Pushed to the Edge, The Ice Climb

It's been 15 days since I came down off a frozen waterfall in the White Mountains and the big toe on my left foot is still numb. I thought it was frostbite. When I finished the climb, I couldn't feel my hands or my feet or my cheeks or my nose or my ears. A long bath revived everything but the toes on my left foot, and over the next week, I checked them as often as I had my shoes off for that horrible blue-black color that means someone is going to have to cut away what is dead to save what isn't. First they were white, then they turned pink. After a few days, three of them came back to life. Then four. Then four and a half and the thawing stopped. I'm beginning to think that dead spot across the front of the toe and up under the nail never did have anything to do with the cold. I think I have a little piece of terror lodged down in there. A physical memento of the whole cruel adventure. Hanging on that ice sheet, 200 feet up, by an ax and a hammer I didn't trust, in a bad snowstorm, behind a guide I couldn't see, attached to him by a rope that meant nothing, beyond panic into a place of preternatural fear, near tears, cursing everyone I'd ever known, especially poor stupid me. It was one of the worst beatings I'll ever take and, like all the great whippings, I gave it to myself. I think now if that toe never wakes up, it'll be a small price to pay for this one. A thousand snakes couldn't have scared me any worse, but I could have paid a lot more for it.

A writer friend told me about ice climbing. He called it "front pointing" and said it was done on water ice that formed into slippery, dead-vertical faces that you could bite into with picks and claws. "It takes a couple of years to be able to lead a safe rock climb," he told me. "It takes a minimum of five years to learn to lead an ice climb." Then he said he knew a man in North Conway, New Hampshire, Michael Hartrich, who was a great climber and, more than that, somebody he trusted. "I'd say, climbing with Mike, you can reduce the fatal danger to almost nothing," he said. That's what I wanted to hear. I wasn't asking for guarantees or promises, but that's what I wanted to hear. I don't do dangerous things to challenge fear, or brush death, or to prove there is a warrior inside me. I do them out of curiosity, I think. Why would a man standing in a winter forest looking up a sheer ice cliff ever imagine that he should, or even could, climb it? And if he did, what would he know standing at the top that he didn't know standing at the bottom? What would he feel like up there where, they say, the ice is blue?

"You'll never forget it," said my writer friend.

I called Michael and he said to hurry. It was the end of March and freak warm spells were trying to break the mean winter of 1976--1977. Great chunks of New England were melting and if I didn't get there before April, it was possible that all the good ice climbs would have turned back into wet rocks and full-on cataracts. I told him I was on my way. He asked what kind of shape I was in, which is a reasonable question to ask of a journalist you've never seen and who is probably doing this thing at least partly for money and partly out of ignorance, no matter what else he tells you.

"Not bad, pretty good," I told him. "I do some yoga, I'm 34, medium-good shape, I'd say."

"All right," he said. "Don't wait too long."

I assumed he was talking about the weather and not my age, and I made reservations that day.

As it was, we needn't have worried about the weather turning gentle. The storm I flew into trying to land at Manchester forced the plane on to Portland, Maine, and the airline had to buy us hotel rooms. The wind was up around 50 miles an hour and the snow was wet and heavy, almost sleet. It kept up all night and in the morning it was still howling. The cars in the parking lot had six inches of snow all over them, and everything else I could see from my window was either white or gray. The paper I bought said it was the worst storm in years. Trees and telephone lines got heavy with the icy snow and then were blown down. Roads were closed, schools were closed, a young Portland boy was killed when he touched a power line that was flapping loose near his house.

I decided to drive to North Conway from Maine, instead of flying back to Manchester, so I rented a car with snow tires and went north 80 miles through the winter-looking mountains on a two-lane road that was frozen and almost deserted. I arrived about noon and went looking for Michael at Eastern Mountain Sports, the mountaineering shop in which he works. It was still storming, though it had started to break up, and when Michael and I met over lunch, we decided not to climb until the next day. We didn't talk much about climbing at that first meeting. In fact, Michael didn't talk much at all. He is short, maybe 5'3", as are many of the really fine climbers. His upper body is heavy and strong, his arms seem long and his hands are big and square. And he is naturally quiet, introspective. He did ask me if (continued on page 134)The Edge(continued from page 97) I had had any experience rock-climbing and I told him no, that I'd once done some rappelling with a friend in Colorado, years before, but not enough to make me feel I knew anything.

"Ideally," he said, "you should rock-climb before you ice-climb. So you're familiar with the equipment. But we'll do a practice climb tomorrow so you can learn the system. Then we'll go up into Huntington Ravine on the weekend and do a series of climbs."

Late that afternoon, we met in the shop so he could fit me with the equipment I was going to need. His office wall is covered with pictures of people hanging by their fingers from cracks in the rock hundreds of feet up. Pictures of ice climbers, way up, on incredible slabs of ice, stuck there like flies by means you couldn't see even if you looked hard. I was looking real hard and while I did, Michael sat down on the floor and began rooting through a box full of crampons.

Crampons are the spikes you strap onto your boots to climb ice. They have ten steel teeth about an inch long that point down from the sole of the boot and two more about the same size that point straight ahead from the toe and are curved down slightly, like claws. When you are climbing vertical or near vertical ice, you kick the front points into the wall and then stand on them with most of your weight. I listened to Mike telling me about them while he fitted a pair to my boots. Finally, I said, "Those front points don't look like they'll hold that much. They look too small."

"They'll hold you," he said.

Then he gave me an ice hammer and a Chouinard ice ax, which has a hardwood handle about three feet long. The blade looks something like a pickax blade: one end curved down and pointed, the other a flat blade called an adz. There is a steel spike that protrudes down out of the handle. The ice hammer is just what it sounds like: a hammer-sized variation of the ax, without the adz and without the spike in the handle. Both the ax and the hammer have the look of serious, sturdy tools, or weapons. When you hold them, you can feel their balance and purpose.

The theory of ice climbing is simple: Between the ax and the hammer and the front claws on your right and left feet, you have four points with which to stick yourself into the ice. You climb by advancing one point at a time, so that three points are in the cliff at all times. And that's it--you, the ice, the ax, the hammer, the front points. All the other equipment you take up the face with you (ropes, pitons, carabiners, chocks, ice screws) is for safety. You don't climb by them and they can't keep you from falling as you climb. In fact, unless you fall, none of the equipment exists, really. But if the system is set right, it can save you from dying.

I bought a pair of wool knickers and some knee socks, because Michael said they would give me the greatest freedom to reach and stretch with my legs. I had heavy ski gloves and he said he guessed they'd be warm enough. Wool would be better, he said. Then he gave me some books on ice climbing and we went to dinner. Afterward, we drank some beer and Michael smoked heavy shag tobacco out of a pipe he couldn't keep lit.

He told me that Mt. Washington, the prince of mountains around there, was first climbed in 1642, that the notches and ravines and knobs in the White Mountains are made of good solid granite and that there are hundreds of climbs you can make around there in the summer. It isn't Yosemite, that great university of difficult rock, but still, the Whites are a fine place to become an accomplished climber. Michael is 25 years old and he grew up in New Hampshire. He began hiking and camping when he was very young and says his time in the outdoors naturally led him to start climbing rocks. Then, about nine years ago, he started ice climbing. He said he didn't think it necessarily took five years to guide a safe ice climb, but he agreed it took a while and you had to work at it.

"It can be dangerous," he said, and although he is not the kind of athlete who dwells on what can go wrong in his sport, he did tell me that about 90 people had been killed climbing Mt. Washington and that, for ice climbers, Huntington Ravine had proved a very risky place over the years. Dan Doody, he said, a member of the 1963 American assault on Everest, had returned from Nepal and fallen to his death two months later while ice climbing in Huntington Ravine.

Michael has climbed all over America and in Europe. As he told me about his shoestring travels and the ragtag bunch of climbers who meet one another in all the climbing meccas, he reminded me of surfers I used to know ten years ago who stowed away, or hitchhiked, who sold everything but their boards to get to the big waves in some strange part of the world they'd heard about from other athlete hobos. For these guys, the purest climb you can make is barefoot and in shorts. No ropes, no pitons, no partners. Some of these guys climb at night and some of them wait for the worst possible conditions to make their ascents. Many of them have seen friends fall to their death and many of them have fallen from great heights themselves. All of them that I have read about or heard about are obsessed the way old mystical saints were obsessed.

Not long ago, Yvon Chouinard, the great California climber, designed a piton small enough to fit in hairline cracks. It's not much bigger than a razor blade and he called it "The Realized Ultimate Reality Piton," because it won't hold much of a fall. But ultimate reality may not be the right name for it. On the mountain, you can ultimately get into places more incredible than any piton is up to. There is a story in the lore of mountain climbing about a 60-year-old climber named Geoffrey Winthrop Young who once hammered two of his own fingers into a crack and hung by them till he was rescued.

Michael likes to climb rock walls that take more than a day to scale. He takes equipment and supplies enough for a week of nights and when he finishes a day's climbing, he ties himself into a bivouac, a hammock of rope that suspends him overnight, like a fly that's been caught by a spider and hung below the web for storage. Michael said his friends kid him about how easily he sleeps in those net beds. I told him I thought you had to like being alone for that kind of adventure. He relit his pipe and a minute later he said, "Nathaniel Hawthorne spent a lot of time around here, you know, and wrote many stories set in these mountains. The Great Stone Face is about a rock not far from here." Then we talked about other Hawthorne stories and about Joseph Conrad, and when we were finished, we made plans to meet in the shop at nine in the morning. "I think we'll go over to Mt. Willey and climb Standard tomorrow," he said. "It'll be good practice."

It was eight o'clock when we left the restaurant and said good night and I needed a hat. I'd lost mine and had forgotten to buy one while I was getting the knickers. I didn't want to waste time on it in the morning, so I got into the car and drove about ten miles down the road till I found one of those ugly shopping centers that have a late-night drug and department store in them.

I found what was left of the winter hats in a sale bin where they'd all been thrown together to make room on the shelves for the spring clothes. I went through the pile and finally picked out a black knit wool cap that was a little thin and a little small. I wasn't going to buy it until I found the price tag and saw it cost $1.17. I liked that. I'd already spent over $40 on knickers alone that afternoon, and before that, I'd spent a lot more expense money on equipment and incidentals for this assignment. In real life, I can't afford to buy a $12 pair of jeans more than about every six months, and although I had it perfectly rationalized that Playboy should rightfully buy me anything I needed to stay healthy in dangerous situations, there was something about that dumpy little hat that was just right. I bought it, along with a couple of beers, and drove back to my motel. When I got into the room, I stripped, took the tags off the hat and put it on, sat on the bed, opened a beer and read the ice-climbing books Michael had given me.

The first was a small paperback called Shades of Blue, by Peter Cole and Rick Wilcox. It's a guide to specific ice climbs in New England. It tells you how to find them and describes something about each cliff itself. It also rates the climbs for difficulty (easy, moderate or hard) and then tells you that the rating system doesn't mean much in ice climbing. Because conditions are everything. A moderate ice climb can become a hard ice climb in about 20 minutes on a bad day.

"There is no way that safety can be overemphasized in ice climbing," I read. "Just think of all the potentially dangerous implements you will be holding on to if you happen to take a fall." That stopped me. I had my crampons, the ax and the hammer in a pile near the bed. I counted the points: 12 on each crampon, three on the ax, one on the hammer. Twenty-eight ways to slash yourself. That scared me worse than anything else I'd read or heard about ice climbing.

I flipped to the chapter on the Frankenstein Cliffs. Michael had told me they were named for a 19th Century landscape painter, but from the names of the climbs in the book, it's clear that local imagination remembers the monster better. There are routes called Fang (hard, unclimbed), Smear (hard, first climbed winter of 1972--1973), Dracula (hard, first climbed winter of 1972--1973), Mean Miss Theater (hard, first ascent unknown).

Tucked in among the ghouls, I found the climb Michael had mentioned. "Standard ... moderate ... first climbed winter of 1969--1970 ... this superb ice climb can be done in many ways using limitless variations on the entire floe, making the ascent easier or harder, according to one's taste. It is also one of the first climbs to come into shape each year. Highly recommended."

Ah, yes, a practice climb, moderate, take it any way you want it, make it as difficult as you want or as easy. It sounded good. But only because I had already forgotten the paragraph about the big flaw in the ice-climb rating system.

The two other books were full of photographs and drawings of equipment and techniques. There were discussions of how to stop yourself when you fell and how to judge the chances for an avalanche. There were French names for the ways to use the ax (poilet cane, poilet rampe, poilet ramasse, poilet ancre), instructions on how to set an ice screw and how to kick the front points into the wall. I was almost asleep when I read a caption under a photograph near the end of a book called Icecraft. The picture was a fuzzy black-and-white of a climber on a gnarled-looking ice face, a lot like the other photos in the book, except the type underneath it said, "This climber fell to his death on an upper pitch after his hammer broke." I couldn't believe it. I'd made it to midnight on the eve of my first ice climb without much real fear and now this author was showing me a picture of an experienced climber who had died horribly because his goddamn equipment failed. It took me an hour to get drowsy again, and whatever my dreams were, I was spared any memory of them when I woke up at 6:30, with my hat still on.

The morning sky was gray with black smudges in it. I did some yoga to stretch my spine and my legs and my arms. Then I went to breakfast at a little place called the Blueberry Muffin. I had a high-nutrition, low-grease, climber's sort of breakfast, and then I sat and thought about the whole thing for a few minutes. I felt ready. I had my equipment, I'd read everything I could and I was just scared enough, I thought, to do a careful, tough job on this thing, whatever it turned out to be. I had another glass of milk, put my hat on, paid my check, stepped out the door of the Blueberry Muffin, hit a very shiny patch of ice on the pavement and fell right on my ass. The way old people and little children fall. It didn't hurt, but I sat there for a while, anyway, trying to think what a moment like that means. I decided it didn't mean anything.

Michael and I met at the shop. He'd picked out a helmet for me and gaiters to keep the snow out of my boots. Then, while he filled a backpack with our equipment, I read the release I was supposed to sign. Translated out of the legal mumbo jumbo, it said what they all say: "You're the only one responsible for this foolishness ... you're the only one who believes that you're coming back alive and unhurt ... we're insurance men and we're not betting a nickel on any of it ... the odds are lousy ... you can go only if you let us out of the game ... sign here."

About 9:30, we loaded everything into the van and started north for Crawford Notch. The sky got lower and darker. Then it started to snow lightly. A few miles farther on, the road was white and Michael turned on the windshield wipers. Neither of us said much and by the time we pulled off the highway onto a side road, if was snowing steadily.

It wasn't cold when we climbed out of the van and there wasn't much wind yet. We were close enough to the cliffs that they towered over us. I looked up through the trees at them. Mt. Willey's ragged east edge, steep, uneven, with outcroppings and overhangs and slides and gullies. And I could see the water ice: weird tongues and long thin ribbons of ice, some of them running from the top to the bottom, others just short patches. We went 100 yards up the road and then turned north at the base of the cliffs and walked along a set of railroad tracks that skirts them. The rails and ties were buried under three feet of snow and it was hard walking. Michael was ahead of me, cutting a trail, and I tried to break down his footprints, so that the walk would be a little easier on the way back.

The woods were beautifully quiet in the deep snow. The calendar said it was spring, but the beech and birch and oak in there weren't feeling it yet. They were a month away from their first green. I watched for animals, but all I saw was two birds about the size of jays. We crossed a trestle and Michael pointed and called out the names of the routes we were passing ... Smear ... Pegasus ... Ghia ... Dropline ... A Walk in the Forest. After we'd walked about a mile, Michael stopped and said, "They call this Standard, because it was one of the first routes climbed around here." By then, the wind was working pretty well and the snow was coming down sideways. I couldn't see the top of the ice face we were under, but the first 100 feet or so looked less than treacherous.

The slope was not quite vertical. The ice had formed over shelves and ledges and creases and slabs and bulges and knobs. Here and there, I could see an outcropping of bare rock. My eyes climbed the easiest route they could see, a crooked way up the gentlest-looking cuts and traverses. There, from the bottom, in the flat morning light, it didn't look so tough. But mountains are not climbed by eye. The whole animal has to come along and I was about to find out what that meant.

Michael walked from the tracks up a 30-degree slope to the spot from which we were going to climb and I followed him. While we were strapping the crampons to our boots, he said, "Hawthorne called this 'the most desolate spot on earth.'"

"What, this ... right here?"

"Yes," he said. "Crawford Notch."

He tied a strap into a bandoleer and (continued on page 151)The Edge(continued from page 136) when he'd strung it with ice screws, pitons and carabiners (large, zero-shaped metal clips), he hung it across his chest, where he could reach them easily. Then he said, "Let me explain the system to you. I want to get climbing as soon as we can." He was looking up the face at the wind, which had begun to whip up wicked little eddies in the sparkling powder that covered the ice. He talked me through the system of belays as he began to put it in place. We each wrapped long nylon sashes around and around our stomachs and chests and tied them with a water knot. Then he tied a nylon strap around a tree two feet behind me and, with a carabiner, hooked me to it. He tied one end of the nylon climbing rope to his sash, the other end to mine and left the 150 feet of slack in a loose pile on the snow between us. He was going to climb up 50 feet, he said, place an ice screw and run the rope through a carabiner that was hooked to its eye. From that point on, if he fell, the screw and I and the tree I was anchored to would keep him from hitting the bottom. Then he would climb until he had used most of the length of the rope, stop, drive another ice screw and anchor himself to it solidly enough that he could stop any fall I might take. Then I would unhook from the tree and he would take up the slack while I climbed. It was my job as second climber to clean the face of pitons and ice screws as I passed them on the way up. When I reached him on the wall, at the end of the pitch, the process would be repeated, so that one of us would always be anchored while the other climbed. He said he would yell "On belay" when it was time for me to climb and "Off belay" as he started to climb. He also said he would yell if he were falling or if there were an avalanche, and he said I should do the same. Then he demonstrated a half-dozen ice-ax techniques I'd seen in the book and called them by their French names.

"Ready?" he said.

I adjusted my hat. It was already wet and had started to stretch. I rolled it all the way down over my forehead and my ears.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I forgot my helmet."

"It's all right," he said. Then he started climbing.

He swung his ax in a smooth arc and set it in the ice as high as he could reach. He kicked the front points of his left boot into the wall three feet up, and then he stood up on that leg and drove the hammer in. Then he set the right front points and stood on them. He worked the ax back and forth till it came loose; then he swung it again, advanced his left foot, then his hammer, then his right foot.

I stood there, paying out the rope, watching him ascend. He looked like a careful monkey. His progress was steady and strong and smooth. Now and then, he let the hammer hang by the strap on his wrist, so that he could use his hand to brush away the snow that covered and hid the ice. Sometimes he kicked more than once to get the front points in solidly.

None of what he was doing looked very difficult from where I stood, which just goes to show again that point of view is everything and that what you can't see in this life is as important as what you can. I was watching a master of this thing and, like all masters, his real skills were invisible.

The wind got higher and I started to feel the cold in my feet and on the back of my neck. I stomped around and watched Michael as he stopped now and then to wait for a long, heavy gust of wind to pass over him so that he could see what he was doing. When he was 50 or 60 feet up, he got a good solid purchase, unhooked an ice screw from his bandoleer and carefully hammered and then turned it until all six inches of it were in the ice. Then he strung the rope through the screw eye and kept climbing.

When he reached the limit of the rope, he stopped. He was about 100 feet up on a small ledge, beneath an overhang. He wedged a crack and a nut into a crack in the exposed rock behind his head, hooked himself to them, got a good stance and then yelled down, "On belay." I unhooked the carabiner that anchored me to the tree, took the strap off the trunk and hung it around my neck, and then I moved to the base of the cliff and yelled back. "Off belay ... I'm climbing."

I took my first swing with the ax and it felt good going in. It stuck a couple of inches deep and when I pulled, it didn't move. I lifted my knee as high as I could and kicked my right points in. That didn't feel as solid. I pulled my foot back and kicked again, but it felt the same ... tenuous. I decided this was the time to test it, while I still had nowhere to fall, so I pulled on the ax, stepped up onto the front points and, in the same motion, I drove the hammer into the wall as high and as deep as I could. Then, using my arms to hold the weight, I kicked my left toe in. I hung there for a minute, trying to feel the genius of the tools. The ax and the hammer felt as if they were growing out of the mountain. I let the muscles in my arms loosen and my weight shifted down onto the front points. That didn't feel safe at all and it put terrific pressure on my calves. I leaned forward again and pulled with my arms, so that they could take the load back. It felt much better.

I could see Michael above me and the rope leading down from him over the route I was going to climb. Now and then, I could feel a small tug as he made sure he had the slack. I was three feet off the ground and I thought to myself, This is possible ... not easy ... but possible. I had to wrench the ax around pretty good to get it out and when I set it again at the limit of my reach, it had that good base-hit feeling. Then I yanked at the hammer. Nothing. I twisted it, levered it and yanked again. It was in like a fishhook. I horsed it back and forth and finally, in an angry jerk that broke a lot of ice, I got it out. My arm was weak with the effort and my hand was already getting cold and stiff. When I swung the hammer again, it twisted out of my grip when it hit the ice and hung by its strap. Michael had said my hands would probably get cold, because while you climb, they are always above the level of your heart. It seemed too soon for them to be as cold as they were, but there was nothing to do about it. The wind was getting worse. I needed to get going. I set my hammer on the second try and for the next 20 minutes I climbed frantically on a burst of energy that I shouldn't have squandered.

Michael had cut two small steps on the wall just below the first ice screw, so that I would have a good toe hold from which to work. By the time I stood up into them, I was exhausted. I bellied up against the ice and tried to get my breath. Then I looked down for the first time. I was only 50 feet up and it scared the hell out of me. Fifty feet down the hard, shiny gullies, over the bumps and outcrops to the frozen base of an ice cliff like this one is enough to kill you and you don't need any experience to know that. My whole body knew it and my arms instinctively muscled up and pulled me as flat as I would go against the ice. And that was the moment my adrenaline came up. My hands and my feet were almost numb. The muscles in my arms and across my chest ached. I started to talk to myself out loud. Michael couldn't hear me. He was too far above me, in a place I wasn't sure I was going to reach, a place I couldn't even see sometimes because of the blowing snowstorm. I was alone. Much more alone than I'd expected to be, in the middle of a job that hadn't needed doing at all before I started it and that now needed doing like nothing I'd ever done before.

"Don't look down, don't look down," I told myself. "There's no going down now ... be more dangerous than going up at this point ... goddamn hands ... come back ... warm up." I hung by my forearms and clapped my hands for a few seconds. It was useless. "They're gone," I said. "They're not coming back ... get used to it ... pull the hammer out ... out out out you miserable son of a bitch ... all right, put the pick of the hammer into the eye of the screw and turn ... that's it, tangle the goddamn strap ... nothing can be easy ... oh shit, that's it, you can't even see now." A big gust of wind blew a cloud of powder around my head, into my eyes and up my nose. Everything whited out. "Goddamned wind ... there had to be killer wind ... put the screw on your strap and climb, stupid ... you can't be out here too much longer ... now, move ... go ... just do it, you pathetic fucking dilettante."

I swung the hammer and when it bit, my hand caught between the ice and the handle and it hurt all the way up my arm. I swore, then I moaned, then I told myself out loud, "All right, you're going up this thing with pain ... you can cry and scream and curse or not cry and not scream and not curse ... it doesn't make any difference ... don't pay any attention ... stop all this thinking and climb."

I went after the ice as if I'd come to wreck it. I hacked and scrambled and kicked and swore at myself and the mountain. Every stroke, every step I took was wild with panic. When my hands got too numb to grip the handles of the ax and the hammer anymore, I hung by the straps and dragged myself up that way. The wind was making me stop more and more and it was full of wet snow. My beard was frozen stiff. My feet had broken through their pain and were senseless stumps. Everything I could feel ached. All the pieces of me were struggling with one another for blood and oxygen and adrenaline. Then I came to a bulge in the wall. Like a huge icy stomach over my head. I craned my neck back to look at it and my hat, which fit like a salad bowl by now, slid down over my eyes. Something in me wanted to laugh, but I didn't, because something else in me more powerful than my sense of humor recognized that the absurd isn't always funny. I was hanging with all my weight through the ax and hammer straps and there was no way to get a hand free to do anything. I leaned forward with my head and tried to scrape the hat back out of my eyes with my forearm. It moved a crooked inch, giving me vision out of one eye that lasted till I swung the hammer again and the hat fell back like heavy wool eyelids. And if there was a single moment my mind shattered like old ice, that was it. I whined, like an ugly child whines. I almost wept. I went into a litany of hate and rage ... against Michael for bringing me onto this mountain ... against the editors who paid my way ... against the guy who put that macabre photo in the ice book of the man whose hammer broke ... against old enemies who began to show up in my head, laughing, as if they'd predicted this moment for me ... against Nathaniel Hawthorne ... what did he know of desolate places? Had he hung from these cliffs like a rat on an oily barrel cast overboard into a stormy sea?

It was useless jabber, all of it, and as I put the ax and the hammer into the bulge and started climbing again, it got worse. Halfway over the bump, I tried to kick my left front points in, missed and jerked my right foot and my hammer out with the same move. I didn't fall. I just hung there by the strap on my ax and I gave up. No way up and no way down. My hat in my eyes and my spirit gone. Michael couldn't see me. I could hear him yelling, but the wind was loud and cold and I couldn't hear the words. It didn't matter. The ugly movie in my head started throwing up failures of mine, from childhood all the way up to that pitiful moment there on the ice. I deserved everything, all of it, I told myself. It was simply a matter of karma--for stupidity, weakness and a life lived badly, I deserved to fall off this mountain. All of it felt like the kind of madness that probably precedes death and is probably the worst part of dying.

Then something happened that I had never felt before. My body took over. My mind went on entertaining a bizarre collection of hopeless images, but my body wouldn't have it. With that much adrenaline in my blood stream, my body finally reared up with a will of its own and said to the intellect, "I'm getting out of this thing one way or another and you're coming with me." Then my brain was a kilo of meat in a bone cup being hauled up that cliff by an animal of incredible strength and endurance, an animal who listens to only one voice, an ancient voice, saying only one thing: "Survive this." There are no feats of courage or strength or macho in that state. There are no French names for what you are doing and there is no reason for any of it. There is no rope, there are no pitons or ice screws. The climber above you is an illusion. You are nothing to the ice but a warm moment that passes quickly, desperately, and is gone. The mountain doesn't care.

My moves from there were not graceful or sure, or careful or strong, but they did the job. I climbed the 75 feet to Michael without stopping, with my hat in my eyes, with no feeling in my hands or my feet, through a storm, while a symphony of dementia played in my weak mind. By the time I pulled myself up onto the ledge, I was still crazy with all of it. Michael said, "Good effort," and I almost attacked him with my hammer.

Instead, I told him, "I'm exhausted, I'm in pain, I can't see a goddamn thing, I can't feel my fingers or my toes, I can't hear you for the wind and I am fucking terrified that I am going to fall off this cliff and die."

"Don't worry about falling," he said. "I'm in a very solid position up here. If you fall, I can catch you. In fact, I'm solid enough to pull you up if you get in trouble. That's what I was yelling at you."

"I can't hear you," I told him. "I heard your voice but not the words and that just scared me worse. You could have been screaming about an avalanche, or that you were falling, or anything." Then I said, "I have to rest. I'm hanging by the straps on my ax and hammer because I can't close my hands anymore."

"Well, stay here till you warm up," he said. "That was the hardest pitch. The rest isn't that bad. And if you climb with your legs, your hands won't get so cold. Don't pull so much with your arms. Stand on your front points and push your weight up with your legs. Use your arms to steady yourself."

"I don't trust the front points," I told him. "They keep popping out. And I don't trust the rope. While I was climbing, you and that rope didn't exist."

"You won't trust the system completely till you fall," he said.

"I don't want to fall," I said. "Not even two feet."

After about five minutes, my hands started to come back, and with the feeling came that fiery pain. It doesn't last long, but it's magnificent while it does. I swore and stamped my feet on the narrow shelf, I banged my hands against the ice, clapped them, cradled them in my armpits, and I moaned. By the time the pain passed, I had some sense back. Not much, but a little sense is a lot more than none.

"That's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life," I said.

"The storm isn't helping," he said.

We stood without talking for another five minutes. We were about 150 feet up, with just enough room to stand flatfooted. Every time I shifted my feet, chunks of ice and snow took the long fall and landed without noise at the bottom of the face.

"Do you like to look down?" I asked. "I looked down while I was climbing and it broke my heart."

"I like to look down when I'm in control of a climb," Michael told me, "or when I've made it to the top. The best feeling, really, is standing at the bottom, looking up, after a tough ascent, saying to yourself, 'I climbed that.'"

"How are we going to get down?" I asked.

"We'll walk," he said. "When we get to the top, we'll hike across through the trees to a slope we can walk down."

"How far is it to the top?"

"Two more pitches," he said. "We'd better get going before this storm gets any worse." Then he unhooked from the anchor strap and I hooked into it.

"I'll cut more steps for you on this pitch," he said. "And since we probably won't be able to hear or see each other, I'll give the rope a couple of tugs when I'm on belay, then you can start climbing. And if you get in trouble, you tug on the rope and I'll pull you up."

No, you won't haul me up this mountain, I thought to myself. Not until I'm limp. And then I knew my arrogant brain was back in charge. I was only moments from the worst sustained terror of my life and already demon pride was creeping back. I thought all that stuff had died in me while I was hanging there in the wind and the fear. Turned out it was just numb, like my fingers.

Almost immediately after Michael started to climb, I was alone again. I watched as he pulled himself up through a beautiful ice tunnel, and then he was gone. I couldn't see how steep or difficult the pitch was going to be. But I could feel Michael climbing through the rope I was paying out. His progress was slow and when it stopped now and then, I imagined him cutting steps. While I waited, I looked around for the first time. I was above the bare tops of the trees. There were moments when I could see the half mile across the notch to the icy cliffs on the other side, but mostly the storm washed out the view. The flakes were heavy and thick, not falling but riding the fast wind south, as if they were late for something.

Desolate isn't quite the right word, I thought. It's too passive, too quiet a word for this place. Then I heard myself--wrestling with Hawthorne over vocabulary--and I said out loud, "Is that it? You came up here in your red knee socks and your $1.17 hat to get shitty with Nathaniel Hawthorne over a word? Did you climb this ice for the right word? And if you get it, will you take it back, hang it on your woodshed door and tell your friends it's just a little nicer than the one Hawthorne shot in this same forest?"

It was the kind of game I play when I am safe at home among my own words, at my own word machine (as I am right now). Up there, when I saw that the slack at my feet was gone, then felt Michael tugging the signal on the rope, all words became tits on a boar again. I unclipped from the anchor strap and felt the adrenaline surge. I knocked the chock and the nut out of the crack they were in, strung them around my neck and started to climb.

I moved up and into the ice tunnel without much trouble. Then I climbed up through the huge ice stalagmites that formed it and out the other side. From there I could see most of the pitch ahead of me, but I still couldn't see Michael, who was somewhere out of sight above me. I began climbing with my legs and I could feel the difference. My left leg shook when I put all my weight on it, and the front points didn't feel any more secure than they had before; but after ten minutes, I could feel that my hands weren't getting cold the way they had. At one point, I had to traverse the face for about ten feet and as I worked myself sideways like a crab, it occurred to me that a wrong whack with either the ax or the hammer could chop the rope in two. I tried to slow down, but the wind kept gusting in my face. I wasn't sure how long my hands would stay warm or how long my head would stay together, so I decided to go with my scramble and hack till I couldn't anymore. I was still frightened, but the panic of the first pitch was gone. I began to notice the ice. Some of it was white, some of it was gray and some of it was pale yellow. It was translucent in some spots, transparent in others. Sometimes when I hit it with the hammer, it would star, then shatter and send the shards flying like plate glass. Other times, the blade hit and stuck as solidly as if it had been driven into the trunk of a big old oak.

Michael had cut more steps for me in the difficult spots, as he said he would. It was always good when I found them, but finally, they weren't much use. Michael had made them to fit himself and the reach between them was too long and bold for me to use. So I cut a few for myself and, as I did, I thought how intensely personal every climb must be. Under the right conditions, you could take it an inch at a time if you wanted to, carve a stairway an old woman could use if the weather wasn't trying to blow you off the mountain. But it was, so I gave up on the chopping and climbed by my claws again. Still without grace, or pleasure, or a sense of accomplishment, but steadily. I stopped only once on that second pitch. I removed an ice screw, I rested, I took inventory: Hands still warm and working, feet numb but no pain, legs weak, arms shaky but better than before. When I reached Michael where he crouched on another small shelf about 200 feet up, I told him I felt pretty good. "The ice was yellow back there," I said.

"It's from minerals in the rock," he told me. "The white and the gray ice have snow mixed in and the blue ice is full of water."

Michael went off belay almost immediately after I reached him. He went across the cliff for a few yards, and then he made a move I'd seen only from spiders before. He was under another bulge, with his right front points in the ice just below it. Then he swung his left leg up till it looked like it was going to pop out of his hip, drove the front points in and then slowly, amazingly, he stood straight up on the points and gained four feet. He beat the whole thing in one move and a minute later he was out of sight again. After about 30 minutes, I felt a couple of tugs on the rope. I removed the belay and started across the cliff awkwardly. I dropped my hammer and caught it by the strap. When I took an angry swing to set it again, my front points came out and left me hanging by two arms this time. It didn't scare me the way it had before. I knew the ax and the hammer would hold me till I got things back together, but I didn't want to look down. I kicked four or five times with my right front points and when they wouldn't go in, I looked down through my arms to see what I was doing. What I got was a view of the bottom and the taste of adrenaline in my mouth. I looked away and told myself it wasn't over yet. Then I muscled and blasted my way up over the bulge. It tired me badly. I did a 15-foot dead vertical very slowly and then pulled myself onto the almost flat top of a huge knob. I lay there, trying to get my breath, looking at the ice. It was blue--aqua, really--a delicate pastel shade, not a winter color, something from the South Seas where the deep water meets the shallow water, not blue, not green, both, and very beautiful.

I climbed another 20 minutes, another 50 feet, and then I saw Michael sitting among small trees.

"You made it," he said.

I said, "Yes," between heavy breaths, but there was no feeling of elation. Maybe I was too tired, maybe I was still in some kind of shock or maybe I was feeling embarrassed for the first time about how badly I had underestimated the whole bold business of ice climbing. And there was that noisome little kid who had sprung on me with all his cheap despair and whining in that first panicked pitch. I hadn't come face to face with that pathetic wretch for years and I guess I'd begun to believe that I'd grown out of him. Standing there at the top, I knew he'd always be with me, waiting in there for our next hard hour to jump up and cry that we were doomed, that he couldn't do it.

"How high are we?" I asked.

"About three fifty," Michael said.

I looked down at what we had climbed. "Amazing," I said. Then I promised myself I'd never do it again.

We slogged across the mountain through knee-deep snow and when Michael found the spot he was looking for, we sat and slid down the slope on our asses. When we were standing on the railroad tracks again, I looked at my watch for the first time. From the bottom to the top had taken us almost four hours.

When we got to the base of Standard, while Michael packed the equipment, I looked up the face and said to myself, "I climbed that," but there was no special feeling to it. Just an ache across my shoulders and a numbness where my feet should have been.

On the walk back along the snow-covered tracks, I watched the wind forming delicate little cornices on the drifts and I thought, Man is nothing out here. The footprints we'd made in the deep snow on our way in were gone. In four hours, the storm had cleaned the woods of any sign that we had ever been there.

In the van, on our way back to North Conway, we were quiet. Our beards started to melt, my fingers tingled and my cheeks burned. After a while, I said, "Thank you for that experience."

"You're welcome," Michael said.

"But I don't want any more," I told him. "It beat me bad down there on that first pitch. I don't need any more."

"You mean you don't want to do the ravine tomorrow?"

"No," I said. "It's going to take me a week to warm up and get the fear off me."

On the way into the shop to drop off our equipment, I ran into a young climber named Brian. We'd talked the day before about ice climbing.

"How'd you do?" he asked me.

"It destroyed me," I told him. "I couldn't feel my hands, I still can't feel my feet, I discovered I'm a fool and a coward and I've never had such terror in my life."

"Sounds like a good ice climb," he said.

"What?"

"Happens to me all the time. That's what it's about," he said.

I stood there in my wet knickers and my stupid hat, shaking my head, trying to resist the idea that trouble and danger are worth anything by themselves. But they are. I'm much too proud of the toe I still can't feel.

"A climber once hammered two of his own fingers into a crack and hung by them till he was rescued."

"My arms instinctively muscled up and pulled me as flat as I would go against the ice."