Brushing the Veil

Astroman, Yosemite Valley, with Anton Olausson

Brushing the Veil

                                                

“There are cracks to other worlds, places in our daily existence where you can pry the walls open and arrive on the other side—if you can get your fingers around the edges.”
                                             -Derek Franz, The Door and the Guillotine, Alpinist 36

“The Harding Slot is a dark place,” an old-timer in the Valley warned me.  I’d heard talk of how narrow it is, so I figured it would be dark inside.  Eager for the glory of success, I was enamored by the idea of getting up there and grunting it out.  I wouldn’t understand his meaning until I actually did.

In the middle of the Slot I reached a point where I was stuck, exhausting myself trying to make progress but unable to make any. I strained my neck to look down and in my peripheral vision could just make out the rope dangling freely from my harness toward my last gear, dozens of feet below.  I knew enough to recognize that I couldn’t retreat, there was no other option; I had to free climb out of this thing.

I hit a point of hopelessness.  It was so damn hard; I was straining every muscle and couldn’t gain an inch, or I’d gain one and slide back down, gasping.  I felt at the brink of despair.  I moaned in desperation, I bellowed in rage, the Slot didn’t care.  Its iron indifference to my anguish was terrifying.  The cold granite, slick with my condensing breath, felt like a tomb.  My pulse throbbed in futility against the walls and my raw shoulders stung and after so much useless flailing I finally accepted that I could not do this on my own.

Stuck in the Slot, I rested and surrendered my ego, my will to conquer.  I surrendered to the crack.  You win. I am weak.  Compared to my flailing life the stone is eternal.  I am a small blink in its memory, but I burn with the heat of blood and breath. 

                                    

On his solitary ramblings, John Muir recognized that as grand as they are, the mighty stones here yield to an even more constant force, the river Merced, the river of mercy.  Sweating and breathing in the dark cage of the Slot, I asked for mercy from the spirit of the place.  I humbled myself before this spirit.  I am weak.  May I pass? Through my narrow view of the sunlit world I watched two ravens drift past on some invisible thermal, imperturbable. 

I surrendered to the spirit of the Valley and started moving upward in half-inch bursts.  Where before I could not move with all my effort, I could now make progress. Somehow I recognized that it was not my strength I was using.  Obviously it took energy, the conversion of glycogen to ATP in coordinated contractions of muscle fibers in my legs and back and arms and chest, but was not my strength.  The movement flowed through me, from the valley to the sky, like a wave that I was suddenly shown how to ride.  I repeated my request as a mantra: valley of mercy, have mercy on me; when I stopped moving to rest I spoke this and kept moving.  In half-inch increments, whispering this prayer, I gained 2 inches, then 6 inches, a foot, two feet, until the Slot widened and I could get a chickenwing, move my limbs, and surge upward into sunshine.  It felt like being born.

It seems there’s a thin veil between our world of clocks and measured quantities and the world of essence and spirits.  Mired in the tentacle web of schedules and demands of 21^st century industrialized existence, we’re too busy to notice it most of the time, but sometimes, when life really gets down to the essence, we can touch it.  In the dark heart of the Harding Slot I brushed against that veil.  I relaxed my iron grip on ego and let something bigger move through me.  I became a vessel.  I was allowed passage.

Today, resting in El Cap meadow, staring up at the towering wall and preparing for another mission of even greater scale, I can vaguely remember the trials and fears of Astroman like a whimsical dream.  This day passes like others, the sun unerring on its endless march toward the west, but I feel something… different.  The touch from across the veil lingers on me, like smoke on my clothing.