Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(45)
“Are your anchors OK?” he shouted up to them. “What are they?”
“One bolt and two fixed pins [pitons]!” was the reply. He sat back and relaxed.
There are young climbers, relatively inexperienced, who attempt and often do the toughest routes in Yosemite. There are climbers who flash across the scene like a comet—“three-year men,” Robbins calls them—and disappear. And there are climbers who own only shoes and a swami belt, everything else belonging to whomever they’re climbing with. This picture of a sport that can welcome its poorest adherent is an appealing one. Climbing, unlike most other things, has beneath it a great and inescapable danger, and it is this danger that purifies it and gives it its rank. Robbins has given his life to it, and what I think he objects to are those who face this danger in ignorance or afterward turn away, renounce it as if it had not really counted.
“He always wanted to do things in a better way, a superior way, purer,” Frost says. “He was always raising the standard. When I climbed with Royal, I always had great experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. He was at the frontier of the sport. It wasn’t just that he was a leader. He stood for something right. For the most incredible length of time, Royal was keeping up competitively with every climber there was. Everyone has his specialties—cracks, chimneys, whatever. But nobody could put up a harder route, nobody could do a harder boulder problem. He kept that up for a long time. If a younger climber comes along who can do something better than I can, I don’t care, but Royal had to do it better.”
We will all die and be forgotten, but there is in climbing a mythic element that draws one on. Half Dome, El Capitan, the Dru: these are names we have given to things that will be here almost as long as the earth itself.
Quest
March–April 1978
Racing for the Cup
At seven thirty in the morning, the loudspeakers begin announcing in German. It is the dead of winter. The mountains are barely visible. Lights are just beginning to come on in hotel windows. The first lone figures trudge toward the cable car station. In a little while the racers will be going up. All morning as they free ski, or in the words of a coach, do frisky runs, the crowd is gathering, building up along the sides of the course like a kind of dark debris clinging to the edge of a stream. The racers are cruising, making graceful turns, getting in tune with their skis.
“I always try and tell myself I’m doing great,” Steve Podborski says of this phase. He is a graceful little Canadian, a coming champion. The crowd follows him around like a star.
About an hour before the start, in a nearby restaurant or hotel, the racers change into sleek one-piece suits that cling like silk stockings. Beneath them they wear nothing, not even an aluminum cup, just briefs. Races are won and lost in hundredths of a second. At high speeds, sixty miles per hour and up, it is wind resistance that causes most of the drag; anything that diminishes it is important. Having dressed, they enter the fenced-off area, separated from the crowd.
A World Cup race. On screens all over Europe, the prelude begins. It is always the same: helicopter views of the course that evoke disaster coverage, discussion of the key sections, standing of the racers, clouds, steep snowy mountains, the crowd. Finally there are the participants, like toreros in their suits of lights, distant, unamiable, and at the moment of their task immensely potent. The excitement is mounting. The starting clock is running, something begins to beep. The racer is living on nerve, the starter is counting. Go!
Down the course gathering speed, the scraping of edges, the blue of the snow, the sudden, terrifying liftoffs and plunging flight. Past trees, blurred faces, mountain huts they fly: harrowing turns, stunning recoveries from certain disaster. The crowds are thickest at the dangerous places. You can hear the racers pass; they are whistling like projectiles. And then there is the last schuss to the finish.
Skidding to a stop with a spray of snow, they look back immediately to see their time, unhappiness crossing their faces or the joy of triumph, white teeth shining.
There are other races, but none like this. “The giant slalom isn’t interesting,” Podborski says calmly. “A lot of big turns. The slalom isn’t interesting either. But the downhill anyone can understand.”
The season begins in December with a men’s downhill in Laax, Switzerland, and then with the traditional opening in Val-d’Isere, France. Through March, moving from country to country, there are races, more than sixty altogether, counting toward the great crystal trophy called the World Cup. There have been years when it was so close that the winner was determined on the final day, but one of the big thrills is in January, when, as they do every year, the racers and their large retinues come to a 700-year-old town in the Tyrol. In addition to the ancient churches around which it is clustered, the expensive hotels, the snug pensions lost in the snow, the dark firs, the restaurants and gorgeous air, the town possesses one other attribute: it is home to the most famous downhill of all, one of the two so-called classics. The town is Kitzbühel. The course is the Hahnenkamm.
“When a racer comes to Europe,” says Mike Farny, a member of the U.S. team, “all he hears about is the Hahnenkamm, how tough it is, who got wrecked on it. Some of them are so nervous the first time they can’t eat breakfast.”
“Unquestionably the toughest downhill,” Bob Beattie agrees. He is a former U.S. coach who now does coverage for ABC. “It has dramatic changes of terrain, cross-hill traverses, and fall-away turns that are like turning on a tennis ball. Technically very difficult,” he says coolly. He is never awed. When he was a boy wonder at the 1964 Olympics, his racers, Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga, won the first U.S. men’s medals ever, silver and bronze. No American man has yet won an Olympic gold.