Survive by Alex Morel

Author:Alex Morel [Morel, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2012-08-01T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

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.

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