Chemistry of Fire Read online

  Just before we were to meet at a big Superbike race in Florida, Dirk wrote, “About winning: I think we have as good a chance as anyone, but Daytona is a very special race. Long and hard on tires and equipment. And Scott Russell is really good at Daytona. He’s tough but Miguel Duhamel has beaten him there.”

  We met at Daytona in the middle of Race Week, which is actually two or three weeks of the worst kind of debauch imaginable. Half a million motorcycles arrive all at once in an effort to make Mardi Gras look like a Girl Scout Jamboree. Most of them are Harley-Davidsons, which we don’t consider to be real motorcycles, because they’re ugly, they don’t turn well, and they don’t make horsepower efficiently. But they are extremely popular, and everyone was tricked out in leather Third Reich gear. I saw a beautiful woman sitting on her Harley with a decal on the back of her black skullcap helmet that said, “My Other Toy Has A Dick.”

  There were strange kinds of motorcycle races taking place all over town. We watched oval flat track, which involves bikes that have no brakes. We went to a Supercross competition, which is a gazelle-like leaping contest for dirt bikes. We even saw vintage races with old motorcycles like the Triumphs and BSAs and Nortons I used to ride in the sixties. Dirk and I rode new Hondas everywhere, watching races into the night, sometimes two or three in a day. Dirk couldn’t seem to get enough of it. We ate hot dogs and drank beer and weaved our way through traffic jams that took hours to get through in the limo. (Yes, Beverly had limos working the event for us, but we’d thrown our cell phones into the pool and were out AWOL on motorcycles that could not see traffic but went through it like neutrinos.)

  On Sunday we went to the big race, the Superbike race, and watched Miguel take the lead away from Scott Russell in the tenth lap and then crash in the chicane turn. As he slid away on his back, a hundred yards through the grass (unhurt), Miguel’s Superbike vaulted end over end “at about twenty-two thousand dollars a bounce,” as one of the mechanics put it. When race mechanic Al Luddington put it on the laser transit to measure the frame, though, it was dead on, and within a couple of weeks, it was racing again.

  The Daytona race took place on March 8. May 20, 1998, Dirk was back at Honda in Torrance when he forwarded me an email he had received from his old friend and colleague Joe Boyd, an engineer at Honda. It was a fake “new product intro,” obviously intended to poke fun at Honda. The press release Boyd had written announced the Built-In Orderly Organized Knowledge device (BOOK) and went on to describe its technological advances: “Compact, portable . . . can be used anywhere—even sitting in an armchair by the fire. Yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM. . . . An optional BOOKmark accessory allows you to open the BOOK to the exact place you left it in a previous session—even if the BOOK has been closed.”

  A week later Dirk was testing a new sport bike on the track at Willow Springs near Rosamond, California. Boyd, a senior motorcycle engineer, was there to observe. At one point before the test, Boyd and Dirk were seen talking, though no one overheard what they said. Boyd had a small point-and-shoot camera, and a number of people who were there assumed that Dirk had asked Boyd to take his picture as he came around the turn. Dirk always wanted photos, and he was excited about the beautiful prints that Candace had made for us all. Boyd had accommodated Dirk before in this regard. Boyd walked out onto the grass and stood beside the track as Dirk ran his laps. Boyd looked through the viewfinder as Dirk approached the turn. Point-and-shoot cameras have short lenses, which make objects appear farther away than they are. Dirk was probably going seventy miles an hour. As he entered the turn, Boyd stepped onto the track with the camera to his eye. Dirk was leaned hard over, right on the edge of traction, where no maneuvering is possible. Such a high-speed race line, once begun, cannot be altered, as I had discovered on my rides behind Tim. Dirk and Joe were such old friends, we could all imagine it. Dirk thought: Well, Joe’s not going to step in front of me. And Joe thought: Well, Dirk’s not going to run me over.

  Dirk’s side mirror hit Boyd in the head and killed him instantly. The force of the impact slammed Dirk into the gas tank, crushing his sternum. The handlebars whipped around and crushed his chest from the side. The bike went down hard, and Dirk was thrown to the pavement. Paramedics worked on Dirk, whose heart had stopped. They were able to get his heart beating, but it stopped again, and the second time, they couldn’t get it started again. Dirk was forty-eight years old. Joe Boyd was forty-nine.

  5

  Hill Fever

  I HAD NOTICED a badly healed scar across the border between South Dakota and Wyoming. I’d heard tales that it had bewitched Custer’s regiment and rendered them simple with its pleasures in the summer of 74. Rolling through the Black Hills two years before their doomed meeting at the Little Bighorn, they had picked wild flowers from their saddles and had even dismounted to play the first game of baseball in the West. The Indians would not venture in there. The place was too powerful for all but a few shamans and vision seekers. The Black Hills had some of the world’s largest caves, they said, and glorious rock-climbing on crystal towers. It had the highest mountain in the United States east of the Rockies, Harney Peak.

  So it is that I find myself in a Ford Explorer piled with gear, heading west on Interstate 90 one blue-sky day, taking in the burning autumn colors and listening to Lucinda Williams sing, “Some laws should be broken from the start.”

  Yeah, I think. Gravity, for example.

  At first light, the moon sets through the pines, looking like a faceted ivory lens. The air is full of wild red and gold leaves, fluttering around like broken butterflies. Far in the distance, I can see Cathedral Spires leaping into decks of pink clouds against a blue-gray sky.

  We’re going out to attack those spires with tight rubber shoes, a few lengths of rope, and a jangling rack of metal wedges. I can’t help thinking, I’m going to fall. My instructor, Sue Schierbeck of Granite Sports in Hill City, South Dakota, tries to reassure me while regaling Bobby Model, our photographer and a top climber himself, and Julia, his tobacco-chewing assistant and half sister, with stories of horrible climbing accidents.

  We hike around Sylvan Lake, passing through a narrow slot in the granite beneath boulders jammed in the crack above our heads. Even though it’s October, the temperature will gradually rise to eighty, but at the base of the seventy-foot stone face near the lake, it’s still comfortably cool. Sue has placed bolts at the top, and now I watch Bobby climb the sheer face to place a rope. He goes up fast. Nothing holds him to the wall. It’s like watching a spider.

  Yesterday I worked some bouldering problems with Bobby and watched him execute a move called a barn door on a smooth overhanging rock perhaps twenty-five feet straight above me. Gravity just politely stepped aside and let him through. So seeing him walk up this rock face the way I’d walk up stairs did little to give me confidence.

  At the base of the wall, Sue says, “I just want you to stay right here and work your way across laterally to get the feel for it. Just look at your feet and find places to put them. Take your time.”

  Everyone has to start somewhere. The route was only four feet off the ground and crosses the rock laterally for about twenty-five feet toward a big vertical crack. My goal is the crack. I move easily across until I get within about two arms’ lengths of it, at which point the wall becomes glassy smooth.

  “This is a five-ten move,” Sue informs me, “but you can do it. Just study it for a while.”

  I catch sunlight winking off of a tiny blue crystal just above my head, and for the first time, I notice how beautiful the rock is. It is a great dark medium studded with a rainbow of colored crystals. Then somehow, I’m in the crack. An earthquake can’t move me.

  “Aw,” she says, feigning disappointment. “Most people fall the first few times. Okay, let’s rope up.”

  Be careful what you pray for, I think, as I tie the knot through my harness.

  I begin climbing. This is easy, I think, grabbing big fists full of rock. Just
like when I was a kid climbing trees.

  I go ten or fifteen feet up, and Sue calls to me, “Lean back.”

  “What?”

  “Lean back. I’ve got you.” I want to do no such thing. I want to clutch the wall. My rushing adrenaline turns to a shrinking feeling. But how can I refuse to trust her here if I plan to trust her farther up? I prepare myself for the ridiculous move, then let go and fall. I’m in the air, feeling gravity grab me. Here I go . . .

  Then the rope gives and springs up and down as my harness catches my hips, and I hang there with my toes gripping the wall.

  I let my pulse return to normal as she holds me on belay, and a sudden joy pours through me. I’d forgotten that feeling from my childhood, when gravity gives you a big hug.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” she calls. “You can’t fall.”

  Yeah, I think. Unless the rope breaks.

  “Climbing,” I call.

  “Climb on,” she says.

  I find myself concentrating on the puzzle made up of feet and fingers and rock. At no time do I look down at the ground, for fear that my fear will freeze me.

  I come to a place where I make a move to a tiny dime-edge crystal and find myself fascinated that it can hold me. My left foot smears on a rounded place, and I’m hanging on to a slim edge with my right hand, looking for the next move across an expanse of granite that appears for all the world to be mirror smooth. There has to be something here, I think, or this wouldn’t be called a 5.6.

  Just then Bobby appears in my field of vision and shoves a camera lens in my face.

  “Smile,” he says, snapping the shutter. Then he scrambles down and around to my other side without effort.

  I’ve reached the crux, the most difficult part of the climb. I’m about halfway up, where the crystals vanish, leaving a blank space about five feet high and rounded out just enough to get in my way. As Bobby scampers past me and onto the summit, I’m still searching for something, feeling like a blind man with my left hand as my calf muscles begin to tremble. I can see that in one more move, I’ll have a place to stand, but there’s nothing in between. I desperately want to go down but remember an old Danish saying: “Pissing in your pants will keep you warm for only so long.”

  Damn it, I think, I know fear. Come on, old buddy.

  I slap my left hand against the rock—a motion like trying to open elevator doors—and move my right hand to another tiny crystal. I set my right foot up, smear my left, and just push hard, feeling the blood in my face. The bottom drops out of my stomach, and with a rocket rush of adrenaline, I make a long reach and grab a bucket, as a slight depression in the rock is known. I’d thought that it was out of range but I’m solid now. I shove my hip into the rock, reach, and move over the hump. I tag the summit just to say I did it. Then I call to Sue to lower me. I lean back and walk down the rock. I am filled with a familiar joy at coming into this scarred old land.

  Rod Horrick is in charge of mapping Wind Cave, the sixth-largest cave in the world. An intense man of medium build with brown hair and blue eyes, Horrick discovered caving while on a trip with his father at the age of seven. There is not a hole he won’t scramble into or an element in it that he won’t stop to explain.

  As we enter Wind Cave, I can already feel my chest tightening as a suffocating sense of claustrophobia descends on me. I’ve never gone caving before and irrationally expect a neat hole like the Lincoln Tunnel with big rows of fluorescent lights. But as we leave the mouth of the cave, we find ourselves descending through the bronchioles and down into a chaotic world of tremendous breakdown, man-size holes that appear beneath our feet. Each hole seems to lead down to sharp rocks and more sharp rocks.

  That’s why we’re equipped with helmets, head lamps, gloves, heavy knee and elbow pads, sturdy boots, and rough clothing as we plunge ahead. You have to see the cave to believe its chaos, a fractal world of riven rock so complex that it’s impossible to take it all in. At first, I try to look everywhere at once, to get a hold on my environment. That sets off a flutter of panic in my chest. Then, gradually, I begin to focus on details. It takes me a full hour to get the sense of how to move through the cave, not so much physically but emotionally. For one thing, the beam of my own head lamp is all the light I have, and if I swing it around, it’s a bad movie. Monster shapes charge at me, and creeping red rock fingers reach out to grab me. There is no floor, so we’re always balancing on one rock or another. I pause and look down from one such perch. The nothingness descends to infinite blackness.

  As we move on and on, I begin to get a sense of some hidden order. We climb huge boulders to a narrow passageway where I have to crawl on my belly. I have to push my pack ahead of me as I drag myself through on my elbows.

  At last we emerge into a huge room whose size is made difficult to comprehend by its complexity. As I shine my light down the side of the boulder on which I sit, it falls away through the branching of countless convoluted passageways—leads, Horrick calls them, the very lungs of the moist earth.

  “Where does it go?” I wonder out loud.

  Horrick points out that this question is the first step in being seduced by the cave: wondering where something goes and then following it.

  Horrick coaxes me off my boulder. “I want to show you something,” he says, hopping nimbly from rock to rock over crevasses that descend to the iron armature of the earth.

  I claw my way up beside him. I find him lying on his belly, pointing his head lamp into a small grotto. I lie down beside him. Look: beneath an overhang, a sea anemone. White domed body with thousands of long and sparkling hair-like feelers.

  “Don’t breathe too hard,” he says. “It’s incredibly delicate.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Those are gypsum needles,” he tells me. “Calcium sulfate. The same stuff that Sheetrock is made of.”

  The creature is a stone, and although the air never moves in here, I have the illusion that it’s waving its tentacles in the sea of near-100-percent humidity in which we breathe. It’s cold enough that I can see my breath. There’s an entire ecosystem down here in this land of the lost. At the bottom of the chain is a tiny mite that eats minerals and lives through chemosynthesis, an exception to the rule that all life depends on sunlight. The food chain moves up through a sort of hopping insect all the way to wood rats, which mark their meandering trails with urine in this Bible-black world, and bats, which are blind and use sonar to find their way.

  Horrick’s voice shakes me from my thoughts. He’s telling me about a room he found that was filled with bones, including bones of bison and other mammals. That seemed an impossibility, there being no source of food. Horrick studied the bones and noticed that they appeared rounded, as if worn in a stream. “I could see tree roots, so I knew we were fairly close to the surface, and I had a theory.”

  Horrick hauled an antenna back into the room, while others triangulated with radio signals from above, pinpointing the spot, which turned out to be in the bed of a stream. The roof was only eight feet from the surface, and Horrick figured out that at one time, there had been an entrance to the cave there. The bones of dead animals had been washed down the stream until they fell into the Chamber of Lost Souls, as he named the room. Gradually, the stream bed silted up, sealing the cave once more. Horrick believes, in fact, that over the years, the cave opens and closes its mouths, providing access to different areas at different times. It’s like this huge breathing beast of living rock, lying half-asleep beneath thousands of acres of land.

  After six or seven hours of exploring, Horrick says that he needs to go find Bobby, who has been taking photographs elsewhere in the cave. I tell Horrick that I’d like to be alone. He has quite a long scramble to get to where Bobby is and back before we start the arduous climb out of the cave. He hesitates as he considers my request. “Look,” he says, “if I leave you, don’t move, okay?”

  “I won’t.”

  “I mean, don’t move at all. Don’t go anywhere, do you understand me
? Just sit where you are.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  He studies me for a long time and restates his warning in stronger terms: “Because if you go anywhere at all, I won’t be able to find you.” It’s the first time since we entered the cave that I’ve seen him display any concern at all. But I understand. The beast will swallow me if I slip from my perch on this boulder. And Horrick is asking himself: Is this guy a flake, or can I trust him? Then he scrambles off. His light bounces around and vanishes at last.

  A silence such as I have never heard descends on me. And if the cave swallows Horrick, I have no idea how to get out.

  So I turn out my light.

  The absolute sensory deprivation of the cave grips me then. There’s nothing to tell me that I even exist except the hammering of my heart, my shallow breathing. Maybe this is what it’s like to be dead. With twenty stories of rock and earth blanking out all of civilization, I’m as close to escaping as I’ll ever get.

  But gradually, sound intrudes. I hear a scraping. Something approaches. At last, a dim flickering of light plays on the rocks, growing until I see once more the bouncing beam of Horrick’s head lamp and hear him climbing over the rocks toward me. I flick on my own lamp and see the look of relief on his face when he realizes that I haven’t vanished. He exhales. “Let’s go,” he says.

  I meet Noah Daniels, Horrick’s assistant, while in Wind Cave. He’s talking with Bobby and Julia and gets all excited when Julia asks about mountain biking in the Black Hills. Noah, like Julia, is a competitive mountain biker, and it turns out that the mountain biking, not the caving, is the real reason he came to the Black Hills. “It’s unreal, man!” he tells her. “There is some of the best single track in the world in the Black Hills!” And then, sotto voce: “Most of it’s unofficial, of course.” We find something pretty unofficial near the Mystic Trailhead parking lot.