Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(42)

From the ground, Robbins seemed to move up the rock with ease, using the toe of his shoe in a crack that was about an inch and a half wide and finding occasional holds off to the side.

“The thing is,” Liz, who was standing beside me, commented, “you can’t tell whether it’s easy or hard from watching him. It all looks the same when he climbs it.” She’s made many climbs with her husband, including a repeat of the sensational face of Half Dome. She described the long, exposed ledge near the top to me—the wall slowly pressing her off it until she finished on one knee with the other leg dangling in space. She also climbed partway up the Nose of El Cap with him—“The most thrilling thing I’ve ever done,” she said.

“Off belay,” a voice called down. It was Robbins, eighty feet or so above. He had finished his lead. It was my turn.

Almost from the first moment, certainly from the time you are eight or ten feet off the ground, there is the feeling of being in another element, as distinct as diving into the sea. Robbins was in a position where he could watch me as I struggled. I had seen more or less clearly what he had done when he was on the lower portion, and I attempted to do the same thing, but before long I was moving on my own and completely involved in trying to find a way to climb it. To my inexperienced eye, there seemed to be a number of possibilities, or what could be possibilities, for holds. Most of these quickly proved inadequate. Others led to impasses. There comes the moment when one must gather oneself and try. I had done some climbing, not very much. I knew certain basic things, but sometimes, even on this easy route, it seemed as if he had taken the secret of his ascent with him. From time to time a bit of advice would be called down to me when I had come to a standstill—“Try pressing down on that place over to the right,” or “Try and get your left foot there and use your right on that little hold.” I was hand-jamming and fist-jamming; there was a period when it seemed I was clinging, legs beginning to tremble, for fully five minutes, unable to find any way of continuing until finally the smallest hold that I had first rejected, then come back to, and then rejected again, became the right one.

I had no fear. With him belaying, I would fall a few feet at the most if, as it seemed would happen any moment, a foot slipped and my fingers slid from whatever they held to. But I did have the anguish, the intense anguish of not knowing if I could make it. That, Robbins told me, never changes—it was still the same for him as it had been in his first climbing days. Sometimes he had remained in one spot for more than an hour trying to find some way to move, trying to solve the rock as if it were the door of a bank vault.

It took us about three hours to do “After Six.” The wind had picked up and was blowing strongly toward the end. We stood on top for a minute or two, coiled the rope, and then started down a path off to the side. In twenty minutes we were back at the bottom. There had been times when he had gone out of sight above me and I couldn’t hear his call but waited for a signal on the rope to begin—I had been alone. I was tired but happy. Robbins had the appearance of a man who has been on a leisurely stroll.

That night we had dinner at the Ahwahnee. Outside it had begun to snow. In the great dining room, filled with people and the warmth of conversation, we sat near one of the windows while the snow went through the darkness at a flat, wintery angle. Robbins mentioned the climbers we had seen on El Cap, probably a little cold and frightened, he said; they hadn’t counted on a snowstorm in May. Many of them started big climbs surprisingly ill-equipped. There was a touch of disapproval in his comment. As we were to find out, there was considerable foresight as well.

Fine meals in expensive hotels have not always been part of his life. He was born in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, on February 3, 1935. His parents were divorced by the time he was six. His mother moved with him to California and remarried; they lived in Redondo Beach and then Hollywood. After the war she divorced again. She worked as a cosmetics expert in a drugstore and they lived with relatives to cut down expenses.

He had his first taste of the mountains with the Boy Scouts on a trip to the High Sierra sponsored by a local radio station, KFI. They climbed Fin Dome, a mountain near the Rae Lakes. “We used ropes. I remember it was fabulously easy for me. The others had trouble. I had none. I just wanted to climb and climb and climb. I was intoxicated with it.” When he quit school in the tenth grade—he was getting poor marks, learning nothing—he had a feeling of inferiority; he wasn’t good at sports, he wasn’t good at anything. And yet at the same time, he says, “I knew I wanted to excel. I felt different from other people. I felt either inferior or superior. I wanted to do something heroic, great.” He was going to the mountains to climb as much as he could, often alone. “I always had trouble recruiting partners.” His first appearance at a climb of the Sierra Club established his reputation. He had a cast on one arm—it was two weeks to the day from the fall he had taken when the piton pulled free—but he climbed anyway. He was soon excelling at boulder problems and nervily applying the moves from these to the airy heights of Tahquitz Rock, a favorite location not far from Palm Springs. He was the outstanding young climber in the area, and his ascent of “Open Book,” a 200-foot inner corner at Tahquitz, was the first 5.9 climb in the country. The route had been done before, but Robbins made it “go free”—that is, he climbed it without using pitons for direct support. It was 1952. He was seventeen.