by Jan Redford
“How many ropes did you guys leave up there?” I asked.
Rik straightened up, his arms crossed over his chest like a teacher, except I’d never seen a teacher with forearms bigger than my calves. Rock climbing half the year in Yosemite and ice climbing the other half in Alaska had turned him into a scruffy, red-bearded, dark-eyed Popeye.
“Six. We should be up and down in a couple of hours.”
We weren’t here to rock climb, we were here to ascend ropes. Rik and his friend Jake had spent three days climbing a route way off to our left, then traversed over here to descend this featureless wall, which was used as a rappel route. They’d left their ropes “fixed” with plans to go back up and finish the route. But Jake had had to bail and leave the valley, so now the ropes had to come down. All nine hundred feet of them.
I reached into my shorts pocket, pulled out my tin of Copenhagen. A little pinch always calmed my nerves, which was why I couldn’t quit. I tucked the black tarry tobacco into my lower lip, tamped it down with the tip of my tongue, spat out a few floaters. The nicotine buzz spread through my body, heating and numbing my mouth.
Rik stopped sorting gear. “You’re not going to spit that down on me, are you?”
“Why, am I going first?”
It made no difference, really, who went first. The ropes were already above us, but somehow, following felt safer, even though dead is dead if you fall from almost a thousand feet.
“Yeah, I’ll come up behind—clean the anchors and drop the extra ropes,” Rik said. “We just need two to get back down.”
Rik thought this would be good preparation for my first big wall route, a multi-day climb that involved specialized equipment and techniques, and sleeping on ledges or in hammocks. He thought I could be one of the top female climbers if I set my mind to it. He’d also invited me to move out of Niccy’s tent and into his, and I’d declined. Rik was twenty-five, four years older than me, and he was such a good climber that I knew I’d follow him around like a baby duck if I slept with him. So I’d told him I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, that it would interfere with my climbing. I’d considered telling him I already had someone back home, but that would have been stretching it. Rory had never really been my boyfriend, since he already had a girlfriend, and a little fling I’d had with a friend the night before I left for California could hardly be considered “a relationship” since I’d fallen asleep in the middle of it. Unfortunately, I’d stored my Dart in the guy’s yard in Canmore just east of Banff. It could be a bit awkward upon my return.
I spat a long, dark stream of tobacco juice onto the rocks.
“That’s a disgusting habit.” Rik sounded irritated, not his normal self. He was usually so agreeable. He handed me a tangled pile of nylon slings and two yellow metal ascending devices. “Here’s your jumars. We’d better get going. We’ve got less than three hours of daylight left.”
After I scooped out my tobacco and took a swig of water, I attached my jumars to the rope and clipped an etrier—a six-foot ladder made from webbing—into each. Jumars can slide up the rope, but when you weight them, they lock and won’t slide down.
“Okay, I’m ready.”
Rik studied me through narrowed eyes. “I thought you said you’d used jumars before.”
“I have. Niccy and I jugged up a tree to hang our food.”
Rik shook his head. “Shit.” He grabbed the two pieces of nylon webbing that were curled up at my feet. “You forgot your daisy chains.”
Daisy chains?
He slipped the webbing through my harness in a girth hitch and attached one to each of the jumars hanging from the rope. “That’s your lifeline.”
Looking down at the mess of gear hanging from my harness, I could see that the daisy chains were the only thing securing me to the rope. Without them, if I were to let go of the jumars, I’d fall to the ground.
“Your harness is doubled back?” He grabbed my harness and jerked it roughly.
“Yeah, yeah.” I pulled away.
When Rik turned his back, I checked my buckle, just in case. Right here in Yosemite, a woman had leaned off a ledge to rappel and fallen to her death because she hadn’t done her harness up properly. One stupid, split-second mistake.
I slid the top jumar as high up the rope as I could reach, slipped my sneaker into one of the loops of the etrier, and stepped up. The jumar locked and held my weight, but the rope swung me around and I slammed into the rock.
“Fuck!”
“Gotta get the stretch out of the rope. Here, I’ll hold it for you.”
“I can do it!”
Rik threw up his hands and stepped back to watch me fumble with my etriers.
He was talking to me like I was an idiot, the way I overheard boyfriends talking to their girlfriends at the base of a climb. But I had come to Yosemite to really climb, not to follow some hot-shit climber around. When I climbed with guys, it was too easy to give up the sharp end of the rope, and lately, I’d started to feel I was being guided. The best thing I could have done was to swear off men altogether. But given my track record, it didn’t look like there was much chance of that happening. And given my latest impulsive, drunken lapse in judgment, which I had yet to tell Rik about.
I was off the ground. With my weight on one jumar, I could reach down and slide the other one up the rope. I slogged upward, transferring my weight back and forth as if I were on some defective step machine at the gym. Not that I spent any time at a gym. My idea of training was ski touring, climbing or hiking, then drinking beer and doing finger pull-ups on door jambs, especially when I had a male audience.
“You’re doing good, Jan!”
One hundred and fifty feet off the ground, I secured myself to the anchor, unclipped my jumars, and transferred them to the next rope above me.
“I’m off!” I yelled down to Rik.
While I hung there, resting against the wall, I watched Robbie farther along the base, starting a climb with a couple of students. He was pretty cute, but he had a girlfriend. He was on the Yosemite climbing rescue team with Rik. They got a free campsite and showers, and a small pittance for each idiot they rescued off a climb. Business was brisk.
I checked my jumars twice before I unclipped from the anchor and once again entrusted my fate to the two pumpkin-coloured pieces of metal. Slide, step, reach, slide, step, reach. My technique was getting smoother, and after a few minutes, I started to enjoy the motion.
“Can you speed it up a bit, Jan? It’s getting late.”
Rik was already near the top of the first rope. As I tried to go faster I lost my rhythm. Sweat trickled down my sides even though I was wearing only a tank top and shorts.
I transferred to the next rope as fast as I could and kept going.
“Rope!” He warned anyone who might be below as he dropped the first one. Then he glided effortlessly up the second toward me.
Rik was one of the top climbers in the valley. I wasn’t drawn to him romantically, but I wished I could be. We could talk for hours, the way I talked to girlfriends—comparing our screwed-up childhoods, talking about what we wanted to do if we ever “grew up”—and he was always giving me things, like a gear sling that was too small for him or his favourite wool earflap hat. But I must have read too many Harlequin romances in high school, because I had an image fixed in my brain of a hairy-chested guy who’d scoop me into his arms and rip off my bodice or my harness or whatever, without stopping to ask my permission.
Someone like Gary, for instance—the mountain guide from Alaska whose tent was right beside mine and Niccy’s. He was the latest, totally unexpected, complication to my love life.
At the top of the third rope, I unclipped and transferred to the fourth. I let myself look down, and wondered how long would it take for my body to reach the ground. Five, ten seconds? A wave of dizziness forced my focus back to the rock in front of me.
“Rope!” The next rope slithered all the way down the face to the ground.
As I slid my
jumars rhythmically up the rope, my thoughts strayed again to Gary—his big dome tent and thick foamy, how he’d tossed me around like a weightless rag doll. I had to stop to let a shudder travel through my body.
I hadn’t even been attracted to him at first. He was loud and hyper—too much like me. And we looked funny together, my five foot one and a half inches to his six foot four. But that body…He was lean and dark, with hands the size of dinner plates, a thick mop of black hair, and a bushy moustache under the biggest nose I’d ever seen that wasn’t plastic. He was so…swarthy. So Harlequin. He told me he’d had his eye on me since that humiliating day when I’d been on my way to a climb with Niccy. I was walking backwards, waving at him, and fell over a log. He said when I popped up laughing, he knew he had to have me. I gave him my usual line—I’m not looking for a boyfriend—the same line I’d given Rik, but he’d just laughed and said, “Bullshit.”
I fended him off for a couple of days then gave in one night while Rik was climbing. We’d been sitting around the fire drinking real beer—Moosehead, not Budweiser—just a short crawl away from his tent. I could blame it on our quality Canadian breweries.
The fourth rope went more quickly, but the whole step/slide/reach routine was growing monotonous. The sun had dipped behind the mountains, and in spite of the cooling air, I was sweaty and hot and my mouth was drier than dust.
“Rope!” Rik dropped another rope.
“Rik, I need water!”
I expected him to say, “Just wait there, I’ll bring it up,” in his typical accommodating fashion, but instead he bellowed back, “Just hold on till we get to the top!”
There was something different about Rik, something in the tone of his voice. He was no longer fawning. His new impatience was a bit of a turn-on.
I started to jug up the next rope.
At the next anchor, I was surprised to find there was no rope above me. Between my rhythmic jumaring and pornographic fantasies of Gary, maybe I’d lost count. I clipped in and yelled, “I’m off!” then hung from the bolts to take the weight off my feet. When I looked down I saw boulders turned to pebbles, and massive ponderosa pine to shrubs. My bowels constricted.
When he was halfway up the last rope, Rik yelled, “What are you doing? Why’d you stop?”
“I’m at the end.”
“You can’t be. There are six ropes.”
I looked back up at the blank rock. “There’s no more rope! I’m at the top of the last one.”
“Maybe you can’t see it. The last one’s black.”
“Hey, Rik, I think if there was a rope above me I’d see it.”
He ascended the last bit quickly, till he was hanging beside me. He looked up, his face streaming with sweat. “What the fuck?” I watched the colour drain away beneath his tatty red beard. “Where’s the rope?” His voice was hoarse with panic. I’d never seen him unravel like this. He sagged against the rock. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Rik, did you drop our last rope?” But I already knew. There was no rope trailing from his harness.
“Rik?”
Rik pounded the rock with his fists till I was sure he’d draw blood. He pounded and cursed while I cringed, suddenly transported back to Munster Hamlet where my father, fuelled by Scotch, and my brother by rum and Coke, had pushed each other around, screaming. Panic cut off my breathing and I needed to escape, but there was nowhere to go. We were hanging off the same bolts. I stared off into the valley and let myself detach, until I barely registered the rage spewing beside me. Tufts of smoke rose from barbecues by the Winnebagos. My stomach growled.
As I waited for Rik to calm down enough to figure out how to save us, the reality of the situation started to sink in. I was hanging, clipped by a locking carabiner and one-inch-thick nylon webbing to two bolts, 750 feet up a vertical wall of granite, with no way down. The bolts were drilled 150 feet apart, the length of a climbing rope, which meant that with two ropes we could descend. With one rope, we were screwed.
Eventually, Rik pushed wet hair off his face and looked around. “Jake must have taken the last rope down when he came up for his haul bag. Un-fucking-believable.”
The sound of laughter wafted up from the base.
“Robbie’s still down there with his students.” I leaned out from the rock and screamed, “Robbie!” I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there.
Rik put his head in his hands and groaned, “This is fucking embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing? Are you serious? How else are we going to get down?”
Rik hesitated, then his voice pummelled my eardrum. “Robbie!”
Eventually Robbie came into view and looked up. Waved both arms above his head.
After Rik was forced to broadcast our predicament to the whole valley, Robbie disappeared with his students. I waited for him to run down the hill through the trees and out to the road to get help, but he didn’t reappear.
“Why isn’t he going down?”
“He’ll finish up with his clients first.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding.” I put my forehead on the cooling rock. “So now what?”
“Just let me think.”
Refusing to look down, I stared at the wall and thought of Gary, how safe and protected I’d felt under his huge body. I wondered if he’d notice if I didn’t show up that night, but I’d only done two climbs with the guy and spent one night in the sack. He was as much my boyfriend as Rory. A familiar longing jabbed at me, a craving for someone who would notice whether I was dead or alive at the end of the day. Someone who could keep track of me, tether me to the ground so I’d stop floating off on any little breeze that blew my way.
I closed my eyes and kissed the rock. Please keep us safe.
“The guys can’t get to us in the middle of this wall.” Rik sounded calmer. “We have to get to that crack system. It’s the only way down.” He pointed to a crack in a left-facing corner. It looked very far away.
“Maybe we should just wait for a rescue.” I wanted to curl into a ball and hang from the bolts, like a pupa.
“No, we have to get as close to the ground as possible. I’ll have to pendulum.”
Rik set up the rope and lowered himself fifty feet. He ran across the rock away from the crack as far and high as he could go, let gravity swing him back, and sprinted toward the crack, straining for it, but it was too far away. He plunged in a long arc below me, ran back to the top of the pendulum, higher than before, then raced again across the rock. Again he missed. This went on and on, until finally his fingertips—conditioned from hundreds of vertical miles of climbing—clamped in the crack like vise-grips. They held his 180 pounds.
By the time Rik lowered me over to him the sun was going down. He grabbed my harness and pulled me toward him to clip me in. I let him. I didn’t give a shit anymore whether he thought I was tough. I just wanted to get down alive. Once I’d settled my feet on the small ledge, the blood rushed back into my legs.
We were both clipped into a single rusted piton poking out from the crack, and a carabiner that Rik had wedged in as a backup. We had no equipment with us to use as anchors to rappel from, so we had to rely on any gear previous parties had left behind.
“How old do you think that thing is?” I asked, rubbing goosebumps off my bare arms.
“I don’t know. Old. Probably put in on the first ascent in the seventies. It’s all I could find.”
“So now what?” I forced my mind away from the elements the piton had been exposed to: sun, rain, ice, sleet, snow…
“I’ll keep going down, see if I can find some bolts. You’ll have to unclip in case the anchor doesn’t hold.”
Rik watched me closely to see if I had understood. I had, but I wished I hadn’t. If the anchor failed while Rik descended and we were both clipped to it, his weight would pull me down and we’d both die. If I unclipped, just Rik would die, and I’d be clinging to a two-foot ledge in the dark, a few hundred feet up without an anchor.
“That’s fuc
ked.”
“I know. Don’t move till I tell you to. If it holds my weight, it’ll probably hold yours. I’m really sorry. I don’t know how I let this happen.”
After I unclipped, Rik slowly lowered himself onto the rope. Neither of us took our eyes off the piton. Fear ate at the inside of my belly. I realized how badly I didn’t want him to die.
“Maybe we should wait.”
“We’ll be okay. Just don’t move.” He forced a smile as he lowered himself below an overhang and out of sight.
On the valley floor, headlights moved toward the village, like a procession of fireflies. My legs cramped. I was thirsty and hungry and could take only tiny breaths because I was too scared to move.
“Rik!” No answer.
I wrapped my arms around myself but couldn’t stop shivering. The rope was still tight from his weight, so he hadn’t found an anchor yet. I pinched the piton lightly with my fingers for the false sense of security it gave me. One slip and I was gone.
If I had just paid attention before he dropped that last rope. As usual, I’d just bumbled along with my brain on pause. When I climbed with guys, even when I went first, I followed. No matter what I liked to tell myself. Just like a few days ago, at the Cookie Cliff. Rik and I had been scrambling across a sloping ledge between pitches. It was exposed, about three hundred feet straight to the ground, but it was easy so we hadn’t roped up. I was looking at everything but my feet, the waterfalls spilling off the mountains, the spires of granite, the clouds in the sky. Rik got to the base of the next crack, looked back at me, and right then my foot slipped on some pebbles and I started to slide. His eyes went the size of boulders and he reached out his hand as if he could save me. In those few seconds—before I caught myself from going over the edge—I realized he couldn’t. No one could. It felt like an epiphany. I was all on my own.
And now here I was again, having the very same epiphany.
