Page 42 of Free Fall #1

“I try not to let it.” I flip my hair over my shoulder and lean forward, getting serious with him.

“I was doing okay with that until I decided to reassure myself by reading this book. Now I’ve got too many vivid pictures in my head.

It’s easier to pretend nothing scary is happening since I don’t climb with him—”

“You don’t? Ever?”

“I’m afraid of heights so he takes me up sometimes at night on smaller walls when I can’t see the exposure, but otherwise no.

I don’t see him do it, and I don’t participate, so it’s all”—I wave my hand—“something that’s out there somewhere.

You know, like how people feel about their parents’ places of work growing up.

They don’t see it often, so it’s easy to forget it even exists. ”

I rub a hand over my face. “Until the chemical companies shut down and leave your town in poverty, but that’s another thing entirely.”

“Sejin?”

“Yeah?”

Rye takes hold of my hand and squeezes. “I’m up there with him and let me tell you, he’s the best of the best, or one of them. He’s good. He’s more than good. He’s inhuman on those walls. But even I can’t promise you anything.”

“No. No one can.” I shove the book across the table. “Maybe I don’t want to read more of this.”

“Maybe you don’t. Or maybe you do. And maybe you should come up on a wall with me and Dan one day.”

“I can’t go up a wall like that. No way.”

“No, not this route he’s training for, anyway. But maybe another, less challenging one, and if you see how good he is, how it’s like breathing for him, then maybe it might ease your mind some.”

“He’ll be roped in, though.”

“Of course. He always is when he’s with me.”

“So, you’ve never seen him free solo?”

“Once. We went to the Grand Tetons, and he free soloed up a chimney. I just sat on the roof of the van and watched. He was amazing. Like watching a monkey climb a tree. Natural. Easy.”

“I don’t know…” I shiver. “I really hate heights. When we climb at night, it’s not so bad, and I do see how good he is. He’s really stable and reassuring. But he’s only taken me to Pothole Dome and some similar climbs like that. He doesn’t want to push me.”

“Maybe you should push yourself then. You don’t have to love it, but if you see how safe it is with ropes—”

“I know it’s safe with ropes. I just get vertigo from the exposure.”

“Right.” Rye rubs his chin, feeling his new hair growth. “That does make it harder.”

“I hear what you’re saying, though. It would be good for me to see him in his element so I understand more fully what he’s capable of. It’d soothe me.”

“Or it could make things worse.” Rye puts his hands up in a “don’t shoot” position. “There’s no saying what you might think or feel about it. It might give you too much to imagine at night when you can’t sleep. It really could go either way.”

“Thanks,” I say with a smile, but can’t help adding sarcastically. “This has been a very helpful conversation.”

Rye chuckles. “I’m sorry. I worry about him too.”

“Does he worry about himself?”

“I think so. He doesn’t want to die. But maybe you should ask him about the climb, have him review the pitches with you, explain why he is or isn’t worried about different parts of them. Knowledge can ease the anxiety of ignorance.”

“Or ignorance can be bliss.”

“Yeah.”

Pete comes in the front door and sees me sitting with Rye and checks his watch. “Don’t you have some hours to make up from when you took off early last week?”

I smile at him winningly, but he just rolls his eyes and motions for me to join him. So I press Rye’s hand and say, “Thanks for talking with me. Gotta get to work.”

“No rest for the wicked,” Rye says.

I don’t think I’m wicked, but as I gather my things and go change into my work uniform, I wish I were a witch or wizard who could put a spell on Dan to keep him safe on the wall as he climbs.

He’d hate that, though. He wants to send the route completely on his own.

Me? Well, I just don’t want to lose him.

*

Dan

“You’ve never been interested in this before.”

I’m a little skeptical. It’s not that I don’t want to show Sejin my plans for Heart Route, but his sudden interest is noteworthy, and my experience with people is that when something is “noteworthy,” it also means “trouble.”

“It’s important to you, and I’d like to know more about it.”

“Hmm.”

I go ahead and get out my notebook with all the topo and beta for the route, and also my Yosemite Big Walls Guidebook.

I crack it open first. “So, this is Heart Route,” I say, running a finger over the line on the photo showing the twenty-six pitches that I’ve etched into my own heart and mind through repetition over the last three years.

I’ve gone over the same terrain again and again, usually alone on the wall since most people have little to no interest in this magical route for some reason. Probably the difficulty with the dyno and the roof, and probably because there are more famous routes to master first.

I explain all of that to Sejin. “That’s part of why I picked this one. It’s ignored.”

“Twenty-six pitches? What does that mean?”

“A pitch is a section of rock, basically the length of one rope. A single pitch climb is one rope length, and a multi-pitch climb is multiple rope lengths.”

“So, this is twenty-six rope lengths?” Sejin touches the red line on the photo of El Cap.

“Yup. And what you and I have done together, when we’ve gone out at night, have all been a single pitch or less.”

“Ah.” Sejin frowns slightly, touching the line again. “What are the hardest parts?”

“Well, the first seven pitches are known as the Heart Blast, and they’re pretty tiring; I’m not going to lie.

That’s why fitness and consistent training is key.

You can’t afford to get up past Heart Blast and then be so exhausted you pump out—” Sejin says, nothing, but I go on to explain it anyway.

“That’s when your grip muscles get weak from lactic acid due to overwork, especially in your hands and arms, and you let go against your will. ”

Sejin’s breath hitches.

“That’s almost never happened to me.”

“Right… Almost.”

“And never while free soloing,” I say soothingly. “Obviously. Because I’m alive.”

Sejin’s body tenses, and I forge on ahead. “Pitch 6, which they call Dub Step, has some of the most difficult moves of the entire route. A down climb—which is when you climb down instead of up, obviously, and a dyno.”

“Dyno?”

I know he knows this term, because I’ve mentioned it before, but I explain it again. “It’s a dynamic movement—in this case, basically a sideways leap.”

“A leap.”

“Mm, and once you’ve started it, you’re committed. You can’t change your mind midway.”

“Ah.”

“So that’s rough stuff, but I’ve been practicing that move a ton this season, both up on the route itself, and with similar dynos elsewhere. I built out the exact dimensions of this dyno on a climbing wall I installed at the barn I was staying in last winter—”

“You were staying in a barn?”

“Yeah, I guess I never mentioned it. It was cheap—as in free—because it was abandoned, and I put a climbing wall on the side of it. I built a model of this dyno and worked my ass off on it. Got to where I was about ninety percent with it, but…” I cluck my tongue.

“The exposure changes things. Obviously.”

“Obviously…” Sejin’s throat convulses as he swallows.

I point out the next pitch. “This is the slab that leads to Heart Ledge. It’s a tough section.

The first team to free climb it—that’s going up with ropes but not using any aids—thought at first it would be impossible, but they found these tiny holds about the width of the side of a nickel.

Sharp holds. Good thing my fingers are calloused all to hell, huh? ”

“Yeah,” he says faintly.

“The steepest climbing is here, starting with the roof pitches.” Here my voice falters a little, and I hope he doesn’t catch it. “It’s spooky, but doable. It’s rated 5.14d which is…well, the rating says it all.”

“Difficult.”

“Very.” I move past the roof pitches and sweep on to the next bit, a crazy flake at a rough angle.

“After that, it’s a section of smooth granite with nickel-sized holds, but then you take Golden Gate right on up to the top.

” I don’t emphasize the true difficulty of the section directly after the roof.

“Well,” Sejin says, leaning back away from the photo. “None of that is extremely reassuring.”

I can’t help the laugh that barks out of me. “Doc, this is hard stuff, but it’s not impossible.”

“Maybe it should be impossible.”

“It just takes training—”

“And luck.”

“Mostly training. As they say, ‘shit happens’, but my job is to make sure I’m in a position to have the climb of my life before I even start up.”

“The climb of your life,” Sejin repeats, and I hear a bit of bitterness. “The final climb of your life, maybe.”

I sit back, jaw tensing. I don’t want to fight with him about this. “Any moment of any day could be the final one.”

“Sure, but statistically—”

“Look, when I was nine, this kid at my school’s dad died, and do you know how?”

“How?”

“He was parked at a stop sign when a massive limb from a tree collapsed onto his car, crushing him.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And when I was in middle school, this kid named John died after getting allergy shots. The anaphylaxis didn’t start until he and his mom were on the highway, far from the doctor’s office, no EpiPen in the car, and boom…dead.”

“Jesus.”

“And Peggy Jo’s husband Ivan died when he was only thirty-two—Bella was just nine—while swimming in the ocean. A freak riptide grabbed him. Look, we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“So why bring extra danger into your life?”

I lean back, frustrated. “Because I can’t live out an existence where I don’t at least see how far I can go against a completely unfeeling, uncaring world—in this case, the rock.”

Sejin swallows and looks back down at the map. “I’m going to make peace with this,” he says quietly. “I am. I don’t want to be the guy who couldn’t handle the enormity of his boyfriend’s dreams. I’m just scared.”

I take hold of his hand and kiss his fingers. “I get scared too.”

“Do you?”

“Of course. I’m not a robot.”

“No…” Sejin says, leaning forward and burying his face against my neck, kissing the skin there softly. “You’re not a robot at all. You’re flesh and blood. You’re fragile.”

“Not as fragile as you think. I’m made of tough stuff. So are you.”

Sejin doesn’t argue, but he does push me down to the mattress and climb on top of me. His weight is comforting and warm, and he says nothing, does nothing, for a very long time.

We just hold each other and breathe.