The Wall Read Online Free PDF

Poe.”
    “He bundled her up in the tarp and took her off,” said Hugh. “A special friend. By the time I got there with the rangers, he’d had a good hour’s head start.”
    “You should have broken his legs while you had him down,” said Lewis. “You threatened him. You should have just done it.”
    “How could I know he’d do a thing like that?”
    Lewis frowned.
    Now what? Hugh waited. He’d had time to think their choices through. But Lewis would need to catch up with it and reach his own conclusions.
    Lewis got quiet. His big fingernail—carefully clipped to the quick for their climb—tapped on the photo in the center of the table. It was a photo of El Cap, though nothing pretty. The frame was filled with everyday rock and just a sliver of sky. Most people would have thought it was a reject. But for these two men, it was both past and future, a black-and-white portrait of Anasazi Wall, the route they had pioneered back in 1968. They were its fathers, and it marked the greatest year of their lives.
    Shortly after making Anasazi’s first ascent, life had taken them off in different directions. Hugh had become a doodlebugger in the bayous of Louisiana, dynamiting the mud in seismic search of oil. When a job came up with British Petroleum, he’d jumped at it and taken his bride off to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai, to vast desert country. Lewis had strayed back to Colorado and earned a graduate degree in Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and done with it the only thing he could, opening a used bookstore that had evolved over the years into a poets’ hangout and a latte bar. Now, like old warriors, the two of them were returning to their battleground, Anasazi.
    Lewis quit tapping. His finger pinned the photo flat. “I don’t mean to be insensitive,” he started. “That could be me lying out there, or you. But…” But it wasn’t.
    Right away Hugh knew in its entirety how their decision would unfold. They would go back and forth a little, paying lip service to what was proper at such times, but end with the fact that, really, the death—even her stolen remains—changed nothing. El Cap was a matter of orbit, the pull of gravity, a fact of life, their life. And she’d had her chance.
    For years, they had been tempting each other to take one more stab at the beast. Once upon a time, big walls and big mountains had been their glory. They came from a bygone era. Vietnam, Camelot, and Apollo had all been parts of their vocabulary. They had lived hand to mouth, working construction jobs, digging ditches, and one summer hiring onto the Alaska pipeline, to pay for gear and more climbing. They’d slept in caves and under picnic tables and on high ledges, subsisting on Jif peanut butter and Charlie’s tuna. A can of peaches and a tin cup of glacier melt were virtually sacraments. And at the center, always, El Cap remained their holy grail.
    In its day, the 3,600-foot-high monolith had been hailed as both the American Everest and the last Eiger. But like Hugh and Lewis, the proud Captain had grayed and slid from grace. El Cap had turned into a circus ground with a whole new breed of speed climbers, bolt gunners, and parachutists performing stunts and bagging records. Once mighty routes, including Anasazi, were now viewed as milk runs. The well-heeled adventurer could even buy a guided ascent of El Cap at the rate of $1 per vertical foot. Coming back, going up, leaving a bit of blood, it seemed the least Hugh and Lewis could do to restore some of the nobility they had known.
    And their time for the grand, absurd suffering of a multiday big-wall ascent was now or never. Anasazi would be their swan song, and they knew it. Each had kept climbing over the years, but it couldn’t last. In preparation for this climb, Hugh had made a daily diet of ibuprofen for pain and inflammation, along with vitamins and whey protein powder. Lewis had gone further, getting testosterone shots that left him bigger than ever. They were