To the Last Breath

by Francis Slakey

  I look back now and realize that suffering the astronomically unlikely one-in-a-million event should have given me a sense of foreboding. Instead, that improbability would govern my next ten years, challenging a sense of imperviousness that I had proudly cultivated. At the moment, those unlikely odds are governing the next tenth of a second of my life.

  Thwwwwip. The last few stitches of webbing unravel and the cot drops out from under us.

  Before we had gone to sleep we were careful to tighten our harnesses around our waists and clip them onto ropes secured onto the rock face. But the ropes have some slack, so as the cot drops out beneath us, we begin to fall until the rope goes taut, takes our weight, pivots our feet under us, and then pulls us toward the wall, slamming us into the rock.

  We hang there in the darkness, our only protection a strand of nine-millimeter-thick rope that keeps us from plunging two thousand feet to the valley floor.

  If either of us had tied a meager knot or were loosely clipped into the anchor, we would be in free fall right now, moments away from having the life crushed out of us. In the history of El Cap climbing, dozens of climbers have met that fate. But having avoided that ourselves, there is comfort now, ease. It is a remarkably peaceful moment.

  I walk my feet up the rock face a few steps and lean back on the rope, staring up at the night sky.

  Breathe in, breathe out. Calm.

  With the immediate danger past us, we now have to focus on the next dilemma. We are dangling like puppets in the pitch black of night. We need to find a way out of this.

  I have no idea how much of our gear plunged to the valley floor below. That will become all too clear the next day. For now, what we need most is some light.

  A fifteen-foot circle of light cuts through the darkness, spotlighting the granite. The beam of Pax’s headlamp starts to move across the rock wall, slowly rastering back and forth.

  I unclip my headlamp from a belt loop on my harness and join the search, sweeping my light across the sheer granite face, scanning for a place—a ledge, a cave, a protrusion—anywhere to take the weight off our harnesses and rest.

  Pax finds it first. “There’s a ledge,” he calls out. Those are the first words spoken since the cot collapsed and if he’d yelled that out at midnight at one of the populated camps in the valley below, he would have awakened someone who would yell at us to shut up. But here, thousands of feet above them all, we’re out of earshot and his words are welcome news.

  Pax’s headlamp is illuminating a feature in the rock that is roughly twenty feet below us and ten feet off to the side. It’s a small ledge, smaller than our collapsed cot, only about the size of a couple two-by-four planks. It is meager, just a fraction of scaffolding, but it is the only option we have.

  “Looks comfortable, Pax. Let’s get down there.” With that, I shift my headlamp’s beam back to my harness. We have to untie from the safety rope we’ve been dangling on and clip onto another rope—one long enough to reach the ledge below.

  From my harness I unclip a rappel device, a thick, sturdy figure 8–shaped piece of metal that fills the palm of my left hand. With my right hand I thread a rope through the top loop of the 8 and then clip the bottom loop onto the harness. I take in the slack and lean back on the rope. It takes my weight.

  The only thing in my vision now is the rope tied onto my harness; the rest of the world once again falls back into darkness. It’s time to untie the safety knot.

  This is a moment that might give some people pause. The safety line is secure: it rescued us from a two-thousand-foot plunge; it has proven its reliability. The rappel line, on the other hand, hangs loosely below my feet, untethered and swaying in a modest breeze. One could imagine a cascade of problems that might result in shifting to that untested line.

  That is certainly one way to size up the options: untested versus proven. But that would be the wrong way to look at it. If I assessed things that way, I would never have gotten off the ground to do this climb in the first place.

  Here’s the way I see it: either I untie the safety line and rappel through the open air down toward the ledge; or I continue to dangle on the safety line with no possibility of rest or relief. It’s not a complicated situation. I untie the knot without hesitation.

  Lowering is easy, but that won’t get me to the ledge. If all I do is rappel straight down I’ll pass by the ledge, which is ten feet off to my right side. So as I lower down, I’m looking for a way to climb over to the ledge. But nothing appears. In the glow of my headlamp all I see is smooth, featureless stone; there aren’t any cracks or holds that I can use to haul myself over.

  There are features to my left, and that will have to do. I’ll climb up and over to my left, and then I’ll have to let go of the rock and try to swing over to the ledge.

  I lower down until the ledge is just about at eye level and then I start climbing up to my left. When I think I’m at the necessary height, I pause for a breath, then I lean back on the rope, pull my feet in, and let go.

  I swing free, into the darkness, penduluming to the right.

  I rise up and over the ledge and drop my feet down on the flat, firm surface. Done. I’ll get some rest tonight. I can relax now, reflect.

  The superstar of El Cap, Warren Harding, no doubt faced a moment like this. To succeed, he had to shrug off crises without concern. His team members had dropped out, his equipment was nearing failure, the weather was unforgiving, the summit desperately out of reach. What kept Harding climbing?

  I think the answer is this: Harding’s spine was fortified with steel, and it gave him a cool indifference to disaster.

  That evening on El Cap, with my back leaning against the cold granite and my feet hanging over the rock ledge, I thought about what just happened. My nerves had been steady; I was calm and detached. I hadn’t always been this way. Growing up, I hadn’t been the kid who at two years old was fearlessly scaling bookcases or balancing on slender tree branches. I had become this way.

  When I was eleven years old my Ecuadorian mother, Zaida Sojos-Vela, died from brain cancer. The struggle ended, and death was accepted, on the day when the doctor matter-of-factly explained to my father that they had just tried the last drug that was available.

  “There is nothing left to do. Zaida will die within a couple months.”

  My father described that moment to me when I was a few years older, old enough to understand the direness of the event. In his telling me the story his voice had acquired the very same clinical dispassion of the doctor, though I’m sure that when he heard the words, rather than when he told me the words years later, he was devastated.

  I had been preparing for that moment, my mother’s death, for years. I saw her long slow grinding decline, from cane, to walker, to wheelchair. Then, near the end, I wouldn’t see her for days at a time as she suffered quietly, lying flat, behind the closed door of her bedroom.

  That last time she came out of the bedroom was to do something for me, to cut some brownies out of the tin that my father had made for my birthday. She was laying on the sofa in the living room, my father at her side, when I walked into the kitchen and saw the unevenly cut jagged pile of brownies. I assumed it was my dad who had blundered around with the knife.

  “Who cut these? They’re all messed up.”

  Those were the last words my mother heard me speak. A week later my father ushered me and my brothers in to her hospital bedroom for one last visit. Her mind was drifting by then, lubricated by morphine. She had no idea who I was. It was then that I recognized the impact of what I had said a few days earlier.

  I’m sure she felt dismay at not being able to do something so modest as slice me a few brownies on my birthday. It probably took what little energy she had left in her just to lift the knife. My ungrateful, foolish words cut far more deeply.

  There was nothing I could do to correct those final words I’d said to her. As I saw it, at eleven years old, I could either be weighed down by regret or act like it never happened.
I chose the latter path.

  Days later, my mother was buried. I remember returning home from her funeral and playing table hockey with a friend. I forced our typical banter as the puck bounced around the metal frame. With my eyes dry, I worked desperately to treat the day like it was any other. That sounds heartless as I confess it now. Yet, after witnessing her years of slow painful deterioration and telling her those final words, I reacted by thickening my defenses. I decided that I would never again let something cut into me so deeply. For decades I allowed my life to drift along with little warmth or purpose. As I grew older, I kept mostly to myself, lived by my own rules, and stayed on the move.

  The next morning Pax and I assess our situation. The cot, dangling flat against the rock wall above us, is ruined; we won’t be using it again. With no place to sleep between here and the top of the wall, we have no choice now. We must finish the climb before nightfall. To do that, we need to lighten our load.

  Pax grips the cot, arms spread wide, a corner in each hand, and looks over at me. We are 2,500 feet straight up and there isn’t a soul below us. While Pax holds the frame, I unclip it from the hauling rope.

  “Adios,” Pax says. He lets the cot slip out of his hands.

  This can work out just fine, I remember thinking as we watch the cot plummet straight down, picking up speed. Sure, it will be mangled when it hits bottom, but we can collect all the parts, box them up, and send them back to the manufacturer with an explanation of what happened. Maybe they’ll replace it, no money lost. And the money was key. We were living on a lean budget, and buying a new $800 cot wasn’t a possibility.

  As the cot continues its free fall, it catches some wind. It pauses its downward plunge as the end turns flat and it transitions from a straight-down fall into a graceful arch.

  “That sucks,” Pax sums up our situation. “Keep your eye on it,” he yells, eyes squinting in the sun, hand flat over his eyebrows. “We have to get that cot back when we get back down.”

  As the cot starts to drift away from the wall of El Cap, for the first time in all the times I’ve climbed here, I actually look out over the valley. I had always been so consumed by the climb that all I ever saw was the block of granite in front of me. I would only see the cracks, the lines, the paths upward.

  Now, for the first time, I’m actually getting a sense of the place. I’ve turned my back to the granite and am seeing Yosemite for the first time.

  The cot is flitting in the wind now, riding the current, butterflying on the gusts. It no longer seems like pieces of hard aluminum fastened together with bolts. It is gliding like a bird slipping across the horizon, down over the colossal unclimbable redwoods—straight as flagpoles and hundreds of feet tall—that fill the valley floor.

  On any typical day, dozens of spectators look up at El Cap with binoculars and telescopes keeping watch on climbers. They are there now, watching all this unfold.

  “You know,” I realize, looking down at them dotting the valley floor, “there’s no way they can figure out why we just did that.” It would be like watching a neighbor toss his bed out a window.

  I’m hoping that one of the spectators will now do the neighborly thing. So long as the cot continues its path out into the valley, it will clear the redwoods and drop down into the clearing. Perhaps one of the observers will collect the cot and hold on to it for us.

  Then the wind shifts slightly and the cot changes its glide pattern. It begins to make its way back to the base of El Cap, away from the clearing. This could be even better. If it lands at the base of the climb, we can pick it up on our way out. Our luck, I thought, just might be improving.

  Suddenly, the cot stops moving. It comes to rest on top of a two-hundred-foot-tall redwood tree.

  Over the next several hours we cover the last five hundred vertical feet to the top of El Cap. Our pace is steady, deliberate. We adhere to the mantra of climbing: economy of motion. Preserving the necessary energy requires that a climber make no unnecessary moves, that positions are optimized with the arms providing balance, the legs the propulsion. Bulk is a liability; a clear mind an asset. Goliaths don’t rule the rock, Davids do.

  As climbing evolved from the lumbering five-hundred-day ascent by Harding to quicker harder climbs, the sport required better fitness, higher strength-to-weight ratio, more poise, and greater flexibility. Climbers became athletes. But they didn’t have the muscled physique of a football running back. Instead, leaner was better and women were as competitive as men. In fact, a woman holds one of the most coveted records in the history of Yosemite climbing. In 1993 Lynn Hill became the first person to ascend El Cap—the very same route as Harding—without using a single piece of equipment to haul herself up. As remarkable as that was, a year later she repeated that feat with blazing speed, this time going from the valley floor to the top in less than twenty-four hours.

  Pax and I continue up the rock face. I move at a snail’s pace compared to other climbers. Yosemite draws the best climbers in the world, and there is always someone better than me, often right on my tail. This route Pax and I are on will take us two and a half days. Three weeks from now, a team from Germany will do this route and set a new speed record: seventeen hours.

  That accomplishment will be overshadowed by the feat of another climber, a member of a unique breed of human: the free soloist.

  Buffeted by supreme confidence, the free soloist scales the rock without ropes or a partner. And here the tales of Yosemite reach mythic scale.

  There is the story of the free solo climber who reached a section of rock, 2,500 feet up, that had a crack too small for him to plug his fingers into. So he pulled out two small pieces of gear, put one in each hand, then alternately reached up and plunged them into the quarter-inch-wide crack and hauled himself up with a series of one-armed pull-ups. One missed gear placement and he would fall a half mile straight down to his death. He made it without incident, without even sweating, so the story goes.

  I know that some people believe that free soloists are foolhardy. But I can think of only one word to describe what these people do: necessary. This is the only way they would think of climbing. And they have to climb.

  Like most climbers, I dabbled in free soloing. Once, when I was alone, scaling a block of granite and about forty feet off the ground, I lost my balance. My right foot was on a thin ledge, my left foot, unsupported, hung free off to the side, providing a counterweight. A few fingers on my left hand were braced against a quarter-inch-deep vertical notch, allowing me to lean my body to the right.

  I couldn’t hold this position for long, but I wouldn’t need to. I moved my body further to the right and reached several inches above me to what seemed like a reliable handhold. I had thought the hold was a solid pocket, deep enough to slip up to the first knuckle of two fingers. As my fingers neared the feature, I realized that it was merely a discoloration—there was no pocket.

  This is when a climber pauses and reevaluates, pulls back and analyzes, searches for a new route. I had been able to carry out precisely that type of rational detachment in countless situations before. Not this time.

  As I review that moment now, the only reason I can offer for not making that cool detached climbing assessment is that I thought I had done all the planning I needed to when I was on the ground sizing up the route. I was now executing my very deliberate plan. When I reached up for that pocket I had already determined that it was the only way up. There was no other route; I was committed. There was no way to down climb.

  I made a mental shift. When what I thought was a pocket turned out to be nothing more than smooth rock, I accepted that I was going to hit the ground. Instead of evaluating options for going up, I began to prepare myself for the fall.

  At forty feet high on an eighty-five-degree-angled slab of rock, I could manage the fall if I could roll when I hit, displacing the energy in the impact. The alternative would be a disaster. If I hit the ground flat-footed and rigid, the impact would go straight up my back and cause a compre
ssion fracture in my spine.

  I looked down at the ground and my right foot popped off the ledge, as if my body simply conceded the inevitable and yielded to gravity.

  I don’t remember the fall. I covered that distance in little more than a second. What I do remember is hearing a snapping sound when I hit the ground and rolled.

  I took stock: there was no blood on the ground, no pain in my arms or back. So far, so good. My right leg was fine; the left leg was throbbing. Staring at my toes, I pivoted the left foot, moving it forward and back. Yes, it hurt, but there was mobility. Perhaps I had imagined that I heard a snap? I stood up. I could put weight on my left leg just enough to walk. I headed back along the leaf-strewn path to the car and drove to the emergency room.

  “Does this hurt?” the doctor asked, pressing in on my swollen left ankle.

  “Not much.” It was painful, sure, but it wasn’t a scream-out-loud ache. “Maybe a four on a ten-point pain scale.”

  “And this?” he kept asking while pressing down in a few more places, twisting the foot.

  “Not a problem.” Nowhere did the pain seem extreme.

  “You did some damage. Clearly. But it’s just strained ligaments, not a break.”

  I liked what I was hearing. This fall would not deter me from climbing. If anything, it would send me back: I had taken a long tumble and came out of it with my limbs intact.

  “Ice it for the next couple days. Then switch to a heat pad.”

  I limped out of the emergency room, confident that I’d be back on rock in a week.

  Over the next two days the swelling eased a touch; aspirin moderated the ache. Then, on day three, I switched to a heat pad.

  In the first few seconds of applying heat, I felt a comfortable warmth, a friendly hand encircling my muscle and bone. I leaned back on the couch, letting the pad work its heat into my leg.