everything into itself. It beats with a luminous orange energy that courses through the world around it. It is the heart of the soil and the rocks and the roots beneath the soil, coming to life.
You think of the elaborate sun temples that ancient civilizations had constructed, of Stonehenge, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Sounion. And for a moment you think that this could be nature’s sun temple, a construct manifesting a connection so far beyond comprehension that the only possible response is awe.
And then the moment ends. The people pack up their cameras and pile into their buses. Within minutes, they are gone.
But you remain, listening to the birdsong, looking at the rock.
You’ve had enough mysticism for one morning, so you drop to your knees and pick up a handful of soil. You want to ground yourself.
But as you let the soil sift through your hands, slowly, softly, you feel it: some kind of electrical connection. The particles passing through your fingers are the same as the particles that molded to form the rock. And you consider: Are those particles really so different from the particles that molded into the big blue and green rock on which you now kneel?
Sift, sift. The grains tilt through your dusty hands, bursting into sun-lit life.
Castaway in the Galapagos
In 2002 I was exhilarated when the editor of Islands magazine asked me to take my family to the Galápagos and write a piece about our adventures on the islands. My two children were twelve and sixteen, perfect ages for the Galápagos, and for years I’d wanted to visit this seemingly enchanted and enchanting archipelago. Could it really be as magical as everyone said? Off we went. The ensuing journey was life-changing in ways we never could have imagined. And the writing journey was equally stretching and broadening. Over the years I’d become used to writing about my own journey, inward as well as outward, but in this case I had to re-create a family odyssey, apprehending and evoking the lessons we’d all learned, inner and outer, individually and together. The story forced me to experience, recall, and shape the trip in a new way, and this ended up adding one more layer to the islands’ imagination-stretching legacy.
I WAS SITTING IN THE HOLLOW OF A ROCK carved over thousands of years by the incessant pulse of wind, rain, and wave. The sounds rushed in: Swissshhh-schwooosh. Tcha-tcha-tcha-tcah. Arerr, arerr, arrer. Chikoo-chikoo.
It was midmorning; a few hours before, my expedition group had ridden Zodiacs onto the beach at horseshoe-shaped Darwin Bay on Isla Genovesa, one of the northernmost islands in the Galápagos chain. The others in my group had moved on to snorkel off the far tip of the island, but I stayed behind to see how it felt to be the lone soul in that singular place.
Well, the lone human soul anyway, since I had lots of other company. To my left, dozens of charcoal-brown juvenile red-footed boobies perched among saltbush branches; their parents whirled around the sky. Two black-and-white Nazca boobies waddled past me. Soft-needled cacti sprouted from a cleft in the rock beside me; with no animals to eat them, they’ve evolved without their protective hard spines. To my right lay a sand-crusted driftwood tree trunk borne from who knows where.
The ancestors of some of the wildlife around me had probably arrived on just such a trunk, clinging perilously to the surface of the storm-tossed wood or embedded snugly inside, like passengers on an accidental ark. The volcanic rock around me—pocked with air holes and studded with brown and red stones—had been tossed from the earth’s fiery crust through a hotspot that sent molten lava spewing onto the seabed in such quantity that it piled up and eventually broke the surface, forming Isla Genovesa, the other almost sixty islands in the chain, and even the hollow in which I sat.
Suddenly, from a thick stand of mangroves I heard a choked squawking, a male red-footed booby trying to attract a mate. Then, straight ahead, oblivious to the human playing castaway among them, three Nazca boobies screeched and squabbled in fierce beak-to-beak combat. Two were ganging up on one, and when the victim rose to confront her tormentors, I saw a light blue egg glistening beneath her. She occupied prime real estate, and the newlyweds wanted it.
A juvenile booby practiced landing to my left, its body wavering to and fro as it fluttered onto a branch. A male frigatebird flew overhead, flashing the red pouch that he puffs into a bright balloon at mating time. Black-and-white swallow-tailed gulls, their eyes outlined in brilliant red, fluttered onto a rocky perch.
At the waterline, black marine iguanas padded across black lava rocks, also dotted with red-and-white Sally Lightfoot crabs. A couple of sea lions fenced with their snouts, bellowing at each other while a whiskery pup flopped along after the bigger one, trying to nurse even while its mother barked at the intruder. Sea lion yelps and roars filled the air and the salt-scented Pacific swashed blue and white.
I swigged water and considered Charles Darwin. Certainly during his seminal visit to the Galápagos aboard the HMS Beagle in 1835, the father of evolutionary theory had sailed into the bay now named for him and set foot on this island. But, I thought, it was quite possible that no other human had ever sat precisely where I was. All islands are to some extent worlds apart, but few, as
Darwin noted in The Voyage of the Beagle, are quite so profoundly separate as the Galápagos. “The natural history of this archipelago is very remarkable,” he wrote. “It seems to be a little world within itself; the greater number of its inhabitants, both vegetable and animal, being found nowhere else.”
Sitting in my little corner of that world 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. And to think that just a week before I’d been having doubts about this trip.
Darwin’s voyage from England took four years and was plagued by seasickness; the worst we faced on our two-day trip from San Francisco were airplane meals and in-flight movies. But I contended with one foe that Darwin didn’t: long-distance déjà vu. Long before we departed, a film of the Galápagos reeled through my mind. I had already seen countless times—complete with James Earl Jones narration—boobies, iguanas, frigatebirds, sea lions, giant tortoises, and the rest of the islands’ famously fearless birds and beasts. How could reality compete with the digitally enhanced version playing in my head?
Also, I am not really a wildlife person. Generally speaking, in my travels I’ve sought people, art, culture, and cuisine. But with my daughter turning seventeen and my son soon to be thirteen, my wife, Kuniko, and I thought this seemed the chance to put together one final grand family fling before Jenny went off to college and Jeremy eschewed all travel with the folks. And what could be more climactic than the Galápagos? Given all that, I feared that not even Darwin had dragged so much baggage onto the islands.
Our voyage began late on a Saturday afternoon. After settling into cabins aboard the MS Polaris, meeting our guides, and hearing the first of our daily natural-history lectures, seventy of us passengers and six naturalists piled into pangas (motorized Zodiacs) and headed for our first excursion on Isla Santa Cruz.
