the valley in the direction of Yosemite Village. The number of gawkers around Jimmy grew as campers arrived from their sites beneath the firs and black oaks towering over the campground.
Members of the Yosemite Search and Rescue team, stationed in a ring of canvas tents west of Camp 4 in the heart of the valley during the park’s busy summer climbing season, arrived at a jog. They wore T-shirts, shorts, flip-flops, and ball caps bearing the YOSAR logo. The rescuers were in their twenties and early thirties, tanned and buff, mostly males with a smattering of females. They elbowed their way to the front of the circle as an ambulance turned from Northside Drive into the Camp 4 parking lot. The vehicle braked to a stop next to the climbing tower, raising a cloud of dust.
From where she knelt at Jimmy’s head, Janelle reached to rest a hand on the storied climber’s tattooed forearm. “They’re here.”
“Thank God,” Jimmy said through compressed lips. Sweat beaded his brow.
The onlookers fell back as a pair of attendants approached from the ambulance.
“I’ll go with him,” Bernard told Chuck.
“Where will they take him?”
When Bernard shrugged three times in a row, raising and lowering his shoulders in quick succession, a YOSAR team member said, “He won’t go to the valley clinic, that’s for sure. I bet they’ll take him straight to Merced. Believe me, they know the way.”
“His foot sure was twisted,” Rosie said thoughtfully, a finger pressed to her chin.
She walked with Chuck, Janelle, Carmelita, and Clarence on the gravel path through the middle of Camp 4, returning with them to their campsite from the climbing tower. West of the campground, the wail of the ambulance siren died away, marking the vehicle’s departure as it bore Jimmy and Bernard down the valley.
“That is so gross,” Carmelita told her sister.
“But true,” Janelle said. “One of the things I’ve learned in my classes is that the human body can get really pretzeled in an accident.”
Picturing Jimmy’s injured ankle, Chuck clamped his jaw, his muscles growing tense. Thank God he’d belayed Carmelita himself; the thought of her leg mangled like Jimmy’s, or worse, made his stomach queasy.
Their campsite came into view through the trees ahead. Camp 4 offered only walk-in tent sites, with vehicles restricted to the large parking lot at the campground’s front entrance. Campsites were arranged side by side in long rows, accessed by pathways linking the sites to the parking lot and central bathroom. Beneath the tall pines and oaks looming overhead, the campground was open and dusty, the only ground cover a few hardy bunches of buffalo grass, with campsites in full view of one another among the tree trunks.
Chuck had erected their two-room family tent in the dark last night at the edge of their reserved research-team site, while Janelle wrestled the half-asleep girls into their pajamas, and Clarence set up his own small, solo tent. Early this morning, Chuck had hauled the last of their supplies from the pickup truck via the graveled footpath past the other campsites to their assigned site, using one of the oversized wheelbarrows provided by the campground. As his family slept, Chuck had propped open his multi-pocketed gear duffle, the words “Bender Archaeological, Inc.” stenciled on both sides, and double-checked its contents for the week’s work to come. He also had opened the cookstove on the picnic table and connected it to its propane tank, and had assured the latch was fastened on the metal cabinet next to the table that contained their food, as required to keep the park’s notoriously nosy black bears at bay.
Carmelita had spied the climbing tower at the edge of the parking lot when she’d stepped out of the zippered family tent that morning.
“Can I climb it?” she begged Chuck, eyeing the tower through the trees. “Pleeeeeease.”
He gaped at her. Carmelita rarely made such requests, particularly with such ardor.
She added, “That’s why you got me my new climbing shoes, isn’t it?”
He studied the fiberglass tower, rising beyond the trees at the front entrance to the campground. Only a few campers waited their turn to climb it this early in the morning. But the line was sure to grow as the day wore on and more climbers arrived in the valley for the start of the Slam tomorrow.
Janelle ducked out of the tent. “Are you okay with it?” Chuck asked her, warming to Carmelita’s interest in the sport that had consumed him as a young man.
Janelle stood at Carmelita’s back and combed her fingers through her daughter’s long, sleep-tangled hair. “You want to be like Chuck, do you?” she asked Carmelita.
“Like me a long time ago,” Chuck clarified.
Now, as Carmelita reached the campsite with the others in the wake of Jimmy’s fall, she spoke while looking at her feet, her voice soft but firm. “I still want to do it,” she said. “I still want to be in the Slam.”
Chuck took Janelle’s hand in his and gave it a squeeze. Carmelita’s first year of middle school hadn’t been all they’d hoped. Shy and reserved, Carmelita had made few friends and refused entreaties from Janelle and Chuck to try after-school clubs and sports. The good news, at least, was that she’d done well in her classes. Very well, in fact. But she’d spent a lot of her free time alone.
“You’re crazy, Carm,” Rosie declared. She swung her hiking boot at a stone, kicking it from the path. She teetered at the end of her kick, her foot nearly as high as her head. Only Clarence’s quick grab kept her from tumbling backward to the ground.
“I was good at it,” Carmelita said. “I was really good. Wasn’t I?”
“That’s stating the obvious,” Clarence told her. “You were estupenda up there.”
Janelle slipped her hand out of Chuck’s grip and turned to him as they walked. “They’ll cancel the competition because of Jimmy’s accident, won’t they?”
“I doubt it. People come from all over to compete in the Slam. It’s turned into a big money-maker for the Camp 4 Fund. Jimmy told me last year’s entry fees paid for a whole new set of gear-hauling wheelbarrows. They’re already planning to use this year’s proceeds to remodel the bathroom. They might even raise enough money to add showers, which they’ve needed forever.”
Janelle slid her hand into the crook of Chuck’s arm. “What happened to him back there?”
“The auto-belay device failed. They’ll fix it, of course—not that Carm would use it. If she competes, I’ll belay her again myself, just to be completely safe.”
“Completely safe?”
“People think everything having to do with rock climbing is dangerous. But big-wall climbing and sport climbing are entirely different animals.” He pointed up through a break in the trees to the top of El Capitan, rising half a mile above the valley floor. “Big-wall climbing comes with unavoidable risk. The potential for accidents on massive cliffs, here in Yosemite or anywhere else, is part of the game. There’s simply too much that can go wrong on multi-day, multi-pitch climbs—sudden weather changes, equipment problems, fatigue, personality issues between team members. It’s impossible to control for all of them.” He aimed a thumb behind him at the tower. “But climbing on a bolted wall is one of the safest sports there is.”
Clarence
