If it were a sheer wall that required a climbing hammer and those big nails they use, we’d be stuck on this ledge forever. But as I really study it, I can see that the slab of wall isn’t smooth but full of cracks, wrinkles, and stubble, like an old man’s face.
Paul puts his gloves on the rock and massages the stone. He looks up and to the left, then the right, trying to anticipate the climb, the consequences of choosing each possible path in the stone. For the first time in a while, I look to the sky and see that the dull glow of the sun behind the clouds has moved directly over us. The rock overhang, which I cannot bear to think of, is now directly over us and will be for the rest of the day. If a storm were to come through now, there’d be no way down and no way up. We would surely die up here.
Paul toes his right boot into a crack and then reaches up with his left hand. In a cat-like move, he springs and lifts, and boom, boom, boom, he creeps up the face. In what feels like seconds, he’s moved up half the face. He looks down at me and holds up one hand and tells me to stay put.
I watch him with awe. He’s studying the rock like a map. There’s maybe eight more feet to the next ledge, but it might as well be a mile. He digs into a crack with his right boot and then gracefully reaches up and grabs a knob in the stone with his left hand. He carefully places his left boot against a divot and lifts and then pushes the sole of his right boot against the flat of stone wall, the force holding him there momentarily. And then, with the agility of a monkey, he bounces up and grabs the ledge. He quickly swings his other right hand up, and he’s hanging by both arms off the ledge.
For a moment, the air in my lungs rushes out. He dangles a hundred or more feet above the ground, above certain death, if he falls.
If he falls, I selfishly think, I am dead up here. I realize, maybe for the first time in my life, that my survival is intimately tied to the survival of another human being. Without him, I will die. With him, there is hope. I can’t imagine he feels the same way about me, but then again, without me he’d be frozen in a chair on the side of a cliff.
He pulls himself up, grunting-then shouting-with the effort. He rolls over the ledge and disappears from sight. A few moments later, his buggy mirror sunglasses peep down and he calls, “All right. Don’t think about it. It’s all instinct.”
“I’m not good at instinct. I’m a big over-planner and a great second-guesser,” I shout. A little joke, in a difficult moment, isn’t so bad, I guess.
He holds up his thumb and grins. “Look who’s full of jokes in the panicky moments now.”
Then he shouts, “I’m gonna pull you up. Just keep climbing even if you slip.”
It’s a lot easier to go on instinct when you know whatever you screw up shouldn’t matter. Just keep climbing, Jane. That’s the key.
I address the wall and push the toe of my boot into the crack of the wall, just where he had. I look up one more time for reassurance. Paul isn’t where I can see him, but I know he is there, somewhere, lodged against a rock for leverage. I feel a burst of joy inside. Paul is lodged behind a rock; he will not let go; he will pull me up if I fall; no matter what I do, we will find a way. We will get out of here.
I spring up and slot my fingers into the rock with my left hand. I see his path clearly now, and my right hand follows quickly to a knob. My legs feel powerful, springing from one crack to the next, and my hands feel like iron, holding the rock with a grip I did not know I possessed.
I reach the midpoint, where Paul had stopped, and halt my climb. I feel the rope tug on me and I use my left hand to tug back. It goes slack. I stand still and catch my breath, careful not to look down.
“You’re amazing, Jane!”
I look up and those bug eyes are watching me.
I look up at the wall. The path that Paul took across the eight remaining feet isn’t one I can replicate. His arms are long, and his ability to leap and his upper-body strength far surpass mine. I see a crack in the wall that extends from where I am, zigzagging like a lightning bolt all the way to the top. The problem is that it is another good eight feet to my right.
“If I can get to there”-I shout and point-“can you hold me?”
“Yes. Wait until I give the rope three tugs. That means I’m ready.”
I hold up my thumb and wait.
Everything is silent, except for the wind. It sings, a little deathly hollow sound that bounces from rock to rock. It is so lonely, roaming through this valley. I know why that lonely song found its way into my heart before, why the very beauty of loneliness itself could become a friend. It is seductive and sweet, maybe sweeter than anything two people can share. I can still hear the call of it, but it has no pull on me now. I’m just looking at the task in front of me, which is moving eight feet to the left without killing myself.
One, two, three. Paul pulls the rope. I feel it tighten against my waist, and I push off the wall and for a second fly through the air, off the earth and away from its gravity. Then my body comes back against a wall with a smack. I scratch and claw to gain a foothold on the cliff. My pants cinch up tight and stress the loop holes around my rope. I hear one of them tear and suddenly I realize that no matter how strong Paul is, no matter how defined his leverage, if the loops go or the rope goes, I am in big trouble.
My left hand finds grounding first. A little nub my fingers latch onto becomes my lifeline. I pull myself firmly to the wall with all my concentration focused on my index, middle, and ring fingers. My eyes dart up the crack, which is two to three feet to my right now and slightly above my shoulder. I grasp with my right hand and cup the crack where it zigzags back across the face of the mountain. I push to check the firmness of my grip and quickly pull myself up. My feet are still scraping against the rock, but with Paul’s pull, they can wait. I reach with my left hand and start hauling myself up the crack.
Suddenly, my right foot finds footing inside the crack and off I go. In a matter of seconds I’m ascending, with Paul’s help, up the side and toward the ledge. There’s a little abutment of rock sticking out and I can’t hoist myself over it. Paul pulls hard, but his force is only pinning me against the rock.
“Stop! Stop pulling!” I can barely call up loud enough for him to hear me.
The rope remains firm but the pulling stops.
“I’m stuck,” I call, “beneath a rock.”
I can hear Paul make his way slowly toward the edge, probably terrified of being pulled over and having both of us tumble to our doom.
“Jane?”
He’s not far from me, but I can’t see him because of the rock.
“Yeah?”
“Your rope is jammed in the rock. That’s why you can’t get onto the ledge.” His voice is calm. “We need to cut it.”
Cut the rope. The words might as well be Jane, we need to cut your heart out of your body. I panic.
“I’ll fall!”
“No you won’t. Tighten your grip and let me know when the rope isn’t supporting you.”
I grasp as tightly as I can until I know in my heart that it is me who is holding my body on this mountain. Not Paul. Not God. Not a rope. Just Jane.
“That’s as firm as I can get,” I finally call. My voice is cracked. “I’m scared, Paul!”
“I’m gonna cut. You need to hold tight for less than a minute. You can do that. In about thirty seconds, my hand will come down to your left. Reach out and grab it, and I’ll pull you up. Trust me. I won’t let you go.”
“Okay.” I say it so softly I’m sure he can’t hear.
“Less than a minute,” he promises.
I grip with all the force in my being. I think of my angels again, like I’m taking off on a plane. Hold me here, I ask. Hold me on this earth. I think of my grandfather and my father and my cousin. I imagine their hands on my back, pressing me into the mountainside. Suddenly, I feel light.
“Jane, you’re going to have to cut the rope. I can’t get the right angle from here.”
His hand comes down holding the knife out for me and I reach out and grab it with my right hand.
“You can do this,” he says. I can’t even spare the energy to answer him.
The line is taut and firm. I push my toes into their hold and jam my left hand as firmly into its hold as I can. I grip the knife and lay the serrated edge against the rope and begin to saw. I am literally pressing my head into the side of the mountain as I saw, trying to keep the rest of my body as still as possible. The blade is sharp, and even though the rope is made to resist fraying, the knife makes its way through. As I near the final threads, I regrip just before snapping the line completely.
It snaps and my weight shifts more than I expect it to. For a second, I wobble. The wind hits me at the same moment and my left foot shifts a millimeter. Reflexively, I thrash out with my right hand and drop the knife. I pull with both hands and cat scratch with my feet, trying to find grounding. I look down and see my boots, the wall, and then one hundred feet of void.
“Grab my hand! Grab my hand!”
I hear Paul shouting. I look to my right and there it is, maybe a foot away. My left hand starts to slip and I flail with my right, over to Paul’s, and we grasp just as my left slips free. I’m dangling by one arm over the cliff. Paul’s massive hand grips me, but we are suspended in mid-air. All his strength holds me but can’t seem to move me up and over.
“Your feet, Jane, get a foothold!”
But my feet are a foot from the wall, swinging wildly in the air. My left hand reaches up and finds a tiny landing on the top of the ledge. I pull as hard as I can, and suddenly, together, Paul and I begin to win the battle. I feel my body moving inch by inch. Paul is screaming like a wild beast, giving everything he has. And then my chest hits the edge and I throw my right leg up and over, landing and rolling onto the ledge.
I let out a scream and pound the ground. I feel like my heart might explode out of my chest, it’s throbbing so hard. Paul moves over and rolls me over and wraps his arm around me as tightly as he can. When my ears stop ringing, I realize he is whispering to me.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
I sob, thinking how close I came to dying, and to pulling Paul over that cliff with me. We lie there for a few moments, just holding each other and catching our breath.
“I dropped the knife,” I finally say.
“I know. You couldn’t have done anything else.”
He looks at the overhang above us and he smiles. “That’s okay. We finally caught a break.”