Twenty Three
The late morning light filled even the shade with clarity and brightness. Rilla stood not far from where Thea wandered somewhere, writing parking tickets and giving directions to an endless line of cars and visitors. But facing the wall, she was alone. In the emptiness. In the silence. A speck on the sea of granite towering above. It was she and her—“On belay,” Caroline yelled—partner, the one she desperately wanted to impress. She was only following Caroline on this first pitch, but after The Great Rope Incident of Last Week, Rilla didn’t feel confident about anything. She eased out a breath and wiped the sweat off her hands before dipping her fingers into her chalk bag off her waist. More chalk. More chalk solved everything. “Climbing,” she yelled.
“Climb on,” came the reply.
The ledges to reach the bolt before the pendulum were an easy scramble. At the bolt, she carefully unclipped the carabiner from the rope, then from the bolt, and replaced the gear on her sling.
“Got the draw?” Caroline yelled.
“Got it.” Rilla’s gut clenched as she looked out over the Valley. Where Caroline had to run back and forth to work her way across, Rilla would just have to swing over. She didn’t realize what that meant until this moment—looking sideways across the sloughed granite—but as the follower, she would be swinging over to the next piece. The one she couldn’t see. The one Caroline had placed.
She clenched her fists and took slow, deep breaths. Caroline was obviously a fantastic and conscientious climber. But depending solely on anyone other than herself felt uncomfortable. Depending solely on a person she was intimidated by and wanted to like her, somehow even worse. Maybe Walker was right—the more she cared, the safer it should be, the more she shied away from it. Oh god. What did that say about her on a personal level?
“You all right?” Caroline called.
“I’m good.” Rilla’s brain said give a thumbs-up, but her hands gripped the rock rebelliously. Just having an emotional meltdown.
“Take your time,” came the reply.
It took another minute to work up her nerve, but she couldn’t get down and she couldn’t go on without facing it. Just do it.
Jump.
2. 3.
Jump.
She still couldn’t do it. Slowly, she inched to the edge, blinked at the open space below, and walked off.
Her stomach leapt into her throat. The whole world soared as the wind hit her face. It felt for a moment or two like she was flying. Soaring through the Valley in clear light and transcendent space.
The granite block rushed toward her. Oh shit. She threw her hands and feet out, instinctively trying to lessen the impact. “Arfff,” she huffed out, whole body slapping the block. Her hands scrambled to hold. Rilla looked for her feet and let her hands go blind, shoving her toes into anything that seemed like it would hold her. Her body was still swinging. Still wanting to go back the other direction. For a second she started to tear away. Without thinking, she grabbed on to the gear Caroline placed. And stopped.
Rilla exhaled. Her elbows scraped the granite. Her stomach muscles clenched tight to keep her feet on the wall. She took a second to catch her breath and stood.
Feeling the pressure of wanting desperately for Caroline not to get tired of her, Rilla pushed upward. The rope slid through the gear above her, clinking gently against the stone. Up. Shift. Push. Just as she fell into a rhythm, her hands skittered across blank granite. The arête was smooth and had no cracks. Argh. She re-adjusted her grip and tried not to panic.
Out of the corner of her eye, a bit of the brown rock moved.
At first, she blinked in confusion, thinking she was seeing things.
It moved again, becoming three-dimensional as it lifted off the granite.
A spider.
What the fuck? With her heart in her throat, Rilla forced herself up on the tiny little divots she wouldn’t have trusted two seconds ago. Desperate to get away from the ambling spider, she practically ran up the wall, screaming through her teeth.
“Are you okay?” Caroline asked.
“Spider!” Rilla squealed, shivering. It was below her now. Somehow. But she was dripping sweat.
The climb from there to Caroline was the hardest she’d ever worked to move on the rock. It wasn’t even remotely pretty. Nothing like the way Caroline moved. But all she had to do was try. Just try. Failure was a friend.
Another deep breath, and she set to work the piece of pro—a cam—out of the crack as she cleaned the route behind Caroline.
“Is it stuck in there?” Caroline called.
“Yeah,” Rilla said.
“Try wiggling it back up.”
That loosened it enough so that Rilla was able to work it out and clip it next to the first piece she cleaned.
Don’t drop it. Don’t drop it. Putting all her mind on the piece in her hand and not on the hundred feet of empty air below, she clipped the piece to her sling and breathed. One more hurdle down.
“Okay?” Caroline yelled.
“All good,” Rilla replied. Caroline was probably sitting up there bored stiff and wishing she’d done anything else.
Rilla got back to climbing—and it continued to suck. She pulled on one of the bolts, which hurt and was not at all the hold her desperate, sweating hands wanted. She slipped off multiple times. Made wretched noises. Wanted to cry. Cursed. Scraped her wrists and elbows. Twisted her legs into weird positions. But, in the end, she crawled even with Caroline on a gravel-strewn ledge. Sweating and shaky-limbed, her arms and legs throbbed.
“Did you say a spider?” Caroline asked.
“Yes,” Rilla gasped. “I almost died.”
“I am so impressed you didn’t immediately jump off. That would have been it for me.”
Rilla kept trying to catch her breath, knocking back her helmet and wilting against the wall. It cooled her back and the wind gusted against her face.
“I can see why Petra and Adeena kept climbing with you. Try not to hang on bolts or gear though, okay?”
“Those bolts are not actually helpful,” Rilla said.
“Yeah and if you pull on gear, you just get it stuck or worse, pull it out.”
Rilla blanched. She hadn’t even thought of that. If she’d been leading, that would be a big fall.
“Plus, it’s not clean climbing.” Caroline shrugged. “It’s bad form to get in the habit of that.”
“Oh. I didn’t . . .” Rilla blushed. “I didn’t realize.”
“You’re a beginner. You didn’t know. Petra had the responsibility of telling you, and maybe she did and it just got lost in other information. But if you want to keep doing it, you should know clean climbing is the rule.” She smiled and looked up. “The next pitch is a good lead for you. It’s easy and ledgy.”
Caroline explained the pitch in detail, using the route map to show Rilla how to read both the route and the map. But when she reached for the gear on her sling to hand over to Rilla, she froze.
“Wait. Where’s the . . .” Caroline paused and yanked the bag toward her, combing through the top. “Did you put that big nut in?”
Rilla’s heart stopped. She remembered Caroline handing it to her. She remembered having to hold it while the smaller pieces went on first. She remembered . . .
“Fuck,” Rilla breathed. Oh no. Tears stung her eyes.
Caroline glanced at her. “What?”
“I put it on the . . .” Rilla licked her lips. “On the picnic table. I forgot to . . .” Oh god. “Pack it.”
Caroline groaned and leaned back.
Lauren echoed in Rilla’s head. You need to learn to apologize.
But it was just a mistake. It wasn’t . . .
It was totally her fault. Rilla squeezed her eyes shut and winced, forcing the words out. “I’m so sorry.”
Caroline just laughed. “Ah, don’t worry about it. We can make it work. Look.”
Rilla opened one eye.
Caroline was pulling two smaller nuts out and held them up. “You’d be surprised how often this happens—something happens—and you need to figure out how to use the gear you have, instead of the gear you need.” She laid the nuts on top of each other, their flat sides flush. “Just stack them to fit into the space. You’ll need to be careful it’s in there. But this will work.”
“I’m really sorry,” Rilla repeated. It was easier now that she’d said it once.
The harness cut into her legs and her back. Her arms below her elbows felt useless. Sweat rolled between her breasts. But she clipped the first bolt and scrambled up to the ledge she’d be following, a long string of rope behind her.
This part wasn’t climbing—not technically. It was mostly walking up a rocky ledge to a pair of bolts that waited at the end. But with each step, Rilla felt the edge. Like the ground below, she heaved as she moved, and at any second she could be shrugged off the cliff. Her legs felt heavy. Each step got smaller and smaller until she found herself stopping.
Deep breath.
She was okay. She was doing it.
Her fingers shook. She checked her knot, and kept on. In a few minutes, Rilla clipped the bolted anchors with an intense surge of relief. With the relief came the accomplishment, and the pride and the glory and the wonder of doing it, and it was wildly fun again.
Caroline explained how to place gear along the next pitch she led, and Rilla listened with serious attention. All she wanted in life was to make it out of this climb without embarrassing herself any further. It went about as disgustingly and terrifyingly as the rest of the climb, but it went.
The afternoon sun shifted from white-hot into intense umber. Rilla was drenched, her sports bra chafing on the edges. The gallon jugs they’d brought were nearly empty, but the bonus was it made the haul bag easier to haul after each pitch.
The last pitch was her turn to lead. Heralding the top . . . an obvious, tall, hunter-green pine tree.
Caroline patted her on the back. “Have fun!”
Rilla nodded, helmet bobbing on her sweating head as she looked up and began to climb.
It might have been fun for Caroline, but it all felt awkward to Rilla. She kept trying to have one foot on each wall and shuffle up the corner. But gravity kept yanking on her body. The stemming—her legs splayed like a little kid inching up a doorway—was easy one second and flat-out impossible the next.
Annoyed, she jammed her feet into the crack and tried to wiggle her way up. She regretted this day. She regretted ever finding it fun. What the hell was ever fun about this?
She sniffed and inched upward. Nothing felt right.
“Can you place a piece?” Caroline asked from below.
Shit. She’d forgotten. She had to place a piece or she was going to die. Never mind the pieces she’d placed farther down that would hopefully hold. Never mind that Caroline was below, on belay. Die. She was going to die.
The fear combined with the effort required to keep herself on the wall worked out into her fingers, and the cam clanked wildly against the rock. She fumbled—
Zzzzzzzip.
Oomph. Her next piece caught with a teeth-jarring and gear-shuddering jerk. She blinked and—
Zzzzzzzip.
Thwack.
She smacked against the wall, terrified and eyes wide, still clutching the piece she’d been trying to place. Shit. Shit. Shiiiit. Scrambling, she jumped onto the wall, clutching at anything she could touch. What happened?
“You okay?” Caroline called. She wasn’t far below now.
Rilla looked between her legs. “No,” she wailed.
“Does anything hurt?”
Rilla quickly took stock. Her heart pounded out of her chest. Her eyes watered. Fingers shook. Her breath came fast and shallow.
“I’m okay,” she squeaked, wishing she believed it. She was not okay.
“Congratulations.” Caroline sounded more chipper than Rilla had ever heard. “You lost a piece and didn’t panic!”
Rilla stared down in mild horror. This wasn’t something to celebrate. “I’m gonna panic, bitch,” she yelled.
Caroline’s eyes widened and she blinked.
Shit.
Caroline busted out laughing.
“Stop laughing,” Rilla screeched. “Help me.”
“Okay, okay. Look. You’re at peace now. Check it.”
Rilla whimpered, forcing herself to reach out and tug on the cam. It seemed solid, but so had the others.
“Can you slide in a nut to back it up?” Caroline asked.
Rilla felt sick, seeing herself reach for the gear on her sling and falling off.
“Just throw anything in,” Caroline said. “It’ll help you feel better.”
Rilla gritted her teeth and forced herself to reach for a nut, slide it into the crack, wiggle it down, clip in the draw, and drop in the rope. Only after she did it did she realize she’d automatically done something she’d basically just learned. “Got it,” she said, feeling a slight thread of relief.
“You were climbing hard,” Caroline said from below. “You didn’t even anticipate that you were falling. You blew a piece and kept your cool. You are the motherfucking shit right now, Rilla.”
Rilla closed her eyes and shook her head. “I want to get down.”
“When you place a piece, pull out when you’re checking it. Not just down. Finish this pitch and then we’re done.” Caroline’s tone was that of a much older girl. Thea the way Rilla kept wanting her to be. Someone in complete control. “Take a minute to regroup.”
Rilla’s stomach twisted and tightened, but she lifted her chin and focused above—not on the fact that she hung in a couple straps of nylon and tiny bits of raccoon fodder stuffed into thin cracks six hundred feet off the ground. She had to get control of herself. She couldn’t lose it. There was no escaping this—this is where giving up meant she would lose all the work she’d put in, not only on the wall today, but in all the days she’d shown up to climb.
Drawing a deep breath in, she held it in her lungs for a half second longer and then eased it out in a long, controlled breath, imagining all that knotted her body easing out with it. “Help me,” she called.
“Shake out your hands,” Caroline replied immediately.
Rilla took one hand off and shook out the arm, then the other. She took another extra-long breath and swung back around to look at the wall.
“Try putting your hands into the crack on the side and pull that way,” Caroline continued.
Rilla followed her instructions, angling herself out of the corner. “Like this?”
Caroline nodded. “And your feet up on the opposite wall.”
Rilla put her foot up. “Oh.” She almost laughed. It still felt awkward and horrible, but the forces twisting and pulling at her eased. Making her body into a right angle that in some way mirrored the right angle of the dihedral, she got back into the position and looked up.
“Shuffle your hands up. Don’t try to go hand over hand like you were. Stem if you can, though. So much easier. And don’t use your muscle here, hang on your bones.”
Rilla frowned. What?
“Straighten your arms.”
Rilla had thought they were straight, but she obeyed and locked out her elbows. “Oh!” She laughed. Now the bones of her arms did the work of holding her into the crack, not all her muscles, like when her elbow was bent and her arm was flexed. It was still hard—but not impossible.
She could do this.
Twenty minutes of shuffling later, she pulled over the ledge, past the tree, and clipped the anchors.
Caroline followed, and they hauled up the bag and spread out on a wide ledge under the shady boughs of an eighty-foot ponderosa pine, four hundred feet off the ground.
Rilla leaned against the wall, still clipped into the anchor and her eyes lifted with relief to the granite above her she did not have to climb.
“Have a treat.” Caroline handed her an apple.
“Thanks.” Rilla bit into it, tasting both the sweetness of the apple and the salt and grit on her lips. It was terrible. And intoxicating. “Goddamn, I’m going to do this again, aren’t I?”
Caroline laughed. “Why wouldn’t you? You were great.”
“It was horrible.”
“But wonderful,” Caroline said with a dreamy grin.
Rilla closed her eyes and groaned. It was true.
“Want to know something?” Caroline said, wiping at the sweat on her face and leaving a smudge of dirt.
“Absolutely,” Rilla said, perhaps a bit too hastily.
“My first big wall climb was up here, on a route just over there.” Caroline gestured down the wall. “And I was so nervous and it was so hot that like ten pitches into it I got diarrhea.”
Rilla did a double take. “That uh . . . is not what I expected you to say.”
Caroline laughed. “I can’t ever walk past here without thinking about it. I was in such a rush and so sick, it was all I could do to get my pants down. I just had to pray there was no poor soul walking below.”
“Oh my god.”
“I know!” Caroline shook her head and gave a little shiver. “I shit into the air!” She laughed. “I was so embarrassed at the time. Now it’s just kind of funny and horrifying.” The ocean of streaked granite and blue sky reflected in her sunglasses. “Did you climb in West Virginia?”
Rilla chewed her apple and stared out at the massive view. “No. I didn’t know anyone that climbed at home. Plus, like, I’m a Skidmore.”
“What does that mean?”
She probably shouldn’t explain. If she’d been on the ground, she would have remembered this truth was not what she wanted anyone in California, least of all Caroline, to know. But up here, things felt different. She unscrewed her Nalgene and took a drink, looking up at the shadowed parts of the white granite cliff. “You know that family back home in Ohio that like . . . lives by the railroad tracks and has trash in their yard and rides a four-wheeler to the store because they have DUIs—you can get another DUI that way, sidenote—and they’re always in trouble and their kids are always in trouble, and all the other parents are like yeah, I don’t want you hanging out with that kid and if you play in their yard you are never allowed inside the house?”
Caroline squinted with one eye open. “Mm-hm?”
“That’s a Skidmore.” Rilla dropped her water bottle and pulled her T-shirt straight down. “This is actually my mom’s T-shirt from the strip club dollar Thursdays.”
Caroline squinted at the shirt. “Southern X-Posure?” She looked confused. “Oh, I get it!” She laughed. “I hope she taught you some moves. Always good to have a career to fall back on for extra cash. Stripping seems like an international sort of skill.”
Rilla snorted.
Caroline unfolded her legs. “Well, so what?”
“I’m not supposed to be here,” Rilla said, hearing her mom again at the bus stop. Girls like her didn’t get chances like these.
“None of us are.” Caroline laughed and leaned back. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but where you come from is part of what makes you, you. When I first left Ohio and started traveling for climbing, it was amazing, but also overwhelming. When you wake up every day wondering how you got there, even if it’s in a good way, it’s exhausting. But, the thing is . . .” Caroline paused a moment, staring out at the Valley. “I don’t know. At first it felt like I didn’t belong, like everyone would figure it out and send me home. But then I realized, all those things that made me afraid I didn’t belong were all the reasons I was there in the first place. Everyone has a different path.” She glanced at Rilla. “I’d go in your house,” she said confidently. “I’d probably live next door.”
Rilla smiled and tucked the apple core into her small trash bag. She wanted to hug Walker for giving her something so valuable as this climb with Caroline. The ease and elegance of Caroline’s style seemed less a threat and more just part of Caroline.
Rilla’s smile was real, her position on the wall was earned, and it didn’t matter if she was special, or mediocre, or boring, or a Skidmore, because right now it felt like she had climbed above all that.
“Here, let’s take a picture,” Caroline said, fishing a camera out of her bag. “Your first lead multi-pitch!”
Rilla leaned in and smiled wide.
Caroline shaded her eyes and looked. “Cute.”
“Can you take one of me with the view? I don’t have any pictures . . . I want . . .” She gulped and forced herself to keep going, since she’d started. “Just to prove to everyone I’m not out getting wasted all the time. Which is definitely what they think I’m doing.”
Caroline waved her hand. “Say no more. Want one of you climbing too? I can rig it up and . . .”
“No. No.” Rilla flushed. “I just. I’m just being petty.”
“It’s not petty. It sucks when people assume the worst.” Caroline stood, pulling out some slack in her rope to have freedom of movement on the ledge. “Here, stand back off the anchors and we’ll get the background.”
Rilla leaned back, weighting the anchors and smiling. She gave a big thumbs-up, but then it felt dumb, so she put her hands down on the rope. It was awkward—to have Caroline Jennings taking pictures of her. She looked down, trying not to seem embarrassed. The ground was far away, but she barely noticed. “Okay, thanks,” she said, pulling back onto the ledge.
“I’ll text them to you tonight. They look good. The light is nice.”
“It’s crazy that a tree can grow this far off the ground,” Rilla said, tipping her head into the simmering blue afternoon and the wavering shade patterns across her face, still feeling awkward about the photos and rushing to move on. Even though Caroline seemed fine, she couldn’t help but hear Petra’s derision about Caroline’s photos in her head. All she wanted was to shove it once in everyone’s face back home.
“Back in the fifties some naturalists tried to get up here to see what kind of tree it was. They put in a bunch of bolts and gave up,” Caroline said, over bites of her apple. “A group of climbers made it up here, and reported back that it was a Ponderosa. They looked farther up and said it was ‘a real opportunity for future rock engineers’, but no one climbed above this point for the next twenty-six years.”
Rilla twisted and looked up the wall. It was surprising to see how vast it looked still—especially after spending all day climbing to this point. It hardly looked like they’d made any progress at all. “Engineers? That’s a weird way to describe it.” Watching Caroline felt like art.
“The majority of climbers that made this Valley what it is, were white-boy engineering majors from Stanford coming down here on summers and weekends. I mean, the guy who said that was a German major, but same diff.” Caroline brushed some dirt off her pants and stuffed the apple core back into her plastic bag. “So yeah, engineers. Because clearly the future of climbing was full of white-boy Stanford engineers.” She caught Rilla’s eye. “Definitely not a skinny girl from southern Ohio.”
Caroline offered her a fruit cup, warmed from the sun and liquid sweet. She savored the soft peaches, leaning against the wall. In the silence and the wind, a tree frog began its song in the boughs above them.
Rilla looked up, eyes wide.
If this tree and frog could be places no one thought they belonged, maybe she could too.
Allen Steck, Camp 4, Steve Roper, 133.