Pecked to death by ducks (33 page)

So you prepare. You learn. You train. And there comes a time when your heart is beating fast, when flight is battling with fight, when the scream-and-gibber mechanism wants to engage itself. Then you take steep Hartwell, apply your hand brakes, and make the turn, just so.

There is a kind of euphoria here, a biochemical reward edge workers of my acquaintance strive to achieve. Some of them call themselves adrenaline junkies. The adrenal glands—little triangular meatballs located on the north pole of each kidney—secrete two hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline. In the blood these

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substances prepare a person for emergency action: Respiration increases, the heart beats faster, the central nervous system is stimulated. The effects can be felt subjectively as fear or anxiety combined with increased mental alertness.

Now the problem here is separating anxiety and fear from euphoria and alertness. Scientists studying anxiety subjected monkeys to stress at odd intervals, and these monkeys behaved like basket cases. They were drenched in adrenaline. A second group, however, suffered the same stress, except they were given a brief warning signal before the stress was applied. These monkeys easily adjusted. It was found that the monkeys in the second group had greater concentrations of noradrenaline in the blood.

Noradrenaline affects those systems in the brain that are concerned with emotions: especially euphoria, well-being, and alertness. In situations of self-imposed stress, feeling good means minimizing adrenaline and maximizing noradrenaline. A period of training helps; a thorough study of the dangers helps. Knowing where the hand brakes are gets the good stuff pumping.

In many cases the biochemical rewards of informed risk taking can, in the words of one psychologist, take the "individual . . . beyond the apparent limitations of the self." Mihaly Csik-szentmihalyi of the University of Chicago has been studying "exceptional people," risk takers of all varieties, including rock climbers, artists, dancers, and surgeons. All, he noticed, describe a euphoric feeling, a clarity of purpose combined with an ability to make time work for them. Neurosurgeons experienced three-hour operations as matters of minutes while ballerinas felt the exhilaration of performing a pirouette in what felt like extreme slow motion. Additionally, irrelevant stimuli were rejected: composers at work, for instance, didn't hear the doorbell ring. Csik-szentmihalyi calls this state of mind "the flow." Children, he says, are eager to match their skills against new challenges and "have flow states all the time."

Adults seek out risk and challenge, Csikszentmihalyi believes, "because the pleasure deriving from the flow state has an autonomous reality that has to be understood on its own terms."

So why isn't everyone out jumping out of airplanes or climbing

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El Cap every day? Ralph Keyes, in his book Chancing It: Why We Take Risks, explains that recent research has shown that "high sensation seekers seem to produce less of the mood-regulating opiates released by stress than do low sensation seekers. This could explain the frequently noted anti-depressant quality of thrill seeking." In a way this sounds very much like the Scottish proverb that states "Some men are born two drinks short of par." As children, we learn the pleasure and pain of risk: We know in some cobwebby corner of the mind whether we are the ones who need physical challenges to find the flow, whether we can be content as a buyer for Bloomingdale's or whether we will have to climb Mount Everest.

Risk, and the flow state it stimulates, can be understood in terms that become almost mystical. Measurements of brain activity taken during *low states actually show a decrease in cortical activity. Csikszentmihalyi thinks we might "get into the flow not by exerting more effort but rather by screening out distortions. That would mean flow resembles Oriental meditation practices— the notion of learning to stop the world."

Some people can sit-cross legged in a room and stop the world. Others of us need a little biochemical cocktail to enter into the flow: We need to take steep Hartwell without brakes.

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ing in the wind, we were taking occasional air rides: fifty- and sixty-foot pendulum swings fueled by gusting winds.

At this point, in this exceedingly inconvenient situation, six hundred feet above the rocks (and two feet above me), Nick needed a men's room.

He's a clever man, Nick, and he had had persuasive reasons for wanting to climb first. On the scree he had pointed out that if I led, his photos, taken from below, would feature my back end silhouetted against the clear blue Yosemite sky. "No one would look at a picture like that," he reasoned cogently. "See," Nick said, "if I lead and shoot down on you, we'll get your face and the drop below." It made good sense, but now I saw, in his demand to lead, motives that had to do with his own personal convenience; sinister motives that lay in a realm entirely beyond photographic professionalism.

We had expected the climb to take perhaps six hours, and we each carried a mere quart and a half of water. Dehydration could be a problem. Nick had drunk a half gallon standing on the scree slope waiting to hook into the rope. It had been a bit too much for his body to process all at once. "This is almost painful," he whined.

"You should have thought of that before we started," I said, sounding precisely the way my father had when one of the kids had to "go" one hour into an all-day car trip. My father grumbled, but he always stopped at some gas station, and I realized, on the rope, that no matter how much I protested, Nick was going to stop at his personal gas station.

"There are people watching us from the road," I argued. "People with binoculars." It was a feeble effort. "Cops," I said. "You could be arrested for indecent exposure. I can see the headlines now: 'Disgraced Photographer Commits Bizarre Sex Crime Involving World's Longest Rope!' Is that what you want? Can you imagine trying to tell your mother?"

But Nick was fumbling about near his seat harness. "Wait," I screamed. And then, with iron calm: "There's a way to do this."

The plan was simple enough. I would climb up so that my head was just under Nick's right foot, then unhook my top Jumar, one

of three devices that held me into the rope. This I would position above the rope-holding devices hooked to Nick's feet and, with a few more technical moves, climb to a point at which my feet were just below his. Thus, at the crucial moment, I would be hanging behind Nick and holding him in a kind of bear hug.

We would both be indicted, of course, but the alternative was unthinkable.

I hadn't done any rope work in almost two years. It had been some relatively hairy stuff then: dropping five hundred feet into the deepest cave pits in America, in total darkness. I got reasonably good at it, so when the folks I worked with in those Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee pits asked if I wanted to join them in Yosemite for a little rope sport, I jumped at the chance.

The men and women who "yo-yo" those southern pits are all cavers, and their passion is called vertical caving. There are limestone outcroppings in the southeast corner of America, great prehistoric ocean beds that rose out of the sea and wrinkled into a rough hill country. In this thickly vegetated land, surface water picks up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, creating weakly acidic rivers that dissolve limestone and form caves. There are subterranean tubes, slanting slightly downward, shaped by these rivers. Occasionally, underground water finds a fault in the limestone, or it breaks through from one series of horizontal tunnels to a lower series. A waterfall is formed. Over the millennia such a falls will form a pit. The deepest of these, Fantastic Pit in Georgia, is over six hundred feet deep.

Imagine: Here you are, half a mile below the surface of the earth, crawling merrily along, and you come on a hole into which you could fit the entire Bank of America building.

Some few adventurous folk found these pits to be a challenge, or more properly, the challenge of a lifetime. In the last thirty years rope work in these pits has been refined to an amazing degree. And the technique of vertical caving—vertical cavers call it SRT, single rope technique—has become a sport in and of itself, a not-so-simple matter of sliding down (rappelling) and climbing back up a rope.

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Yo-yoing the pits has always been a dirty underground endeavor. In the past few years, however, vertical cavers have emerged into the light of day. They have begun practicing SRT out in the open.

In 1980 a caver named Dan Twilley organized an SRT trip to Yosemite with the aim of yo-yoing El Cap, then thought to be the longest unbroken cliff in the world. Before the ascent, in talking with the climbers who hang out at Camp Four on the valley floor, Twilley and the SRT team discovered that there was some controversy as to the longest free-vertical drop. A rough consensus had it that Mount Thor, on Baffin Island off the eastern Canadian coast, could drop as far as one mile.

In 1981 a team led by Twilley (and including Nick Nichols) hiked into Mount Thor and, after a month's worth of hard trekking and careful rigging, managed to yo-yo the cliff. The free-fall section was 3,200 feet—indeed, arguably the longest such drop in the world. The rope itself, for symbolic purposes, was precisely one mile long.

Photographic evidence of the SRT work on Thor was submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records, but, after consultation, the editors decided not to include the Thor drop. They feared that others might lose their lives trying to set a new record. SRT was simply too dangerous for the Guinness Book of World Records.

"Can you believe that," raged Kent Ballew, who was on the SRT team at Thor. "In this book they got guys who jump off cliffs in parachutes, bungee cord jumpers, they got guys who eat entire Chevrolets, but SRT is too dangerous?"

Kent was here at Yosemite for his first crack at the second-longest free drop in the world. He was sensitive about the issue of danger because he is employed by Pigeon Mountain Industries (PMI), the LaFayette, Georgia, company that makes the rope we would be using, the company that made the milelong rope used at Thor.

"Look at this," Ballew said. He was standing on the scree slope, grabbing the rope, which was just under half an inch in

diameter. "Static kernmantle construction," he said, which means that the load-carrying part of the rope, the core, is protected by a tight sheath. "The core consists of twenty-three and two thirds strands of nylon with a breaking strength of seventy-one-hundred pounds."

PMI is the rope preferred by most vertical cavers, but since there are probably fewer than a thousand such people in America, PMI sells its ropes primarily to search-and-rescue teams. Big-city fire departments are practicing with SRT (which they sometimes call high-line work) in hopes of rescuing people from high-rise fires.

"You know what we did with this very rope?" Ballew asked. In a demonstration of the efficacy of high-line rescue techniques, PMI employees had gone to Toronto at the invitation of the Canadian government. They tied the rope off 1,250 feet up the CN broadcast tower and ran the line 3,800 feet to a traffic bridge. There, for the edification of crowds gathered for Canada Day, they slid volunteers from the tower to the safety of the bridge.

"You know why the Guinness people think it's dangerous?" Ballew asked. "Because they asked some Royal Mountaineering Club about it. Most climbers don't know anything about SRT. So they just assume it's dangerous."

Indeed, the climbers at Camp Four regarded the cavers with amused tolerance. When a few of us slung a rope over a high tree branch and did a little climbing to test our gear, a small crowd gathered to watch. There was some laughter. It must have seemed to them that we carried a lot of gear for so simple a task.

I was using Gibbs ascenders, small mechanical devices that slide easily up a rope but bite down hard, without damaging the rope, when they feel downward pressure. There was one on my right foot and another positioned near my left knee. This second Gibbs was connected by a loop to my left foot. An elastic cord ran from that Gibbs to a harness I wore on my chest. I could step on the loop—the Gibbs would bite, allowing me to take a step— then step and climb on the right Gibbs. As I raised my left knee, the elastic cord would pull the left Gibbs up the rope. The rope itself passed through a wheeled roller attached to the harness on

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my chest. This held my upper body close to the rope. Above the roller was a Jumar, a rope-biting device like the Gibbs. This was my safety line: It was connected to my seat harness. In order to rest, I simply slid the Jumar up and sat in the seat sling.

It was, I admit, a fairly laughable rig. The climbers also found the rope itself strange: It was heavier than climbing rope, and there was very little stretch to it. Climbing rope carries a lot of stretch; it is designed to stop a fall. A climber may move above his point of protection, make a bad move, and plummet thirty feet or more before the slack is out of the rope. If the rope were not dynamic, if it did not stretch, the climber could suffer a broken back, internal injuries.

In SRT work you are never off the rope. There is no need for stretch. The PMI rope we used on El Capitan had a stretch factor of only 1*7 at 200 pounds. Even this small amount was something of a pain: It meant that when you hooked in on the scree slope, the rope was going to stretch 1.7 percent of 2,650 feet, or 45 feet. In practice, this meant that you got absolutely nowhere in the first forty-five steps. You just stood there on the scree slope, climbing the stretch out of the rope.

Another property of the long rope was its lack of spin. On an ordinary climbing rope there is a bit of twist. On the PMI rope, if you started climbing looking at the face of the cliff, you might make one revolution in a half-mile climb. This is as it should be. Dervish dances on a long rope are a prelude to projectile vomiting.

So here we were, Nick and I, a quarter of the way up a half-mile climb deemed too dangerous to even mention in a book full of dangerous exploits. We could have walked up the back of El Cap and just done the rappel, but that would have been cheating. Nick and I were both aware of a strong Calvinistic streak in our caving friends. You had to earn the rappel. Cavers call this being "stout," and it is a high accolade. So we were climbing the rope, and we were arguing absurdly about his bodily functions.