Peak Read Online Free PDF Page A

the pencil and the Moleskine away.
    Discouraging.
    Two hours and thirty-seven minutes.
    As I sat there watching everyone coming and going, it finally dawned on me that I was free, and this got me thinking about what had led up to this—and I don't mean climbing skyscrapers, or getting arrested, or the trial. I mean way back. Back before I was born...
     
     
    I WAS CONCEIVED in a two-man tent under the shadow of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.
    At least that's when my mom thinks it happened.
    My parents were twenty-four years old at the time. The day before the tent, they had reached the summit of El Cap along the Iron Hawk route in the record time of thirty-two hours and forty-three minutes. And this was not the only climbing record they had broken that year: Hallucinogen Wall, Body Wax, the Flingus Cling, and dozens of other records had fallen to the climbing team of Teri Marcello and Joshua Wood.
    Climbing magazines and equipment companies had started to pay attention to them ... and to pay them money. The rusty old van they had lived in for three years was ditched for a brand-new four-wheel-drive truck camper. No more temp jobs to scrape together money for gas and food, no more mooching off the weekend climbers. They bought a piece of property in Wyoming and built a log cabin in front of a ninety-foot vertical wall, perfect for conditioning climbs. The rock rats were on their way up.
    I'd seen photos of them back then. My father looked like a bodybuilder, but he was as flexible as a gymnast. My favorite photo of him was the one where he was standing on a high ledge touching his knees with his nose.
    My mother was a foot shorter than my father. She was lean, with dreadlocks tickling her powerful shoulders, muscles in her arms and legs like knotted ropes, and abs like speed bumps. She was bulletproof.
    But she was not baby proof.
    Two months after El Cap she told my father she was pregnant. I have no idea what his reaction was, but I doubt he jumped up and down for joy when he got the good news.
    It was a difficult pregnancy. There were complications. She was told to stay in bed or she would lose me. She did, but my father was on the move, teaching seminars, endorsing equipment, and climbing—shattering records on Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount McKinley, and Annapurna, which is where he was the night I was born.
    He called her from Base Camp on a satellite phone after reaching the summit.
    "What do you want to name him?" Mom asked.
    "Peak."
    "Pete?"
    "No, Peak. P-E-A-K. Like 'mountain peak.'"
    He didn't lay eyes on me until I was three months old, and that's when my mother had her accident in the backyard. I was there, strapped into a car seat at the base of the wall (and at that age, probably staring at the prairie dogs popping out of their holes, only dimly aware that I had parents at all).
    They were thirty feet up the wall, free-climbing. For rock rats like them, this was like strolling across a level parking lot. Mom reached up and grabbed a handful of rotten rock. It was still clutched in her hand when my dad got down to her, which was probably five seconds after she hit the ground.
    Thirty feet. Shattered hip. Broken back.
    My dad canceled all his seminars, climbs, everything, staying right at her side through the whole orthopedic jigsaw puzzle. It took nearly a year to put her back together. Wheelchair, crutches, and finally, when she was able to hobble around with a cane, Dad left again, showing up a couple times a year for a day or two at a time.
    It took Mom two more years of physical therapy to ditch the cane, but she never climbed again.
    Dad took me climbing for the first time when I was five years old. (We tried to keep it a secret, but the fly rods and fishing gear didn't fool Mom for one minute.) Only four more climbs with him over the next two years, but in between I made hundreds of solo ascents on the wall in back of the cabin with Mom manning the belay rope, shouting instructions up to me.
    Then Rolf