In the Clouds with Charles: Random Climbing Notes from My Journals

 

i

“We live by accidents of terrain, you know.  And terrain is what remains in the dreaming part of your mind.” Said Hemingway in Across the River and Into the Trees.

 

ii

Brian Hall (in High Risk: Climbing to Extinction) recalls: “Al [Rouse] would arrive at my doorstep wearing his mother’s disheveled fur coat and [Mike] Geddes in a threadbare army greatcoat.”

This is resonates with my memories of the 1970s.  When our mutual friend Drago Archer passed away during one of the pandemic summers, the poet Pat O’Neill recalled one time that Drago and I randomly arrived at their house at three or four in the morning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  I reminded him that the house was full of people, all of whom were awake and partying.  I really miss Drago being in the world.

 

iii

Hall also tells of his and Al Rouse’s attempt of a climb on the Gogarth sea cliffs in Wales. It was winter and they ended up in the water, had to abandon the rope and now had to climb out, wet, unroped, hypothermic, exhausted and about to become benighted.  They barely made it.  Hall recalls this conversation amid this epic:
           Wish I’d brought a torch, I said.

Did you tell anyone what we were doing?

No.

Did you leave a note on the car windscreen?

No.

This, to me, somehow epitomizes the state of climbing in the 1970s. I don’t think we thought we were immortal, or that we were particularly careless.  We were just naive, and sometimes fatally so.  Drago would call bullshit, claim I am playing word games.

iv

“Climbing and mountaineering have never been sports.  They are adventures with a level of danger and an uncertain outcome.”  So said Reinhold Messner, with which I agree.

v

Sometimes I make notes but don’t provide enough context to recall what the actual point of writing it down was.

This one was written into a book that I was planning to discard and I transferred it into a notebook, hoping the reason for originally noting it would miraculously appear.

As recorded: “Charles [Sassara], shaking my hand, after telling me the story about using stuff sacks filled with snow as rappel anchors on University Peak in the Wrangell St Elias Range (an audacious ascent with Carlos Buhler, that probably has not seen a repeat).”

The shaking of my hand, underlined in the original note, was apparently the key, but whatever the meaning held for me has not miraculously reappeared, although placing your life in the staying power of a bag of snow?  You had to be there.

 

vi

In the 1980s I lived in Southern California and my regular climbing partner, was Jim Pinter-Lucke, ten years my senior. Many of my favorite climbs from the Sierra to the Cordillera Blanca were done with Jim. Although we usually switched leads, he was stronger and most likely the lead-switching was calculated so that he lead the hardest pitches. 

Recently I returned to Joshua Tree, where Jim and I had often climbed, after an absence of over thirty years.  I was mildly surprised to not be able to get off the ground on routes I knew I had easily climbed all those years ago.

Although Jim had recently suffered a stroke and had various other physical ailments, his wife drove him out to the desert to have lunch.  The sight of Jim, one of the strongest persons I’ve known, struggling to walk, was very sobering.

We sat in camp chairs in the desert sun and summoned our shared past to the surface–we both remembered the guy who fell forty feet to the ground and had to be helicoptered out. In my memory he had died; in Jim’s he survived. Not sure why I believe Jim’s memory was likely more right. In either case, the sight, more like the sounds, of the fallen climber rendered us disinterested in climbing for the rest of that afternoon and we wandered around the desert for a while and called it an early day. That part we agreed on. When Jim left I was worried I wouldn’t ever see him again.

 But, I am happy to report, I have seen him again. He’s holding on.

vii

“Hanging on for dear life to the side of a mountain so you feel alive deserves some questioning.”~Jeremy Jones, The Art of Shralpinism: Lessons from the Mountains.

 viii

Charles and I head up to McHugh Peak and reach the cloud ceiling rather quickly. From then on we are walking in the cloud and sensing that we are not going to rise above it.  We catch and pass a couple of old guys, old, you know, like about ten years younger than ourselves. Chat amiably before moving on.

There’s a high plateau before you reach the cockscomb summit crag of McHugh Peak. It’s a remarkable place, an enormous expanse of nearly flat land. At that point the trail basically ends. We pass a cairn, but after moving on a few steps we can’t even see it. We pull out our compasses, but with visibility at about six feet there are no landmarks to aim for. 

We decide to head down, passing the other two old guys who are soldiering onward, mostly due to the fact they had been shuttled to the trailhead and had a car stashed to which they had to complete the hike to arrive at.

“Read about us in the newspaper,” they laugh as they disappear into the void.

 We sit down to eat our peanut butter sandwiches. Another couple approach. They have enormous handguns strapped to their chests, but are without a compass. After talking with us, they turn around and head down.

 When we pass them on our way down, the couple has stopped and just opened a couple bottle of beer.

We make quick work of the descent, piercing the cloud ceiling only a couple hundred feet above the parking lot.

 

ix

Our last morning in Joshua Tree and Sweeney and I set out to climb The Blob. Here are the reasons we told ourselves as to why that did not happen:

 

1.     Super windy and cold;

2.     Can’t find the start;

3.     Scary down climb from summit that we do not know the location of; 

4.     My fucked-up fingertips;

5.     Sweeney’s anxiety about driving home and his need to get on the road.

 

x

Drago was the one of the smartest, sometimes I think the smartest person I have ever known. He rarely, almost never, left Michigan. He believed that mountain climbing was the stupidest activity humans had ever conceived. He missed very few opportunities to remind me of this.  We agreed to disagree. I really miss that dude.

 

From the Notebooks: a Baker's Dozen

 I fall asleep nightly to the sound of the Pacific crashing into the shore. When the tide is low the sound is distant and soothing; when the tide is coming in, I can hear the individual waves, violent and insistent.

 

“All problems about writing have one solution: you had to, you said you would, it was contract you made with yourself, it was your life.”–– Elizabeth Hardwick, as told by Pinckney Benedict

 

A recurrent dream is of a particular bookstore, in a particular neighborhood, in a particular city. It’s a happy place for me.  But I recently realized that the pace does not exist in “real life.”

 

“Of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time.”––Wittgenstein

 

I found this note-to-self scribbled into the flysheet of my copy of Midnight’s Children: “What was it that was analogous to the arsonist removing materials that are personal from the building, that he, and only he, knows will burn?” Remains unanswered.

 

Lately I have had an uncanny feeling that there’s third person in the house secretly listening to Aisha and I talk.

 

In 1980 on the summit of the Tour Ronde I took my favorite mountaineering photograph: a French climber sounding his barbaric yawp directly into the statue of the Virgin Mary that adorned the summit. Something about that photo I just loved.  But I lost it over the years.

 

Summer 2022. Stopped at the red light at Tudor exiting Old Seward a tall long-haired kid on a skateboard glides by evoking such a profound memory of our son that I burst into tears, until the car behind me taps its horn, and I make the wet-faced turn.

 

Hardwick, I think, was right.  But Wittgenstein might be exactly wrong about that.

 

Reading The Rings Around Saturn, the book of new friend, poet Maria Maggi. Noting her diction. It’s certainly not elevated, and yet I am conscious of never having used many of her words: isinglass, ingot, paperskin, poultice. Maybe poets are allowed to use more words than mere prose writers. So many ways to say it, as my dear friend Eva once observed.

 

Before we moved from Alaska I organized my photographs, slides, for storage.  I go through all the 1980 slides one-by-one. I realize that the “photograph” of “The French Guy Barking at the Virgin Mary at the Summit of the Tour Ronde,” was never a photograph, only a memory.

 

“But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in hard grief, whose mouths  were open like caves with ancient  painting inside them.”–– Patricia Lockwood

 

The sound of freeway traffic awakens me.  So many cars on the road. Sirens, too. But we’re not in Anchorage anymore.  The road here is very far away and mostly empty. It’s my dreaming brain mishearing the Pacific.  I am home.