Fifty Degrees Below (47 page)

“So who were those guys anyway?” Frank asked again.

“Who the fuck knows? We never saw them again.”

“Lucky for you.”

“No lie.”

“You guys could use a phone. Whip it out and 911 in situations like that.”

“Yeah right!”

“So that being the case, I brought you all application cards so you can get into FOG, the zoo group.”

“No way.”

“They tell me the park is going to be regulated this summer, so you’ll need to be a member to be able to stay in the park.”

“You think the cops will act any different just because we got some card on us?”

“Yes, I do. Plus, they give you a cell phone if you’re a member. It’s a little party line, but it works.”

“Oh good I always wanted one of those!”

“Shut up and fill out the form here. Come on—I bet you can put down any name you want. Besides, it can’t possibly break any parole agreements. They’re not going to throw you in jail for joining the Friends of the National Zoo for God’s sake.”

“Ha ha! Who you saying is on parole?”

“Yeah who you saying is on parole? At least we got
noses
.”

“Ha ha. Just fill out the form.”

Coming up to their little closet, Frank heard someone in there talking to Rudra, and came up to the door curious to see who it was, as the old man seemed somewhat neglected in the house. But no one else was in there. Rudra started at the sight of Frank, stared up at him with an addled look, as if he had forgotten who Frank was.

“Sorry,” Frank said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I am happy you did.”

“Talking to yourself, were you?”

“Don’t think so.”

“I thought I heard somebody.”

“Interesting. Sometimes I, what say . . . I sing to myself. One kind of Tibetan singing makes two sounds from one voice. Head note? Overtone?” He opened his mouth and emitted a bass note lower than Frank would have expected from such a slight body; and at the same time there was a scratchy harmonic floating in the room.

“Very nice,” Frank said. “It reminds me of Louis Armstrong.”

Rudra nodded. “Very fine singer.” He opened his mouth again, sang deeply, “The odds, were a hundred to one against us,” like Louis played at two-thirds normal speed, slower and deeper.

“That’s right, very good! So you like him?”

“Very fine singer. Head tone undeveloped, but very strong.”

“Interesting.” Frank unrolled his groundpad, laid himself out with a small groan.

“Go to park?”

“Yes.”

“Find your friends?”

“Some of them.” Frank began to describe them and the situation out there—the bros, the fregans, his own project. He lay down on his back and left the laptop off, and talked about the paleolithic, and how the brain had evolved to feel good because of certain stimuli caused by behaviors performed repeatedly in the two-million-year run-up to humanity; and how they should be able to feel good now by living a life that conformed as closely to these early behaviors as possible. Which was what he had been trying to do, in his life out in the park.

“Good idea!” Rudra said. “Original mind. This is Buddhism also.”

“Yes? Well, I guess I’m not surprised. It seemed to me that you were talking about something like that when you spoke at NSF last year.”

Rudra didn’t appear to remember this talk, which had been such a shattering experience for Frank—a real paradigm buster, as Edgardo would say. Frank did not press the matter, feeling shy at admitting to the old man what a profound effect he had created, with what had apparently been an offhand comment. Instead he described to Rudra the ways in which he felt that prisoner’s dilemma and Snowdrift modeled ethics in a scientific way, how the games were scored and the strategies judged, and how, at the start of the winter, he had come to the tentative conclusion that it made best adaptive sense to pursue the strategy called always generous.

“Good idea,” Rudra said. “But what are these
points
? Why play for
points
?”

Frank was still pondering this when Sucandra and Padma clomped upstairs to see how the old man was doing. “Cookies,” Sucandra said, holding out a plate. “Fresh out of the oven.”

He and Padma sat on the floor in the doorway, and the four of them ate sugar cookies like kids at a sleepover.

“These are good,” Frank said. “I’ve been getting so hungry this winter.”

“Oh yes,” Sucandra said. “You get much hungrier in the cold.”

“And much colder when you’re hungry,” Padma added.

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “We learned that both ways, didn’t we?”

“Yes.”

Frank looked at them. “The Chinese?”

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “In their prison.”

“How long?”

“Ten years.”

Frank shook his head, trying to imagine this and failing. “How much did you get to eat?”

“A bowl of rice a day.”

“Did people starve?” Frank said, looking at the remaining cookies on the plate.

“Yes,” Sucandra said. “Died from hunger, died from cold.”

Padma nodded. “Others survived, but lost their wits.”

“Maybe we all did.”

“Yes, no doubt.”

“But I know who you mean when you say that. We had this old monk, you see, who was shitting some kind of tapeworm. Long red thing, segmented. Like millipede without legs. We knew this because he cleaned them up when it happened, and brought them to the group to offer them to the rest of us as food.”

“He claimed Bön spirit was inside him making food for us.”

Frank said, “So what did you do?”

“We chopped the worms up very fine and added them to the rice.”

“No doubt it added some protein to our diet.”

“Not much, it was more a gesture.”

“But anything helped at that point.”

“It’s true. I kind of got to looking forward to it.”

They grinned at each other, looked shyly at Frank.

“Yes. It helped us feel like we were together. People need to be part of a group.”

“And to help the old monk. He would get very distraught.”

“But then he died.”

“Yes, that’s right. But then the rice seemed to be missing something!”

ONE MORNING WHEN IT WAS SPRING and all, cool and green and sweet, like some May day remembered from a distant past that they had assumed would never come again, Charlie drove out to Great Falls and met Frank and Drepung. Frank was going to teach them the basics of rock climbing.

Anna did not thoroughly approve, but Frank assured her he would make it safe, and her risk-assessment realism impelled her to concede it was probably all right. Charlie, only momentarily disappointed that he had lost this best excuse to back out of it, now parked next to the other two, and they walked out the short trail to the gorge, carrying two backpacks of Frank’s gear and a few tight loops of nylon rope. After coming to an overlook, the trail paralleled the clifftop, and they followed it to a spot under a prominent tree, which Frank declared was the top of a good teaching route.

It was a new route, he said, for the great flood had greatly rearranged Great Falls, tearing new routes all up and down the south wall. When that much water ran over rock it tore at it not only by direct friction but also by a process called cavitation, in which the water broke into bubbles that were in effect vacuums that sucked violently at the cracks in the rocks, cracking them further, so that big blocks were plucked out rather than worn away. The walls of Mather Gorge had been plucked pretty hard.

Frank uncoiled one length of rope and tied it off around the trunk of the tree. He pointed down the cliff. “See the flat spot down at the bottom? On the right here, you can basically walk down to it, like on stairs. Then you can climb the wall over here, or there. It’s like a climbing wall in a gym.”

The knobby black rock was schist, he said. The gorge was an unusual feature in this region; there was another smaller one on the Susquehanna, but mostly the eastern piedmont lacked this kind of rocky outcropping. It had been cut in discrete bursts, the geologists had found, perhaps in the big floods that punctuated the end of ice ages. Their recent flood was a minor scouring compared to those.

Now they stood on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the river’s white roil and rumble. “There’s almost every kind of hold represented on this wall,” Frank continued. “Conveniently identified for the beginning climber by the fresh new chalk marks you see on them. There’s been lots of action here already. I’ll have you top-belayed the whole time today from this tree here, so even if you slip and come off, you’ll only bounce in place a little. The rope has some flex, so you won’t be brought up short if it happens. I’ll have you jump off on purpose so you know what it feels like.”

Charlie and Drepung exchanged a reassured glance. It was going to be okay. Neither would die as the result of being a bad student, something they both had been a few times in the past.

That being established they became happier, and put on their harnesses cheerfully, indeed prone to sudden bursts of muffled hilarity ostensibly caused by the difficulties of getting their legs in the proper holes. It was pretty lame, and Frank shook his head. Then they were solemnly studying Frank’s knots, and learning the simple but effective suspension belaying systems used by climbers, techniques that held without fail when needed, but also would run freely when desired. Frank was very clear and businesslike in his explanations, and patient with their fumbling and misunderstanding. He had done this before.

When he seemed to feel they had absorbed the necessary minimum, he retied all their knots himself, then ran Charlie’s rope through a carabiner tied to their tree and wrapped it around his waist. Charlie then carefully descended the staircase analog that ran down to a floor just above the river. Standing at the bottom Charlie turned to look up at Frank.

“Okay,” Frank said, pulling the rope between them taut through the carabiner. “On belay.”

“On belay,” Charlie repeated. Then he started climbing, focusing on the wall and seeing it hold by hold. The chalk marks did indeed help. Monkey up, using the knobs and nicks they indicated. He heard Frank’s suggestions as if from a distance. Don’t look down. Don’t try to pull yourself up by the arms. Use the legs as much as possible. Keep three points attached at all times. Move smoothly, never lunge.

His toe slipped and he fell.
Boing,
fend off wall; bounce gently; he was okay. Relocate holds, get back to climbing. Was that all? Why, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as he had thought it would be! With such a system there wasn’t the slightest danger!

The way Frank failed to agree with this served to refocus Charlie’s attention on the wall.

Some of what Charlie was doing was familiar to him already, as it resembled the scrambling he had done on backpacking trips in the Sierra. The steps, grabs, and motions were the same, but here he was performing them on a surface drastically more vertical than any he and his backpacking friends would have attempted. Indeed if he had ever wandered onto such a face during a scramble in the Sierra, he would have been paralyzed with fear.

But being top-roped really did remove the source of that fear, and with it gone, there was room to notice other feelings. The action felt like a kind of acrobatics, unrehearsed and in slow motion. Charlie became absorbed in it for a long time, slowing down as the holds seemed scarcer, until his fingers began to hurt. For a while nothing existed except for the rock face and his search for holds. Once or twice Frank spoke, but mostly he watched. The tug of his belay, while reassuring, did not actually pull Charlie up; and now he began to struggle, with only a final awkward lunge getting him up to the rim.

Very absorbing stuff! And now a surge of some kind of
I
’
M STILL ALIVE
glow was flowing through his whole body. He saw how it was that people might get hooked.

Then it was Drepung’s turn. Charlie sat with his feet swinging over the edge, watching happily. From above Drepung looked bulky, and his expression as he searched the rock face was uncomfortable. Charlie had his years of scrambling experience; Drepung did not. After hauling himself up the first few holds he looked down once between his feet, and after that he seemed a bit glued to the rock. He muttered something about a traditional Tibetan fear of falling, but Frank would have none of it. “That’s a tradition everywhere, I assure you. Just focus on where you’re at, and feel the belay. Jump off if you want to see how it’ll feel.”

“It seems I will get to find out soon enough anyway.”

He was slow, but he kept trying. His moves were pretty sure when they happened. His small mouth pursed in a perfect little O of concentration. In a few minutes more he made it up and hauled himself around to sit beside Charlie, uttering a happy “Ha.”

Frank had them do it again, trying other routes on the face; then they belayed each other, nervously, with Frank standing beside the belayer making sure all was well. Lastly he had them rappel down, in a simple but scary operation like the old Batman, but for real. They practiced until their hands got too tired and sore to hold on to anything.

After that (it had taken a couple of hours) Frank changed his belay to another tree on the cliff top. “It looks like both Juliet’s Balcony and Romeo’s Ladder survived. I’m going to do one of those, or Gorky Park.” He dropped away, leaving Charlie and Drepung sitting happily on the cliff’s edge, kicking their heels against the rock and taking in the view. To their left the rearranged falls roared down its drops, every step along the way boiling whitely. Below them Frank was climbing slowly.

Suddenly Charlie leaped to his feet shouting: “Where’s Joe!” and looking around them desperately.

“Not here,” Drepung reminded him. “With Anna today, remember?”

“Oh yeah.” Charlie sank back down. “Sorry. For a second there I forgot.”

“That’s okay. You must be used to watching him all the time.”

“Yes.”

He sat back on the cliff’s edge, shaking his head. Slowly Frank ascended toward them. As he looked up for his next hold his face reminded Charlie of Buster Keaton; he had that same wary and slightly baffled look, ready for anything—unflappable, although
not
imperturbable, as his eyes revealed just as clearly as Keaton’s that in fact he was perturbed most of the time.