Rock, Paper, Fire Read online

  “No, it’s . . . ah . . .”

  “C’mon, man, you have to tell me. Please.”

  “Oh hell, okay. It’s one of Urs Kallen’s photos.”

  “You’re telling me that this is in the Rockies?” The ice looked so linear, so perfect, a staircase into the sky. It looked Great, as in Greater Ranges “Great.” Could it actually be in our backyard?

  “Yes. It’s on the east face of Mount Fay.”

  “Mount Fay at Moraine Lake?” The scale wasn’t adding up for me.

  “Ya, man,” David said, in his cultivated South African English. He’d immigrated to Canada just two years ago. “But not the Moraine Lake side, the east face, above Constellation Lakes. That face is much bigger.”

  “Holy shit! When do we go?”

  The first snows of winter had just, that evening, sifted small arcs of white onto the windowsill. We cracked a couple of beers and got down to planning an attempt that coming winter. In my mind’s eye, I saw David and me cleanly inserted into Urs’s picture. Perfectly present there, the two of us doing what we believed we were meant to do: going up.

  Later that night, Dave dropped me off at my mother’s house on the far side of Calgary, farther from the mountains. In the morning, I’d board the bus back to Canmore. It was October, 1983.

  MY MOTHER had five half-breed kids by three different men in seven years. None of the white fathers made it; all of them left, and it was as if the fabric of our family had changed from a white wedding dress to a faded and patched pair of jeans by the time Stephen came around. At seventeen, Stephen was flunking out of school and already in trouble with the law. He’d been drinking at a party when he got talked into a robbery attempt by an older man who had previously done time.

  Just fifteen months earlier, I’d moved to the mountains to take the first steps up the career path of mountain guiding. One of the good men I’d taught to rock climb was a gifted criminal lawyer.

  “It will make a strong impression on the judge if as many of your family as possible can be in court to support Stephen,” he said.

  When the judge asked if there were any family members in court, my mother, brother, sister, and I all stood up. The judge gave Stephen a term of probation conditional on his staying in school.

  It was late by the time I finally said goodbye to David and opened the door of my mother’s house. Stephen was still out.

  “I don’t know what to do with him,” my mother said. Her forehead sank into her fingers and her elbows trembled against the hard sheen of her kitchen table. A deep sob shook her shoulders. I put my arm around her. I’d seen my mother cry before, but that was usually over Stephen’s dad. She’d always been a pillar for us, a tigress.

  “Maybe he can come and stay with me,” I said. The only way I knew how to help was to take him climbing.

  Two days later I found a cheap blue house to rent. It was a single-level, built in the 1950s, and it had seen some hard use with no recent maintenance. It sat on the westmost corner of “Teepee Town”—a collection of valley-bottom flats in old Canmore where Stoney Indians used to camp: perfect. The next week I moved away from my two housemates and into the empty blue house. My mother drove Stephen up on the last day of October and he enrolled in the local high school. We sat on borrowed chairs at a borrowed table and ate a lot of pasta with red sauce. My girlfriend took to calling our house “Sparta.”

  It felt good to see my little brother go out the door, walk to school, and start to make some friends. I knew he was trying to step up, to be good enough, and I had hope. And although that hope would waver over the next twenty-two years, I realize now that I never really lost it, no matter what my brother did.

  MID-DECEMBER, blue ice was laminated in strips onto the grey walls above our valley. Stephen and I had been living together for six weeks and we were doing okay, but I wanted to help him more.

  “We should go ice climbing, bro. I think you’d like it.” His huge brown eyes widened; interest and imagination glinted.

  The Canmore Junkyards are so named because early in the town’s history, people started dumping junk there, including several cars, all for the redneck shits and giggles of it. Since I didn’t have a car, Stephen and I walked for two hours instead of driving for ten minutes and hiking for five. We were doing the best that we could.

  My brother stood six feet—three inches taller than me—and at 200 pounds, he had thirty on me. He took pride in his physique. We’d been hitting the gym together, and while I trained to be a better climber, getting leaner and harder, Stephen just got bigger. He looked more native than I did and I’d joke with him, call him an “FBI” (Fucking Big Indian).

  He did fine with the ice climbing, and I hoped it would capture him as it had captured me. “How do you like it, bro?”

  “It’s pretty cool, Bear,” he said. “But it’s scary.”

  “Fear can be your friend,” I said. “It can make you stronger.”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  The muffled crackling of water emanated through the blue ice and from higher up, above where Stephen stood secure on his crampons, came the roar of open water; mist birthing from spray and slowly rising against the stark, black wall of Ha Ling Peak, high above.

  IN FEBRUARY, four months after he moved in, Stephen said, “Canmore isn’t working for me, brother.” We’d been living in our hollow house cooking meals, going to the gym together, getting by. I made sure he went to school. I even tried to get him to run up the road above the Junkyards with me. “Running isn’t my thing, Bear,” he said. “It’s too hard.”

  Stephen told me that Calgary just had more going on, and he’d decided to move back to my mother’s house. We walked to the bus station together. An Arctic airmass had cracked Alberta with a deep frost. Rigid snow squeaked under our boots, like the sound of a ship’s timbers flexing.

  “Thanks for all your help, Bear,” he said.

  “It’s okay, bro. I hope Calgary is better for you now.”

  Our hug was a little clumsy, as always: it felt awkward for me to wrap my arms around my brother’s floundering. But then I got him close, and I felt my love for him, and I said, “Be good, bro.” A glassy sheen of tears shimmered over my eyes.

  “I will, Bear,” he said. His voice quavered. “I will.”

  We’d tried. I walked back to Sparta, wishing I could help him more, but not knowing how.

  AT 11 P.M., five hours after Stephen stepped onto the bus, David Cheesmond and Carl Tobin pulled up to the front door of the blue house and we hit the road for Lake Louise. David sang along to a Juluka cassette about the scatterlings of Africa. Strong guttural male voices issued the chorus: “YUN! BO! HA!” and I saw lines of Zulu warriors pounding the earth with bare feet, cowhide shields, thrusting spears, preparation for battle. David’s Econoline van barrelled down the dark and deserted highway and inside that sanctum Carl and I joined David in chanting out the chorus. Our pact of ascent was a given.

  “BUGGER!” THE TOE BAIL on my binding had snapped clean and cold as a frozen twig. I stabbed the broken skis into the snow and wrestled my second pair out from the load in my blue plastic sled.

  Our plan was to ski, by headlamp, eight miles up the closed Moraine Lake Road and bed down in a cook shelter for four hours. We’d cache one pair of skis there to facilitate our return down the north side of the mountain, and at 8 A.M., we’d ski on the second set up a branching valley that led to the east face. We had just two days for the climb, Saturday and Sunday, and Monday for the ski out. David had to be at work on Tuesday morning. Carl, who was on vacation from Alaska, intended to ski back in later that week to pick up the set we’d leave below the east face. Now, down to one pair of skis, I’d have to walk out behind them from the cook shelter.

  The grey strip of road rolled through dark timber. I skied through clouds of exhaled breath, my ski skins creaking over the coarse, frozen track. A halo of frost grew on my chest. I thought of Stephen back at our mother’s house and hoped that he was at home. It f
elt good to move through the cold, skiing toward what I’d imagined Urs’s photo to be: a beautiful alpine dream.

  “I’M GOING TO JUMP!” Carl yelled down to David and me the next day. He was halfway up an aquamarine pillar of ice that dropped plumb from the apex of an outward-leaning, 100-foot-high black wall of limestone.

  “What do you mean?” I shouted back. I didn’t believe ice existed that Carl couldn’t climb; to me, he always looked like Tarzan. I’d seen him shirtless in the gym and his pectoral muscles were like plates of metal—broad, flat, and efficient, none of the bloated bulk of the bodybuilder. A grid of abdominal muscles armoured his gut like cut white marble. “You can’t fucking jump!”

  “I can’t hang on anymore! I’m going to jump. Fuck!”

  David’s eyes flashed wide at mine, then we both looked at our meagre anchor of shallowly driven pitons and picketed ice tools. We were 1,000 feet off the deck. And then Carl let go of his ice tools and jumped. I stopped breathing. David and I lunged into the wall as Carl sailed through the frame of our vision and nailed a perfect gymnast’s dismount on top of a snow ledge. Flexing his knees and thrusting his arms out, he stayed in balance and didn’t even weight the rope. Pure action superhero shit, I thought.

  Minutes of deep breathing passed. Carl made his way back to us, and then David turned to me. “Right then, now it’s your turn.”

  To this day, that pillar remains one of the hardest trials I’ve had on ice. I only got up it by clipping Carl’s in-situ axes for protection, then weighting one of my tools, twenty feet higher, to place a screw. I pulled over the top with my lungs coming through my nostrils and my heart hammering. It took the remainder of the day to get us, and our packs, up that blue column of ice.

  Cold to the bone, I woke up shivering. The top of my homemade bivvy sack had slipped down and my shoulder had melted a hollow into the chrome-coloured water ice that formed the back wall of our cramped snow cave. Water had saturated my sleeping bag. I rearranged my pit and struggled to find some warmth. I shivered. I pumped my legs up and down, punched my arms down the plane of my body again and again. The shivering would come again and I’d clench my body into a fist and hold, forcing exhalations. I had to sleep, I had to stay warm enough, I prayed for the dawn.

  FINALLY, THE SUN. Heat radiated into my dark clothing, and I felt warm. One hundred and thirty feet overhead, Carl was tacked onto a silver strip of ice. A rock pillar rose from the top of the ice above him like the handle of a sword affixed to a gleaming silver blade. The stone glowed in an aura of oblique light, and we envisioned a direct finish that way to the summit. Then—Crack! The air vibrated with the whir of a large object accelerating. I glanced up: the belly of a cornice was bearing down on Carl.

  “Avalanche!” I wailed, and the sky exploded. I dove forward, weighting my tools as the chunks thumped into the snow all around me. Something like a sledgehammer smacked into the back of my right shoulder. Pinpricks of hot, white light scatter-shot through black. I slid six inches before my body snapped to and flexed harder into the slope. I stopped. The roar drew off down the mountain, and then hushed into a hiss.

  In the silence, I looked for Carl. He was still on the ice—white from helmet to frontpoint, but still attached. We bellowed frantically at each other:

  “Should we go down?”

  “Do you think it could happen again?”

  David and Carl were both okay, and we decided to keep going up.

  My shoulder blade was bruised, stiff, and throbbing. I was out of the leading. I hung back and followed, riding the jumars on the steep sections. It was marvellous to watch how well David and Carl worked as a team. At one anchor David handed Carl a carabiner full of pitons indexed by size, then he silently clipped an etrier onto a vacant gear loop on Carl’s harness. Ready, Carl locked his eyes onto David’s and crinkled into a grin. David’s fox eyes twinkled and he said, “Climb like a beast, man.” They hadn’t mastered the mountain. Instead they’d come to know and accept their place on its side.

  That afternoon the storm began, and that night I passed long hours inside our snow cave pumping my limbs, willing myself to stop shivering, trying to keep my teeth from clattering. The dark and the cold isolated me, cornered me. Through my sodden sleeping bag I felt the bottomless cold of the mountain; the wall was pressed against my back. I shivered and I fought and again I prayed for the sun.

  HEAVY SNOWFALL obscured Monday’s dawn. Our dream of climbing the rock pillar straight to the summit was out. We simply needed to survive. Late in the day, we traversed through the twenty-ninth hour of continuous storm, striving for an escape to the ridgeline of Mount Fay. Waves of spindrift rushed down the wall and I could feel the cold of those ice crystals like metal against my neck and the insides of my wrists. Wind slapped snow across my face and my eyelashes kept freezing together. I’d squeeze my eyes shut for seconds to melt the bind. Snow, fine as ground glass, was pushed into all the openings in my clothing. I turned out from the mountain and began screaming obscenities into the driving snow, challenging the storm. I wanted perfection in my alpinism, and I was given this. This is what you dream; this is what you get.

  I spent what was left in my lungs and turned back into the snow slope breathless and crumpled. Carl caught up with me, waited for ten heartbeats and then said, “Hey man, it don’t gotta be fun to be fun.”

  Perfect. I had to laugh.

  At dusk we dug one last snow cave. The fuel was gone. Dinner was a box of candies split three ways. Sealed within our white vault, we talked about life, and I told them about Stephen. They empathized with me, and listened, graciously prompting me to continue, but a brother in trouble was too big a problem inside our snow cave and the best they could do was to be beside me and reassure me that everything would be okay. David went through each of the empty food wrappers to retrieve the scraps. He licked the powder from peeled-open soup packages. They put me between them, but I still suffered. The cold tried to get my core.

  We hit the ridgeline early the next morning and spent all of Tuesday retreating. I staggered out on foot behind David and Carl. The only food we could get in Lake Louise at one A.M. on a Wednesday was potato chips from the bar.

  “Don’t worry, man,” David said. He leaned against the open door of the van. “It will all be okay. I don’t understand my brother either.”

  I swayed as I climbed the steps to Sparta. My girlfriend was there, and she drew me a hot bath and gently helped me into it. The hallucinations were magnificent. Four hours of sleep, and then I had to get up and move that day from the house where Stephen and I had lived for four months. All that time we’d spent there seemed written into the walls, a form of physical remembrance like the faint patinas of evaporation that ring a Mason jar.

  THREE YEARS LATER, I tried to help Stephen again. This time, I took him climbing in Peru. He wasn’t a kid anymore, and he’d gotten bigger. All of my hand-me-down climbing clothing looked tight on him, yet when we stood on top of the white summit of Ishinca and I asked him if he was having fun, he cracked a big, goofy grin and said, “It’s fun to be on top, Bear, but it is so much work!”

  As we walked out of the Quebrada Santa Cruz, we learned that David had died on Mount Logan. Stephen had never seen death. I had. His brown eyes opened wide. “Oh man,” he said. My eyes clenched tight in tears. “Fuck! fuck! fuck!” I cursed, my head in my hands, and sank to my haunches. And then my brother walked over to me and put his arm around my trembling shoulders.

  I was teaching ice climbing in New Hampshire in 2005 when my mother called and told me about Stephen’s overdose. We both wept.

  I realize now that I knew David better than I ever knew my brother. I think that Stephen never felt good enough. When I look at his grade-school pictures in the album at my mother’s house, I cry. Yet I hold fast to another mental image: my brother’s laughter when he realized we’d just walked two hours to go ice climbing in a junkyard on that winter’s day in 1983. “This is crazy, Bear!”

  Norman Maclean’s
words have helped me immensely over time, and I return to them: “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”

  I love and I lose, I lose and I love.

  We do the best that we can.

  Niall Grimes

  INTO THE MOUNTAINS

  WHEN ALL that can be said is said, and all that can be done is done, when the words have lost their insides, condolences so empty that they seem obscene, I get in the car, and drive, drive toward the county.

  ONCE I HEARD the news I would fly home as often as I could, gulping down time together. We would sit silently together in front of the TV, talk nonsense, never mentioning it. When they put her in hospital we laughed about the hair loss, and with the red headscarf tied in a big knot at the back, she called herself Casey Jones.

  The last time back, a late flight got me in near the end of the day. I crept into the hospice after hours and found the bed, her body a shadow under the cream sheets. I knelt down beside the bed, took the little hand and kissed it.

  “Your baby’s here, Ma,” I whispered.

  I was torn between not wanting to wake her and wanting to grab every second. She lay unconscious, but I needed to talk, needed to make the most of this time together.

  “Not been seeing any bright lights lately, have you?” I said again to her stillness.

  Two weeks earlier she had reported to our old neighbour Sheena MacMenamin that she had twice seen a bright light outside the window of the hospice, shining on her.

  “What do you mean a light, Pauline?” Sheena asked. “What was it like?”

  “Lovely.”

  I held her and, lost for words big enough for the occasion, whispered the words of a song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

  Then, in the low night lights of the ward, I saw her eyes open. The sharp humorous glint was now an opaque struggle, trying to see through. It took me by surprise, and I felt nervous.

  “It’s me, Ma, what about you?”

  Her mouth tried to move. I came close to her. With my ear to her lips I heard the barest breath forcing out the words: