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Double D
climber
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Mark, if Jello endorses it, what’s not to like? Sounds like you’re off to an awesome start.
Personally I always enjoy books and movies that make it “real” for me… especially when it comes to activities that I’ve nurtured in my own life. I always use the movie “Point Break” as an example of making something real. The audience lived through the frustration of learning how to surf. Those of us who do surf could totally relate in a way that re-surfaced the memories of what that struggle was like. Then they moved into the “I get it” phase, particularly in the moonlight surfing scene. It’s all about the connection made which, in that case was the waves and the rhythm of being in sync with that environment. The main story line carried the excitement but the honesty and transparency of the actual sport came across in a very powerful way to both surfers and I assume non-surfers.
It’s not enough to write about the excitement of a sport, you have to really get to the core of the elation experienced.
Or… you could just use a bolt-gun and get it over with! (-;
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TomT
Trad climber
Aptos.
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I like Double D's thought. I like to relive climbing decisions- when to run it out, when to bail, when to hunker down in a storm, when to press for the top. Those are adrenaline fed moments, vivid in my memory, relived hundreds of times. I'd like to read about those and their consequences-good and bad . Mark and I got caught half way up WF Leaning Tower when we were teens, in a full spring blizzard. We were pressing on, but it was stupid crazy, down jackets (before poly) soaked to the core, lighting strikes wrapping our heads in white light, watching an etrier flutter away, a pin dropped by a frozen half mitt, and finally we gave in, back-nailing (back-flailing), and after touching the bottom, straight away driving out of the valley, wipers struggling to show us the way home through the rain.
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Captain...or Skully
Social climber
North of the Owyhees
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Yowza, Tom.... I can see it all.
Hard right rudder, Ya scurvy dog, into the waves!
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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david roberts wrote a novella titled "like water and like wind", and to me it is still the gold standard for climbing fiction. it's just a breathtaking read.
but, having said that, my guess is that if i were not a climber "like water and like wind" would have seemed unremarkable enough.
writing a really good novel that realistically incorporates climbing and at the same time would be be of interest to a general readership...is it even possible?
james ramsey ullman wrote stuff like "the white tower", did these books ever make it beyond a climbing audience? i dunno/
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bvb
Social climber
flagstaff arizona
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ok, "banner in the sky" by ullman was, like, a runner-up for the the newbery award in 1955. the newbery is like the national book award or the pulitzer for children's books. so yeah, it's been done (in children's lit, anyway).
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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writing a really good novel that realistically incorporates climbing and at the same time would be be of interest to a general readership...is it even possible?
Dunno about the "good novel" and "realistic" part, but there are a few "successful" novels with climbing in them. "The Eiger Sanction" might be trash, but it sold a zillion copies and was made into a movie...
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Mark Rodell
Trad climber
Bangkok
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Topic Author's Reply - May 15, 2009 - 12:45am PT
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Some that responded to this thread asked for an excerpt from my novel, A Stance of Wonder. My initial response to this was that you can’t tear off a patch of a painting to get a sense of the work. However, perhaps this is not as applicaable to a novel as to paintings.
I’ll try to copy and paste a small bit from the final chapter. I don’t want to give too much background of the story, nor do I want to summarize the novel. I started the thread to generate discussion around fictional works that have and could use climbing as a background or as an involvement of characters within a novel.
But another weekend is upon us and perhaps you may enjoy a short bit of my writing to fire you up for a couple of days in the crags.
The narrator has linked up with the main character, Conrad Flowers, after a long separation. Both are now deep into middle age. Years earlier Conrad lost and eye and was disfigured in a climbing accident. He put down climbing but has now decided to give it another go. Walter is Conrad’s uncle and Glory, Walter’s love interest.
From Chapter Fourteen
Conrad called the day after I’d seen him at S.F. Peaks and asked me to meet him in Yosemite on the weekend. I wanted to talk but he said we’d have time later. Friday afternoon, after teaching, I got in my new 2002 Ford Everest and drove alone to the Park. The rolling hills that separate the coast and the Central Valley were green but turning tawny and the wild poppies were blooming orange. I turned up the music high, played Santana and the Dead and time rolled back. The ropes in the back were new. I’d bought Conrad a harness as a gift and I was on an adventure again. The rote work of classes, grading and student issues were sixty miles behind, a mile more every minute. I was getting younger. I stopped for gas and bought a thirty-two-ounce soda and a big bag of sunflower seeds and munched my way across the valley and was on the road leading to the park by late afternoon and I pressed to make it before sundown to see the last light on El Cap.
Conrad said to meet him in Climber’s Camp but when I roared through El Portal and past Glory’s shop, I saw Conrad’s truck. It took me a minute to decide to turn around. I thought maybe Conrad wanted private time with Glory and Walter but decided that I also wanted to see them. Glory had often confided in me about her concerns over Conrad and Walter was always a surprise. I wonder what he’d be like deep into old age.
When I entered the shop it was empty. There was nobody at the counter. Anyone could have come in and walked away with the store. I went back out and walked around back past old wooden window frames, a cracked toilet and a pile of used lumber. I heard Conrad and Glory in disagreement, then Walter.
I heard Walter,“It’s my project, you two. You’ll do it like I say.”
I turned the corner and stood looking at the three. Conrad and Glory were sitting at a picnic table and Walter was standing on a chair with a video camera filming. He was filming Conrad and Glory making arrangements. There were seven baskets on the table filled with flowers: one filled just with dandelions, another filled with California poppies, one of oleander blossoms. One basket held lupine and one of yarrow; another held purple thistle blooms and a basket of red clover buds.
Conrad saw me, called “Good, I hoped you’d see the truck. Come here and put your hands to this.”
Glory got up and using a walker shuffled a couple of steps toward me. I stepped forward and hugged her. Walter called her back, told her to get to work. Without turning the camera away from the table, he told me to sit down and watch and pick up what they were doing. They were sticking the stems of the flowers though large, boatlike false hellebore leaves, the long leaves cupping the blossoms. About a hundred of these flowered boats rested to the side, some held only one kind of flower, others were an assortment and this was the cause of Glory and Conrad’s disagreement. Conrad, in Glory’s mind, was using too many different assortments.
Conrad said, “When they float by, the colors are going to blend and who knows what hues will result.”
“Yeah,” said Glory, “it’ll be a mess.”
“Trust it,” said Walter. “Let it work itself out.”
Walter was filming the whole process. He and Glory had gone out and collected the flowers and this had been recorded and after the boats were ready they were going to release them in the Merced and film the releases, film them releasing themselves from the calm rotation of the eddy below the deck and then film them shooting through the gaps between boulders and when they got caught in the turbulence of rapids.
“So Conrad, you climbing again?” asked Glory.
“I am.”
“Why?” asked Walter. “Thought it was over.”
“It was, but I see it different now.”
Then I said, “It’s safer now. People put in a lot more bolts and the bolts are a lot closer together. Long falls are pretty much in the past. It’s called Sport Climbing.”
Conrad said while smiling, “Oh, I’m not going to be doing that. I’m going for understanding. What the rock or mountain gives up I’ll use. I’m going to try not to impose.”
“Sure, if there is a crack, well, you use it. But if there is nothing, then you have to knock something in,” I said.
“Nope. That’s my point, find out what is there.”
“But that would limit the climbing.”
“It would also open it up.”
Then Glory told us to stop yammering about stuff neither Walter or her were interested in, but Walter said there were common points. He said he was still learning what pigments would allow.
“Besides,” said Conrad, “the danger is very important.”
I understood what Conrad was saying but resisted it. I did not want dying to be part of climbing. I wanted the feeling of accomplishment, wanted the views and fellowship, but then, I questioned if I could have those without the risk.
We made the leaf ships and talk turned to age. Walter was into his eighties and Glory seventy. Conrad asked Walter if he was still going back and forth from Bishop to Glory’s.
“I still am an Eastside man but living in this canyon has focused my work. I get more out of little things, but I still need expanse. I have stopped going up to the Palisades, too many people. I go to the Whites now. I found a camp where there are bristlecone pines and I can view more than a hundred miles of the Sierra. It’s different. It’s dry, few lakes and because I’m up so high, the nights are cold. I see sunsets, not rises, but it fits. Old men don’t need as much water. Maybe I am turning into a mummy.”
“You have always been a dry old goat,” said Glory. “Now that the light is gone, can I make dinner?”
“I’m taking you out, and if you guys want, I’ll feed you too. Cedar Lodge, okay?”
“No, that’s okay,” I said.
“No, let’s feast,” said Conrad. “We got a climb tomorrow.”
I have a copy of the film Walter made of the flower boats. I play it and listen to the water sounds and marvel at the random play, circling at first, hundreds of them bunched in the spiral of the eddy they start from, looking like a single large spinning blossom. I watch how one or a group release into the major current.
When I watch this I sometimes think of a time when I was seven or eight and in a summer recreation program. The directors had had us fill out index cards with our names and address and we put a stamp on the card and tied the card to a helium-filled balloon and released them. We had a map and when a card was returned we would mark where it was found. The map filled without my card being returned. Watching Walter’s film brings back the hope that my card might yet be returned and reach me.
The next day Conrad and I drove into the park. I followed Conrad’s truck, his teepee poles in a rack on top of his truck. He pulled over in the turnout that was below Cathedral Rocks. He wanted to climb Braille Book.
“What do you think, good choice for a one-eyed man?” he asked.
I had done the route before and knew it was not too difficult, that there were many places to set cams or nuts. It was long and never really easy but it was far up a canyon so the hike would be tiring and the descent, equally taxing, especially considering my fitness. But I was excited to be climbing with Conrad and excited to touch real rock again. I’d only climbed in gyms for the past years and found fun in packing food and water. Conrad brought apples and oranges, celery and carrots. I brought a can of sardines and three quarts of water. We left our trucks at eight and it was still nearly cold. We found the faint trail that wanders up the canyon. The density of the forest blocked all the noise of the cars that looped around the valley floor and I could hear our footfalls, my breathing. Conrad walked a steady pace and, as years before, talked little. We startled a doe, and it cracked through dry branches as it ran from us. I put my hand on a tree and brought it back sticky with fragrant pine sap and this hovered around me all day.
At the base of the climb we roped up and Conrad led the first pitch. He did it quickly and only put four nuts into the crack, going thirty feet between placements and yet I was unconcerned; he climbed without effort, body away from the rock, always with three points on the rock while reaching with a hand or stepping up with a foot. Came my turn and I surprised myself with my speed, finding rhythm easily. After three rope lengths we rested on a small ledge.
“You know,” said Conrad, “when I told Walter that I should have visited, he said twenty-eight years isn’t such a long time. What do you think?”
I said, “He has a point if you are eighty.”
“I don’t know if you have to be eighty for it to make sense. You can do an awful lot in a year, and nothing over ten. Time might not make much sense.”
“I guess.”
“He said he wanted to sign over his land to me.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him to will it to an art department, give to a school.”
“Wouldn’t be easy. It is hard to give stuff away.”
“Yeah, crazy, huh. That doesn’t make sense either.”
It was a fine day of climbing. I had forgotten how I loved the whole deal. When we topped out we coiled the ropes, ate the last of the food and started down. Conrad took off his eye patch and it showed up as a clean zone on an otherwise dirty face. He asked me if I had time to climb the next day, Sunday, and I said sure and then he asked me if I wanted to try a new line.
“I felt pretty good today,” I said, “but I don’t know if I am up for putting up a new line.”
“It wouldn’t have to be hard,” he said. “I think I know of something we could try.”
Camp was cleaner than years before, organized and controlled. Better and newer cars were in the lot. I found an empty parking space next to Kris’s van. He hadn’t left the bounds of the Park in more than fifteen years, climbing most every day, reading in his van at night, making money when film crews came in, moving gear and rigging lights to vertical faces. Conrad found a space nearby and walked over.
“Hey Kris, how have you been?”
“Conrad, you back?”
“Just day-tripping now. Place the same?”
“It’s still rock and climbers. I solo a lot now. Lots of us are.”
“Going alone?”
“Not always. Sometimes a couple of us will go out but leave the ropes in the cars. I mean, friends are important. There are us and traditionalists and the rock gymnasts—the sports climbers. There’s room for all. Some guys are up on walls more than they are down here, twenty five days out of a month, up. So some things are the same and some aren’t.”
“That’s wild, twenty-five out of thirty.” said Conrad.
“You know, the Nose, what you wanted, was freed.”
“By who? When?”
“Lynn Hill, and she came back and did it in a day. Nobody else has come close, only her. Ninety three when she did it first.”
“It’s like that sometimes. Someone will second it but I’m glad someone got it, and it’s good that it is still a rare thing,” said Conrad. “Kris, climbing tomorrow?”
“Braille Book.”
“We did it today.”
“Want to do it again, sans cord?”
I heard this and jumped in right away and said no. Conrad and I were both out of the grove.
“It’d be a new route, wouldn’t it?” Conrad said.
“Conrad.”
“We did it today and you know we didn’t have any problems. We can do it.”
I looked at him and was angry. I had hoped that the years would have brought him down. I had wanted him to see as I did, to feel and fear as I. But here he was, willing and wanting to climb, again, a step or more, much more ahead of me. Climbing the Braille Book had me believe we were level and now, even with so much time having passed, Conrad was confident in a way I may never know.
“F*#k you,” I said. “I’ll see you around. I’m going for a drink.”
Conrad found me at nine. I was in the Mountain Room Bar, working my third whiskey sour, talking with some climbers who had found jobs in the park. Our talk was all in the past tense, past lives of the people we’d once been. Conrad found me and asked to talk outside. The guys I’d been talking with knew Conrad, remembered him and asked him to sit but he asked me again to come out. And I sat for a minute.
Conrad started. “Kris and I are leaving tomorrow morning at eight. You should come with us. We both want you to go.”
“Why do you always have to raise the bar, Conrad? No rope, Christ, it’s ten pitches, fifteen-hundred feet and all I have to do is get tired, and I will, get tired and misstep or panic and I’m gone. I am afraid just talking about it. Aren’t you?”
“No, and you don’t have to be either. I got tired of being tired of death. You could do that climb fifty times with a rope and never fall, never need it, right?”
“So, what’s your point?”
“You don’t believe in yourself, doubt yourself, even against the evidence.”
“Conrad, it’s a stupid game you’re pushing. You think everyone should climb without ropes? Get rid of all protection? You want to see me back off.”
“Not true. I’m saying each case is different. And this is for me too. I want this. I need the edge and I am not going to get it through doing tougher and tougher climbs, gymnastically more difficult routes. I can’t do that but I still can get closer to understanding.
“Climbing is not just about the moves. It is not just summits. I heard Walter say yesterday that a river is not defined by water. Climbing is the same. I think that the rope today blocked some of the experience, got in the way of us understanding the rock and the wind. And it got in the way of me understanding and knowing you, blocked me knowing my movements. All of it. And I am curious to go back and do it with you, with Kris and without a rope. I want to get it, to experience fully. I wonder about it.”
“Conrad, goddamn it, do you think I can do it?”
“I know you can, but there is no lock on living long.”
Three in a line, walking, maybe heard the same doe. Seemed hotter, the trail steeper and longer. Told myself I could back off at the base. They’d be cool, not tell, but I, now over forty, know I crucify myself most cruelly and others don’t hammer in the nails. Told myself it’d be a good way to go. Fall. I drank some water and Conrad joked, said I used to do this and then try to deal for his water ration. Three old guys going up and then we were at the base and my mood turned. I told Kris he didn’t know what I was going through, that he had lived in the Valley so long and climbed so long and for so many days, years, he had no idea of what I was going to do. He said I was right.
I went first. I had to. I was going to get ill if I did not move and so I took off and then after twenty feet of going too fast I slowed and ten more feet, rested on a small ledge. The moves were all clear and easy to see. Holds were solid. I moved with care and concentration and heard Kris and Conrad below. They were climbing and I took heart in this and continued to the first belay ledge where we could all sit or stand.
In the movies they say don’t look down. Whatever you do, don’t look down. But I wanted to and did. Yes, it did stir up reluctance and fear, but it backed off. The higher I went, the more I understood my climbing, what I could do and how to move. I felt my weight clearly and knew how hard I was squeezing a hold, how hard I was pinching. I never was aware of that before. I relaxed a little, didn’t use myself up.
I recognized holds from the day before, but definition was heightened. I continued to go first, Conrad next, then Kris. We said little, nothing about how to move, no suggestions. No. Conrad noticed the sound of the cliff swallows jetting by and said he only remembered hearing them in shady places. I said I could remember the taste of the carrots we’d eaten yesterday but it was like I was eating them right then.
We went pretty fast. Kris said we should rest, that soloing is almost always faster and there’s time to pause and check things out. When climbing with ropes the person who belays has this time, and it is meditative and relaxing. This day we sat on top of a big block wedged into the long corner we were ascending, an open book, tilted to eighty-plus degrees. We were in the shade and opposite were the Cathedral Spires. They were in full sun, striking, vertical arrows of granite. Conrad said he heard music. I didn’t and don’t think Kris did either but we kept it to ourselves. Kris told a story of soloing with Tommy Smit and Smit he said, his emotions ran out like water out a hydrant. First he was laughing and then yelling and laughing again, spat anger like the devil, all the while Smit kept climbing. Kris said they ran down the descent trail at a full sprint and it was scarier than the climb, afraid he’d smack or tumble but he said he felt protected by Smit’s energy, said Smit jumped over a five-foot-high boulder in a bound.
Conrad, holding a small pebble in one hand and pouring a smidge of water over it said, “So much depends upon lichen on a pebble, wet colors jumping beside calm white quartz.”
I said, “What?”
“Ideas spring from things, said a poet,” said Conrad. “The William Williams guy.”
It was crazy-ass sh#t that I heard on that block with Conrad and Kris, three-quarters up, a thousand feet up by eleven in the morn. Unreal.
They waited for me to start and I did after half a peaceful hour. Panic drew a cut line on me after a hundred feet off the block. The corner opened up and the route moved out onto the open wall. It wasn’t that the climbing got harder, only different and once this fear flared, I had to stop. Big air, just space down to the trees and the gravel at the base and I had it in my mind for a bit, that if I moved any way, up or sideways, I was going to fall. I was there for two minutes when I heard Conrad say, “Just one move up. Just that in mind, okay?”
I did move that one move, set my foot on a hold and pulling, stepped up. Then the next handhold looked bigger and I took hold of it and saw where to put a foot and I was again climbing. We moved out of the shadow and it was warm and the top was soon to be and I was almost sad that it had passed so fast.
On the next ledge I let Kris and Conrad get ahead of me and when they topped out and called down to me that I had only fifty more feet, I told them to shut up and get the hell going, I wanted them down the trail. I wanted to be alone at the top but they were there at the lip and saw my tears. Three old guys at the top of a rock, most of the day left and I, for one, thinking better of myself and them and the Park that I had known for years. Conrad was no longer my hero
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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May 15, 2009 - 01:22am PT
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hey there mark, say... i am a writer, but not on climbing..
i write the jake smith ranch series..
seizures, head injury and tongue loss issues... and about fraternal twins, and realtionships in overcoming...
no one wanted to publish my books, (ficiton)... but i eventually found lulu.com and i will not give up...
until i can ever find a publisher, i just make my own, and try to advertise them... at least, it is a start for me, even if it goes nowhere...
i know i am supposed to keep the project alive and i have more stories to write, so i do so....
god bless and best wishes... keep on looking to publish your work... if you want to, you can also do lulu.com an make your own store front, or, even pay for isbn, then and get it on amazon.com....
http://stores.lulu.com/neebeeshaabookwayreadjakeanddonate
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Daphne
Trad climber
Mill Valley, CA
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May 15, 2009 - 01:48am PT
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I still own "Banner in the Sky" from when I was a child. I loved that book and read it so many times that I could still tell you the exact plot line. A great climbing book. And I was a little non-athletic geeky girl back in the days I loved and re-read that book. (Maybe a seed planted that led me to eventually tying in?)
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Mark Rodell
Trad climber
Bangkok
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Topic Author's Reply - May 15, 2009 - 02:13am PT
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Sorry about the page layout. When I copied it onto this site, the indentations and other things came out different than how it is in the manuscript.
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mooser
Trad climber
seattle
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May 19, 2009 - 04:47pm PT
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So, Ghost...I'm about a quarter of the way through your book - (Deadly) Vortex - and I'm diggin' it. Dude, you're a good writer!
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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May 19, 2009 - 05:03pm PT
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Thanks Tom.
Once you've finished it, and once I'm back from visiting my dad back on the prairies, let's go climbing.
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mooser
Trad climber
seattle
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May 19, 2009 - 05:11pm PT
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Sounds great, David! Have a good visit.
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hossjulia
Trad climber
Eastside
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May 19, 2009 - 05:43pm PT
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Mark,
I loved this excerpt! Made my hands sweat. The emotions and fears are very real. Very cerebral.
Yeah man.
(Edited out fever induced confusion, carry on.)
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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May 19, 2009 - 08:24pm PT
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Book + climbing = GOOD.
Bring it on!!!
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couchmaster
climber
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May 19, 2009 - 11:41pm PT
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Ditto the good comments on Banner in the Sky. It was more than a climbing book. Like to see your work too Mark, if Jeff Lowe is impressed......
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
merced, california
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Apr 16, 2012 - 03:25pm PT
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Better late than never, as books tend to hang around for years. I just read a line from a Robert Graves book, White Goddess, to the effect that
THERE IS ONLY ONE STORY. He's being mystical about myth. Chase that cat around the block, says the Mouse.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Apr 17, 2012 - 10:55am PT
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Climbers don't want to read your book, because they've lived it.
yea, kinda my feelings too. nonclimbers get attracted to climbing because of their sorry, dull, inactive lives. climbers climb. there is some stuff to be read, of course, but when i pick up a novel, i have to be attracted to the story. the story is all. if you're gussying it up with sex and climbing to make it marketable, maybe you should be in marketing, not writing.
i was a tony hillerman addict, but as a climber i found his novel the fallen man particularly disappointing. it begins with a dead climber discovered on shiprock in new mexico, which is off limits to climbing. great start, but hillerman did not know or understand climbing, and it showed. sly stallone also looked like a climbing idiot in cliffhanger.
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Toker Villain
Big Wall climber
Toquerville, Utah
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Apr 17, 2012 - 11:05am PT
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Like I said; gotta have a bolt gun.
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Yeti
Trad climber
Ketchum, Idaho
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Apr 17, 2012 - 04:46pm PT
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I've read Mark's novel and it's really good. I recommend it.
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