Читать книгу Lighting Out - Daniel Duane - Страница 11

Just before dawn I bolted upright in my sleeping bag, sweating from the heat that rose out of the Central Valley. I thought I’d heard something nearby, maybe a coyote, so I sat for a while, smelling the dust and pine and the faint residual exhaust coming off the road. A Sysco restaurant supply truck blew past toward Yosemite and I decided to get up. I thought again about my girlfriend and how I’d begged her to come out here with me after school, maybe drift around in the truck together for a while. Go down to Mexico and space out on some beach. No interest.

In Groveland I stopped at a coffee shop with a blue-tiled floor for a waffle with ice cream and a side of bacon. At a big, round table, a man in new blue jeans and a clean white T-shirt, with a huge, hard belly and powerful hands, poured nonfat milk over a bowl of raisin bran. He listened to an unshaven older man in a green denim sportcoat and snakeskin boots talk about a Fourth of July fair, about how his son had paid five bucks for five sledgehammer swings at the Lincoln Continental but hadn’t busted anything.

Then, farther east into higher mountains; colder, pinescented air from still-blooming alpine meadows and evergreens replaced the arid dustiness of gallery oak forest and manzanita. An hour later, past the deep gorge of Yosemite Valley proper, the range stretched out in wide-open views to the north and south, hundreds of square miles of rocky peaks and forested valleys.

I remembered climbing the ancient winding stair to the top of Notre Dame during my junior year abroad: nothing but metropolis in all directions. At one smoggy horizon I saw another cathedral, Sacré-Coeur. The next day I took the metro out there. Again, sprawl to the horizon and I knew I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t stay. I read a used copy of Walden in Shakespeare and Company Books for a few days until I could get my tuition back in traveller’s checks. I blew the chance of a lifetime and headed for the Pyrenees. Everyone loves Paris . . . and the chance to live there?

Alpine meadows at nine thousand feet: acres of green rock-garden, a meandering river, white granite domes bubbling out of the trees and broken white peaks reaching to over twelve thousand feet. Air noticeably thinner and colder, smelling still more of pine and summer. At 8:30 a.m. I pulled off Route 120 into the parking lot of the Tuolumne Meadows Grill, a white canvas building alone on the mountain highway. Four skinny guys in worn-out Patagonia jackets stood around playing Hackey Sack; their white cotton pants were shredded in places, reinforced in others. I wondered if they lived here year-round—they seemed adapted, as if they’d never thought of going anywhere else and had wasted no time getting here. A man and a woman in matching blue Lycra tights stretched their hamstrings in a patch of grass. A bleach-blond teenage boy sat in an open 1965 VW bus and ate granola from a plastic bag. Dad and Uncle Sean were drinking coffee in the sunshine at a picnic table and I could see Dad laughing as I killed the engine.

“The elevator-shaft drop,” I heard Sean saying, as I walked toward them, “puts me right in the pit on this wave my buddy’s too spooked to touch, so I’m ripping down the line at forty-five, pissing my trunks”—with one forearm he made the shape of a wave with the hand curling above while the other hand motioned along the side of it—“fully spooked the monster lip’s going to close out and punish me, so I freak and bail off my board. Well . . .” He looked up at me and motioned with a finger to let him finish the story. “Well, on a fifteen-foot wave you can’t just bail. That puppy shot me into the air like a rag doll and while I’m falling I’m thinking, ‘OK. This is the part where I die. The coral reef ’s definitely going to Cuisinart me this time.’ ”

Dad pulled me down next to him at the picnic table and put his heavy arm around my shoulders. His hands were covered with athletic tape and scabs and his hazel eyes were alive and calm like they never were in town. He and his brother were both darker-skinned than I was and both had dark brown hair, but Dad was balding and he was shorter and thicker than Sean. Sean was my height—almost six-foot-three—and had more angular features and a broad, thin-lipped smile over perfect teeth. He took a sip of coffee, then went on. “So twenty thousand gallons slam me toward the reef but for some amazing reason my back slams down against the only patch of sand in the bay. I was like, ‘sheeeeeit, this place ain’t shit.’ Hey, Danny! You look a little pale, you got the flu, or what?”

They were up training in the Meadows to climb the Northwest Face of Half Dome—the ultimate aspiration of their shared alternate life. Three full days on a wall, sleeping on ledges, climbing from dawn to dusk. They’d been working up to it the whole time I’d been in college and were finally ready. They’d gone through a long series of practice climbs, a program of steps and trials. Dad got some more eggs on a paper plate and they talked about how ready and how scared they both actually were. It was an enormous, world-famous wall, maybe just enormous enough to ease the frustrations of their urban lives.

Sean had come up for the climb from San Diego, where he and his wife lived by the beach. At forty he was surfing three times a week, running ten miles a day and, at his wife’s insistence, seeing a therapist about his Peter Pan complex. He’d been enjoying selling wine for two California wineries—driving up and down the state, skiing in Tahoe when he made winter sales trips to the resorts, climbing in the Meadows when he had to come up to Mammoth in the summer. Sean had also patiently taught me how to surf when I was a kid. We’d camped out in his little car in a parking lot by a nuclear power plant at San Onofre and he spent a whole day showing me how to spring to my feet. It took a while to stick, though, because up north where I lived it was more about character-building than fun-in-the-sun: fogbound rocky coastline with pounding Pacific waves, frigid water. He said it’d be a soul-surfing experience up there if I could ever get good enough for the bigger winter swells. Fewer kooks in the water, fewer Nazis.