Chemistry of Fire Page 14

  Bobby, Julia, and I scramble through brush and buckthorn until we find a faint pathway and set our bikes on it. It rises gradually for about fifty yards and then takes off uphill so sharply that it just seems to suck Julia and Bobby into the dark forest like one of those pneumatic tubes at the drive-in bank. My bike has fingertip hydraulic disc brakes, and I get a taste of them right from the start. As I struggle uphill, my front wheel comes off the ground like a snakebit stallion, and I lean forward to bring it under control. On a short downhill section, I grab the brakes and nearly endo the bike, sliding around and running off into the woods a few yards with my rear end up in the air.

  Then I get on the main track and grind to a halt, heading up at a forty-five-degree angle. The track is twelve inches wide and scattered with sharp chunks of shale. As I climb two hundred, then four hundred feet, a wall of trees and stone rises to my right, while the drop from my left foot approaches the vertical. It’s heavily timbered and populated with big, sharp rocks. My bike’s titanium and carbon frame is nice and light, which comes in handy, since I carry it most of the way up.

  I don’t mind going slowly in that dense and beautiful forest. The woods of the Black Hills are a spooky spirit world, with vestigial Ice Age flora and the ghosts of Cretaceous monsters still lurking in the limestone and luminous schist. Already in the early evening light, a yellow moon is rising full on the wind as the woods exhale a tangy spoor of mint and sage. In the leaf-fractured searchlight of late cathedral sunbeams, I can see golden aspen leaves whirling down to decorate the pines as if they’re Christmas trees.

  Half an hour later, I’ve slogged the thousand vertical feet to a logged-off area of crepuscular shadows where I find two hunchbacked figures astride their bikes in the mist, conferring with their helmets touching. It gets cold at night, and we have no lights for night-riding, so they’ve decided to race back down. Julia’s going to descend as fast as she can while Bobby follows, snapping pictures. He has a camera mounted on his bicycle and will trip the shutter by clenching the remote shutter release in his teeth.

  When I express my wariness of the tiny track, Bobby says, “Oh, no, going down is a piece of cake.”

  Julia adds, “Actually, um, going down this is gonna be pretty radical for a beginner.” She shows me how to use my feet and brakes to minimize my chances of inverted flight.

  Bobby clamps his Nikon at about chest level, and he takes off chasing Julia down the narrow track. I bring up the rear, judiciously using fingers and toes to keep from flying straight off into space. As I scatter rocks and hop fallen logs, it’s all I can do to keep my wheels on the narrow cut in the mountainside.

  Julia is expertly screaming along the hairline track with Bobby on her tail, his wild-man blond hair flying out from under his helmet, teeth bared in a wild snarl, as he clicks off shots with his incisors.

  I’m now starting to get the hang of these high-speed turns, spitting chunks of shale into the forest as my tires slide off the edge and somehow jump back into place. Hey, this is fun, I think. Julia suddenly shoots ahead of Bobby, bent low to her handlebars, shouting, “Duck!”

  Bobby rockets down the track, hard on her rear wheel, sitting fairly upright to keep his chest clear of the camera and the metal spike that holds it. His bike seems to hesitate for a moment in midflight. Then it lurches upward, his front wheel comes way off the ground, and I think: If it looks bad, it is bad. I hear a cracking noise as a tree falls across my path, and Bobby disappears off the edge.

  Not exactly. By the time I skid to a stop at the point where Bobby went airborne, I can hear him cursing and groaning. Several pieces of equipment are still leaping and crashing down the long hill through the underbrush, and one of them is obviously a strobe, because it goes off, illuminating the dark forest with a blast of light.

  Bobby has come to count on incredible luck. He was once swept across a glacier by an avalanche and avoided being dumped into a crevasse only by leaping at the last second, snagging the far edge with his fingertips. He spent sixty days getting up Trango Tower in Pakistan, nine of them in a hanging tent stapled to a wall three thousand feet above a glacier in blizzard conditions. His backpack had snagged a tree limb, bringing the whole tree down and sending Bobby over the edge. This time, he fell into a pile of branches and stopped about twenty yards down the eight-hundred-foot slope. But soon Bobby and Julia were chasing each other down the hill once more, and as I watch, I understand their secret: Bobby and Julia are running, too. They’re just running faster than I am.

  Practically from the moment I arrived in the Black Hills, I started hearing tales of Jan and Herb Conn, who caught hill fever right after World War II and settled here in 1949. With the crudest equipment imaginable, they would eventually lay the foundations for all the climbing and most of the caving in the area.

  So it is perhaps inevitable that one day I find myself sitting in a circle beside their woodpile at the base of a low and rocky hill, out on the warm grass in a boulder-strewn grove of aspen and pine on their land near Calamity Peak. Sunlight streams down, igniting the mica chips scattered across the ground. The mica gives an impression of pixie dust, as if a magic spell has been cast on this place.

  Jan, seventy-seven, and Herb, eighty-one, are both less than five feet tall and have an air of quiet mischief about them. When we first pulled up their drive, Herb was standing there as if he’d been expecting us, this tiny man with an unruly shock of white hair and a quiet, knowing grin. I had heard people in the area describe them as reclusive, but that’s not quite accurate. For Herb and Jan, people are absolute volcanoes of energy with all their noise and restless motion. Most of us can filter all that out, but the Conns find it intolerable.

  “Herb and I always shied away from making contact with people if we didn’t have to,” Jan explains. “I’ve always hated cities,” she adds, and when I ask why, she says, “Well, trying to figure out what all those people are thinking can plumb wear you out.”

  An almost mystical reverence surrounds their history. We heard tales of elfin shamans, their fingers reading the Braille of unroped routes where mortals fear to tread, literally flying up the rock faces on antigravity beams. We also heard that they live in a cave.

  They don’t. They built an enclosure of rock set against a seven-foot-high rock face and covered with a tin roof. They stayed there while constructing their spacious house (no plumbing, water, or electricity). But when the house was completed, they could never quite bring themselves to move in. They liked the smaller space. “Anyway,” Herb tells me, “you can heat it with an armload of wood.”

  The door is four feet, two inches high, and there’s just enough room inside for Herb and Jan to squeeze past each other. Once inside, I feel like a giant. Every bit of space is densely packed with their belongings, from Herb’s typewriter, on which he writes short stories, to wooden cups hanging from the ceiling, tools of all sorts, and stacks of paper. A shelf is fixed to the rock face at shoulder level and thinly padded to make a bed beneath a small skylight cut in the tin roof, “so we can see the stars,” Jan explains.

  Standing there, attempting to make some sort of sense of it, I realize what they’ve done. From the start their love was born of and based on rock. As the 1959 climbing season came to an end, Jan and Herb met Dwight Deal while climbing in the Needles, just a few miles from here. He invited them to join him on a trip to map Jewel Cave. They accepted, not expecting much out of it. But there was something about the rugged, tortuous, yet intimate contact with rock. There was the labyrinthine confusion of the passageways littered with boulder fall, the slithering through flinty canals, fit only for an incubus, then being born into virgin cathedrals, great billowing duomos with stained-glass crystals and fretwork no human eye had ever seen. There were the startling discoveries of mysterious aragonite frostwork and gypsum cave cotton, a million years in the making. On top of that, the endeavor required all their technical skills as climbers as they stemmed up chimneys into black nether heavens. In one such place, Jan fo
und a dripstone cascade, a frozen waterfall of rock, and found that its flutings played like a xylophone when she tapped them.

  The cave had gotten inside them. They had gone in to help survey a bit of it and emerged instead with a map for the rest of their days: Jan and Herb spent the next twenty-two years in Jewel Cave, eventually surveying some sixty-five miles of it.

  Given their love of rock, it stands to reason that they arranged to live on a rock face. Their bed is bolted to it like a portaledge on a big wall climb. They sleep on the rock face every night, curled up warm above a woodburning stove made from a milk can, the constellations framed in their skylight, the comfort of a rock womb always close around them.

  Bobby is trying to get them to tell us about their great pioneering climbs, but they’re simply too modest. In their view, they didn’t pioneer anything. They were just having fun. While they are credited with creating the ground-up ethics of the Needles, Jan says, “I don’t know why they get so excited. You climb for what you get out of it, not for what someone else thinks.”

  At one point in our talk, Jan leaps up and runs to a shed and returns laden with the gear they used to make their historic climbs: an alarming collection of rusted pitons, F. W. Woolworth $1.99 sneakers, and a US Army–issue brown hemp-nylon rope circa 1945.

  “No harness?” I ask.

  “We just tied the rope around our waist and went up,” Jan says. “Of course, if you fall more than fifteen feet, you’ll break your back, so you don’t want to do that.” While we all handle the gear, like people marveling over the first space capsule, Jan asks, “Herbie? Do you think we can get these people up Juniper?”

  Soon we are racing through the woods along a secret path that Jan and Herb have cut, as they giggle about the Forest Service’s disapproval of their unofficial trails. They make them hard to find and hard to follow on purpose. As we proceed through airy pines over rough terrain, I can see that all around, the green heads of rocks are trying to be born out of the ferny earth’s placenta.

  We reach Juniper Rock. At least that’s what Herb and Jan call the ninety-foot spire wedged into a hillside at an angle. They scramble away like squirrels and vanish. We have, of course, no ropes. Julia, beside me on the rock, is realizing that her clogs are inadequate to the task at hand. Jan appears far above us, peering over a flake of rock, and assesses the situation. Then she calls behind her, “Herbie? Why don’t you throw your shoes down? We’ll worry about getting down later.”

  Herb makes the summit in a few more deft moves and then sits to take off his shoes, which he throws to Julia. They’re all up there eating peaches and nuts out of their packs by the time I get close enough to hear what they’re saying. Jan and Julia are engaged in a discussion of composers. Jan favors the impressionists, such as Debussy. She comes up here to play her flute.

  Now I see why Jan wanted us up here: the entire world is spread before us, Calamity Peak ridge to the northwest, Cathedral Spires to the north, and not a road to be seen. A bird flies up to me at eye level, then veers off, as surprised by the encounter as I am. But Jan and Herb sit chatting, their feet dangling over the edge.

  I notice Herb watching Bobby, who is bouldering on a twin peak that juts up about twenty yards away. Now Herb climbs down eagerly, finds a place to cross between the two, and scrambles up to where Bobby stands. Herb says, “I’ve got to see if I can reach that handhold.” Clearly, he has seen a move Bobby made and wants to try it.

  I watch as Herb makes the climb, gets to the same point where Bobby moved for the top, and reaches. Herb is balancing on his toes perhaps sixty feet up on the slim edge of a flake, reaching as high as he can. He makes a small jump, and his toes leave the rock. For a second, he’s suspended in midair, touching nothing, then his hand gets purchase on the rock, and he hangs for another second or two, then drops back to his toes with the balance of a dancer. He nods, satisfied that he could do it. When he turns around to face me, he’s smiling, his sky-blue eyes twinkling with contentment. In another moment, he has scrambled back to Jan’s side. It’s what a scientist I know calls “a hummingbird problem.” You know it’s impossible. He’s bleeping eighty-one years old. But there it is: you can see it. When Herb and Jan descend the ninety-foot spire, it’s like watching firefighters slide down a pole. I’m the last one down, of course.

  I awake to the sound of Bobby screaming, “We’re gonna die! We’re all gonna die!”

  It’s been a bad night on Harney Peak. I’ve been awakened numerous times to find myself, by turns, in Sue’s arms or in the arms of her dog, Jake. Well, paws, jaws, tail, tongue, teeth—it’s been a little hard to tell with Julia kicking me in the face as she struggles to find comfort. Two beautiful women, two studly guys, and a golden retriever: if this sounds like the cast of a rollicking good porno movie, try it in a two-man tent being pounded with the Zydeco rhythm of a blizzard with forty-knot winds, blowing snow, and freezing rain on the edge of an icy cliff on the wrong side of the mountain in the middle of the night.

  Now, at last, as daylight drips like cold chicken fat through the yellow nylon, I notice an ominous weight over my head. I reach up and shove, and an old-fashioned avalanche heaves and slides off our roof with a seismic sigh and tumbles a hundred feet down over the cliff at our feet.

  “This is bad,” I say, and Bobby starts up again, screaming that we’re all going to die. “Hey, hypothermia is no joke,” I insist lamely.

  “Yeah,” Julia says with a yawn. “How are we going to make espresso?”

  Is there no way to impress these people with the gravity of our situation? Sue is still sleeping soundly.

  Yesterday began mild and sunny, and we took our time getting up here from Sylvan Lake. We’d already had two weeks of near-tropical weather in the Black Hills, with warm, sunny days of mountain biking and rock-climbing, wild nights in Pringle at the Hitchrail, where a gutted elk lay on its back in a pickup truck in the parking lot, casting a rheumy eye on the wicked hieroglyphic constellations arcing slowly overhead. By the time we made our push to Harney Peak, the highest point east of the Rockies, we’d been lulled into complacency and were due for a rude awakening.

  So here I sit, my frozen claw digging into Sue’s shoulder, trying to wake her to this shameful reality: “We have to get off this mountain, Sue. Like now.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says, rolling over in her bag. “We’ll take care of you.”

  “Frostbite is a serious thing,” I say. “Pretty soon I’ll be snipping off your black and shriveled toes.” No reaction. “Snip, snip, snip.” Nothing. She’s asleep again.

  I tell myself to be thankful: I nearly made the hike in shorts and flip-flops. But something in the air last night told me that it just might be chilly at seventy-two hundred feet, so I brought a few extra layers. Still, it’s been snowing hard—sideways—all night long, and it shows no sign of letting up now. And we have no gloves.

  We had solidified into a light assault team to tackle this daunting project: to recce and then get a headlock on this enchanted land. Seen from space, the Black Hills look like a giant scab straddling the South Dakota–Wyoming border, an old necrotic wound that healed badly. But ground truth shows that wound to conceal more exceptional climbing, mountain biking, hiking, camping, caving, and all-around woods-and-wilderness delirium than any place I’ve seen in a very long time. Unfortunately, our crew is not very well acquainted with the better part of valor, and I have been concerned for some days now that one of us might get killed, never mind embarrassed.

  Bobby is by far the worst. He has Fitz Roy in Patagonia and even a near summit of Everest notched on his rack. So I can understand how he might not consider our little blizzard to be a very big deal.

  Julia is a marauder on a mountain bike. She’s only recently taken to climbing but has never learned the f-word. “Fear” is not in her lexicon. An MRI would show that in place of her amygdala, the fear center in the brain, are the McDonald’s arches. She might be the first and only woman to pee off the top of the Brooklyn
Bridge, which she did while filming Philippe Petit, who walked a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. And Sue was born and raised in these dark hills. She runs the climbing school and guide service here. But while Sue’s ceaseless optimism is bracing, she’s the one who decided that she and I didn’t need to bring a tent for ourselves on this overnight.

  Now she is reluctantly rising, as I realize that I left my new Montrail hiking shoes out in the snow all night.

  Bobby shoves Jake out into the screaming wind, and the dog is swallowed by a snowdrift. Three of us are sitting up now, but no one’s making a move to actually leave the tent.

  We reached the lookout tower at Harney Peak late yesterday afternoon to find the hills spread before us in every direction, fading to infinity in a gathering mist, shot through with a soothing golden sunlight. We hiked around to the west side of the mountain across jagged rocks and arêtes to find a place to camp in an area of small but ancient pines. Eons of erosion had lined shallow crevasses with soft soil, moss, grasses, and low-growing evergreen shrubs. Bobby and Julia set up their tent on a flat and sandy cliff edge where the wind seemed to accelerate through a venturi of towering rock steeples.

  While Julia and Bobby began unpacking dinner, I watched the eighty-by-sixty-mile crazy quilt of rock spires begin to drown in evening mist. It looked like a bowl filling with milk. From high above, I could see mobs and gangs of rock towers surrounding us, leaning in, dark, hoary, atavistic monoliths, urging us on. We could see white mountain goats grazing the ridges.