ISTAND AT the base of El Capitan, my hands flat on the warm rock, straining my neck to stare up three thousand feet of granite. A thin red line of nylon climbing rope lies against the blank face and disappears up out of sight.
Jake throws his backpack on the ground and starts to dig out the gear.
“How high are we going?” I ask in my most laid-back voice.
“About eight, nine hundred feet. Don’t worry. We’ll be up and down in a couple of hours.”
“I’m not worried. Just wondering.”
Reaching into my shorts pocket, I pull out my tin of Copenhagen. I take a pinch of the tar-black tobacco, tuck it into my lower lip, tamp it down with the tip of my tongue, and spit out a few floaters. The nicotine buzz spreads through my body, calming my nerves, heating and numbing my mouth.
Jake stops sorting gear. “You’re not going to spit that down on me, are you?”
“Why, am I going first?” Even though I’ve never ascended ropes, somehow following feels safer, even though dead is dead if you fall from 900 feet.
“Yeah, I’ll come up behind—clean the anchors and drop the extra ropes.”
We’re not here to rock climb, just retrieve ropes, but at least I’ll get to hang off the most famous hunk of rock in the North American climbing world. Jake and his partner Mike spent the last three days on Horse Chute, then they used the bolts on this blank wall to rappel back down, leaving the ropes behind. They were planning to ascend the ropes and finish the climb after re-stocking their food and water, but Mike copped out. Now the ropes have to come down.
I spit a long, dark stream of tobacco juice into the rocks.
“That’s a disgusting habit.” Jake sounds irritated, not his usual self.
I learned to chew snuff two years ago in Wyoming on a three-and-a-half-month outdoor leadership course where I also learned to rock climb—my big dream come true. At first I chewed to gross everyone out and to prove girls can do anything guys can do, but now I’m addicted, in spite of my terror of mouth cancer and the fact that Copenhagen smells like pig shit and gets stuck in my teeth.
Jake hands me a tangled pile of nylon slings and two yellow ascenders.
“Here’s your jumars. We’d better get going. We’ve got less than three hours of daylight left.”
He steps back, his arms crossed over his chest like a teacher. Except I’ve never seen a teacher with forearms the size of my calves. Rock climbing half the year and ice climbing the other half has turned him into a scruffy, red bearded, dark-eyed Popeye.
After I scoop out my tobacco and take a swig of water, I attach my jumars to the rope and clip an etrier—a six-foot ladder made from webbing—into each.
“Okay, I’m ready.”
Jake studies me through narrowed eyes. “I thought you said you’d used jumars before.”
“I have. I jugged up a tree once to hang the food.”
Jake shakes his head. “Shit.” He grabs two pieces of nylon webbing that are curled up at my feet. “You forgot your daisy chains.”
Daisy chains? He slips the webbing through my harness in a girth hitch and attaches 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 can see that the daisy chains are the only thing securing me to the rope. If I let go of the jumars, I’d fall to the ground. This is starting to look more complicated than rock climbing.
“Your harness is doubled back?” He grabs my harness and jerks it roughly.
“Yeah, yeah.” I pull away.
After climbing in Alberta for almost two years, I know how to put on a harness. But when Jake turns his back, I check my buckle, just in case. Right here in Yosemite, a woman leaned off a ledge to rappel and fell to her death because she hadn’t done her harness up properly. One stupid, split-second mistake.
I slide the top jumar as high up the rope as I can reach, slip my sneaker into one of the loops of the etrier, and step up. But the rope swings me around and my body slams into the rock.
“It’ll take a bit to get the stretch out of the rope. Here, I’ll hold it for you.”
“I can do it!”
Jake throws up his hands defensively and steps back to watch.
Fumbling with my etriers, it occurs to me he’s talking to me like I’m an idiot, the way I overhear boyfriends talking to their girlfriends at the bases of climbs. But I came to Yosemite to really climb, not to follow some hot-shit climber around. When I climb with women, we alternate leads. When I climb with guys, it’s too easy to give up the sharp end of the rope. The best thing I could do is swear off men altogether. Become a lesbian. But given my track record, it doesn’t look like there’s much chance of that happening.
Finally, I’m off the ground. When my weight is on one jumar, I can reach down and slide the other one up the rope. I transfer my weight back and forth like that, slogging upward, as if I’m on some defective step machine at the gym. Not that I spend much time at the gym. My idea of training is ski touring, climbing, or hiking, then drinking beer and doing finger pull-ups on door jams when I have a male audience.
“You’re doing good, Jan!”
About eighty feet up, halfway to the first anchor, I have to stop and flex my fingers, stiff from their death grip on the jumars. This gets the scabs on the backs of my hands bleeding again. For the past few days, we’ve been crack climbing, and my jamming technique is less than perfect. I notice Jake doesn’t have one scrape.
By the time I get to the first anchor—two bolts drilled into the rock—my feet and hands are numb. I shouldn’t be getting pumped so quickly. Not after working ten-hour days on a trail crew in Alberta all spring and summer, and rock climbing or hiking in the Rockies every day off. But going up these ropes seems to use a whole different set of muscles.
I secure myself to the anchor, unclip my jumars and transfer them to the next rope above me.
“I’m off!” I yell down to Jake, to let him know he can start his ascent.
While I rest against the wall, I watch Robbie at the base, starting a climb with a couple of students. He’s on the Yosemite climbing rescue team with Jake. They get a free campsite and showers, and a small pittance for each idiot they rescue off a climb. Business is brisk.
I check my jumars twice before I unclip from the anchor to put my fate back into these pumpkin-coloured pieces of metal. Slide, step, reach, slide, step, reach. My technique is getting smoother, and after a few minutes, I start to enjoy the motion.
“Can you speed it up a bit, Jan? It’s getting late.”
Jake is already near the top of the first rope. As I try to go faster I lose my rhythm. Sweat trickles down my sides even though the sun is gone and I’m only wearing a tank top and shorts. We decided to go light, since we wouldn’t be on the rock long. Not long enough to need food, or warm clothes. Jake has a water bottle clipped to his harness, but we’ve left the packs at the base.
Jake and I met last spring, on my first trip to Yosemite Valley. He lives here in Yosemite half the year, Alaska the other half. Right now we’re slumming at Camp 4, the climbers’ campground. There are no showers, no hot water, and the toilets overflow daily, but it’s only a dollar a night per person. Jake is camped with the rescue team; I’m at Site 27 with the friends I came down with from Alberta, co-workers at a kids’ outdoor camp near Calgary. I’m sharing Niccy’s tent, but she’s heading back north, so I’ll be homeless soon, and Doc is heading back to North Carolina, leaving me without transportation. Jake invited me to share his tent and I declined.
Jake is tewenty-five, four years older than me, and has never really had a girlfriend. It shows. He still thinks you get the girl by being agreeable. I told him I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, that it would interfere with my climbing. I considered telling him I already have someone back home, but that would have been stretching it, since I’m between boyfriends. Sort of. Randy was never really my boyfriend, since he already has a girlfriend, though she is living back East. And that little thing with Scottie the night before I left for California can hardly be considered “a relationship,” since I fell asleep in the middle of it.
Jake is waiting at the bottom of the rope, so I transfer to the next rope as fast as I can and keep going.
“Rope!” He warns anyone at the base as he drops the first rope, then glides effortlessly up the second toward me.
Jake’s among the top climbers in the Valley. I wish I could be drawn to him romantically. We can talk for hours, the way I talk to girlfriends—comparing our screwed-up childhoods, talking about what we want to do if we ever “grow up”—and he’s always giving me things, like a gear sling that’s too small for him or his favourite wool earflap hat. But I must have read too many Harlequin romances in high school, because I have an image fixed in my brain of a hairy-chested guy who’ll scoop me into his arms and rip off my bodice or my harness or whatever, without stopping to ask my permission.
Someone like Max, for instance—the mountain guide from Alaska. He’s the latest, totally unexpected, complication to my love life. He doesn’t ask.
At the top of the third rope, I unclip and transfer to the fourth. I let myself look down. How long would it take for my body to reach the ground? Five, ten seconds? A wave of dizziness forces my focus back to the rock in front of me. When I took my first lead fall in the spring, here in the Valley, it was only fifteen feet, but I felt like I was never going to stop. It felt like a rite of passage. Like losing your virginity.
“Rope!” The next rope slithers all the way down the face to the ground.
As I slide my jumars rhythmically up the rope, my thoughts stray again to Max—his big dome tent and thick foamy, how he tossed me around like a weightless rag doll. I have to stop to let a shudder travel through my body.
I didn’t even like him when I first met him. He’s loud and obnoxious and hyper—too much like me. And we look funny together, my five-foot-one-and-a-half to his six-foot-four. But that body. . . He’s 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’ve ever seen that isn’t plastic. He’s so. . . swarthy. So Harlequin. He told me he’d had his eye on me since that humiliating day when I was on my way to a climb with Niccy. I was walking backward, waving at him, and I 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 gave Jake, but he just laughed and said, “Bullshit.”
After a couple of days of fending him off, I gave in one evening while Jake was up on this climb. So my resolution to focus on my climbing and forgo men has lasted approximately two weeks. Something that is becoming a bit of a pattern in my life—if you can even have a pattern at twenty-one.
The fourth rope goes more quickly, but the whole step/ slide/reach routine is getting monotonous. In spite of the cooling air, I’m sweaty and hot and my mouth is drier than dust. I shouldn’t have had that last chew.
“Rope!” Jake drops another.
“Jake, I need water!”
I expect him to say, “Just wait there, I’ll bring it up,” in his accommodating fashion, but instead he bellows back, “Just hold on till we get to the top!”
There’s something different about Jake today, something in the tone of his voice. He’s no longer fawning. His new impatience is almost attractive.
I start to jug up the next rope.
At the next anchor, I’m surprised to find that there’s no rope above me. Between my rhythmic jumaring and pornographic fantasies of Max, maybe I’ve lost count. I clip in and yell, “I’m off!” then hang from the bolts to take the weight off my feet. When I look down I see boulders turned to pebbles, and massive ponderosa pine to shrubs, and my bowel constricts.
When he’s halfway up the last rope, Jake yells, “Why’d you stop?”
“I’m at the end.”
“You can’t be. There are six ropes.”
I look 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 Jake, I’m not blond. I think if there was a rope above me I’d see it.”
He ascends the last bit quickly, till he’s hanging beside me. He looks up, his face streaming with sweat. “What the fuck?” I watch his colour drain away beneath his tatty red beard.
“Where’s the rope?” His voice is hoarse with panic. I’ve never seen him unravel like this. He sags against the rock. “Jesus fucking Christ!”
“Jake, did you drop our last rope?”
“Jake?”
Jake pounds the rock with his fists till I’m sure he’ll draw blood. He pounds and curses and there’s nowhere for me to go. We’re hanging off the same bolts. But I’ve been through similar episodes with the men in my family—my dad and brother, one fuelled by Scotch and the other by rum and coke—so I know what to do. I stare off into the valley and let myself detach until I barely register the rage spewing beside me. Tufts of smoke rise from barbeques by the Winnebagos. My stomach growls.
As I wait for Jake to calm down enough to figure out how to save us, the reality of the situation starts to sink in. I’m hanging, clipped by a locking carabiner and one-inch-thick nylon webbing to two bolts, 700 feet up a vertical wall of granite, with no way down. The bolts are drilled 150 feet apart, the length of a climbing rope, which means that with two ropes we could descend. With one rope, we’re screwed.
Eventually, Jake pushes a flop of wet hair off his face and looks around. “Mike must have taken the last rope down when he came up for his haul bag. Un-fucking-believable.”
The sound of laughter comes wafting up from the base.
“Robbie’s still down there with his students!” I lean out from the rock and scream, “Robbie!” I can’t see him, but I know he’s there.
Jake puts his head in his hands and groans, “This is fucking embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing? Are you serious? How else are we going to get down?”
Jake hesitates, then his voice pummels my eardrum. “Robbie!”
Eventually Robbie moves into our view and looks up. Waves both arms above his head.
After Jake is forced to broadcast our predicament to the whole valley, Robbie disappears back with his students. I wait for him to run down the hill through the trees and out to the road, but he doesn’t reappear.
“Why isn’t he going down?”
“He’ll finish up with his clients first.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.” I put my forehead on the cooling rock. “So now what?”
“Just let me think.”
Refusing to look down, I stare at the wall and think of Max, how safe and protected I felt under his huge body. I wonder if he’ll notice when I don’t come back, but I’ve only done two climbs with the guy and one night in the sack. He’s as much my boyfriend as Randy or Scottie. A familiar longing jabs at me. Sometimes I crave 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 close my eyes and kiss the rock. Please keep us safe.
“The guys can’t get to us in the middle of this wall.” Jake sounds calmer. “We have to get to that crack system. It’s the only way down.” He points to a crack in a left-facing corner. It looks very far away to me.
“Maybe we should just wait for a rescue.” I have an urge 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.”
Jake sets up the rope and lowers himself fifty feet. He runs across the rock away from the crack as far and high as he can go, lets gravity swing him back, and sprints toward the crack, straining for it, but it’s too far away. He plunges in a long arc below me, runs back to the top of the pendulum, higher than before, then races again across the rock. Again he misses. This goes on and on, until finally he scrabbles at the edge of the crack and his fingertips—conditioned from vertical miles of climbing—clamp down like vise grips. They hold his 180 pounds.
By the time Jake lowers me over to him it’s getting dark. He grabs my harness and pulls me toward him to clip me in. I let him. I don’t give a shit anymore how tough he thinks I am. I just want to get down alive. Once I settle my feet on the small ledge, the blood rushes back into my legs.
We’re both clipped into a single rusted piton poking out from the crack, and a carabiner that Jake has wedged in as a backup. We have no equipment with us to use as anchors to rappel from, so we have to rely on any gear previous parties have left behind.
“How old do you think that thing is?” I ask, rubbing the 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’ll keep going down, see if I can find some bolts. You’ll have to unclip in case the anchor doesn’t hold.”
Jake watches me closely to see if I understand. I do, but I wish I didn’t. If the anchor fails while Jake descends and we are both clipped to it, his weight will pull me down and we’ll both die. If I unclip, just Jake will die, and I’ll be clinging to a two-foot ledge in the dark, 600 feet up without an anchor.
“That’s fucked.”
“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 unclip, Jake slowly lowers himself onto the rope. Neither of us takes our eyes off the piton. Fear eats at the inside of my belly, nauseates me. I don’t want him to die.
“Maybe we should wait!”
“We’ll be okay. Just don’t move.” He forces a smile as he lowers himself below an overhang and out of sight.
On the valley floor, headlights move toward the village, like a procession of fireflies. My legs cramp. I’m thirsty and hungry and can only take tiny little breaths because I’m too scared to move.
You’re not as tough as you think you are. That’s what Max said to me when I pulled out my tin of tobacco. Maybe he’s right.
“Jake!” No answer.
I wrap my arms around myself but can’t stop shivering. The rope is still tight from his weight, so he hasn’t found an anchor yet. I pinch the piton lightly with my fingers for the false sense of security it gives me. One slip of my feet and I’m gone.
If I had just paid attention while I was jumaring, I could have said something. Before he dropped that last rope. As usual, I just bumbled along with my brain on pause. Even when I go first, I follow.
I call down again.
“Jake!”
The rope goes slack. He’s found another anchor.
“Rap down slowly!” His voice is faint.
With the rope through my rappel device, I lower my weight onto the piton. Jake weighs about seventy pounds more than me, so I should be okay, unless his weight shifted the pin and now it’s ready to pop. I start to descend into the black night, cringing as the rope runs through my rappel device in quick jerks, putting more strain on the anchor. My jumars and etriers dangle from my harness, clanging against the rock, the only sound except for my breathing—short, quick sips of air.
“Be careful. I barely made it to the anchor.” Jake appears just below me and off to the right, still several feet away. Relieved to see him, I descend faster.
“Watch your brake hand! You’re going to run out of rope! STOP! NOW!”
As the words rip from his mouth, I feel the tape that marks the ends of the rope and I instinctively squeeze before the last bit of nylon can slip through my rappel device. Three inches. That’s all that stands between me and the paper bags of shit at the base that climbers jettison during their multi-day climbs. If Jake hadn’t shouted at that moment, I would have rappelled right off the end of the rope.
I hang, over 500 feet up the wall, paralyzed. I don’t weigh enough for the rope to stretch those extra few feet to the anchor.
“Jake. What do I do?” To keep from crying, I clench my teeth.
“Just don’t move. Don’t let go. I’ll get to you.” I can hear him unclip from the anchor but don’t dare move my head. By the time he rigs up a sling and hauls me over to him, I’m shaking like an epileptic.
“It’s okay. We have a good anchor now.” He clips me into two bolts and I slide my back down the wall to sit on the ledge. My feet dangle into nothingness. Jake sits and puts his arm around me but I can’t calm my body. Can’t stop the tears.
“I’m so sorry. We’ll get down. I promise.” He passes me the water and I gulp it down. Terror has sucked up the last of my saliva. “The guys should be here soon, but I think we can get down another pitch.”
“I don’t think I can move.”
“It’s okay. We’ll take our time.”
We watch the headlights creep along far below on the road. I hear the rumble of a car in dire need of a new muffler, just like my own car, Baby Boat, and out of the blue, homesickness explodes in my chest. I want to go home. I want a home to go home to but I can’t even narrow “home” down to an address. Home is Canada. Home is my car. The most stable thing in my life right now is a rusted-out Dart that won’t start unless I shove a stick in the carburetor to open the choke.
Jake eventually breaks the silence. “Can I ask you something?” His voice is strained.
“What’s the matter?”
“I just want to know something.” He pauses. “Why Max?”
His dark eyes shine and his mouth twists under his beard. Shame courses through me, like I’ve been caught screwing around. But Jake’s not my boyfriend.
I clear my throat. My mouth is so dry. “I don’t know. It just happened.”
It just happened. Like everything else in my life. Like hanging off El Cap, without a rope, waiting to be rescued.
Jake removes his arm from around my shoulders. A shiver courses through me as I lose his body heat. “I thought you didn’t want a boyfriend.”
“I didn’t think I did.”
“Max is thirty-eight. He’s almost old enough to be your father.”
“I know.”
“He just separated from his wife.”
“I know, I know.”
Max doesn’t seem seventeen years older than me. He’s young for his age. Playful. Just the other day he said, “I bet I can bench-press you,” and got me to put on my harness so he’d have something to grab on to, then lay on his back and hoisted me into the air like I was a barbell. Jake would have no trouble doing the same thing—I’ve watched him do endless pull-ups—but the thought wouldn’t even occur to him.
“I don’t get it,” Jake says.
What am I supposed to tell him? You never bench-press me?
While I search for the right words, I wonder how he found out, but anyone could have told him. Max does have a nice tent, but a millimetre of ripstop nylon doesn’t offer much privacy.
“They’re here,” Jake announces in a low monotone, as though the zombies have found our hiding spot.
I lean out and look over the edge. The blackness below is punctuated by a procession of headlamps bobbing through the trees. I want to dance on the ledge and yodel, partly because I know that I’ve survived the night, and partly because I won’t have to continue our conversation.
“Thank God. I could use a beer.”
“Don’t get too excited. It’ll take them a couple of hours to climb high enough to shoot us another rope. Hopefully they brought the rope gun with them.” Jake stands up. “I’ll head down and find another anchor.”
Suddenly a blast of white light pins us to the rock, like wild animals caught in headlights. When my eyes adjust, I see two huge spotlights tilted up toward us from the ground; half a dozen bodies flutter around them like moths.
“Hey Jake! What the fuck you doing up there?” someone hollers.
“Jake, you moron! Is this whatcha gotta do to get a date with a chick?”
Jake turns his back to the taunts and sets up to rappel.
I yell down, “You assholes sure took your time! We’re freezing our nuts off up here!”
Jake leans out from the rock and starts to descend.
AT TWO in the morning, we walk through a quiet Camp 4. Neither of us speaks. Most of the tents are dark, but the occasional fire still crackles in a campsite, with climbers huddled around in pile jackets and down vests. There’s no sign of life in the sagging two-man tent I share with Niccy, nor in Max’s big yellow dome beside it. Jake and I say goodnight and he turns to leave, pauses, then comes back and gives me a hug.
“Sorry ’bout the fuck-up.”
“Hey, don’t worry about it.” I punch his arm. “At least now I can say I’ve been rescued off El Cap.”
I wait until he fades into the night, then kneel in front of Max’s tent and unzip the door.