Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(50)
Steve Komito has a climbing boot shop in the town of Estes Park. From his porch the summit of Longs Peak is visible. Komito is thirty-eight years old, short, and good-natured. He is, he says, the classic bad-luck guy, the victim. His father was in the furniture business in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Komito had never so much as seen a mountain when he came upon a copy of Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. He read it and was overwhelmed. For the first time in his life he was in the presence of something that really took hold of his spirit. He began to devour books about climbing, and in the last year of high school went on a YMCA trip to Wyoming. The group spent one day in climbing school and then climbed Grand Teton. He was hooked.
His parents wanted him to live in Florida so he would be there when they retired, but he left the University of Miami and moved to Colorado. That was in 1960. Soon after he fell in with a legendary figure of the era, a six-foot-five giant named Layton Kor, a man of demonic energy who sped from one climb to another in a bald-tired Ford. For a decade Kor was the leading climber in Colorado and constantly in search of new partners. One night he ran into Komito at a party and immediately latched onto him. They went on their first climb the next morning at dawn. It was an ascent of something called Outer Space. It was 5.8 with aid, a high rating for those days.
“Don’t worry, Komito,” Kor was fond of saying as they clung to a face. “The worst that can happen to us is we’ll fall off and get killed.”
“He got me doing hard climbs,” Komito says. “I’m not athletic. I’m not brave. To me every accomplishment is a major breakthrough, and every failure I’ve expected anyway. With Kor I was afraid all the time, but it gave me what I needed. It was something I could do and be proud of. And I had the friendship of someone I respected. What it gave me was a breakthrough to something many of my contemporaries don’t acknowledge: manhood.”
By his own admission Komito is a perpetually mediocre climber. He climbs twenty or twenty-five times a year. He still has certain ambitions, however: the principal one is to continue climbing to a very old age. On trips to Europe he has been moved by the sight, which is common, of men and women in their sixties and seventies hiking and sometimes climbing in the mountains. They represent to him something admirable in a society that has become more and more artificial and throwaway.
Fifteen miles from the shop is the great, glacier-shattered East Face of Longs. It is 2,000 feet of vertical and more-than-vertical rock interrupted only by one wide ledge. The top portion because of its shape is called the Diamond. By any standard it is a great wall climb with the traditional hazards of storm and rockfall. The Diamond was first climbed in 1960. The first winter ascent was in 1967 (by Layton Kor). A first solo ascent came three years later.
There is a hiker’s route that goes up the back. It’s a long trek of ten or eleven hours up and down, but it is very popular during the summer and has been for nearly a century. From the top one can see a hundred miles—to Pikes Peak, the Mountain of the Holy Cross, as far as the Medicine Bows in Wyoming. Little children have made the climb, people on crutches, and even an eighty-five-year-old minister, an example to warm Komito’s heart. Longs Peak is 14,255 feet, well up among the fifty-three mountains in the state that are over 14,000. All of the Fourteeners, as they are called, can be climbed without a rope, and a surprising number of people have climbed them all. Some are members of the Colorado Mountain Club and send in notices of their having completed the circuit to the club’s magazine. Colorado governor Dick Lamm has climbed fourteen of the mountains, including Pikes Peak on New Year’s Eve, probably one of the safest ways of spending it.
In Boulder anyone can turn out to be a climber. The waitress at the Goode Taste Crepe Shoppe is a pretty girl in a long dress. She hands us some menus.
“Were you up climbing today, Jennifer?”
“Yeah, it was great.”
“Where’d you go?”
“We did the Great Zot.”
“Out of sight.”
Many women are climbing in Eldorado these days and at least three of them are outstanding. Women tend to have less upper-body strength than men, but climbing is done mainly with the legs, and balance, intelligence, and deftness of footwork are extremely important.
Molly Higgins is a lab technician in a hospital. She has blond hair and the decent, American face of a girl in the emergency room who is there when your eyes open and you love her from then on. She is very together. She has climbed the Diamond and Yosemite’s El Capitan. She comes from a town near Philadelphia, on the Main Line. Her mother works in a bookstore—her father died when she was thirteen.
Molly was always attracted by mountains. One day her mother brought home some literature from Colorado College, tossed it on the table, and said, “How’d you like to go there?” A pamphlet from the college mountain club was pinned up in her room all that summer.
Two weeks after she arrived in the fall of 1968 she was climbing in the Garden of the Gods. She loved it, but the club was as much social as athletic and she liked the hiking even more. One day she and a boyfriend found a rope on the floor of a storage room and went out to try a climb. It was sixty feet high. For two hours she watched while her boyfriend attempted to do it. Finally she asked to try. She was wearing lug-soled boots and after a fearful struggle managed to get to the top. She was so grateful that she fell on her knees and kissed it. The boyfriend never did follow. “It really turned me on,” she says. “I could feel things in myself I couldn’t feel other places. I was frightened, but on reaching the top and overcoming that fear I felt an incredible self-esteem.”