Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(41)
We had descended to the valley floor. In the late afternoon the trees seemed rich and green, the Merced River clear enough to see every pebble in its bed. Suddenly there loomed out of the dusk the top of a great, pale bulwark, like the blunt prow of an enormous ship facing not quite toward us. A thrill of recognition went through me, I had seen so many photographs: it was El Capitan. There was still a little light, and Robbins stopped the car, took a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment, and examined the face. There were several parties climbing, he commented, at least one on the Nose, and there was someone bivouacked above the Roof, a large overhang more than two thirds of the way up. Bivouacked meant attached to the face in a kind of hammock in which the climber would pass the night with 2,000 feet of empty air beneath him. A climb of El Cap by any of its routes takes several days, and sometimes longer, depending on the conditions and the ability of the climbers. It is extremely difficult and exposed, and to have some idea of scale one must imagine a wall more than twice as high as the Empire State Building.
A few days earlier we’d had dinner at Robbins’s house in Modesto with another well-known climber, T. M. Herbert. It was a congenial occasion. Herbert is a schoolteacher in a small town near Merced and a man of great wit and vitality. He made what seemed to me a surprising confession: he said that as a boy he had been terrified of heights, and that the germ of that fear was still within him.
“T. M. never falls,” Robbins said. “He puts in protection every three feet and sometimes goes down the rope to double-check what’s already in.”
The longest fall he’d ever taken was thirty feet, Herbert admitted. Robbins, on the other hand, has fallen frequently. Generally speaking, among serious climbers there is no such thing as not falling. It is inevitable. These falls are protected by a belay rope, but they can be dangerous.
“Have you ever fallen when you didn’t more or less anticipate it?” I once asked Robbins.
“No,” he said. “Once, when I first began climbing, I leaned back on a piton I’d just put in and it pulled out. I fell thirty feet and broke my arm.”
It had been what climbers call a “ground fall,” meaning that one hits the ground. Thirty feet is a considerable distance—men have been killed falling from stepladders—but I had already heard of 150-and even 200-foot ground falls where the climber not only had lived but had gone back to climbing.
It’s disturbing, perhaps, to think of Robbins, one of the greatest climbers alive, as losing his hold and falling—after all, if he falls, then what about me?—but the reason has nothing to do with lack of ability. Robbins falls when he attempts something that is at the very limit of his powers, and it is his nature always to extend these limits. He expects a fall and is prepared for it.
Herbert and his wife were on their way to Yosemite the night they spent at the Robbinses’. Close to forty, Herbert was as passionate as ever about climbing. Earlier he had spent an hour by himself doing exercises in the living room. He was climbing as well as he ever had, he told Robbins. He was going to Yosemite every weekend. He was still in there. Climbing had changed, of course, he admitted. A new generation had appeared.
“All climbers are on dope now,” he said somewhat resignedly. “They’re smoking during ascents, even dropping acid.”
Robbins said nothing. He and Herbert have known each other for more than twenty years. When he was first starting to climb, Robbins told me, one of the things that impressed him was the sort of men he met. They were men he admired, who were superior to anyone he knew “down there” in the city. It was one of the things that made him decide to choose climbing as his life. Marijuana as a necessity for Yosemite bivouacs was obviously something foreign to him.
“How many times have you climbed El Cap?” Robbins asked at one point.
“Hundreds of times,” Herbert said.
“I don’t mean in your imagination.”
“Three,” Herbert said.
Light had come in Yosemite. We ate in the large restaurant in the lodge, Robbins, his wife, Liz, their young daughter, and I, together with hundreds of visitors: old couples, campers, sightseers, and, of course, a sprinkling of climbers whose very appearance set them apart. They were indifferently, even poorly, dressed: plaid shirts, old sweaters, beards, and the filthiest of pants. As they ate or sat afterward in the bar with their girlfriends, one leg was often tapping nervously up and down. It was characteristic, Robbins said.
I climbed with Robbins the following day, a short route in an area called the Manure Pile. He had picked a climb called “After Six”; according to the Sierra Club Guidebook, it is a Grade II Class 5.7 route first climbed by Yvon Chouinard and Ruth Schneider in 1965. There are a number of systems to classify the difficulty of routes. The Yosemite system uses a Roman numeral to give the overall length and difficulty—Grade I takes a few hours, Grade III most of a day, etc.—and the Arabic number gives the level of the most demanding section. “After Six” is a moderate climb that might take two or three hours.
We roped up near the bottom of the first pitch, which happens to be the most difficult. Two husky girls were engaged in climbing it. Liz talked to them later. They were from Wyoming: this was their first climb in Yosemite, and they were just warming up. Rather than wait, we moved twenty feet or so to the right, where there is a variant, and began there. Climbers who are equals take turns leading, but of course we did not do this. Robbins went first, wearing corduroy trousers, a shirt and sweater, and a sort of white, old-fashioned golfer’s hat. Over one shoulder he had slung the nylon loops with aluminum wedges that are often used instead of pitons in Yosemite and elsewhere. These come in a great variety of shapes; they are placed in a crack where it narrows or is irregular and jam there. They serve the same purpose as pitons, which are a kind of flat steel spike with a ring at the blunt end to attach the climbing rope to the mountain, either firmly or so it can run freely. With wedges, however, the rock is preserved from all the damage of “nailing,” as climbers call piton placement.