Teewinot by Jack Turner

Author:Jack Turner [Turner, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

9. The End of Summer

After the middle of August, the sky changes. The sun sinks to the south, its lower rays sharply illuminating the southern buttresses of the peaks. The great northern faces darken. Shadows in the canyons deepen, becoming shadows worthy of de Chirico. The light of spring and summer is limpid, gentle; the light of autumn has an hallucinatory clarity, crisp and brittle. When it is particularly hot and dry and the snow is gone, the peaks glitter with the metallic sheen of schist and mica—the color of isinglass. Nights are chilly.

The leaves of serviceberry turn yellow—the first sign of autumn and so ubiquitous that its message cannot be ignored. The aspens and cottonwoods turn. The year rolls on. And we respond in counterpoint to its deeper theme, striving for harmony but always subordinate, mere obblagati to a grander motif.

I teach climbing classes and climb the Grand. The vast snowfields of spring are reduced to dirty seams of snow, buried in the deepest cracks. The days are hot, in the eighties, which is as hot as it usually gets in this country—the record high is only 95. We go for days without seeing a cloud. Then come the late-summer thunderstorms, destroying our potlucks, sending everyone into the cabins. The thunderstorms here are one of the wonders of the world—a recent one near the town of Douglas dumped six inches of rain in two hours and pounded the residents with hailstones 2.75 inches in diameter. When we have to be out in such storms, we hide in the trees or in caves. On climbs, we put on all our gear and put our packs over our heads. The storms pass as rapidly as they arrive—the light changes, the birds sing, steam rises from the rocks, and you climb on.

My friend Casey visits with her son Weston and his climbing partner, Andrew Hockwald, who is also thirteen and a competitive climber. They are training for the Nationals. They work on the boulder problems at Jenny Lake, and they change the handholds on the climbing wall at the back of the Rescue Cache to make the moves harder. They boulder with Rolo and talk with him, and about him, for hours—he is their Michael Jordan. In the evening they stalk pronghorn and elk along the edge of the meadow, studying them with my spotting scope and taking photographs.

I run up and down the Grand, the boys climb, and Casey writes in the cabin, interviews my neighbor Dick Dorworth for Wild Duck Review, the journal she publishes, and cooks elaborate dinners. At night we lie in the hammock and watch the Milky Way with binoculars, drink tequila, and eat chunks of fresh salmon our Chilean guide Rodrigo Mujica has flown in from Alaska. Life feels so full and complete that the prospect of change, any change, brings anguish.

Driving home from a day at intermediate school, I pass a collection of Park Service vehicles and a truck loaded with jet fuel. The near meadow looks like a landing zone, as though we are at war.

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