A N G E L S O F L I G H T
By Jeffery Long
For Diane
"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
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 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 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 terms.
"Watch me," he groaned. Frost poured from his mouth. Ten stories below, Tucker couldn't quite hear the command, but he heard the groan and was already watching as best he could, a vigilance more of touch than sight. He was reading the rope's vibrations with his palms, listening to John's desperation. Tucker was scared and his wide white eyes stared blindly toward the summit. It's always worse waiting for disaster than fighting it, but he was patient. He loved John, although he was still too young to realize you could admit that about another man. That he was here on this wall in these circumstances was a testament of that love. John was the only friend he had, and when "the Mosquito" for Christmas had first been mentioned, Tucker accepted the invitation because it was John, not because it was the Mosquito Wall. Agape has its limits, however. Tucker knew that if his partner fell, all their protection, including the belay anchor, would probably rip, dumping them into forever pronto. In a way that only a white suburban American boy can be, Tucker was presently optimistic about their situation. He was optimistic for both of them. Fervently optimistic.
John grappled his weight a body length higher. The hardware slung from his racks tinkled musically, the sound a horse makes shaking its bridle. He stuffed his fist into the rock and cocked the flesh against whatever flakes and crystals might catch it. The hand stuck with satisfactory firmness, and he pulled up against it, releasing with his lower fist so he could jam that, too. The smoothness of the move pleased him. If only the rest of the crack would go this well. He was taking things one inch at a time, and his frown ebbed. Except for the hunger and cold and impending storm, and those two fingernails he'd torn clean away yesterday morning opening a fisherman's knot, and the sapping ache in both knee joints, this was where he loved it most, on the far jagged edge of the world. True, you took more pain up here what with the sun and the wind and the god-awful sheerness picking you bare, but then again where else was everything so obvious? It wasn't so much easier to see—especially for John with his talent for finding the labyrinth in each and every event, even this straightforward, squared-off crack in the rock—as it was just plain easier to do. Up here it was like a Clint Eastwood movie, where the metaphors are always blunt. Physical. Where what you touch—and nothing but—that's what you get.
Over his shoulder, the distant storm was boiling to a soft crescendo. You could see lightning glittering like hungry eels in the snow clouds, but not a sound escaped the roiling violence. Since three o'clock that afternoon, he and Tucker had been monitoring the slow, black tidal wave of clouds that now engulfed half the sky. What had begun as a bud on the west of what an ice climber named Bullseye liked to call Our Video was now bending to flood the moon, his only source of light. In Islam, the new year cannot begin if the moon is covered. So it was for this orphan of the Jesuits. Forty feet more to 1987.
Two ropes were knotted at John's waist. One bellied out into open space, arcing down and then back into the wall where the far end was tied to Tucker. The second rope fed through a series of rusting pitons and nuts fixed into the wall. It was this second rope that was supposed to catch John if he fell.
He pinched a slight granite flake and shifted his weight from the toe of one foot to the other. It was a wintry motion, slow and brittle. The moon, carved white, hung beside his feet. Forty feet more, he coaxed himself. Forty feet into midnight and he'd be up. There he would anchor the ropes and haul their gear up one line while Tucker ascended the other. Forty feet to reentry, to the horizontal planet where trees grew upright and he could stand without clinging, where he could forget the aggravations, the paranoia, the stink of old human shit waiting on the ledges, the community dandruff in his lukewarm Cup-a-Soup.
He'd been here before, muscling against the elements, hugging close to big walls while exhaustion or fear or storms or the mountain itself conspired to dislodge him. He'd always survived, sometimes just barely, but never stupidly. Sports Illustrated or People or the Chronicle, one of those, had made much of this obstinacy after his haunting fiasco in the Andes on the South Face of Aconcagua, attributing his "barbarian survivability" to his aborigine past. "Grandson of a Chiricahua Indian shaman, half Indian and magician himself, Coloradas can stick a finger or toe to almost any surface—granite, brick, or the sandstone of his native desert spires—and it will stick like a spot weld. One of the nation's premier rock climbers, a natural-born mountaineer...." A grim, cold cuate, shivered John. Beat, froze, and forty feet short. He eased upward, locking his taped knuckles harder inside the ungiving fissure. The way it felt, the movement it invited, the very smell—all were echoes of a thousand similar cracks. There were other echoes, too, other dimensions as he pulled higher and edged the inner toe of each worn rubber sole against new crystals. Not all were as immediate as the bite of stone against his fist or the urgency rearing high in the cloudbank. Some of the resonance was so old and persistent that it was next to silence. There was, for instance, no ignoring the Chiricahua advice that no one is your friend, not even your brother or father or mother; only your legs are your friends, only your brain, your eyesight, your hair, and your hands. My son, echoed the void gaping under each of John's heels, you must do something with those things.
He fell.
It was that sudden.
As if skinning off a glove, John felt his hand slide from the crack. His toes lost their granite purchase. He gave a reflexive slap to the rock. Then he was off, flying toward the ground far below. Again the wall's exaggerated angle was a blessing, allowing him to drift mute and free, full of fear. He hit nothing. The air was clear. The emptiness seemed to buoy him up. I'm falling, he registered. It was a soft moment, which allowed him thoughts.
Climbers call long falls screamers, but rarely scream when they fall. Their lives don't flash before them. They have no special grip on their fear, no mystical insights into self-control. They drop like quiet ripe fruit, which is not to say they aren't terrified. Their rib cages vapor-lock. Their eyes see. And they hear a voice. Not always, but sometimes. Even among the hard-core, fat-free warrior set—the 5.11 boys with their streamlined lats flaring like vestigial wings, nineteen and twenty years old with tendonitis in their overtaxed knuckles—even among the fanatics, the voice is usually nothing more than adrenaline babble. It's easy for climbers to confuse the wild surge of biochemicals, tape-deck tunes, and naked risk with the song of being. When the abyss sweeps up to devour them they vainly believe themselves tagged by the hand of God, when in fact "flushed" is more like it. But sometimes, rarely, a falling climber really does hear the voice.
He listened. This is what he heard.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It said nothing. It sounded like nothing, which, unless you're there dying, may sound like the proverbial one-handed Zen cow patty.
Twisting sideways, then backward, John glimpsed the cadaverous moon rocking all out of kilter. This shoulder, he predicted without question, this hip. They'll hit first. Shit, John, you've done it now. Even so, he wasn't particularly concerned. For one thing, his arms instantly felt as if he'd gone to Cancun on vacation. The lactic acid let go. His lungs quit laboring. He felt great. All his heroic struggling to be elsewhere was suddenly a moot point. Cascading past the glowing stone, John felt like Zeno's arrow, the one forever caught between source and end point. He was at peace.
And then he heard a thin, metallic pop. It was an inconsequential noise, a mere kernel of popcorn exploding. But it was followed by a second pop, and the bottom dropped out of his gallows. John gritted his teeth. Dread deepening, he realized he was unzipping. He had time to think, shit the pins. And then his brain mainlined the fear because he understood his wings had truly been clipped. One by one, the rusting old pitons, the pins that he'd clipped into, were failing. Every time a climber hammers in a piton or wedges a nut into the rock, he customizes and expands his own health insurance policy. The idea is that each piece of protection (or "pro" in the abbreviated surfer-climber patois) is capable of catching your body weight times the velocity of your fall. The size of the pro is less significant than the physics of its placement, but since no one can see inside the crack, no one can state with certainty what will or won't hold. Matters of faith. As John climbed the crack, he had attached his leading rope to seven "fixed" pitons placed on sunnier days by earlier climbers. Because he was in such a hurry, though, he'd neglected to back up the old pro with some of his own setting. Now it was truth or consequences. The weathered old pins were jerking loose from the crack like machine-gun slugs. Pop, pop, pop. It sounded like breakfast cereal. Climbers call it a zipper fall for the way you unzip the pro. Having nothing else to do as he unzipped, he counted the pops.
He passed Tucker. He saw the moonlit teenager as an instant of mercy. Spare me, thought John. Catch me, Tuck. Please. But not a sound passed his lips. It would have done no good anyway. He felt the rope tighten at his waist and counted two more pops. With each pop the rope relaxed again. Gone, he realized. Gone away. The wind poured into his ears and he began to drown in the waves of his inner ocean. Panic began to unpiece him. His graceful, unending breaststroke from here to nowhere began to take on a frenzied, ridiculous tone, which set off a deeper alarm. Climbers still talk about one of their own who erred near a summit and was heard to calmly sigh "Shit" as he sailed past a lower ledge, trying to keep his balance. John was on the verge of losing all balance. He'd lost control of the big picture; now he was losing control of the little one, himself.
And then he heard the voice. It said nothing. Absolutely nothing. It calmed him. The tempest in his ears suddenly abated. His clenched jaw relaxed. The shout in his soul faded. Everything became acceptable.
Just as suddenly, he stopped with a long, dreamlike bounce. The rope stretched elastically, snatching him away from the abyss, and then he was slammed pell-mell into the wall, his shoulder and hip striking first. His lungs emptied with a frosty whoof.
Tuck had caught his fall.
He felt pain, but it was a distant, unflowered sensation. John didn't care. Like a supplicant, he reached both hands above his head and grasped the rope, gasping. He touched his forehead to the rough Perlon line. "Padre nuestro," he started the chant, then gave in to his adrenaline and simply sat there. Still clutching the rope, he dangled above the inky forest floor. He raised his head to what stars were left. He heard the abrupt, macho burp of a faraway frog. In a slow, noiseless spin, the world began to accumulate around him again. The same moon was gleaming across the same cold acres of vertical granite, illuminating his long, black hair and the sparse whiskers on his wide jaw. It was like him to watch himself dangling there, tied to a puppet string far too close to God.
At an even six feet he was barrel-chested, with legs that were longer than Apache but slightly bandy all the same. He didn't have to wonder what his vagabond mother had looked like; one glance down his hybrid body told all. Besides these long legs, she'd carried narrow feet and small hands that looked too delicate on him. He was self-conscious about those hands. They seemed so inadequate for all the gripping and grabbing and pinching that climbing demanded. Yet they'd pulled him across land no one had ever touched or seen, and that was something. So many scars had laced their flesh and then sunk under new scars that now and then he forgot their service.
Certainly his hands seemed less than true to the desert savagery that was his other half. The Indian in him was prominent: straight hair, black eyes, and huge Mongolian cheekbones. On an expedition to the Chinese flanks of Everest two years before, Tibetans had regularly addressed him in their native tongue, convinced he was one of them. What he most often recognized in the mirror, though, was neither the Anglo nor the Indian. What he saw was the overlay of one culture upon the other, something quieter than intercourse, the mark of history all over his face: smallpox scars. To his eye, the pockmarks ruined his wide, angular cheeks. He saw himself as a bad invention, the product of too fierce a seed or a not quite certain matriarchy. The pitting scars were proof that his mother had vanished into mystery, marooning him and his brother with a dusky, nomadic man who knew roughnecking and bars and a thousand stories of his father's fathers and who could track bobcat from horseback and cut water from cactus and braid rope from yucca and coax crude oil from the barren earth, a man who'd struggled like a hero to be both father and mother to two dusky sons but never quite got it down. His father had forgotten to get John immunized, and by the time he'd remembered, the disease had finished with his younger son's face. John didn't blame his father. That was part of the fatalism that carried him so brilliantly across the stone walls and kept him a prisoner of the Valley.
He'd even quit blaming himself for the scars he found so ugly. He could look in the mirror these days and touch the pockmarks and accept that he was marred, but that it wasn't his fault. With a sort of reverse vanity that had infuriated his Jesuit high school teachers, he carried everywhere with him a sort of pet humility. Sports Illustrated had loved it ("a captivating modesty"). He was reticent in crowds, shy around strangers, and coeds had never quit teasing that he must be retarded or mute. The pockmarks gave him a vigilance. When he looked at people, his dark eyes always saw them looking first, studying his face, his skin, his infallibility. Actually he suspected that the handsomeness is almost never generic, that maybe people were intrigued, not repelled, with his face. That wouldn't be the first admission he'd put off. Too many years had gone into feeling marked. Maybe, he sometimes smiled in the mirror, maybe he carried penitente blood in him along with the Chiricahua and Anglo. Maybe he just enjoyed tormenting himself. Sort of like climbing with knees he could scarcely bend some mornings and hands plagued by arthritis. Or hoping for Harvard someday when Berkeley had proved too confining after three short semesters. One thing John had learned was to travel light. Buttoned in the left-hand pocket of his corduroy shirt was a folded Polaroid of Liz, his lover, and a tube of wild cherry Chap Stick for the windburn. Four ounces of luggage, that was it.
Only a few years earlier an American ornithologist on sabbatical had discovered a well-preserved corpse in a Swiss valley. Dressed in tweed clothing and hobnailed boots, the body was lying where it had been disgorged at the mouth of the Zermatt glacier. No one could figure out who it was until the local climbing club laid claim to the young man, identifying him as a certain alpine soloist of the 1880's. Like John, he had been carrying next to nothing in his pockets: a round-trip train ticket only half used, some sprigs of edelweiss, three coins. There's something about human beings in the mountains, they seem to care less about the anchors that other folk require. The result is that they take on a curious lightness. How else to explain, for instance, the middle-aged Spaniard strapped in fourteenth-century armor who was similarly resurrected at the foot of a pass in the Pyrenees in 1937. Climbers had a way of eluding gravity, even climbing out of their graves. John wasn't there, but two summers past at a base camp in the Patagonian range, near the fang called Cerro Torre, a party of Yosemite climbers had recovered another such Lazarus or at least part of him. To everyone's horror and titillation, one Matthew Kresinski had shaken hands with the desiccated arm extending from a flank of ice, then snapped the entire arm loose to use as a backscratch.
The moon floated perilously close to the billowing storm clouds. Frost poured from John's nostrils. He suddenly felt like taking a nap, just a short one.
"John?" Tucker's voice fluttered down and prodded him. John looked up toward the paltry cobweb of nylon slings and ropes that anchored both their lives to El Cap. For the moment he didn't bother to answer. Somewhere in that mess of ropes hung the silhouette of the world's best climber, at least for the past six months. Tucker was up there somewhere, stoically holding John's hundred and eighty pounds through what amounted to a makeshift pulley system. The boy had been stationary for the last two hours, dangling from the rock while feeding out rope as John deciphered the crack. Belaying could be very cold work. It could also be punishing, especially when your partner took a screamer the length of a football field. Belayers had been known to lose teeth, break bones, and burn their hands to the ivory catching falls half that distance. All the same, John luxuriated in the glory of his own survival for a moment longer.
"John?" Tucker repeated, more urgently. John was tempted to let him wonder a bit longer, not because he was sadistic but because he could. He'd earned a minute's rest down at the end of the rope. But he roused himself.
"You okay?" John called up, stealing the initiative. His voice quavered a little, which annoyed him. It annoyed him, too, that he would be annoyed. Machismo was not one of his ambitions.
"Yeah." He could hear the boy's relief, and then a philosophical "Wow."
"Nice catch, Tuck." The wind spun John in tiny circles, back and forth.
"What?"
"You caught my ass."
"What?" Climbers use a small but efficient vocabulary of monosyllables for communicating in wind and around corners. None of John's compliments were making much sense to Tucker.
"Merry Christmas, Tiny Tim," John tried again.
Though it didn't belong in the vocabulary either, Tucker understood this time. They'd been kicking that old dog all climb long. Merry Christmas Tiny Tim to the last of their red and yellow M&Ms. Merry Christmas Tiny Tim to each other's penis during the morning pee, to an unsafe belay anchor on the fourteenth pitch, to the end of their good weather.
"Yeah." Tucker was no longer amused. Nor was John.
It was cold, he was exhausted, and the summit was a whole lot more than forty feet away now. He'd have to climb the pitch all over again. Glittering overhead, liquid in the moonlight, hung the icy summit. The holy fucking grail. He sighed. He had memorized most of the moves up to where the rock had spat him out, but even so it would take another hour to get to the top, maybe two or three. He doubted the storm would wait that long. John moved his limbs one by one, checking his shoulder and hip for damage. Bruised, he knew. He studied his taped hands as if they were traitors. He felt old. Ten months into his twenty-eighth year, he was old, at least by Valley standards. It was high time to quit climbing but difficult to let go. More than the life-style of a rock jock tiptoed in the balance; it was also a heritage, a full-blown past rooted in centuries of simple lust for the mountains. On both sides of his family, Anglo and skin, ancestors had loved and coveted their abrupt landscapes. At least he liked to think so. More than anything else, the defiance of gravity guided his thoughts about heritage and gave him license to think of himself as a mountain man. The thought of leaving these walls and mountains caused him pain—pain, he sometimes rhapsodized, like the fur trapper Hugh Glass must have felt, grizzly-scarred and lame, bidding adios to his people at the 1824 rendezvous in Jackson Hole... like Maurice Herzog, the great French alpinist, must have felt as he watched the doctor snip off frostbitten joints in the jungles below Annapurna. Echoes. The thought of turning his back on the mountains and never returning was as terrible to him as it was romanticized. That was all part of it, though. The overblown melancholy. The power and the glory.
"You got me?" he shouted. The wind opened a window for his words. Tucker heard.
"Take your time." Tucker didn't really mean it. He sounded weary and frozen.
John let Tucker wait just a little longer. He knew this wasn't the time and place, but he wanted to rest and digest the adrenaline, draw in the moment all the same. Once the climb was over, he'd forget these thoughts about aging or, better yet, fish the thick spiral notebook out of his gear box down in Camp Four and jot down his confessions under the heading "Mosquito Wall." The notebook was dense with similar ramblings filed under such names as Muir Wall, North America Wall, the Shield, Bonatti Pillar, Super-Couloir, Walker Spur, Everest-North Face, Ama Dablam, and all the other major routes he'd done or attempted. Finger paintings, Liz called the journal, the stuff of his never-ending childhood. His eyes followed a lone set of headlights creeping along the valley floor. An orange satellite cruised up beside Taurus, then sank into storm clouds.
And then, for just two or three moments, between wisps of sharp breeze, John heard something new and separate. It was a faint, irrelevant buzz, like the drone of a gnat. Just as suddenly it was gone, next to imaginary. The noise was an airplane, off course and sliding to its doom. Though John didn't give it a second thought, he would remember this moment several months later. He sniffed the air and wondered how Tucker had put up with his stink for so many days. He smiled, just barely, then grabbed the rope. Up, he commanded. Up so you can go down. Up. Down. The no-exit, alpine circle game. Sisyphus never had it so good. He pulled hard.
"Fly or die, Tuck."
The salute came right back down at him. "What?"
"Fuck this whale."
"Yeah, John. Fuck it."
John started all over again.
On the night before Christmas the Sierra Nevada set in motion columnar inversions over lakes that served as constant temperature sources. Through such whirlpools of air, an aging Lockheed Lodestar, off course, tried to thread the mountain range. Near the crest a fierce and sudden battle of physics ensued, during which the aircraft sacrificed its right wing in order to maintain the temporary equilibrium of its whole. Minutes later the greater part of the plane came to rest at the bottom of Snake Lake, an oval tarn so named for neither its shape nor the presence of serpents thereabouts. It was one of those elapsed and dusty facts that a trapper with Jedediah Smith's expedition in the early nineteenth century had so christened the lake after his favored Hawken buffalo gun, which had a way of snaking its lead balls around barriers and into the heart of things. Nomenclator forgotten, there it lay, an insignificant body of water coiled upon itself just below the tree line at ten thousand feet. There was nothing spectacular about the lake, which made it doubly irrelevant in this spectacular geography. Bullseye once argued (on mushrooms) that God must have been in His SoHo phase while creating Yosemite and the higher Sierras, how else to explain the weird domes among dinosaur forests, the rioting colors and slashed, sculptured valleys? The area was wild with an egotist's vision. Towering above Snake Lake was just such a sculpture, the East Face of Bowie Peak, a study in tan-and-black severity, all sharp right angles and cut-up space. If Bullseye was correct, then Snake Lake—so mild with its stooped basin and quiet blue gentian that even people who'd been here could never quite place it—was an act of divine omission on the psychedelic blueprint. Had the access been shorter and more sober, elderly couples might have enjoyed picnicking by the docile waters.
The dismembered plane struck at 210 miles per hour, hanging a geyser beneath the stars that lasted all of a few seconds. As if closing one contented eye, the lake slowly froze over in the following weeks, covering the dead machine with a thick sheath of ice, snow, and pine needles. The cold sediments would have kept the secret perfectly except for one item: Seven telltale feet of the tail section jutted above the lake's surface.
On February 28, more than two months after the crash, a party of snowshoers discovered an airplane wing with the obituary N8106R emblazoned on its metal skin. On their way back out of the forests high above Yosemite Valley, they forgot exactly where they'd found the wing, but that was all right. For the time being, the call letters were quite sufficient. The Federal Aviation Administration was first. Contacted by one of the snowshoers, it pieced together a background report on the plane. N8106R was a Lockheed Lodestar with a five-thousand-pound load capacity, registered to a fictitious person in Albuquerque and purchased with cash in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Beyond that there seemed to be little information: No flight plan had been filed, no distraught relatives had called for help. The news of an unknown plane crash puzzled the FAA only mildly. The existence of a flight over the Sierra in a snowstorm at night was odd, but not so odd that the plane's purpose was a complete mystery. Smugglers rarely file flight plans.
The FAA contacted Customs. The presumption that drugs were involved was automatic; therefore Customs contacted the Drug Enforcement Agency. What exactly was being smuggled, how much, and where it was at present remained unanswered questions. But three agencies were now involved, and that, the respective authorities felt, was a good start. Had the crash occurred in warmer weather and closer to the highway, representatives of the three agencies no doubt would have examined the site themselves. But given the fifteen-foot backcountry snows, it was deemed wise to contact the National Park Service, which was essentially in deep hibernation until the tourist season kicked off on Memorial Day. Seldom is the NPS called upon to bolster national security, and provided with this twenty-four-carat opportunity, it was not found wanting. With what amounted to a snappy bureauwide salute, the Park Service jumped to life, and on March 10 ten rangers on its Yosemite winter staff were dispatched to pinpoint the wreckage. The rangers were rebuffed once, then twice, by blizzards. Finally, on March 27, a young ranger by the name of Elizabeth Jenkins unlocked the mystery of N8106R.
A bright, large-boned girl from a southeastern Oregon cattle ranch, and a graduate of the University of Washington's forestry program, Liz Jenkins was the sole woman in the company of nine men, most of whom were taciturn about having her along. Equal opportunity was not exactly an unknown trespass in the Park Service; nonetheless, Liz had discovered, the bureau preferred to digest fads at its own bucolic rate. Female rangers were all right, make no mistake, but the feeling was they might better feather into the job by guiding nature walks or policing campgrounds during the summer season. Over coffee, two of the men present had gone so far as to hazard the belief that menstruating women lure bears and put them in a mauling frame of mind.
Luckily, Liz had not been present for this airing of superstitions. As much as the more progressive rangers loved baiting the old fogies about their outlandish demagoguery, even they were less than enthusiastic to have a woman along. It wasn't Liz, certainly—she was a sturdy enough femme, if a bit acid and quick on the draw. Rather they shared the opinion harbored in firehouses and police departments from the Florida Keys to Port Angeles, Washington, that out yonder on the firing line muscle makes the difference. Bust a leg up in the backcountry and if your partner's a lightweight, that's all she wrote. Liz herself rankled them less than the idea of her did. She'd been hired solely to satisfy a trend, that's how most of them lived with it. For them, her rationale was simple: She was on a husband hunt. It made blunt sense. Where better to gold-dig than in the Valley midwinter am...
allforjesus2001