The Calling by Barry Blanchard

Author:Barry Blanchard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports and recreation, Mountaineering
ISBN: 9781938340321
Publisher: Patagonia
Published: 2014-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Mornings I would rise early and run the trail to El Cap to see the sun hit the top of the Wall of Early Morning Light. Wally and TP slept. TP could do that for a long time…noon even. Tension born of impatience welled up in Wally and me as we waited, chomping at the bit, to get to our chosen climbs for the day.

“Where the fuck is TP?” I spat one morning while sitting on the tailgate of Kev’s truck. We were all incredibly self-centered young men, yet less so Kevin. He had the Christian regard to care for the stranger and a gift for empathy, but much of the time that had to be provoked.

“I don’t know,” Kev replied, “I’ll go see if he’s up.” And he stomped off across the parking lot.

TP resolved to run with me one morning and he did get up and we started, but about a half mile out his footfall landed on a redwood cone the size of a softball and twisted his ankle. He limped back to Camp 4 to sleep it off.

Watching the light of the new day creep down the Wall of Early Morning Light is sublime, and the next day it slowed me out of my powerful strides and wiped clean the fantasies of conquest surging through my head. I stood panting, slack-jawed, watching the sun descend onto the Great Stone, and some of the lightness that I’d found in the Alps came into me through the soles of my trainers, and I felt good and clean and blissfully optimistic.

Four days after descending from Half Dome we fixed ropes to Sickle Ledge and the next day we launched onto the greatest rock climb in the world, the Nose of El Capitan.

“Hey guys, do you know that Warren Harding started up the Nose four days after Robbins climbed Half Dome? We’re on the same schedule. That’s kinda cool, eh?” Kevin said.

“Let’s hope that it doesn’t take us a year and a half like him,” TP countered.

Kevin had taken the plans for a haul bag to Calgary Tent and Awning and got them to sew one up out of vinyl coated nylon, and “at a good price too, Blanch.” I clipped some one-inch webbing into the haul loops to create shoulder straps and then leaned into the eighty-pound load, much of which was water.

“You look like a giant walking bottle of horseradish!” Wally chortled.

Five minutes into the trail I bumped up against six guys with shoulder slings manhandling a blue plastic-wrapped cylinder the size of a deep-freeze up the trail toward El Cap.

“What the hell is that?” I asked, thumping the haul bag, which I’d already taken to calling “the Pig,” down onto the trail behind me.

“And down,” the guy at the front left corner instructed, and all six of them squatted in unison and set the cylinder to the ground like ancient Egyptian slaves. The guy closest to me answered in a slow Southern accent, “That there is a 3,000-foot nine-millimeter rope.

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