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direction. In the other two boys and a girl were playing Hacky Sack to the
sound of Windham Hill "limp-dick music,"
Bullseye liked to scorn it. Whoever wasn't off and about was preoccupied.
Nobody paid John any attention. It was deliberate, and John knew it. They'd
passed the word among themselves let John be. He was thankful for that and
limped over to his table to sit and rest, just for a minute, that's all it
would take. His head ached. The rest of him felt like throwing up. He propped
his skull against his hands and tried to arrange his next step. Suddenly he
knew the post-wall ritual wasn't going to be adequate. He was too hungry to
make it to the showers, too fatigued to eat, and too desperate to sleep. When
he closed his eyes the Visor was waiting for him. When he opened them, Half
Dome was looming in the east. It was hard to breathe. He felt small and
lonely. At last he stood up and hobbled over to lower his food sack from a
tree pulley. Inside was a bag of roasted peanuts. Back at the table he cracked
and shelled and ate peanuts and tried to figure a way out of the brittle
present. The sunshine crowded him. Oddly, he remembered Whymper. He discarded
the legend as too abstract, but it came back. Every climber can recite the
details like a catechism lesson: In the spring of 1865, Edward Whymper
conquered the Matterhorn. On the way down, Whymper's team was struck with
disaster. Their youngest member slipped and dragged three others off into the
abyss. The rope between those unlucky four and Whymper's lucky three
miraculously, suspiciously snapped. Europe's most
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light dramatic ascent ended with death and scandal.
Instead of knighting the intrepid climber, Queen Victoria considered banning
all Englishmen from the sport. The burghers of Zermatt called for an
investigation of the tragedy. All eyes turned toward
Whymper and that frayed, snapped rope. Now, sitting at the bare picnic table
cracking peanut shells, John wondered if this was how Whymper had felt. They
were watching him all right, waiting for his story. His answer to the
question. Where had
Tucker gone? "Fuck you," John muttered at the peanut shells. Hadn't he seen
what he'd seen? Tuck arguing with the wind. Losing. Killed. His fingers froze
around a peanut. Who would believe Tucker had been killed? Not just that he'd
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fallen and dropped and died, but that he'd been murdered. By who? And why? You
saw it?
they'd say. And he'd say no, but I know. And they'd say, how? And he'd say, I
just know. And they'd look at him. And why should they believe a wild, sick
thing like that? Murder? In their Valley? No way. It would lack the resonance
of truth. There'd been rapes and beatings and robbery and even, yes, homicide,
in Yosemite, but never among climbers. The Valley as they knew it was a place
beyond the world of other people. In this gash of earth fear bought beauty,
and beauty was epiphany, a thousand transformations that orbited what was
natural and what was human. Like the old Roman poem about metamorphosis it was
no wonder that upon the jutting, serene architecture of El Cap and Half Dome
and the Leaning Tower and Sentinel and Mount Watkins and all the other walls,
men and women turned into animals and trees and rocks, and that those things
in turn took on the aspects of man. No wonder that Tucker had become a bird
and soared off. He was gone, maybe forever. That's what they were going to
say. Dead, maybe, but not murdered because what did that mean? Now, as the sun
shone and animals fed their springtime broods and the
Hacky Sack popped back and forth from foot to foot, John brooded at the picnic
table that had served him for so many seasons as a writing desk, kitchen
counter, and shop table, and suspected that, just so, Whymper too had brooded
about the wondrous crossing of man with mountain.
There had been fatalities among the Camp Four tribe before. Not often, but
memorably, climbers had returned from their walls and mountains spent and
dazed and alone and reeling with visions of their partner's fall, all too
ready to equate their own survival as a sort of failure, a fall from grace.
Time healed, though. John had seen that. He'd been through it himself after
Tony died on Aconcagua. The survivors got what they needed. From Whymper on
down, climbers had been dealing with their ghosts. Either they sold their gear
off, or else they recomposed a style and attitude toward the rock. Now, all
over again, it was his turn. No one was going to bother him for a while. No
one was going to visit. No one would pester him to eat or cry or talk. He'd
been closest to the event, and for now it was his to make sense of.
John sighed. They would never believe him. He didn't believe himself. This
time it was different. No act of God or nature had stolen Tucker. Something
indecent had
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Jeff Long - Angels of Light trespassed against the give and take of ascent.
Something evil. It made no sense. No, he decided, he was never going to make
it over to the showers. All that could wait.
John slept and slept. Camp was quieter than usual. Now and then, when he
surfaced from his dreams and lay in the tent, he tried to discern if camp had
always been so quiet or if perhaps people were tiptoeing around on his
account. As it turned out, the camp was half vacant. On the second twilight,
still unshaved, unwashed, bloody, hungry, and thirsty, John struggled out of
his tent, more delirious than ever. He felt ill and feverish. His head was
throbbing, and all day long, as the sun heated the tent walls, he'd been
sweating and mumbling. Whoever the Samaritan was kept replacing his empty
water bottles with full ones. Small packages of food had begun to appear at
his feet, too, but he had little stomach for food. The packages were there
throughout the day; then at night, when the bears came out and would rip tents
open or push car windows in at the smell of food, the packages would be
removed. All this happened while he slept. John noticed, but didn't dwell on
the kindness. Some of his cuts, particularly a rope burn along his right
thigh, were getting infected. And either his lips and ulcerated fingernails
were worsening or else, without the heights to distract him, he was just
noticing them more. Individually, his torments were trivial. Taken all
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