Pecked to death by ducks (37 page)

While the macaroni was cooking, Teresa talked about walking the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, 2,126.5 miles. She had done it two years ago, at the age of twenty-four. Now, she was planning another half-year hike, from Montana to Mexico along the line of the Continental Divide. "Winter camping is a natural thing to do if you want to understand the whole wilderness," Teresa said. She thought that putting up with bad weather, with being cold, provided a sort of camaraderie between people on a long trek. "What I like," Teresa said, "is that hard-core trekking comes down to what I can do and what I can't do. There are no fantasies anymore."

The writer and photographer were listening. Whenever Teresa talked, they shut up. The men weren't at all reluctant to learn from Teresa, who, clearly, knew more than they did about the mountains of New Hampshire. The two guys, you could see it on their faces, had a lot of respect for Teresa Sims, who was talking about how she quit a good job managing real estate properties to work for the Appalachian Mountain Club. She had been on half a dozen rescue missions up in the mountains. One stormy night, wearing a headlamp, she had helped carry an unconscious woman across an ice field. "My parents don't understand why I do this sort of thing," Teresa said.

Eight pm. Sixteen degrees. Too cold to do anything but climb into the tent and try to sleep. Steph had secretly changed out of her cotton shirt, but she couldn't shake the chill it had given her. She woke around two, freezing to death.

"Deb," she said, "I'm just so cold."

"You have your hat on?"

"Yes."

"Is the bag tight around you?"

"Yes."

"What else did they say? If you wake up cold? Didn't they say to eat something?"

Til try."

Deb felt her friend was very low, and she tried to help her through the worst of the night with talk. "Teresa's amazing," Deb said.

"Superhuman," Steph agreed.

"Absolutely," Deb said in Teresa's soft Virginia accent, and they both laughed because that was the word the guide used instead of "yes."

"Ahm on the loading dock," Steph said. It was a Teresaism meaning "Let's go."

"Ah love mah boots," Deb said, because Teresa loved her insulated boots with the plastic shells. The women, by contrast, hated their own boots. They were too soft to kick good steps, and Deb's soaked up melting snow like a sponge. She thought of them as "slush puppies."

"Teresa," Steph said, "she's . . . heroic." The women thought about this, wondering how they had come to admire a person so thoroughly after knowing her less than twenty-four hours.

"I still don't know why do they do it," Deb said after a while. "I mean, if this is all there is to it." Steph didn't answer. The food had warmed her, and she was sleeping. Deb wondered if she would have accepted an all-expense-paid trip to the Black Hole of Calcutta. At least it would be warm, in the Black Hole. She was sleeping with her icy slush puppies in the bottom of her bag. Everyone had told her she had to sleep with the boots: If you left them out, they'd freeze solid, and you'd never get them on your feet in the morning.

It wasn't fun yet, not as far as Deb was concerned.

They left the base camp carrying light day packs, moving down into a small valley, along a trail that would take them to Mount Jackson, which stood alone, in the middle of the southern Presidential range. The women could see it in the distance. It looked ominous, foreboding.

Everyone was wearing snowshoes, but the writer's rental models had bad bindings, and he was falling behind, adjusting the things every five minutes and cursing steadily.

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Eventually, the writer gave up and carried the snowshoes in his hand. He followed the tramped-down trail everyone else made, but every fifty or sixty steps, he fell through the snow into what Teresa called a "spruce trap." Wind had whipped falling snow into a pocket on the lee side of the trees, then new snow had covered the hole. You could tramp right over a spruce trap in snowshoes, but a man on foot, like the writer, would drop waist-deep into the snow. It made Steph feel good, listening to the steady stream of outraged obscenities: The writer wasn't being polite anymore. He was being "natural," and it was as if the curses were a sign of acceptance. She felt so good she laughed aloud, and the writer, pulling himself out of another hole, muttered, "Bitch." Down below, the word was an insult; up here it meant the man respected her enough to curse her out. It made her feel like a legitimate part of an expedition, not a sorority girl on an outing.

They were walking the Appalachian Trail, but the blazes cut into the trees were buried under fresh new snow, and eventually the writer suggested that they forget about trying to find the blazes and "bushwhack" it to the top. It wasn't too difficult: The summit rose stark white against a cobalt-blue sky before them.

As they came out of the valley and began rising, taking a steep slope, Teresa said to plant the spike end of the ice ax into the slope ahead of them. "That way you pull yourself up to it."

On a slope like the expert run on a good ski hill, Deb planted her ax too far uphill, and her feet slid out from under her. She began to slide down the hill, but the writer planted himself and caught her. Deb didn't say anything, but the slide scared her, badly. She didn't know how to stop herself, and the mountain ahead was steeper, covered over in sheets of ice. Steph was talking to her now: a nice calm tone of voice. Deb realized that Steph was trying to talk her up the mountain, that the two of them were helping one another, working through the tough spots together. It was like a kind of telepathy: The two women had never felt closer.

Teresa called a halt. "Too steep for snowshoes now," she said. "We'll leave them here and pick them up on the way back." They

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kicked steps, moving slowly up the mountain, and on top of a ridge, where the spruce gave way to twisted, wind-tortured dwarf trees two and three feet high, Teresa said, 'This is a good spot to practice self-arrests."

It was fun, practicing self-arrests, like children's snow play, but with a serious purpose. It was the only way to stop a long, fast slide down steep snow and ice. Steph tried it first, sitting down on top of a snowy hill, then letting herself go, sliding down the slope. Teresa told her to build up a little speed, then called "Now!" Steph followed instructions perfectly: She turned onto her belly, planted the pick of the ax into the snow, then got her shoulder up over the place where the ax was buried in the snow. She humped up, like a hissing cat, with her toes dug into the snow, and she stopped dead, right there on the steep, icy slope.

When Deb tried it, she saw immediately how easy it was to stop a slide that otherwise might result in injuries, that could, in fact, be fatal. Another trick: a technique. Once you knew the art of self-arrest, steep slopes didn't scare you. As much.

They ate lunch out of the wind, on the lee side of an outcropping of rocks there above the timberline. After everyone finished their cheese and crackers and trail mix, Teresa, who was on the loading dock, asked, "Would, uh, anyone be too bummed if we didn't make the summit?"

"Well," Steph said, "I'd like to go for it."

"Me too," Deb said.

They were thinking almost the same thing: They were thinking that they hadn't come all this way to turn back now, not now when the summit was only an hour away, not now when they knew how to kick steps and stop a slide. Not now.

Teresa and the two guys exchanged looks, as if there was something funny, but they couldn't laugh about it just yet.

"Let's go," Deb said, and Steph added, "We're on the loading dock."

"Absolutely."

They moved up over the loose snow, kicking steps, until they hit a small ice field. There, just below the summit, above the

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timberline, constant mountain winds had turned the slope into a sheet of sheer ice. The party stopped for a moment, and Teresa brought out her crampons. They fastened to the bottom of the boots she loved: a dozen sharp prongs that bit into the ice and held her stable on the slope. Steph and Deb looked at their instep crampons, which consisted of two little spikes positioned just in front of the bootheel. Anyone could see that the heel was higher than the spikes. It was just as Teresa said: Instep crampons were useless.

"We'll go it without crampons," Teresa said. "Remember, your ice ax is your best friend."

The last slope was steeper, slicker than anything they had been on before, and you had to move slowly, carefully, to prevent a fall. Steph found she wasn't frightened in the least. Her mind was on the summit. Deb kept thinking, Almost there, almost there.

And then they were up over the lip of the slope, on the summit, with the land dropping away on all sides of them, and the wind was howling like a savage symphony up there on the top of the world. Something inside Steph burst wide open, and she whooped, shouting out a wordless cry of joy and triumph. Deb grabbed her, and they hugged one another in that high spot with only the sky above them.

"Hey!" It was the writer calling to them. "Hey, Deb, is it fun yet?"

She saw the three of them standing there: the writer, the photographer, and the guide. Everyone was smiling, and Deb could tell they couldn't help themselves. They felt as good as she did. Deb thought about ski students she'd had: people who finally did everything right and ran the bunny slope all the way without a fall. God, it made her feel good. That's what the writer was feeling, what the guide and photographer felt. Deb knew it, and for just a moment she felt as if she loved them all.

"Yeah," Deb said, laughter bubbling like champagne in her throat, "it's fun."

Steph thought about cotton and crampons, about self-arrests and bushwhacking, about slush puppies and curses and camaraderie—everything she'd learned about cold-weather survival—

and realized that the "fun" Deb talked about left a mark on a person. Reaching a goal not easily achieved: It changed your whole life.

"Better than fun," Steph said thoughtfully.

"Absolutely," Deb said.

Vm$ h a Cave, TkU h tke hid

It's like, why me?

Burt Grossman, second-year defensive end for the San Diego Chargers, asked the question aloud at a kind of celebration dinner after three days of crawling around in the mud, watching trees fall out of the sky onto people, having bats winging around his head, and hanging from a rope 165 feet above a pit supposedly full of poisonous copperhead snakes. He had climbed and crawled over places with names like Danger Canyon and Death Ledge. He had heard—nobody in San Diego would believe this— he had actually heard a couple of these cave guys, cavers they call themselves, seriously discussing the idea of going back down into the copperhead pit to retrieve part of another guy's face. His face, man.

There were a writer and an editor at the dinner, and they were trying to explain about how they had an idea for an article about fear and whether fear motivates performance on the football field. They wanted a story about "a top-notch defensive" player. They thought defensive guys were supposed to be crazy and fearless. It wasn't true, they said. Nobody in the NFL wanted to back

off a cliff and slide down a rope in absolute darkness. Finally, one guy said he would do it, but he canceled at the last minute. It had taken a lot of talking, the editor said, and a lot of the NFL teams didn't get it. "We wanted," he explained, "to take someone who had a reputation for being fearless in one area of sport and "introduce him to another sport/'

"Where," the writer added, "there might be an element of fear."

"A sort of worlds-in-collision kind of deal," the editor added.

"Which is more what it turned out to be," the writer said.

Right. When Burt Grossman's people at San Diego approached him about the project, nobody said anything about fear or caves or worlds in collision. Maybe he wasn't listening real hard, but he got the idea that he'd slide down a rope the way they do in the army recruiting ads. Once. Get his face in a magazine. Good promo.

And it wasn't until he was on the plane to Tennessee that he looked at his ticket and saw that they expected him to stay five days. And these guys, these cavers, wanted to take him on a death crawl to the center of the earth.

It was all a horrible mistake.

Happens all the time with Burt. His mouth gets him in trouble. He doesn't even know why, he just started doing it in college. The sportswriters would come around after a game, and everyone was saying the same thing. "We were fortunate to have the momentum. . . ." Burt just started saying what he thought. Still does. A lot of times he ends up putting down other players. "I don't like [Mark] Gastineau, to tell the truth," Grossman told San Diego sportswriters his first day in town. "I don't like [Brian] Bosworth either. Those two go off the handle and criticize everything. Like they say, misery loves company. Look what they got. One got Brigitte Nielsen. The other got . . . what? Seattle."

So now the sportswriters want to talk to Burt after Charger games. He gets quoted a lot. About midseason, some guy sent him a letter. The guy pulled down his pants, sat on a copier, and sent Burt the result. It was a fairly ugly photocopy, with the message "A guy with a big mouth ends up looking like an ass."

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So Burt knows there're plenty of people who'd like to see him get his. He's inspired by this knowledge and feels he has to play well to back up his mouth. People are going to watch him on the field, isolate him, because of what he says, and he doesn't want to be, well, embarrassed.

So after he said he'd do this rope stuff, there was no way he could back down. It's not Burt's way.

Burt Grossman arrives in Chattanooga. The writer picks him up at the airport and asks him what frightens him. Burt says he can't honestly say he's afraid of anything. What scares him are movies like The Exorcist or The Guardian. When he was a kid, he used to be afraid of the dark.

The next morning it's pretty scary right off the bat because they pick him up at the motel and he's got to ride in Trick Howard's truck. People in Tennessee have names like that. Trick. Buddy. Burt grew up in Philadelphia, a Mainline family, fairly well-to-do, went to Pitt, got signed with the Chargers for 8.3 million, and bought a house in swanky La Jolla: He's twenty-three years old and never really hung out with somebody named, like, Goober. He never rode in a truck like Trick's.

It's a Tennessee limousine: a 1969 Chevy three-quarter-ton pickup truck. Trick's got a camper shell on the back that someone gave him. The camper looks as if it's fastened to the bed with Super Glue and Silly Putty. There are stickers on the bumper that read, guano happens. Bat droppings, man. The guy thinks about bat droppings.

To get to these caves, you've got to drive up into the mountains. Trick's truck wobbles on twenty-year-old springs. The roads are twisty, and there are big drop-offs. Suddenly, it becomes The Exorcist inside the cab. Seriously. Bees start flying out of the ventilation system on the dash: big yellow jackets.

"Truck's been parked in the woods," Trick explains. He's a little guy, Trick, five-ten, maybe 150 pounds, and he's wearing a black T-shirt that says, 1 am bad crazy.

Burt's trapped in a rolling deathtrap driven by a self-described insane person, and he gets stung by bees, twice. The thing isn't a

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vehicle; it's a horror film careening through the mountains on bad tires. Friday the 13 th on wheels.

Trick hands Burt a cigarette and says he should chew the tobacco, make a paste, and put it on the stings. As if there's nothing particularly unusual about getting stung by a bee at sixty miles an hour. No way is Burt going to put tobacco spit all over his body.

Trick parks near some rocky cliffs, and there are about twenty people standing around: the writer, a photographer, a whole bunch of cavers and their families, and a couple of other folks out for a Sunday stroll who just stopped by to see what was going on. The cliffs are maybe sixty feet high, and from the top you can see all of downtown Chattanooga and the Tennessee River rolling through the town.

There's a rope tied to a couple of trees, and it hangs over the cliff. The cave dorks help Burt put on a seat harness, which is kind of like a reinforced diaper. There's a long hunk of metal, a rappel rack, connected to the front of the harness. The rack's shaped like a stretched-out horseshoe. The rope goes over one of the bars on the rack, under another, over the next. The bars slide up and down. Get going too fast, and you just slide the bars together. Create more friction. Nothing to it, the cavers say. Nothing can happen.

The main guy training Burt is Buddy Lane, who, it turns out, is vice president of a steel company in Chattanooga. The writer keeps telling Burt what a hero Buddy is: how he was elected president of some caver society, twice. Turns out that when people get lost in caves, Buddy is the one the cops or rangers call. He used to be head of the local search-and-rescue team too. Just last week Buddy had to crawl through a sewer and drag out a worker who was overcome by carbon monoxide.

The writer's telling Burt all this stuff to calm him down, because what you have to do in caves, it turns out, you have to slide down long ropes in the darkness to get where you're going.

The writer says that it's kind of like mountain climbing, except that the point isn't to get to the summit. The point is to go in one entrance and come out the other. That's called making the connection. Sometimes, in caves, the only way to make the connec-

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tion is to go down a big pit. Some of the cave pits are 450 feet deep, about the same drop you'd take from the top of a forty-story building.

A lot of what the cavers do is exploration. What's down there after the pit? Buddy Lane has discovered literally hundreds of caves, the writer says. Buddy Lane is like this writer's hero: Buddy discovers caves and saves people's lives.

"Buddy's the best," the writer says.

That may be true, but Burt can't think too much about it right now. The cavers seem to want to start working with him right now. They want him to practice on this outdoor cliff in bright sunlight, with everyone watching him. He has to clip the rope into the rack, stand backward, and step off a sixty-foot death cliff. That's real natural.

Burt doesn't even look down. What's the point? If he looked down, he could get scared and call the whole thing off. They'd have his picture in the magazine with a caption that reads, The Whimpering Coward of San Diego. Real good promotion there.

Sure enough, the rope holds, and the rack works. Burt's standing in the red and blue wildflowers at the bottom, looking up, and the cavers want him to climb back up on the rope itself. They put little metal gadgets on his feet. The gadgets bite down when he puts pressure on them; they let go when he pulls up. He can, Buddy tells him, walk right up the rope.

And it works, except people have to stop because no one can motor right up the rope without resting. Burt can't help thinking, What if the rope breaks? Every time he stops, two words clang together in his mind: broken . . . rope.

Burt's got a reputation as a weirdo, a big mouth, and he really wouldn't like a whole lot of people to know it, but he's fairly conservative in some ways. Careful. Wears two watches, for instance. Got a 3.85 in economics at Pitt. He hates to think about it, but if something goes wrong in football, he could—the shame of it—fall back on his education. Be a stockbroker.

Burt likes to have it covered. He took his signing bonus last year, put most of it into an annuity, and defers a large part of his salary into the same fund. He should be able to retire at thirty

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and collect $300,000 a year until he's seventy-five. A lot of his teammates buy eighty-thousand-dollar cars with their money. Burt's still driving the car he had in college. He thinks it's only wise to look to the future, and now, wise guy that he is, he's literally hanging from a thread. The end of his life would sound like this: twaaaanggg.

Burt manages to climb the rope a couple of times, and all the cavers are telling him that he's doing fine, that he's ready to try a bigger pit. Not one of the big dark ones, though. The one they want to train him on is a wimp pit, open to the light.

The cavers pack up their gear, and about half the people standing around get into their vehicles and start driving. Burt gets to ride in Trick's truck again, with the bad tires and the bees. An hour later everyone turns at a Baptist church with a sign out front that reads, believe on the lord jesus christ and be saved. The caravan drives up a red dirt road that winds into the hills. There are trees all around, and it's like the jungle or something. The houses are tar-paper shacks. People have pigs and chickens in their yards. Burt tries to imagine what it's like, living in one of these places. You'd get up in the morning, look out your window, and you'd see trees and pigs.

Up near the top of the road there's a dilapidated trailer house with a bunch of empty cardboard drums around and some old timber rotting in the yard. A big sign on a tree at the edge of the forest ringing the house reads, mad dog and crazy man, keep out.

The woods are full of really comforting stuff like that.

"Is this where they filmed Deliverance}" Burt wants to know. "We gonna see some little kid playing a banjo?"

But the cavers are out of their trucks and walking through the trees up a steep slope. Trick is telling him fun things to know, like: "Sometimes copperheads get washed down into the pit by the waterfall. Watch out for snakes on the bottom."

Oh, now it's Indiana Jones in the snake pit.

"See this?" Trick holds up his right index finger, and it's puffed out and crooked. What happened, Trick says, was that he was at the bottom of the pit and grabbed a copperhead behind the neck with his thumb and forefinger.

"Thought you were faster than a snake, huh?" Burt says.

"I was. But I should have done a three-finger grab. Put the index finger on his head. It's like a big knuckle behind the head, but I felt that knuckle go out of joint, and the head came around, and pow."

"Gee," Burt says, "what else you guys in Tennessee do for fun? Hunt wild boars naked?"

The cavers finally stop at a kind of plateau in all the jungle foliage, and in the middle of the flat area is a strange keyhole-shaped hole in the ground. Burt glances into the pit. They tell him it's 165 feet deep, but you can't see to the bottom because it's dark down there. A big waterfall comes out of a hole in the wall about three quarters of the way down, and it's so loud you have to shout up top. Wouldn't it be all water in the dark at the bottom? Burt doesn't want to think about this at all. He lies down in the grass, and Buddy Lane tells him to watch out for ticks.

"Ticks," Burt says, "what do I care about ticks? I'm going to die in the waterfall."

Burt just lies there, yawning, then Buddy tells him it's time to drop the pit. There are two ropes tied off onto the trees that overhang the pit. One of the cavers, Roger Ling, is already down there, and Buddy Lane will go down with Burt on the second rope. Burt rigs himself, refuses to look down into the pit, backs over a lip of rock, and finds himself dangling in midair. "No pits scare me," Burt howls. He supposes he doesn't sound scared at all. "The only pits that scare me are my own." Ha. The man died with a joke on his lips.

Going down isn't too bad. It's kind of fun. Burt would rappel ten thousand feet if they had a helicopter to come pick him up so he didn't have to climb the rope and think about it breaking all the time. The walls are all heavy, dripping rock, big, looming dark stone, and when the sun breaks through the clouds, these shafts of light slant down into the pit. It's like in a cathedral or something. Except it's spooky.