Virga
David Stevenson
Along the bleached shores of Mono Lake thousands of breeding gulls scavenge bits and pieces of this and that for their nests. This full juju is defined in the dictionary as good luck but only the gull knows the reason behind collecting its booty of fishing gear, colorful plastics, and ribbons. The gulls frequent the dump, picnic areas, and local restaurants for these decorative nest treasures.
—from a display at the Mono Lake Visitor Center
First we follow directions: twenty miles on the Benton Crossing road. Forty minutes and no signs of humanity later, the crags come into view. Another mile and a half up a steep, deeply-rutted dirt road. From here the view is impressive—of nothing—an unnamed mountain range and back to Benton Crossing road where no cars tread. But now: tire tracks, a firepit. The tribe has been here.
We stagger up to the crags, panting thickly in the thin 8,000-foot air. The guidebook drawing is crudely made, poorly reproduced, barely readable. Although the climbs are named and listed in order, they are utterly indistinguishable from one another:
Jimmy Jones
Caligula
Psycho Killer
Psycho Chicken
Mayhem
Hillside Strangler
We locate what we think is a distinct line, although from below we have no idea where it goes at the top.
I find a hawk feather.
We are being bitten mercilessly by small flies.
We do the climb which is highly recommended with three asterisks that we understand to be stars: a three-star route. Adventurous. From the top we make a short rappel and then a scary downclimb on slabs.
We find another climb, easier than the first, leading to a spacious comfy alcove high on the rock overlooking the empty valley. The clumps of high cumulus have darkened and are loosing rain into the air—virga, the rain that falls toward the high desert but never reaches the ground. From the top of this one we can walk off fearlessly.
For lunch: smoked cheddar on sourdough, Cloud 9 chocolate—dark and pocked with raspberries. We split an orange and wash it down with icy cold water.
Perhaps one more climb. We wander around the rock formations; there are four or five of them rising like castles out of the hillside. Eventually we reach the last formation, which finally gives us a sense of having found our bearings. There in the sand I see a Black Diamond carabiner—better than any I own.
A sign! I say.
Of what? says Jim.
That I’ve found a carabiner.
Instantly, I feel foolish. For a moment I had been in my meaning-making mode, caught up in the desire for things, that is objects, events, coincidences, the natural world, to mean more than they are. But then I returned intuitively (this formalization in language coming later) to the poet’s dictum: insistence upon THE THING ITSELF. In climbing, the safest operating principle is to assume that a thing is what it is. I once heard Christopher Isherwood speak, Isherwood whose lesser known works include the play, The Ascent of F6, a 1930s collaboration with Auden no less, which foresaw much of the folly surrounding today’s overblown mountaineering expeditions. The night I heard him, Isherwood told a story about D. H. Lawrence seeing a fish on the shore and saying, “Look, the symbol of Christian faith and fellowship!” And Isherwood said, “Yes, and life was never boring again.”
A hawk feather is just a hawk feather, even if for a moment one wishes, as if the thing itself were not enough, to make something more of it.
We locate a many-asterisked route, although we are unsure of the start and high above I can clearly see two impossible sections. Also, I am tired. Weary. Unfortunately, my wrist—so unusable the previous night that I could not twist the cap off a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale—is not feeling bad right now. A damned shame too, as I actually injured it climbing, therefore potentially providing me an honorable excuse to wuss out.
But no, Jim has a vision and is racking the gear. Putting on a climbing harness, after years of climbing, becomes second nature. But perhaps for precisely this reason people do it sloppily—forgetting to double back—mechanics—the equivalent of missing a loop when putting on a belt, but with far more serious consequences. The act must be deliberate. Sometimes when my wife and I are working with our children, we say, “It’s your decision,” meaning something like, we think we’ve given you the tools to construct what we see as the “right decision.” And it’s true they choose what we think of as “wrong” often enough, but we imagine they are learning to take responsibility for their actions.
I try to put my harness on and tie in to the rope with this sense of deliberation and yet I know my wife sees climbing as somehow irresponsible—at least an activity that takes me away from the family, at worst I’m putting myself in danger—for what? she’d like to know. As I twist the rope into a figure 8 and loop it through and back on itself, I imagine her saying, “It’s your decision.” And I act deliberately.
Jim acts even more deliberately, leading up awkwardly, stopping ninety or a hundred feet above to bring me up. I follow nimbly—the adverb applying to a climbing style that tends to be possible only when the rope is above me. When the rope is above you, falling is no worries, mahn. Lead climbing is another story; when you’re leading your end of the rope is called the sharp end. The clouds, as I climb, gather in thick menacing bunches.
From where I meet Jim I can see that the second pitch continues to hold unclimbable passages, as well as unprotectable ones (this meaning that if you’re the leader and you fall, you die). Above us a squawking group of seagulls swoops and wheels around, in seeming imitation of raptors or larger scavengers. They’re far from the Pacific and far from Mono Lake, their traditional breeding grounds, far in fact from any water at all except that which is about to drop out of the sky
What are they doing here? Jim asks. It’s not an unreasonable question. I’m a naturalist working in the general area; I know a few things. But I have to shrug. They’re confused, I say.
Lot of that going around, he says.
Jim smoothly leads through all problems but the last. Here he hesitates, then superhumanly disappears from view, over the lip of the impossible. Now it is beginning to rain. My goal is to climb quickly to the final impossible moves before a downpour occurs, and to dangle there until Jim pulls me over the top or I die of hypothermia. I’m dramatizing: the first scenario truly impossible—one person can’t really pull another up a sheer face, and hypothermia is unlikely though not impossible.
I do arrive at the crux before a downfall occurs, but the moves are still impossible. For ten minutes I stand there on footholds the size of fifty-cent pieces. (It would be a gross exaggeration to call them dime-sized—the climber’s stock metaphor—or to imply that I’m hanging off their edges by my fingernails). I am thinking about the difficulties, and then I calmly surmount them, as if detached. Whatever has just happened, it has nothing to do with brute force nor force of will. In a few feet I am sitting in a large pothole watching the thunderstorm close the gap between the unnamed ridge and us.
The hail hits as we’re setting up the rappel off a natural horn of rock on the backside. I’m thinking of my splendid high-tech jacket purchased just a week earlier with birthday money from my parents. The jacket is in the car. We are wearing cotton t-shirts. Today is my birthday.
We toss the rope out and because it passes an overhang, we can’t know for sure if it reaches the bottom. We know it’s close. With the rope stretching . . . , we argue. People die fairly often by rappelling off the end of their rope. In climbing there are many ways, most of them literal, to be at the end of one’s rope. But death seems unlikely here. And it’s raining.
The rappel is smooth and surprisingly airy—free, it’s called—the rope hanging over an edge, the climber spinning in the air. The rope reaches the ground as if cut to size. And it drops us into a slot of perhaps ten feet between the rock we have just descended and another of the castle-like formations. The rain falling harder now, but we’re on THE GROUND, where nothing very bad can befall us, or so we tell ourselves. One summer I did a long climb in Alaska and returned in a state of shock, paralyzed by an after-the-fact fear of the potential for disaster, until I was in a car accident that winter: the real danger, I realized, was everywhere.
Now, there can’t be more than a half-hour between us and the car, and we feel the warmth generated by having just done something the outcome of which had been uncertain.
We skirt around the base of the formation, back to the beginning of the climb where we had left our packs. In a moment of atypical efficiency I had tucked Jim’s camera and guidebook into his pack and covered my hiking shoes with my own pack. As I rounded a final corner those nylon things of the world came back into view.
The hail pelted us and we laughed, like, “Can you believe this?” This is the laugh of those who know that the car, replete with chocolate and beer, is now no more than fifteen minutes away. Reading the journals of John Cheever—a harrowing record of domestic unhappiness—I found the surprising and uplifting lines: “I do not seek it for long, but how wonderful it is to see at last a vision of wholeness, including some mountains.” My friend, John Boe, found this hilarious considering the source: “Yes,” he said, “Cheever in the mountains. Preferably seen from one’s sofa with a gin and tonic in hand.”
Then amid the loud patter, something more furious than patter really, hard rain and hail, a faint clink and Damn, says Jim, My wedding ring. For luck he wears it around his neck when we climb. Its string had broken. Which reminds me of how hard our route had been: Jim said fuck twice during the climb.
In our sixteen years of climbing together I’ve heard him utter it perhaps only a half dozen times. In such situations as leading onto dicey ground or losing my wedding ring, my personal mantra informed by years of study and acquired sensitivity to the subtleties of language, is a string of expletives worthy of a street thug in a drug deal gone bad. Now Jim has lost his wedding ring in a hailstorm in the mountains: Damn, he says. Jim is a mathematician. Climbing is what we have in common.
Don’t worry, I say, we’ll stay until we find it. All magnanimous and giddy am I, not wanting any mundane tragedy to take the edge off the climb.
Now the rain is sluicing off the rock, forming pools on the ground, waterfalls everywhere, and we are on our hands and knees raking through the twigs and rocks, pine needles and volcanic sand. Five minutes.
We expand the search slightly: Nothing. We can’t believe it. Ten minutes.
I was right here when I heard it hit the rocks, he says. Our clothes now soaked to the skin.
I take my eyes off the ground and look at him. The cuffs of your pants, I say. Let me check. And there it is.
This puts a final sweet spin on events, and I’m feeling lucky, I’m finding stuff, my mojo’s rising, baby. The Nevada border is only about five miles to the east. We could be there in a heartbeat and I could let a twenty ride on the roulette wheel at what might easily contend for the much-contested crown for Nevada’s ugliest casino slash truck-stop slash whorehouse slash trailer park. But I’ve been paying enough attention to know it’s not that kind of juju.
It continues to rain as we traipse onward to the car. And I think now (scene of writing) of “the walk to the car” as a discrete concept or event, and how one time at Peshastin Pinnacles more than twenty years ago walking though an apple orchard, Roy and I, these sprinklers soaking us with thick cords of water and—we just didn’t care. Nothing could touch us. In another world a relentless stream of bills amasses in the post office box, and more ambitious assistant professors everywhere slouch toward tenure. Fuck it, I think, I’m forty-four today.
Now, the car windows steamed by our wet clothes and body heat, we drive homeward out of the rain. Tomorrow, Charlie, who’s lived here for over forty years, (but still not considered a local by the locals) will say, “Some road isn’t it?” and I will agree. “ The only people who went out there,” he says, “were the lionhunters.” Lionhunters, he says, all one word. “But now,” he adds, “No one goes out there.”
Later, some weeks after the climbing, one of the summer’s minor disasters will occur, one which we all laugh about now in hindsight: the family gondola ride to the top of Mammoth Mountain. Our four-year-old son became terrified the moment the gondola swung free of the loading dock. His fear was so abject, so palpable, that we couldn’t be angry with him, only sympathetic. Once at the top this fear was unabated; we set off to walk down the road, and he feared we would fall off it, even though there was no place to fall. He was like a cow spooked by one of those fake cattleguards painted yellow on the blacktop. We had no choice but to get back on the gondola and descend immediately. Once back on the ground our older son, a worldly six years old, to our surprise, emptied his pockets. We hadn’t been anywhere long enough to fill his pockets, nor had we witnessed it, nonetheless here were:
–a wrapper from a candy bar
–a grommet with a twist of yellow rope knotted to it
–a stick
–a couple lift-ticket wires
–a strand of orange nylon baling twine
–a basket from a ski pole
–two small rocks, neither possessing a single distinguishable feature.
What’s this stuff? I asked (and what I really meant was When did you pick up all this crap?). It was all covered, by the way, with a thick layer of dust.
He looked at me as if of all the stupid questions I had ever asked (and there have been many) this had to be the stupidest.
Treasure, he said.
David Stevenson is associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Western Illinois University where he teaches fiction writing. New or forthcoming work is in Weber Studies and in the American Alpine Journal 2002 where he has been an associate editor for many years.