Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(40)

Not all medical opinion is favorable.

“What’s happening in Utah is an aberration,” says an important surgeon. “It’s way out in left field . . . In fact, it’s a very bad idea. Jarvik and DeVries are self-destructing. Old Kolff, he’s retired and his contact with medicine has been peripheral . . . We’re not at that stage where we’re ready for it.”

“There’s room for the artificial heart but I think it should require more work,” another says. “It took us five years to negotiate permission to implant the LVAD . . . Utah has a lot to learn.”

There are considerations that are not purely scientific.

“We’ve sold four hearts to Argentina, to Favaloro,” DeVries says. “His group may be the first to take one and put it in a patient. What if they say, you can’t do it here, and Argentina does it?”

Dr. René Favaloro is the surgeon who developed the coronary bypass operation when he was in Cleveland. More than 100,000 are now performed annually in the U.S. The clock is ticking.

A grotesque optimism, a blind push towards progress, science for the sake of science, and a perfect faith in the undiscovered—these are disquieting but they are not what motivate the team in Utah. Kolff, Jarvik, and DeVries, all doctors and sons of doctors, represent in a strange way a kind of nineteenth-century idealism striving to perfect what they see as an eminently useful device. They are not pursuing monstrous visions to whatever end. Nor do they seek, as some critics say, to create a race of invalids. Their goal is simpler and more direct: to heal the sick. Forever? Hardly. The body will find ways to die despite an imperishable heart.

Typescript

May 26, 1981





Man Is His Own Star: Royal Robbins


In Yosemite there is a great hotel, the Ahwahnee, with beautiful windows and chateau-like grounds. In sitting rooms the size of churches there are tables from England, rugs from the Caucasus, and lamps made from antique Japanese jars. There is also, friends tell me, a ten-year wait for Christmas reservations.

There used to be a nightly display for guests: at nine in the evening the rangers would light a huge pyre of bark slabs and wood and push it over a cliff. This ceremony was known as the Firefall. At the far end of the valley, on the vertical 2,000-foot face of Half Dome, climbers attempting its first ascent could see this river of fire from whatever narrow ledge they were bivouacked on for the night, and they chose the time to flash signals to their friends on the ground.

The climbers were led by a young, hatchet-faced Californian, aggressive, supremely talented, who had been famous since his teens. They were five days on the face of Half Dome, tormented by its immense scale and by the summit overhangs which would have to be crossed somehow. On the fifth morning they stuffed their excess gear into a hauling bag and threw it into space. They watched it fall endlessly, never once touching the wall, and finally hit the ground. Then they pushed on and, by means of a narrow ledge barely a foot wide, hanging from it by their hands at the end, they at last reached the top. It was the first Grade VI climb in America, a climb of the highest level of endeavor. The year was 1957. The twenty-two-year-old leader was Royal Robbins.

I drove to Yosemite National Park with Robbins not long ago. We pulled off the road at an overlook near the entrance to the valley and sat there in silence gazing out at it. The great glacial cliffs, the forests, the deep valley floor were still far off and appeared smaller than I had expected. Still, it was very moving, this first image he was letting me have without a word of description or reminiscence, standing back from it as it were and allowing me to see it with my own eyes. He, of course, had seen it countless times. He had spent, by his own estimate, more than a year in Yosemite, half of it on one climb or another and more than sixty nights bivouacked on the big walls.

Robbins—even a chief rival calls him “Numero uno”—is forty-three now. He’s medium sized, strong, with blue eyes and straight brown hair. There is something neat, even academic about him. With his glasses and beard, his fine ears and high forehead, he might be an anthropologist with important work behind him. In fact, he is a high school dropout; his education came later. He speaks in a low, somewhat reluctant voice. His responses are often just a single word.

Yosemite rock, which he began to point out as we drove along, is all smooth, steep, and glacially polished. There are few handholds, and a climber must make use of characteristic vertical cracks. These often run for long distances, varying in width from several inches to two or three feet and then narrowing to a line no broader than that of a pencil. A very technical and highly evolved method of climbing is necessary, and even then climbs are not easy.

“Great climbing,” Robbins explained, “is steep rock without excessive difficulty. Yosemite steep climbs are often difficult. Yosemite tends to be discouraging and to require condition and endurance. Also, it’s not particularly exhilarating. They are problems you wrestle with rather than overcome with finesse.”

To one who does not climb, of course, steepness seems to be the most difficult thing to accept, the most demoralizing. I had mentioned this on another occasion and Robbins had said that very often something that looks hard actually isn’t.

“Steepness, for instance, isn’t one of the things that make a climb hard.”

“What are the things that do?” I asked.

“The lack of holds,” he said simply.