Sixty feet up the cliff, the toe of his climbing boot resting on a ledge no wider than a dime, two fingers curled around a nubbin of rock, Barry was suddenly afraid that he would fall. “Rope,” he called.
At the foot of the cliff, his daughter let out the golden line of rope that joined them. As Barry felt the rope go slack, he raised his right knee and pressed his toe into a shallow depression. Grunting with the strain, he stood up on his right leg, then paused, uncertain of his next move.
The cliff had proven to be deceptive. The conglomerate, with its rough, gravel-like surface, had looked easy. Close to the base there were large handholds, so that at first the climbing was little more difficult than walking up stairs. Then, unexpectedly, the surfaces smoothed; the places where he could get a secure hold were spread farther and farther apart. At the same time, the numerous cracks dwindled until there was no place to set any protection. Unable to go back because of his pride, he had continued until he now found himself dangerously far above his last piton. If he fell, he would drop twenty-five feet to the piton, then twenty-five feet past it before his rope came taut and held him. There was, because of the elasticity of the rope, a chance that he would ground out.
The thought flitted through his mind that it would be like falling from the top of a six-storey building. Tensing his fingers, he straightened his elbow and leaned back from the rock so that he could search for his next hold. Above him, there was a half-inch ledge. He reached up, got a good grip, then lifted his left leg higher than he had ever imagined he could and set his foot on the rough patch that would provide the necessary friction to hold his weight.
He had been scared many times but never like this. Never before had he been this close to paralysis, to a sensation of letting go so that the tension and the fear would be over. The way he felt, he imagined, was the way a wounded animal felt when it finally gave up fleeing and allowed itself to be killed.
Six inches from his left hand there was a vertical crack that seemed hardly wider than a fingernail. Cautiously, he explored it with his fingers. Just within his reach it widened slightly. He ran his hand over his rack and unsnapped the smallest chock nut. He forced the aluminum wedge deep into the crack. From the wedge there hung a wire loop and from that a carabiner. Catching hold of the rope tied to his harness, he lifted it up, forced open the spring-loaded gate of the carabiner and fitted the rope into the aluminum oval.
Once the gate snapped shut, he sighed with relief. The chock nut, the wire loop, the carabiner, the rope, fragile as they looked, would hold ten times his weight. If he wanted to he could let go and simply hang in space.
“You all right?” his daughter called.
“Yeah,” he lied, “just resting.”
His voice sounded faint and breathy. He was glad she could not see his momentary weakness. He could not control the trembling of his legs. The muscle of his right arm jerked spasmodically. Ever since his wife had left them, he had tried to compensate by providing unhesitating leadership for his daughter. He did his best to keep life simple and uncomplicated. It was, he thought, the way to provide her with security.
He glanced down. Among the scattered grey boulders, Moira’s red hair gleamed like a burnished cap.
“You’re doing fine,” she hollered. The crosscurrents of air that played over the cliff face blurred her voice, making it seem farther away than it really was. To hear what she said, he had to strain toward the sound. “You’ve got another twenty feet to a big ledge. You can do it easy.”
He was grateful for her confidence. Before they had started climbing, there had crept into his daughter’s voice a constant note of disparagement and disappointment. The times he had managed to overcome his own insecurity and had asked her what was the matter, she had turned her back on him, answering “Nothing” with a tightly controlled voice.
Bewildered, he had sought the advice of women at work who had teen-age daughters. They had been no help. Behind their competent, efficient professional selves, they were, he had realized, just as confused as he was. In desperation, he had gone so far as to pose to his class the question of the relationship of fathers and daughters. He had not been prepared for the reaction he got. From every corner of the room had come cries of bitter disappointment and resentment.
As he had left the classroom, one student had called to him. He had stopped to wait for her. She had frizzy dark hair, wore long dresses that might have come from a western movie set, a rainbow assortment of beads and a nose ring. She always talked as if she were thinking in some exotic language and translating it badly. She was the only student he’d ever had who insisted on analyzing War and Peace by consulting the I Ching.
“The caged bird proves nothing but the power of the captor,” she had intoned.
For a moment, he suffered vertigo, and the cliff seemed to sway as if in an earthquake. He pressed his forehead to the cool stone and shut his eyes. Inside his flesh, his bones trembled.
Taking up rock climbing had been an act of desperation. All the past activities Moira and he had done together—going to foreign films, visiting Seattle, beachcombing—she had dismissed with a contemptuous shrug of her shoulders. At one time, they had played chess nearly every day. Lately, she pretended she had never seen the game. When he had noticed an advertisement for rock climbing, he remembered that she had spoken admiringly of classmates who had hiked the West Coast Trail. He had registered them and paid their fees. Then he had informed her.
He had hoped she would be pleased. Instead, she was incensed that he had committed her to something without her consent. He knew she was right to be angry but he was too frantic to care. Over the previous month, she had come home late a number of times. Each time, the sweet-sour smell of marijuana clung to her, and her pupils seemed unnaturally large. He had not dared to accuse her of smoking dope. If he was wrong, she would never forgive him for being unjust. Being right frightened him even more. If she said, “That’s right. I’m smoking dope, six joints a day, and sniffing coke and participating in orgies,” he didn’t know what he would do. Ranting and raving had ceased to work. Reasoning with her had no effect. He felt utterly helpless.
By emphasizing that the money was spent and there was no refund, he won the argument over rock climbing. However, while he took the car to the first class, she took her bike. She went prepared to sneer at everything, but once she saw her classmates, her attitude changed. Instead of Moira being isolated by her youth, Barry was isolated because of his age. Of the fifteen members, eleven were under twenty. The instructor still didn’t need to shave more than once a week.
By the time the three hours were over and he realized that rock climbing wasn’t going to be rough hiking, it was too late to back out. There were only three girls in the class. In return for the attention of one-third of the young men, Moira was prepared to scale the Himalayas.
Barry began with an attitude that was typical of someone raised on the prairies. Anything over three feet was a substantial elevation. During the second class, he was expected to climb vertical cliffs. He gave some thought to dropping out of the class but realized that, after the fuss he had made about the fees, he would look like a dreadful hypocrite.
Gradually, as a dozen Saturdays passed, what had seemed impossible was reduced to the merely difficult. Cliffs that had looked flat and smooth as polished marble became a series of problems and solutions. The names of the unfamiliar equipment became a part of his vocabulary. Young men in climbing boots frequented his back yard and kitchen. To his relief, Moira accepted him enough to spend an occasional hour practising knot-tying with him.
This weekend there had been no class. In an attempt to heal a rift caused by an argument over her going away to college—she was two years ahead of herself in school and, therefore, in spite of being in grade twelve was only sixteen—he had offered to go climbing with her. To his surprise, she’d accepted.
“Climbing,” he called.
“Climb on,” Moira answered.
He stepped up, away from the safety of his perch. His life, he realized, was in her hands. If he fell, she was his protection.
The thought of giving her so much responsibility was like the prick of a thorn. In all other things, he had been trying to keep her from rushing headlong into taking on too much responsibility at once. The result had been a long series of disagreements. She did not have the decency to let one dispute finish before she began another. Sometimes three or four overlapped.
On Fridays, when he went to the faculty club, he ordered double brandies and brooded over whether he shouldn’t have insisted on Sunday school in a good fundamentalist church all the past years. When they talked about their teen-age children, his colleagues, the majority of whom were the epitome of liberal tolerance about most things, reverted to wistful fantasies about convents and boarding schools in inaccessible locations.
The weekend past, Moira had wanted to go to an all-night party with a boy he just vaguely recognized as having drifted through the house two or three times. Barry was dumbfounded. At the same age, he’d had to have his girlfriends in before midnight. If he had kept a girl out all night, her father would have met them with a shotgun.
“Good girls,” he said, quoting something he’d heard in adolescence, “don’t stay out all night.”
“Good fathers,” she shot back, “don’t think the worst of their daughters.”
That afternoon was filled with slamming doors, weeping and raised voices. He found himself fighting so hard against her staying out all night that he compromised on three o’clock and afterward, when he had calmed down, wondered how it had happened. He had been determined to start with a deadline of midnight and let himself be persuaded to accept one o’clock. Although Moira claimed not to remember the chess moves, he had the distinct feeling that he’d been checkmated.
The final blow had been her insistence on going away to college. They had the money, he admitted. It just wasn’t sensible, at sixteen, to travel two thousand miles to attend a school when the local university was every bit as good, even if it did have him on the faculty. He suspected the choice had more to do with her all-night party boy than with academic excellence.
Now, as he worked his way up toward the large ledge where he was to set up a belay station, it was as if Barry were in danger of being pulled backward by the sheer weight of his memories. It was with a sense of relief that he heaved himself over the ledge. He paused to catch his breath, then anchored himself to a boulder.
“On belay,” he shouted down, giving Moira the signal that he was ready.
His daughter, eighty feet below, seemed so small that Barry felt he could lift her into his arms. She looked no larger than she had when, at three, she had eaten a bottle of aspirin. He had scooped her up and run with her four blocks to the hospital. After that desperate race and the struggle to hold her down—it had taken both him and a nurse to control her flailing limbs while the doctor pumped her stomach—he was acutely aware of how tenuous her life was, of how much he would suffer if he lost her. For a long time afterward, he thought of her as being intricately constructed of fragile paper.
“Climbing,” Moira answered.
“Climb on,” he shouted.
From time to time, she paused to pull loose the chock nuts and pitons her father had left behind. These, since they would be needed later, she clipped to a sling that hung over her shoulder. Once, when she deviated from the route her father had taken, she became stuck at an overhang. Not having dealt with the obstacle himself, Barry could not help and had to leave her to find her own solution.
The climb seemed agonizingly slow, as if it would never be completed. Then, when it was over, and his daughter, grinning, breathless, was climbing over the edge, it was as if hardly any time had passed.
They sat side by side, sipping orange juice, their feet dangling in space.
“I thought you were in trouble,” Moira said.
“I though you were too,” he replied, matching his weakness with hers. Then, ashamed, he admitted, “I gripped.”
Moira twisted about. Her red hair was snugged at the back with a rubber band. Being outside had sprinkled her nose with light freckles.
She studied the cliff face. It rose another hundred feet. There was a crack that ran more than halfway, then a small series of outcrops. He tried to see the route they should take, but the last ten or fifteen feet seemed impossible.
“I’d come home for Christmas,” she said in a rush, “and classes are out in April. It’s not as if it was such a long time to be away.”
She had caught him unaware, and none of his carefully prepared arguments were at hand.
“It’s just so unexpected,” was all that he could manage.
“I’ve got to leave sometime.”
The house will be so empty, he wanted to say. How will I get used to being alone? It is as if you lost your first tooth only last year. As if I took you to kindergarten six months ago. You’re barely rid of your braces.
She lifted her index finger and rubbed the side of her nose. She had done it as long as he could remember. It was her signal that she was going to impart a confidence or confess a wrongdoing—that she liked some boy in her class, that she had got a detention or that she had spent all her allowance before the end of the week and needed more money.
“I’m not innocent, you know.”
He wondered what she meant by that but was afraid to ask.
“I mean,” she continued, “Vic High’s a big school. You hear a lot. Everybody’s on the pill. The dope’s there if you want it. There’s lots of opportunity.”
He was tempted to let loose his anxiety in a lecture, but the memory of the frizzy-haired student in his class stopped him. She had stood on one foot all the time they were talking, the sole of her left sandal pressed to her right knee. She had passed her hand before his face in an affected arc. He’d heard her father was a prominent lawyer in the East but found it hard to believe.
She had talked in aphorisms and riddles, then a silence had fallen between them. He’d wondered why she had bothered to call after him, what she had really wanted to say. He had left her but, after a few steps, glanced back. She had given up her stork-like stance and was standing with feet together, shoulders slumped, her face slack beneath her gaudy makeup. For the first time, he had seen how much younger she was than he had thought. If he had not known better, he’d have said she was a lost child.
Just then, she had seen him watching her. Immediately, she had drawn up her shoulders, flung back her head, given an exaggerated sway of her hips and pranced away. That had been the last time he’d seen her. She had never come back to his class, and one day a yellow drop-slip with her name on it had appeared in his mailbox.
“I want to lead this pitch,” Moira said.
Barry was startled. She had never led. Always before she’d been second or third on a rope.
“I was thinking of rappelbng down,” he answered. “I can’t see a clear route up.”
“There,” she said. “There and there and there.” She jabbed her fingertip at a series of holds.
“But where would you set your protection?”
Her hand wove a series of stitches in the air. “There. Up there. To the side. Back across. Up about six feet.”
His fear for her was not without reason. The climbing, after seeming so dangerous at first, had begun to lose its aura of hazard. They all fell from time to time, but their ropes kept them from suffering more than bruised knees and elbows. Then, one of the climbers who was leading had ignored instructions and, overconfident, had put in only one piece of protection. He placed it improperly, and when he slipped and fell, his weight jerked it loose. For a moment, no one had been able to move, then those who were not belaying or climbing had run toward the boy who lay sprawled on his back. Bright red blood seeped from his nose and ear.
“Jackets,” Barry had demanded. Red Cross training that he’d not thought about in years came back with an intense clarity. “Every piece of clothing you can spare. We mustn’t let him get cold.”
They all had moved automatically, clumsily, unable to think. Having done as he instructed, they all stood stupefied. Their faces were shocked white beneath their tans.
He sent two of the students racing down the hill for help.
For an hour, they had huddled in a ragged circle around the boy whose hair was paler than the sun-drenched grass and whose skin might have been molded from wax. He slipped in and out of consciousness. Each time his eyes shut, they all tensed, afraid that he had died. But then, he would groan or let out his breath harshly, and the moment would pass. Someone, Barry did not notice who, had started collecting gear. One, and then another, began to pack. They moved slowly, silently, as if any noise would disturb the delicate balance between life and death.
Grounded out. That was what they called it. Because his safety had not been properly set, he had grounded out. Barry remembered that the air force had been like that too. Pilots never failed. They never died. They bought it. Grounded out. The semantics covered up the fear.
Now, for a moment, it was as if, once again, he could hear the sharp, startled cry, see the backward arc, the body falling without grace or beauty, the rope writhing and twisting, the red-shirted boy settling in a cloud of unexpected dust.
“Ron,” Barry protested, surprising himself at remembering the boy’s name.
“Do you think I’d be so careless?”
It was asked in a tone that allowed no argument.
Stiffly, he stood up and tested his belay.
Don’t climb, he thought, it’s too dangerous. Let us go back the way we came and find somewhere that’ll always be safe. But even as he thought it, he knew that it was impossible.
Once again, it was as if he were standing before the frizzy-haired girl, watching her long green nails sweep slowly before his face. At the time, he had not wanted to understand, “The world seeks balance,” she’d said. “Extremism begets extremism.”
“On belay,” he said.
“Climbing,” Moira replied.
His daughter, easily, with the supreme confidence of youth, grasped a handhold and pulled herself onto a flake. Smoothly, she worked her way up one side of the crack, straddled it and crossed over.
Below her, her father, ever watchful, full of fear, smoothly payed out the rope, determined to give her all the slack she needed, while at the same time keeping his hands tensed, ready to lock shut, ready to absorb the shock of any fall.