by Alex Morel
“Listen,” he finally blurts out after playing with the ropes for what seems an eternity. “I’m going to lead us up. This is your rope. Run it through your belt loop.”
I grab it and pull the rope through my back loop and tie a knot.
“If you fall, that won’t hold you,” he says.
I look at him with a so-tell-me-what-to-do-dipshit stare.
“Pull it through the front and loop the rope around all the loops, like a belt. Then re-loop the last one and tie off a couple of knots. That stitching will hold you. You’re like a feather anyway; it won’t take much.”
Well, at least he noticed! I loop, tie, then nod.
“Let’s do it,” he says, putting up a fist bump.
“A fist bump,” I say. “I’m going to die and you want me to fist bump.”
He looks sheepish for a second and then says, “Sorry. Just trying to inspire you. Remember yesterday. You were amazing. Be amazing today.”
I look up the mountain one more time to assess my situation. Because the wall in this section is steep, there’s less accumulation of snow. That could change in a couple of months, but I’m starting to see the wisdom of Paul’s choice. After about one hundred feet of steep hiking, there’s a fifteen-to-twenty-foot climb to a small ledge.
Once we make the ledge—and that is if I can make the hundred-foot hike up the icy side of the mountain, followed by the short wall climb—I can see there’s an inversion of maybe ten feet that juts out as if Nature herself put it there to prevent all those who have entered this valley from ever leaving. Once over that, we will be off the valley ledge and on the mountain again. From there, maybe—maybe—it will be easier for someone to find us.
Paul hands me two one-foot-long sticks, maybe an inch thick, that have been whittled to a sharp point on one end and left untouched at the other.
“For climbing this first bit. Watch me.”
He jams the right-hand stick into the snow, which is thick and icy but not impenetrable. His boots are better suited for climbing in snow with their sharp steel toes, and he kicks them into the mountain as well and then jams his left-hand stick a foot or two higher. He starts moving up the mountain, one limb at a time, with slow but remarkable precision.
He turns back and looks at me.
“Come on. Use my toe holes, but make your own stick holes. You’ll be fine.”
Simple. Just replicate a trained soldier up a mountain. I start to question the validity of this decision. I start to question this whole euphoric feeling I’ve had since crashing, the adrenaline rush that has picked me up and carried me several times over the last forty-eight hours.
“Come on, Jane. I can’t go any higher without you moving behind me.”
As a kid—before my father died—I was invited to birthday parties at indoor climbing walls, and I was always drawn to the heights. I was a natural climber and was exhilarated by what I considered the most death-defying climbs. All that went away after he died. I take a breath and try a technique I learned at another hospital from a woman named Dr. Morris, who liked to say, “Visualize who you want to be.” I amend her words and try to visualize my younger, more daring self. I watch my younger self dance up the wall like a spider, light and sticky.
I poke my left toe into Paul’s first toe hole, leaning my weight against the mountain, simultaneously slamming my right-hand stick into the snow above me. The slope is gradual and supports my body, and the sticks Paul made add balance and grip. I pull up my right boot and find his toe hole again. Holy Jesus, I’m climbing. Don’t look down, I tell myself. Don’t look down.
He moves quickly and with purpose up the first fifty feet. Halfway up, he stops and looks down and gives me a thumbs-up. I nod in the most imperceptible way, instinctively, because any energy not going into this climb is wasteful.
Turning back to the mountain, he moves five to seven feet to the right, hand over hand, foot to foot, sideways instead of straight up. When I reach the spot, I see a large splotch of rock-hard ice. It is frozen runoff water from the overhang above it. I shiver for a second, wondering just how far back that ice goes and fearing that the overhang itself could be completely covered.
His sideways steps are long, and it is difficult for me to stretch my legs out wide enough to re-create his steps. I can feel my heart pounding underneath my jacket. My ears ring as my blood surges, and I feel aware of my heart pumping it all through my veins. There’s something about moving sideways that makes me look down, and when I do, I feel a rush of dizziness, and the earth below me becomes weirdly elongated. I turn my head back to the mountain, but it’s too late. I gag, and bile comes up into my mouth. I spit into the ice in front of me.
“I’m stuck,” I shout.
“No you’re not.”
My body is giving out. I can’t move. I can’t think. Except I know I’ve never wanted to slug another human being the way I want to slug Paul Hart right now.
“Because you’re me, is that it? You know exactly how it is for me right now.” I’m already rattled by the climb, but my anger toward Paul makes me shake even more.
“No, because I know you’ll make it,” he shouts. I feel a sincere and positive tone in his voice; he’s trying to inspire me.
“I can’t. I really can’t,” I shout back. I don’t want to be a victim, but I’m stuck and scared. I look down again. We must be sixty or seventy feet off the ground. The slope is so steep, I wonder how we’ve gotten this far already.
“I’m going to tighten the rope between us and give you a little lift. On the count of three, stretch across.”
“I can’t,” I shout.
“One—”
“No.”
“Two—”
“I can’t!” I scream, feeling my face burn red as I strain my vocal cords.
“Three.”
The rope between us is suddenly taut and I feel my weight lift, and I reach out my right foot and find a new hole and then again with my left. I stop thinking altogether and, foot by foot, I slide across the mountain slope until I reach Paul’s new path.
I look up at Paul, who watches me from behind his chrome, mirrored sunglasses, giving me zero to hold onto emotionally.
“What was that?” he hollers down.
“What?”
“I can or I can’t?” He laughs.
Bastard. Cambridge-Boston butthead. I focus on the mountain and don’t respond. My legs burn, like acid is pumping through my thighs. My arms feel wobbly, like they are made of Play-Doh. I feel doubt blooming in my brain, so I take a few deep breaths and refocus. Crush the doubts, Jane. They offer nothing and take everything.
We make our way up, and as Paul hits the first ledge below the wall climb, he pulls me up on the rope as I climb, making my own climb much easier. When I reach the first summit, I lie on my back and stare at the sky for a few minutes. My chest is heaving and my heart is racing, mostly from effort but with some pride too.
“Not bad,” Paul says. “Not bad at all.”
He stares out over the wall we just climbed and then up the next ascent. I sit up and then shimmy to the edge and put my legs over, letting them dangle.
“Wow. Thank you,” I say, trying to find a way to bridge the anger between us.
“Thank yourself.” He swipes playfully at the top of my hat and then turns to the wall. He looks up and I follow his gaze. There’s nowhere else to go but straight up.
Chapter 22
If it were a sheer wall that required a climbing hammer and those big nails they use, we’d be stuck on this ledge forever. But as I really study it, I can see that the slab of wall isn’t smooth but full of cracks, wrinkles, and stubble, like an old man’s face.
Paul puts his gloves on the rock and massages the stone. He looks up and to the left, then the right, trying to anticipate the climb, the consequences of choosing each possible path in the stone. For the first time in a while, I look to the sky and see that the dull glow of the sun behind the clouds has moved directly over us. The roc
k overhang, which I cannot bear to think of, is now directly over us and will be for the rest of the day. If a storm were to come through now, there’d be no way down and no way up. We would surely die up here.
Paul toes his right boot into a crack and then reaches up with his left hand. In a cat-like move, he springs and lifts, and boom, boom, boom, he creeps up the face. In what feels like seconds, he’s moved up half the face. He looks down at me and holds up one hand and tells me to stay put.
I watch him with awe. He’s studying the rock like a map. There’s maybe eight more feet to the next ledge, but it might as well be a mile. He digs into a crack with his right boot and then gracefully reaches up and grabs a knob in the stone with his left hand. He carefully places his left boot against a divot and lifts and then pushes the sole of his right boot against the flat of stone wall, the force holding him there momentarily. And then, with the agility of a monkey, he bounces up and grabs the ledge. He quickly swings his other right hand up, and he’s hanging by both arms off the ledge.
For a moment, the air in my lungs rushes out. He dangles a hundred or more feet above the ground, above certain death, if he falls.
If he falls, I selfishly think, I am dead up here. I realize, maybe for the first time in my life, that my survival is intimately tied to the survival of another human being. Without him, I will die. With him, there is hope. I can’t imagine he feels the same way about me, but then again, without me he’d be frozen in a chair on the side of a cliff.
He pulls himself up, grunting—then shouting—with the effort. He rolls over the ledge and disappears from sight. A few moments later, his buggy mirror sunglasses peep down and he calls, “All right. Don’t think about it. It’s all instinct.”
“I’m not good at instinct. I’m a big over-planner and a great second-guesser,” I shout. A little joke, in a difficult moment, isn’t so bad, I guess.
He holds up his thumb and grins. “Look who’s full of jokes in the panicky moments now.”
Then he shouts, “I’m gonna pull you up. Just keep climbing even if you slip.”
It’s a lot easier to go on instinct when you know whatever you screw up shouldn’t matter. Just keep climbing, Jane. That’s the key.
I address the wall and push the toe of my boot into the crack of the wall, just where he had. I look up one more time for reassurance. Paul isn’t where I can see him, but I know he is there, somewhere, lodged against a rock for leverage. I feel a burst of joy inside. Paul is lodged behind a rock; he will not let go; he will pull me up if I fall; no matter what I do, we will find a way. We will get out of here.
I spring up and slot my fingers into the rock with my left hand. I see his path clearly now, and my right hand follows quickly to a knob. My legs feel powerful, springing from one crack to the next, and my hands feel like iron, holding the rock with a grip I did not know I possessed.
I reach the midpoint, where Paul had stopped, and halt my climb. I feel the rope tug on me and I use my left hand to tug back. It goes slack. I stand still and catch my breath, careful not to look down.
“You’re amazing, Jane!”
I look up and those bug eyes are watching me.
I look up at the wall. The path that Paul took across the eight remaining feet isn’t one I can replicate. His arms are long, and his ability to leap and his upper-body strength far surpass mine. I see a crack in the wall that extends from where I am, zigzagging like a lightning bolt all the way to the top. The problem is that it is another good eight feet to my right.
“If I can get to there”—I shout and point—“can you hold me?”
“Yes. Wait until I give the rope three tugs. That means I’m ready.”
I hold up my thumb and wait.
Everything is silent, except for the wind. It sings, a little deathly hollow sound that bounces from rock to rock. It is so lonely, roaming through this valley. I know why that lonely song found its way into my heart before, why the very beauty of loneliness itself could become a friend. It is seductive and sweet, maybe sweeter than anything two people can share. I can still hear the call of it, but it has no pull on me now. I’m just looking at the task in front of me, which is moving eight feet to the left without killing myself.
One, two, three. Paul pulls the rope. I feel it tighten against my waist, and I push off the wall and for a second fly through the air, off the earth and away from its gravity. Then my body comes back against a wall with a smack. I scratch and claw to gain a foothold on the cliff. My pants cinch up tight and stress the loop holes around my rope. I hear one of them tear and suddenly I realize that no matter how strong Paul is, no matter how defined his leverage, if the loops go or the rope goes, I am in big trouble.
My left hand finds grounding first. A little nub my fingers latch onto becomes my lifeline. I pull myself firmly to the wall with all my concentration focused on my index, middle, and ring fingers. My eyes dart up the crack, which is two to three feet to my right now and slightly above my shoulder. I grasp with my right hand and cup the crack where it zigzags back across the face of the mountain. I push to check the firmness of my grip and quickly pull myself up. My feet are still scraping against the rock, but with Paul’s pull, they can wait. I reach with my left hand and start hauling myself up the crack.
Suddenly, my right foot finds footing inside the crack and off I go. In a matter of seconds I’m ascending, with Paul’s help, up the side and toward the ledge. There’s a little abutment of rock sticking out and I can’t hoist myself over it. Paul pulls hard, but his force is only pinning me against the rock.
“Stop! Stop pulling!” I can barely call up loud enough for him to hear me.
The rope remains firm but the pulling stops.
“I’m stuck,” I call, “beneath a rock.”
I can hear Paul make his way slowly toward the edge, probably terrified of being pulled over and having both of us tumble to our doom.
“Jane?”
He’s not far from me, but I can’t see him because of the rock.
“Yeah?”
“Your rope is jammed in the rock. That’s why you can’t get onto the ledge.” His voice is calm. “We need to cut it.”
Cut the rope. The words might as well be Jane, we need to cut your heart out of your body. I panic.
“I’ll fall!”
“No you won’t. Tighten your grip and let me know when the rope isn’t supporting you.”
I grasp as tightly as I can until I know in my heart that it is me who is holding my body on this mountain. Not Paul. Not God. Not a rope. Just Jane.
“That’s as firm as I can get,” I finally call. My voice is cracked. “I’m scared, Paul!”
“I’m gonna cut. You need to hold tight for less than a minute. You can do that. In about thirty seconds, my hand will come down to your left. Reach out and grab it, and I’ll pull you up. Trust me. I won’t let you go.”
“Okay.” I say it so softly I’m sure he can’t hear.
“Less than a minute,” he promises.
I grip with all the force in my being. I think of my angels again, like I’m taking off on a plane. Hold me here, I ask. Hold me on this earth. I think of my grandfather and my father and my cousin. I imagine their hands on my back, pressing me into the mountainside. Suddenly, I feel light.
“Jane, you’re going to have to cut the rope. I can’t get the right angle from here.”
His hand comes down holding the knife out for me and I reach out and grab it with my right hand.
“You can do this,” he says. I can’t even spare the energy to answer him.
The line is taut and firm. I push my toes into their hold and jam my left hand as firmly into its hold as I can. I grip the knife and lay the serrated edge against the rope and begin to saw. I am literally pressing my head into the side of the mountain as I saw, trying to keep the rest of my body as still as possible. The blade is sharp, and even though the rope is made to resist fraying, the knife makes its way through. As I near the final threads, I regrip
just before snapping the line completely.
It snaps and my weight shifts more than I expect it to. For a second, I wobble. The wind hits me at the same moment and my left foot shifts a millimeter. Reflexively, I thrash out with my right hand and drop the knife. I pull with both hands and cat scratch with my feet, trying to find grounding. I look down and see my boots, the wall, and then one hundred feet of void.
“Grab my hand! Grab my hand!”
I hear Paul shouting. I look to my right and there it is, maybe a foot away. My left hand starts to slip and I flail with my right, over to Paul’s, and we grasp just as my left slips free. I’m dangling by one arm over the cliff. Paul’s massive hand grips me, but we are suspended in mid-air. All his strength holds me but can’t seem to move me up and over.
“Your feet, Jane, get a foothold!”
But my feet are a foot from the wall, swinging wildly in the air. My left hand reaches up and finds a tiny landing on the top of the ledge. I pull as hard as I can, and suddenly, together, Paul and I begin to win the battle. I feel my body moving inch by inch. Paul is screaming like a wild beast, giving everything he has. And then my chest hits the edge and I throw my right leg up and over, landing and rolling onto the ledge.
I let out a scream and pound the ground. I feel like my heart might explode out of my chest, it’s throbbing so hard. Paul moves over and rolls me over and wraps his arm around me as tightly as he can. When my ears stop ringing, I realize he is whispering to me.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
I sob, thinking how close I came to dying, and to pulling Paul over that cliff with me. We lie there for a few moments, just holding each other and catching our breath.
“I dropped the knife,” I finally say.
“I know. You couldn’t have done anything else.”
He looks at the overhang above us and he smiles. “That’s okay. We finally caught a break.”
Chapter 23
