"On the Rocks"

By Dennis Butler

We arrived fifteen minutes late to find Blaire Kennedy already waiting at the trailhead parking lot, wearing an impatient frown. He shuffled uncomfortably in a new pair of Scarpa boots, the polished newness of their leather apparent fifty yards away as we drove up the gravel road.

“Are you sure that he’s up for this?” I asked as we pulled in beside the Volvo Blaire had borrowed from his aunt for the trip. Plumes of dust blew past Tim’s jacked up Bronco as we came to a stop; he killed the engine.

“I dunno,” Tim said. “Guess we’ll find out. You up for this?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

I’d met Blaire a few years ago, at Tim’s sister’s wedding. He was a bridesmaid. I’m still not exactly sure how that works; ‘they were close’ was all I’d ever managed to get out of Tim.

I had known Tim for only a few years as well, but those years had been spent cementing our friendship on the cliff faces of dozens of the northwest’s rock climbing hotspots. From our first climb on Madrone Wall to the long summer months camped among the crags of Smith Rock, we had been inseparable for nearly four years. Coiled on my pack, our constant companion, fifty meters of ten-and-a-half millimeter thick, neon-pink kernmantle rope caught Blaire’s eye.

“We aren’t going to need that are we?” he questioned.

“Oh hell yeah we—“

“Nah, it’s just in case,” Tim cut me off, handing him a rented pair of crampons and an ice axe.

“Nice boots,” I commented, catching him shifting uncomfortably again.

“Thanks, my aunt bought ‘em for me when I told her we were gonna do this.”

“Nice aunt,” Tim replied, modeling his Danner workboots, that had been repurposed to the task of mountaineering. I laughed.

The furrow deepening in Blaire’s brow signaled he was beginning to understand that Tim and I were two sides of the same chuckleheaded coin, and that his fate would soon be left up to our toss.

Fifteen minutes into our hike and he hadn’t shut up. He just bought a new football game for his PS3, that he really likes, but isn’t sure yet if it’s any better than Madden ’07 for the Xbox 360, which, at this point, he rarely ever plays since the hard drive went out, but he has a friend in his math class who will hook him up with a used one so he doesn’t have to send it in to get it repaired, oh, and his aunt got a great deal on some season passes for something somewhere and for reasons that will, forevermore, remain unimportant to me.

“Did you guys see the Redskins game on Sunday? Twenty-one to fourteen Raiders lead with two minutes left in the fourth when Davis ties it with an eighty-eight yard kickoff return, Raiders fumble the first possession and Redskins win with a field goal. So awesome.”

“I don’t watch baseball,” I said, realizing, too late, that I was only encouraging him.

“Football.”

“Do you play?”

“Which? Football or baseball?”

“Either.”

“No, but the Redskins have been my favorite team since fourth grade, when my aunt took me to a playoff game.  They ended up losing but still it was…oh damn. Did you guys remember to bring toilet paper? I totally forgot. I can’t believe I forgot. I seriously have to take a poop. Can I borrow some?”

“Nope,” Tim said, not bothering to explain. I kept quiet, hoping I’d already guessed Tim’s next move.

“What am I supposed I do?” Blaire asked.

 “Just use some leaves.” Tim pointed off to the right of the trail, trying to hide a hint of a smile curling at the corners of his mouth. It was a smile I had become too familiar with, as his roommate for the past year and a half. I had missed the significance of that smile the day he emptied a box of baking soda in a gallon of my milk, and the morning I passed him in the hall on the way to find my toothbrush soaked with pepperspray, and every time I found him feigning innocence, sitting on the couch, wearing that same stupid hint of a smile, as I walked from the bathroom, saturated in Purplesaurus Rex from the shower head he had packed with Koolaid, smelling like chicken, because Koolaid wasn’t enough, so he had put in some bouillon cubes for good measure; and then, in order to fully enjoy his handy-work, he’d turned the hot water off in the garage, after allowing just enough time for me to get soaked. As I stomp back by, returning from the garage, he never appears to have moved. He’s still staring at the TV with the same twist of the lips, but sure enough, there’s a blue rubber chicken in the bottom of the shower waiting for me. Every time.

Watching Blaire traipse off through the brush seeking relief, I was immediately struck by the bright red leaves rubbing past his bare legs. An oily sheen on their surface reflected the afternoon sun filtering in through the canopy of firs.

“Remember how sad I was when I found out you weren’t allergic to poison oak?” Tim asked.

“Broke your black little heart. I doubt Blaire will disappoint you.”

“No. I imagine he won’t.”

Just as the afternoon glow faded to dusk, we crested a small ridge and the open meadows of Jefferson Park welcomed us from the airy forest. Our three pairs of boots slowed to a stop in synchronized apprehension. There she was. Robes of mist flung skyward from her shoulders were lit like crimson flame by the setting sun.

At 10,497 feet, Mt. Jefferson is far from peerless even in her own range of the Cascades. She doesn’t have the legs of the Himalayas, the centerfold stretch of the Rockies, or the bust of the Tetons. But she sure has angry eyes. The simmering, sultry look she gave me, the way the late summer ice clung to her exposed rock buttresses like a lace gown raised goosebumps along my arms and neck.

A towering castle of 500-foot cliffs guards her peak, only a sliver of ridgeline breaks the sheer ice slopes plummeting from the base of its walls. After attaining the saddle of that knife’s edge ribbon of rock, we hoped from there to sneak undetected to within scoring distance of her coveted pinnacle – considered an achievement, even by the standards of seasoned climbers.

“Well, hello Mrs. Jefferson,” Tim said. Cocky bastard.

That spring, five members of Silverton high school’s senior class had made front-page news here, when their climb ended in a twelve hundred foot fall down her southwest flank followed by another thirty-foot plunge into the yawning mouth of a crevasse. The Air Force’s 1042nd rescue wing carried all five off the mountain in the bellies of Pavehawk helicopters. The kids suffered pulverized femurs, crushed ribs, and the overwhelming realization that they should’ve bought lottery tickets instead. A vision of Dirty Harry questioning my luck lurked in the corner of my mind.

Staring in dumbfounded adoration at what the tantalizing description in our climber’s guide had utterly failed to capture, I searched for some excuse to turn back that would leave me with any shred of dignity. I had nearly finished fabricating my story of impending gastrointestinal distress when Tim started off down the path; sheepishly, I followed his lead. Blaire lingered behind a moment, then trailed me like a shadow of my own fear.

Finding a campsite at one of the half-dozen lakes that dot the Jefferson Park plateau was a pleasant change from the five-mile ascent, allowing the burn in my thighs a chance to cool while blistering heels coasted effortlessly along the flat trail. We unshouldered our packs at Scout Lake; I set up my one-man tent, while Tim and Blaire spread out their sleeping bags in dusty beds. Within minutes, the alpine lullaby of the stars through the mesh roof of my tent sent me drifting toward slumber. I heard Blaire ask, “Does somebody have some bug spray I can use?” but I pretended not to hear him. Tim was already snoring.

A horrific scream woke me sometime in the night. Tearing my tent flap open, my flashlight illuminated Tim standing in naught but tighty-whities looking out into the night.

“What is it? Bear?” I asked him.

“Nope. Blaire.”

“Yeah, but what’s eating him?”

“M’skeeters.”
            “What?”

“He was too hot in his bag, tried to sleep on top. He woke me up with all his scratching. Had a pretty bad case of poison oak.” I could hear the smile in Tim’s voice. “That’s what brought ‘em in. They can smell raw flesh a mile off.”

“Mosquitoes?”

“Thousands.”

“Unreal. He’s brewing the perfect storm of itchiness.” More whooping screams.

Captain Kirk replied from the blackness beside me. “He’s…beyond-help-now. We…can-only-wait…and-pray.”

“He’ll be useless tomorrow.”

“Yep.” But we couldn’t afford to lose any sleep over it. I don’t know how long or how far Blaire ran that night.

The sound of Tim’s watch chirping startled me; four AM had snuck up on all of us. Unstuffing our packs of anything but bare climbing essentials, Tim discovered the foot-long section of wrought-iron railroad track his dad had placed with loving care in the bottom of his pack; it must’ve weighed fifteen pounds.

“Hmph” he grunted, a proud smile spreading across his face. The old man still had it.

“He’ll be sad to hear you found it before you carried it to the summit.”

“Yeah, I better bring it,” he said, appearing to be thoughtfully replacing it in his pack. Blaire turned his back, only for a moment, and just like that his pack was fifteen pounds heavier.

The giant black shadow of a mountain outlined in the predawn sky reminded me that I wasn’t here on a camping trip. She was still sleeping. The three of us didn’t talk anymore. I noticed Blaire’s aunt had supplied him with a new pair of wool pants as well, his hands taking over the constant motion that his mouth had relinquished. Between the poison oak, mosquito bites and scratchy pants, Blaire had achieved a trifecta of irritated skin. I focused on dressing a few blisters in duct tape but could hear him incessantly wrestling with himself beyond the peripheral vision of my LED headlamp.

Thick timber and brush ring her like a skirt fallen from the hips of a goddess. We entered its folds ten minutes from camp, losing sight of her completely. Two hours spent wandering in umber silence through velvet forest finally gains us passage beyond timberline. I expected her to be closer by then, but she was only bigger.

Out of the trees the wind ripped through our clothes, forcing us to keep moving to stay warm. We followed the curve of a ridge to its convergence with the base of a half-mile wide glacier.  Affording ourselves only a brief stop here, hydrating and eating an energy bar, we geared up for glacier travel. The sun was already too high for an August climb on a thawing volcano.

Lacing the twelve-toothed crampons to the bottom of my leather boots felt frighteningly foreign. Blaire said they felt like high heels. I didn’t ask. None of us had been this high on a mountain before. This seemed a poor place to practice, a playground for unforgiving consequences. Reaching into my pack, I pulled out a comforting friend, our old climbing rope. Its surface, worn fuzzy from constant use, calmed my throbbing nerves. My hands instinctively weaved the figure-8 knot, clipping it into my harness. Its purpose today still seemed uncertain. The idea was that if one of us fell, the other two would sink their ice axes into the glacier and arrest the fall. The reality was that we were all going to fit in the same casket if any one of us fell. Tim and Blaire moved to join me, beginning to tie themselves in at intervals along its length. Seeing Blaire struggle, I offered to help him tie in, noticing Tim has left too much rope between the two of them.

“You’re gonna want to be closer to Blaire, Tim”

“How come?”

"Because if you fall with that much distance between you, by the time the slack runs out your velocity will be unstoppable.”

“Unshtoppabubble velosity!?” Tim mocked but walked another ten feet closer and began to retie.

“You guys know what you’re doing, right?” Blaire glanced back and forth, eyes resting briefly on each of us in turn.

“Definitely not” and “Nope, no clue,” we replied in unison, shaking our heads. Returning his gaze, I wondered if he was going to burst into tears or throw himself off the mountain. He seemed uncertain himself, one hand, palm flat against his face, vigorously working over the puffy red patches on his cheek, the other scratching his thigh, then crotch, then slipping inside his shirt before returning to his thigh, still scratching.

Late summer crevasses split the glacier, creating a labyrinth that criss-crossed our path to the saddle. After spending the remainder of the morning meandering through this maze, we turned aside to the eastern edge that traced a steep wall of rock, allowing us unimpeded progress to a perch of ice a mere hundred vertical feet from the ridgeline.

Furniture-sized boulders were scattered haphazardly across the ice field here. We sat on one large stone that formed a ten-foot long couch. Looking down toward camp, we ate lunch, marveling at our success. I took a photo of Tim and Blaire seated there. Tim’s broad confident smile, Blaire’s wistful gaze transfixed on the valley floor, his left hand frozen mid-scratch, a trail of pink rope following me out of frame.

Three hundred yards directly across from our seat, a burgschrund crevasse offered us another rest before our final leap to the ridgeline saddle running between her summit and a tooth-like pillar that stood sentry over her western slopes. Reaching that benchmark proved more of a test than I had ever imagined. Halfway there, pinned in a vertical embrace with the frigid queen, I peeled my eyes from the point where my axe intersected her ice and peered down. What I found, seemingly spilling from the soles of my boots, was a bottomless void that defied measure. She had waited millennia for that look. She laughed, shaking loose two-dozen truck-sized boulders.

By the time my mind registered what was happening, two had already passed through our lunch spot, trailing a spray of white slush, spinning faster and faster, plowing trenches in the ice as they rolled. A third smashed directly into the slab we had sat on, filling the air with a cataclysmic CLACK!, shattering into a hundred pieces. Another flew by, buffeting me with a blast of air, ten feet away, but close enough that I could smell its wet, musty odor. Then another, and three more; the herd was on us.

“Oh God I don’t wanna die! We’re gonna die! Oh my God, are we dead?! Are we dead? We’re not dead? Are we gonna die?!” Blaire screamed.

HUSHHH! she scolded, geysers of molten ice launching into space. The entire avalanche missed us, barely; only one huge rock had clipped between Blaire and me. The rest shredded the ice to my left. I looked back to Tim, furthest from the action, and saw him smile. I didn’t think it was wise to tempt her.

In the post-apocalyptic silence I could almost hear a piece of Blaire’s already brittle psyche fracture and tumble off in pursuit of the ten-thousand metric tons of earth that had just raced past.  The tink-tink, tink-tink of crampons kicking across the glacier face Rockette-style was the only answer Blaire got to his string of questions. He followed us to the shelter of a sheer ice barrier that sent tiny rocks zinging well over our dizzy heads.

Crawling deeper inside the crevasse we found a small shelf where we huddled together in starry-eyed reverence. We had always thought that retreat would be an option if the climb became too intense. Now, in the heat of the day, retreat would lead us back through a mine-field of lethal rockfall.

“Do we have a plan B?” I asked Tim.

“Have to look for another route off on the south side, then work around the base, back to camp. After a quick jaunt to the top.” Tim remained defiantly fearless.

A 35-foot vertical wall of ice separated us from the safety of the ridge’s crest. Someone would have to climb out of a narrow gap on the west end, face a 2,000 foot drop-off, and take the lead end of the rope with them to the saddle where they could anchor it for the others. I voted for Tim as that someone. Blaire voted for something indecipherable, sounded like maybe ‘ice cream’. Tim accepted the nomination. My 210 pounds was better suited to belay his featherweight 130. Were I to fall, it would result in an extraordinarily steep shortcut back to camp for all of us.

I wrapped the slack end of the rope around my hips and wedged myself as tightly as I could between the walls of ice. Tim poked his head out the tiny slit opening onto the face of the glacier and hesitated. The sight of him stalled there in indecision knotted every muscle in my body. Tim squeezed out of sight, burning rope across my back as he went; I prepared for the worst.

“You’d follow him anywhere,” I heard Blair mumble. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe.” I tried to focus on the rope sliding past the lip of the crevasse.

“He’s going to get us all killed.”

“You plan on living forever?”

“I don’t know. Guess we’ll find out.”

Tim surprised me with a sharp tug, signaling his arrival at the top. Blaire went next. Trusting Tim’s anchor from above, he left without pause. Another tug on the rope, a few minutes later, told me he’d made it.

Peeking out of the gap, my breath is stolen by a cold, hard wind in my face. My body felt impossibly heavy as I balanced on the toe-spikes of my crampons, kicked into glass-hard ice. My calves were shaking. I wanted to let go. I just wanted to let go and sit on a couch with Blaire and play videogames and dream about pretty girls and eat waffles. The rope tightened, then pulled hard; Tim was helping as much as he could. I swung my axe high overhead; it sunk in a mere half an inch – disheartening to say the least. I added my “Oh-please-God-please-God-please-God” that Tim and Blaire must have said when they had seen this. I didn’t dare look down, just kick, step, swing, kick, step.

Minutes later, I was beyond the ice, seated with Tim and Blaire on a spine of rock ten thousand feet in the air. Blaire looks scared and that worries me. Tim looks worried and that scares me. I follow his gaze to what we had aimed at for so long, the summit. What had seemed so close is now revealed as an imposter, a giant fan of rotten volcanic igneous, which had eclipsed her without our knowing. The knife’s edge ridge continued for a full half-mile on the far side, across to her fortress of towering cliffs.

Tim’s worry vanished under the cover of his best John Wayne ‘circle the wagons’ face, “Think we can make it?”

“Blaire?” I suggested.

Blaire had opened a granola bar to snack on but apparently forgot to eat it. He stared at the bloody skin he’d torn on his hands during the final push to the saddle, covered in miserable welts and rashes, too injured to itch. A single tear trickled down his cheek, bouncing back and forth between the swollen mosquito bites that peppered his face. Then, suddenly, as we watched him, his face turned up to look at her. Tim and I did the same. For a moment the stars in my eyes sparkled back at her, but quickly melted at the dawning realization that this was as close as I would come.

“Maybe not,” I said.

“Yeah. Prolly right,” Tim agreed. “We’ll head down the southwest ridge here.” He already had his map out, showing Blaire in an attempt to console him. “Looks a lot less steep, mostly rock. Shouldn’t even need crampons.”

A few steps down and my confidence in Tim was renewed. It wasn’t that steep; it was all rock. We took our crampons off. Blaire finally ate his Luna bar. Fifteen minutes later, we even untied the rope.

Tramping down the finger of ridgeline, more chasms chased down her to the east. Luckily, we didn’t need to go east. We followed a line of rock clockwise, to the west, as it worked us closer to home. A line of hundred foot cliffs that surrounded the ridge on three sides stopped us short. We spent another hour retracing our steps, this time holding close to the western edge of the ridge, until it shallowed to a twenty-foot drop into a steep ravine. The drop looked negotiable, we found a chimney-like chute through which we could easily scramble down off the rocks. This, however, would land us on a near vertical slope of mostly ice, its surface worn thin by the southern exposure to the sun. A few step-like rocks protruded from the ice, inviting us to walk across them to a trail of glacial debris, the consistency of potting soil, which we could walk down all the way to the base.

Being the heaviest of the three, and seeing nothing else on the far side to anchor the rope with, I offered to go first, testing each foothold as I went. I was the best anchor we had. Tim spooled rope out to me, as I climbed down to the glacier’s edge, then stepped, tentatively, onto the first rock. It felt surprisingly firm. A few strides further and I was across. Blaire clipped into the rope, a full forty feet distant from me, Tim fifteen feet farther down from him. The two traced my path down the rock wall and began the traverse.

Seated in the soft dirt, straddling the shaft of my ice axe planted to its head in deep moraine between my legs, facing down the mountain, my back resting on the slope behind me, legs stretched and heels dug in, I prayed this would be enough to hold their weight if they slipped. A giggle of small stones tumbled past on my right from above. She could barely contain herself.

I glanced away from Blaire, to see if more rocks would be coming my way, looking back just in time to see his foot prod a loose stone from its place, and begin his downhill descent with it. His mouth was frozen in a silent scream, unable to make a sound as the vacuum of gravity gripped him. Tim, tied close, sunk his axe in the crust of ice, and held him. Blaire hung by the neon thread, choking tears, for one terrified moment before Tim’s axe tore through the weakened ice, sweeping the two of them below me in a giant bullwhip pendulum, snapping Tim at the far end as the tether went stiff. The full force of their ‘unstoppable velocity’ hit me in the seat of my pants, jolted me upright by my harness, giving me only a split-second to survey the plunge I was about to take. My axe plucked free of her, I began a monumental teakettle flight.

The ravine’s slope cushioned my landing but in no way slowed my descent. She had hurled us clear of the ice, into a channel of black rock even steeper than the glacier. Tim logrolled ahead of me, I cartwheeled helplessly behind, Blaire was somewhere close, screaming. Sky, then rock, blue, then black, the colors flashed over and over as she mercilessly beat them into us. Above us I heard some of the rocks we had fallen through begin to tumble and accelerate. One gem in particular, nine inches in diameter, perfectly round except for a four-inch horn jutting out like a party hat, sped away from the rest. Just as I took my last tumble, she found me, prone, spread-eagle and dazed. She assaulted me from behind, horn first, deftly splitting the seam of my pants in an instant. Scattered at broken angles among the detritus, at the very nearly terminal end of the glacial ravine, she added up the sum of the looks on our three faces – Yahtzee.

For several long minutes, none of us moved or made a sound, each taking inventory of body functions and components in hushed aftershock. My ice axe had driven clean into the joint of my right knee; clear blood-tinged fluid drained out. It looked gruesome, but only hurt when I bent it, and even then it was barely a dull ache compared to my throbbing, freshly kicked butt.

“Huh,” Tim finally said, displaying his solitary injury to me: a miniscule cut on his middle finger; he raised it high and waved it back and forth at her. I held the horny rock up for Tim, showing him the hole it blasted through my pants; it must have weighed twenty pounds. Blaire got up and we could see that the entire left half of his shirt was missing. Apparently he hadn’t tumbled down, but skidded, grinding his side into hamburger from hip to armpit. He didn’t even look at us, just turned and walked away, unclipping the rope from his harness.

“This is really messed up man,” he said, his voice soft and tired, arms pumping in fevered spasms of scratching.  “I’m walkin’.” He spoke to the air around him, addressing neither Tim nor I. “Y-yeah, I love waffles.” His monologue was broken with sobs, as he walked off to the east. “Waffles…”

Seeing that I would be walking wounded, Tim offered to carry the rope as he coiled it on my pack lying on the ground behind me. I nodded; he said he was going after Blaire to try to steer him back to camp and maybe even give him a nudge back to reality. I wished him luck.

I felt strangely grateful to Tim during my four-hour companionless limp around Mt. Jefferson back to Scout Lake. I can’t believe he offered to take the rope, I thought, he must be getting weak. Maybe she touched him too. Back at camp, I began packing for the five-mile hike out. Then, and of course only then, did I find the twenty-pound stone he’d hidden in the bottom of my pack, a tattered thread of my shorts still dangling from it.

Long shadows had stretched across the meadow by the time I reached the top of the steep trail leading back to the parking lot. I paused briefly there with two out of breath, incoming climbers.

“Watch out for the mosquitoes at Scout Lake,” I cautioned.

“Did you make it to the top?” one asked, seeing the ice axe strapped to my pack.

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid not.”