Jeff Long - Angels of Light

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A N G E L S O F L I G H T

ALSO BY JEFF LONG

Outlaw: The True Story of Claude Dallas

electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval

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Jeff Long - Angels of Light

Department, Beech Tree Books, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 105 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.

10016.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Long, Jeff.

Angels of light.

I. Title.

PS3562.O4943A5 1987 813'.54 86-32155

ISBN 0-688-07251-8

Printed in the United States of America

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

BOOK DESIGN BY JAYE ZIMET

The word "book" is said to derive from boka, or beech.

The beech tree has been the patron tree of writers since ancient times and represents the

flowering of literature and knowledge.

For Diane

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Jeff Long - Angels of Light

"The existence of some terribly yawning abyss in the mountains... was frequently

described to us by crafty or superstitious Indians. Hence the greater our surprise

upon first beholding a fit abode for angels of light."

—LAFAYETTE BUNNELL, member of the Mariposa Battalion, on discovering Yosemite

Valley in 1851

ANGELS OF LIGHT

CHAPTER 1

Like that wild boy who flew too close to the sun, there was no way the climber was

not going to fall. The difference was that John's wings were melting under the moon,

and that for him ascent was not escape but captivity itself. It was too soon for him to

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Jeff Long - Angels of Light

admit desperation, though, and so John Coloradas worried his hands—taped, raw,

and smoking with a fresh coating of gymnastic chalk—tighter and higher in the cold

granite crack, grimacing because there was no pain and there should have been.

There would be time enough once (he declined "if") he and Tucker hit flat land to

thaw his fingers and check for frostbite. For now he bit a lungful off the night breeze,

smelling pines so far below you couldn't hear them. Moonlight seared the wide, stark

acres of stone, starving his shadow, beckoning him higher with its quicksilver. He

could taste the chalk powder in the back of his throat, and from much farther away,

perhaps a cave or a stand of timber on the summit, the scent of moss crossed his

tongue, too. And beneath all the Valley's smells he smelled the storm.

It was going to snow. But not before it rained. And so he kept twisting and fusing his

hands and feet into the indifferent stone, wrestling against the tyranny that hung on

him like a monkey in heat. Nasty as it was, the threat of getting wasted by a Pacific

cold front didn't astonish him. In the pantheistic order of things, it made perfect,

dust-to-dust sense. If he could have spared the motion, he would have shrugged.

Maybe they'd make it, maybe not. Since departing the earth five short days and long

nights ago, the climb had been freighted with miscalculation and fuckups: too little

food, too much water, some important pieces of equipment dropped from numb

fingers, a half day spent following the wrong crack. Any big-wall climb magnifies

such venial errors. A big-wall climb in winter can make them downright carnivorous,

and here it was Christmas Eve. The Duracell batteries in their blaster had given up

the ghost, robbing them of Talking Heads and the Himalayan climbers' standard

Pink Floyd, and John's sole wish was for an end to this combat with gravity, one way

or the other. He was, as they say, running on the little red E. When you pull off a

close one, climbers call it an epic, as in radical. When you don't, you're stuff, so much

meat for the chop shop of mountain lore. Sometimes you can swing in the wind for a

full season before they get you down, meaning the superlong telephoto lenses come

out of storage for ghoulish trophy shots.

John could feel the continent drifting all around him, and he wondered again about

hypothermia. His mane of thick black Apache hair weighed fifty pounds tonight, so it

seemed every time he bent his head back scanning for sign of the summit. Summits

are elusive things. Ever protean, they shift around, encouraging false hope, defying

prediction. Sometimes they leak farther away even as you watch. Other times they

suddenly drop away under the tips of your toes. You can fight a mountain almost to

your coffin, lose fingers to frostbite, your mind to despair, and finally reach the

summit only to find not a damn thing there, just a slag heap without a chin. Or top

out with great élan, only to discover the true summit stands across and then up a ten-

hour knife ridge. The temptations in mountaineering to cheat—to quit and lie—are

abundant; as always in matters of faith, it's between you and yourself. Tonight there

was no such temptation. Since sharing a palmful of M&M peanuts for supper while

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Jeff Long - Angels of Light

the sun went down and the wind picked up, John and his partner, Tucker, had been

stalled on this final stretch of unyielding rock. They'd taken turns failing on it, and

now they were out of time for failure. First would come sleet perhaps a few degrees

above freezing, then the temperature would show some real downtown hostility.

Soaked, they would lose core heat, turn foolish, get sleepy. By morning they'd look

like two dragonflies shellacked with superglue. John had begun to hate the summit,

which did precisely as much to bridge the gap as loving it would have. The galling

thing was that it hung almost within reach. Just a half pitch above—forty, maybe fifty

feet more as the rope stretches—the summit was radiant in a spill of moonlight. All

that divided John's darkness from safe, flat haven was that silvery line. And all he

had to do was touch it. Then he heard the noise. And again, elbows askew, hips dry-

humping in close to the rock, he cowered from the monster.

It sounded like bones loosening as a huge, immaculate sheet of ice peeled loose from

the summit. Ninety feet long, thirty wide, but only a few inches deep, the glassy slab

glinted once in the moonlight as it drifted away. Like a fat man swan-diving, it

sucked at the sky for six, then ten heartbeats. The free-fall was downright delicate.

Then a corner touched against the girdle of rock three thousand feet lower, and the

ice exploded with a roar. Crystalline shrapnel scourged the spidery forest that crowds

El Cap's prow, decapitating Jeffrey pines and mangling the manzanita that each

spring and summer perfume rock climbers who dot the walls, indistinguishable at a

distance from the wild blackberries few tourists dare to eat. The shrapnel would have

been a killing rain, but no one and nothing was dying tonight, not yet anyway. Frogs,

rodents, and fox bats living and hibernating in the granite cracks were slotted deep

and safe; the peregrine falcons that nest on the dawn-facing wall weren't due to

arrive for another five months; and what coyote remained in the Valley were off

sampling mice in quieter coves. Except for John and Tucker, then, all was well.

Ironically, they were in danger for precisely the reason they were momentarily safe,

because the headwall upon which they dangled was so severely overhung. The

overhang meant that most of the falling ice, particularly the slabs and torso-thick

icicles, whirligigged out and away from them. Unfortunately the overhang also meant

they could not retreat.

"Fuck," breathed John, a brief anthem of relief. His fingers were blown, and he was

tiny, a slight creature willing itself up the hard space and colors that form the vertical

boundaries of Yosemite. It didn't matter that no one belongs three thousand feet

above the dark soil of California on Christmas Eve in the path of a blizzard any more

than it mattered that John did belong because he'd chosen to leave the ground in

search of dragons or in flight from the common mud or on fire with whatever else it

is that propels ascent. He had a soul, he had his reasons, and he was frightened. All

that really mattered was the Valley spread below—half a mile wide, half a mile high,

gashed deep into the harsh earth by not-so-ancient glaciers. The Valley had its own

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JeffLong-AngelsofLightANGELSOFLIGHTALSOBYJEFFLONGOutlaw:TheTrueStoryofClaudeDallasCopyright©1987byJefferyB.LongAllrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereproducedorutilizedinanyformorbyanymeans,electronicormechanical,includingphotocopying,recordingorbyanyinformationstorageandretrievalsystem,withoutp...

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