I USED TO CLIMB IN THE SIERRAS. I was not such a good climber, but I was good enough to get into trouble. I was an apprentice teacher of rock climbing in a camp that was based at ten thousand feet near Mount Langley. Our students that year were high-school kids from East L.A. They were tough but good kids. And fooled kids. The recruiter who’d snared the guy on my Mount Whitney rope had told him he was going to the mountains to go water-skiing! (He’d confessed this to me just before I pushed him over the edge of a 150-foot drop for his first rappel.) He was big and strong, formidable on his own ground, but a baby at the end of a rope.
We’d got on the wrong route, not the easy broad-ledged pitches around a big outcrop we called the Bus, but up the scary vertical and tilted pitches of Shaky Leg Crack. There was about two thousand feet of clean granite exposure stretching downward in a gentle concave arc beneath our feet. That was when my ropemate said he couldn’t go any farther.
What was I going to do? I didn’t know if I could go any farther either, but I knew that he had to. So I took his rucksack off his back to lighten his load, tying it off so that it hung by a hank of rope from my waist. Now, I was quite certain that I couldn’t make it, even if we found the right route again.
Stepping up to lead the next pitch, I came into a wide shallow crack that leaned a little outward from the face and to the right. Again and again, I tried to get wedged into it, only to fall back. I was terrified. It was clear that the only way to do this move was to turn face out and shimmy up it. The dangling pack was in my way; my ropemate was saying he couldn’t hold me; and I was, I felt, unquestionably about to fall.
Perhaps thirty seconds later, without knowing exactly how, I had made the move and found myself jammed in the crack—by the shoulders, upper arms, hands, knees, and feet—looking straight between my legs at a little alpine lake way below me, and out across the broken skirts of the Sierras, across the Owens Valley and to the high, stark White Mountains on the other side. All the fear was gone from me. In fact, I felt as though what became of me was a matter of no great consequence, and that regardless, I was completely happy. The question as to whether or not I would fall had become irrelevant. I felt I saw the world—in that moment—as it actually is.
Aquinas says that God is in the world not as the essence of all things but as their cause. That, I think, is what I saw that made it possible for me to relax more deeply than I ever had before or have since. The divine was not some Thing in which to “believe,” but living and active, not far off and deigning to descend, but the common principle of existence. It filled everything, yet could be diminished by the death of nothing.
All of that time is living to me: the colors that were not stronger but more fully modulated than I have seen since, the interaction of the wind and the sweat on my arms, the shifting weight of the pack swinging like the pendulum on a grandfather clock beneath me.
And with that, I feel particularly the press of the granite around me, and I sense my hands reaching up, looking for little ledges above me, brushing off a bit of the rock’s exfoliating skin, smelling it as a dust that for me is still more erotic than the perfume of my wife’s sweat.
The divine is the commonest thing in the universe. At that moment, the granite dust and I parted company. My companion and I headed up, straining and puffing, until we reached the suddenly easier pitches of the Grand Staircase. The dust of the rock sucked and twirled in the eddies of the air and went to join the skin of the Earth.
A quarter ounce of plagioclase feldspar clay falls through the afternoon. Half an hour later, my partner and I wait out a brief thunder-shower under a broad roof in the Grand Staircase. The feldspar is still in the air, lifted and thrown down by the violent air currents, until a raindrop passing at around twenty-five miles per hour, slams into it and carries it onto the fan of talus blocks at the base of the slope.
It slips along among the boulders streaked yellow with oxidized iron. Every block has a weathered rind, more or less thick according to how long it has lain exposed and how much water has struck it. The feldspar slides down with the water through the talus, into a runoff stream and thence into Mirror Lake.
Swept through the outlet, and out into a rapidly descending creek, it bounces down to the Owens Valley, where it rubs off in the bend of a stream meander. (You can see how a creek meander works by looking at the bottom. Where only the heavier gravels can be seen, the current is swiftest. Where sand is on the bottom, the stream is slower, allowing the comparatively small particles to settle.) When the stream dries in summer, the speck of feldspar is blown farther downhill until it comes to rest in the soils created over thousands of years by previous generations of these forces.
The soil is rich in acids, largely generated in humus or through the reaction of water with the high percentage of carbon dioxide in the soil atmosphere. These react with the feldspar, gradually releasing excess silicon and potassium, substituting hydrogen for some of them, and converting the crystal from a tight nest of polyhedra to the alternating sheets of an illite clay.
The special property of the clay is that along its exposed edges and its outer surfaces, it is not electrically neutral. It therefore attracts to itself oppositely charged particles, many of which are necessary for organic reactions, including potassium, calcium, and nitrates. From a locked closet of the mineral world, it has become an open shelf, where the roots of plants may shop for what they need.