Holy Stokes Pt 1
From the soft dark he can hear the ring of chimes - quiet at first, just the deep edge of enormous forms, but gradually becoming celestial, timeless, holy. He can feel himself falling through the rosy glow of dawn, at it’s heart a pulsing seed of sound. His flailing, weightless limbs conduct the curves of sound into a rising tide.
He can’t feel the wind on his skin, but it still feels like he’s falling, falling, falling into a sea of lurid wails that blossom to enclose him and then, just as quickly, recede into the past. He’s gone too far, he hears the roar of the terminator coming; where there was nothing, there is green.
He’s in a field of frost-bitten juniper fruits though it’s summer, his hands already on the red rocks of the summit.
He climbs frantically, his breath huge and hoarse. His hands are on fire, smeared with sweat and dust of crumbling rock. The wind is gone, the song is his. He’s found the source, so placid. Warm. Inviting. On his knees, he grovels in perfumed cinders, tears well from his cold eyes, and he welcomes in the raging chorus.
Then, suddenly.
Silence.
——
He opens his eyes into complete darkness and the whisper of wind. The air is dry and cold and it tastes of stone, and then the other sensations slowly filter in. The slip of nylon against his skin, the broken spring that’s jagged against his back, the faint texture of wood right next to his head. He’s alone.
He suddenly remembers and sits up, smashing his head into the low beam above his bunk. With a hiss he sinks into the fetal position where he’s able to slough the pain into the slippery mass of down and silk of his sleeping bag. His hands press against his temples and shove the stars back inside of his skull. Finally, he’s able to rise and meet the disoriented feeling on his feet.
For a moment, there’s only fragments. The sick feeling that had been in his stomach for the last three days lurches again as he thinks of driving to the airport alone, sleeping on the dirty tile floor in Guatemala City, hours of a ten minute organ grinder loop playing against the fluorescent buzz worming his way inside his skull, the empty seat next to him, the engines screaming on the descent into Castiloche. The blurry death wish that always hung around in the background, crispening around the edges.
As the explosion in his skull tapers off, his breathing slows and other sensations get the right of way. It’s cold, he thinks, shivering in his underwear in the corner of an empty room. He bends down to get his sleeping bag and feels the lump on his forehead pulse as the blood rushes to his head. A soft groan escapes his lips, but he manages to get the sleeping bag around his shoulders and the darkness sweeps from the corners of his eyes when he stands upright.
Through the window next to his bunk, he can see the moon - swollen and orange, sinking quickly towards a jagged sea of white-coated ridges. Around the cabin, the fresh snow glitters like a handful of cruel diamonds. It’s so perfect, so frigid, that his breath catches. He starts to turn around, ready to crow in satisfaction, vindicated for the absolute circus that it took to get here, but the words turn to ashes on his tongue. She isn’t here. Judging by the empty bunks of the refugio, actually, no one’s here. All ten are empty. On the far wall, though, he can just make out the silhouette of a door by the thin crack of light around it. Maybe they’re in the kitchen?
The optimistic train of thought is interrupted by the faint bzzz - bzzz - bzzz from somewhere in the darkness near his bunk, and it’s like the breakers go out inside his head. Suddenly, he’s on his knees, digging frantically through the crevices around the mattress. Fishing his phone out from behind the bed, he blinks in the bright white light of the screen.
¡Buenos días! El desayuno está en la estufa, estaré de vuelta en unas horas. ¿Necesitas algo?
For a moment, he debates just ignoring the message, but he sees the little blue check in the corner - she’ll see he’s read it. He rubs his forehead and chews on the edge of his thumb. His fingers hover over the keyboard. I gotta say something… what if she comes back before I leave? It’d be a whole thing. So he types back no gracias and pauses for a minute. Period? Exclamation mark? The absurdity hits him. Man, I don’t have time for this. He hits send and is about to throw the phone back into his bag but then he looks at the screen shining blankly in the darkness and can’t stand to let it go. He tucks it into his waistband, walks to the other side of the room, and opens the door.
______________
The biggest problem in chasing a good stoke was other people. Two hundred years ago, Will always tell whoever would listen, there was no such thing as the tourist crowd. There were just the pure of heart, those who chased stoke with enough abandon that their names became synonymous with adventure. He knew this because he’d read about it, eating up the stories almost without breathing, allowing them to enter his mind like fully formed objects, the homunculus of adventure curling up in the corners of his mind, from where it filled his dreams with coral beaches washed with turquoise waters.
In his favorite one, he would arrive on the shore of a familiar island where the waters were filled with corals and the waves broke gently on a white-sand beach. When his feet finally touched the shore, a small child, a girl, maybe ten years old, would appear and solemnly lead him back into the water, where they would stand, perfectly still, until the fish grew complacent. At just the right moment - which he never quite knew how to anticipate - her hand would rush into the water like a spear and emerge with a fish in hand. It was always the same fish: orange, spiked, with ponderous lips and enormous eyes that rolled indignantly in its head. Without waiting, she would break it’s neck and sink her jaws into the soft flesh of its flank, threading the meat from the bones with her sharp little teeth. She would hand it to him with a gesture that meant it was his turn. Though in the waking world the thought of raw fish turned his stomach, here there was no question - he would eat. Its flesh felt spicy on his tongue, as if an electric current ran from it to him, and he would close his eyes to savor the moment. When he opened them, the sky would be changed to a sunset so vibrant it was like a molten bowl had been upturned into the sky, and there would be nothing left in his hands except for a pile of exquisite bones that stung his palms. At the very edge of the beach, just where it turned into an impenetrable wall of green, the girl would wave him on before disappearing. With the first steps in her direction, where he felt so strongly that he needed to go the clouds above the trees would slowly clear to reveal an ancient, broken plug of granite that called him to ascend.
Climbing the mountain never happened, and he had never been able to figure out it was a real place. Years of searching had only served to convince him that he’d been born in the wrong century, that by the time he arrived on the planet everything that could be reached had been reached. All the continents mapped, all the animals named, all the mountains climbed once, twice, and then in a chain one after another with a television crew in tow. More and more, he became tortured by the idea that nothing worth achieving remained.
What bothered him was how sudden it seemed. Even a generation ago the tourists were still contained to hyper-localized resort pods, simulacra of civility that allowed the extraction of coffee beans, bananas & rum to hum contentedly in the background, while the foreground was filled with travertine courtyards lit by the dancing flames of white-cloth pig roasts. But their children noticed the frighteningly thin aborigines scraping the uneaten food from their plates and vowed to swear off the sterile flavors of canned culture. Instead of remaining ensconced in a fantasy that was starting to get tattered around the edges, touched by too many unwashed hands, they wanted to meet the people, to kiss the little babies, to climb the mountains and etch their names into the rocks at the top. What never quite settled in their minds at the outset was how little interest they had for the people who had pulled themselves fist-over-fist from the dirt, or how tongue tied they would be when confronted with the family photo albums of the disappeared, with the women selling tapestries for poverty wages, or with the quiet men with royal features, wizened into grey age by 30.
Still, it was hard to blame them, even now that everything teetered drunkenly on the verge of collapse. They couldn’t have stayed home, where the options for notoriety were rapidly shrinking. Every year more and more people competed for a smaller number of slots, eventually coming to realize that they were living in a world where they were disposable - maybe even by design - because there wasn’t quite enough to go around and have everyone stay comfortable. So an entire generation was seduced by the dream that the rest of the world was the canvas where they could paint a new version of themselves, where they could construct a heroic narrative from a few unnamed mountains, a decade of unrequited love, and a drinking problem.
Of course, almost no one could stand such razor-thin living for more than a few weeks, maybe a few months. Luckily, washing out didn’t mean going home - it just meant it was time to descend the mountain and dissolve into the living fabric of the jungle, sleeper-cell sages for what was to come. Sure, there was some resistance among the natives when the next wave first started showing up, odd groups of boys with tousled hair and ladies with sleepy eyes and beaded fringe jackets who all seemed to live in converted school busses, looking for something fresh, but it didn’t have much spine to it when faced with the quantity of dollars in their pockets, secondary only to abundance to the confidence in their hearts that across the border they would find their final salvation. Without ever appearing to be crusaders, they converted every coastal village and jungle hamlet accessible by road.
Eventually this crystallized into the backpacking circuit, a not fundamentally different version of the all-you-can-eat resorts left behind in childhood. What it lacked in polished stone, gleaming wood and flower crowns it made up for with tile-floored dormitories with little lockers for valuables at the head of each bunk, stacks of boardgames, and little cups of espresso served with buttered white bread dripping with fresh honey. It was a fever that traveled by word of mouth, and within a year or two it became possible to spend a few weeks liveing shoulder-to-shoulder with rowdy australians looking for a drink, hard-faced israelis fresh out of the army, and the occasional remote worker who was still running the books for businesses back home - but happened to be spending work days in the shade of a coconut palm, rather than under the thumb of a loose-brained manager who always talked about satisfying corporate but didn’t seem to know what that actually meant beyond interrupting his employees five times an hour. All of them, as one, bound together by an unshakable faith in the romance of the voyage, ensconced in a shallow pool of countless fleeting interactions.
In the wake of their progress, the sleepy little fishing villages that had one been secret surf breaks reserved for the most diehard stoke-heads were no longer. Instead, they became points of interest on a massive global map, little seats of capital where yeah, there still was fresh caught fish - of course there was fish it was the beach after all - but there were also the little boutique hotels that were actually owned by multinational corporations, fancy pastry shops that sold truffles that melted in the tropical heat as soon as you left the shop, a bustling massage industry, and women in red leather stilettos and diamonds at the tiki bars. Tourism bureaus put up websites in ten language with professionally shot promotional films of white-toothed eaters smiling in the tinkling candlelight of fine dining, stopping just short of telling prospective visitors about the red-light alleys where it was possible to cop all kinds of dope, pills, and juice.
It was the symptom, really, of the death of the edge. Old maps used to have these waters marked out where no one really knew what was out there, or how to get there, or how to survive getting back - and that’s what had driven the entire arc of the species, from polynesian crossings of the pacific on outrigger canoes to foot crossings of the bering land bridge, journeys that took generations to figure out how to accomplish and were monuments to the ingenuity of a small band of animals with the ability to imagine there was something worth seeing beyond the horizon. And now? Now everything was parceled out, fences were up, and the people who filled the streets didn’t know how to ski or climb or surf, they just were rich enough to buy the experience for a week out of the year before returning to humdrum lives and a few pictures on the ‘gram to highlight the experience.
Some on the circuit, largely members of an exclusive club of true-believers-in-suffering, who spent their days in thin-walled tents on the side of mountains, claimed it was a temporary problem. Maybe it was seemed like sage wisdom due to the chronic lack of oxygen at high elevations, but the verdict was uniformly held by the community: this, too, shall pass. Will desperately wanted to believe in this version of the world, as it would have allowed him to cultivate a tender seedling of optimism that there would be a day when he could walk across an alpine valley without finding an entire bag of garbage along the way or coming across open pits of human waste. Problem was, he got the feeling it was nothing but a comfortable fiction, enjoyed by the climbers because it allowed them to believe their kind would eventually inherit the earth, if only they could keep their hands clean by waiting out the collapse in the rafters of the Earth.
Will’s instinct on the matter was confirmed unexpectedly at an Oslo street cafe, where he was killing time while waiting for a cup of coffee and a sandwich for the road. There wasn’t much to look at out the window. It was a modern part of town where the northern minimalist fanaticism was so complete that the buildings and street both appeared to be made of the same featureless grey tile that blended seamlessly into the heavy iron curtain of the sky. Feeling depressed by the sight of the stunted trees growing from their apportioned slots in the sidewalk, he turned his attention to one of the magazines tucked into the small bookshelf on his table.
Norwegian was incomprehensible to him, largely because he’d never tried to learn anything except for how to ape the few phrases he needed to indicate a sufficiently positive but uninterested attitude, but it never mattered for these kinds of magazines. It was some kind of outdoor adventure, which was always more about offering a delicious visual experience than it was about the articles, like a mother-earth edition of penthouse. It was the same in any language - a few short articles with dramatic photos of technical terrain wreathed in clouds or snow, often taken in the golden hour of the day. Then there was a profile, headed with a shot of a peaceful but dramatic looking female mountaineer who was also in the cover but in a less serious pose, and then the back half was ubiquitous lists of the best gear for whatever seasonal activities market research had indicated were most popular with their relatively wealthy readers. All this interspersed, he noted, with full page ads that were indistinguishable from real copy except for the logo prominently visible on all the equipment. Just as he was about to give up and go looking for his lunch, he flipped one more page and saw the stupid photo.
It was of a mountain peak, with romantic tendrils of sunlit snow wafting from the edge of a delicate cornice perched on a slant of dark, broken rock. Surreal, suborbital sunlight bathed the entire scene, making the blue of the sky so dense it was almost black. At first glance, Will thought it was an art installation, where someone had gone and laid a thick red and orange rope along the knife-edge of the ridge. But then he looked closer and saw the goggles, the backpacks, the down snowsuits. It wasn’t a rope, it was people, crowded so tightly they appeared a single object, on the last ridge below the summit of Everest.
Will looked around for a waiter in the hopes that someone was about to relieve him from thought, but the employees were so pre-occupied with the espresso machine that they gave off the impression of working the core of a nuclear reactor. He sighed and turned back to the picture and focused on keeping his soul from leaping from his body. Everest had always been a final escape in his mind - the place at the lonesome end of the earth where he could prove himself worthy. The movie that played in his mind was simple and brief. No lead in, just a long and dreamy shot of him standing on the peak, alone for many miles, with only his footprints in the pristine snow below him that periodically vanished in the drifting clouds. At no point did the fantasy involve crowds.
All those people crowded together, trying to get to the summit, leaving their empty oxygen canisters and dead bodies behind, fundamentally changed that calculation. For one, it occurred to him that there wasn’t ever again going to be a step he took that had’t already been taken, over and over again, by people who didn’t deserve it. They weren’t there because they were capable of something superhuman - they just demonstrated that the motive power of cold, hard cash was strong enough to get you to the peak of the highest mountain in the world. Maybe if he had the cash to burn it would be a different calculation, wherein he would be comfortable rubbing shoulders with the strangers that were stepping all over the memory of Norgay and Hillary - but in the same breath he doubted it. The treasure wasn’t the mountain itself, it was the solitude.
———-
Part 2
