​CHAPTER ONE of ROCKHEAD (COMPLETE)
“Yosemite,” he said to me in the dark. “You and me and a big, bad wall.Maybe Orion or even the Seven Seas.”


It was my climbing partner, Dade, and he’d just woken me  a from a dream. I could see him in my mind’s eye, hulking there with his terrible posture on the other end of the phone. I swear I could smell him too: the smell of some feral animal. Of fear and fearlessness at the same time.

I turned my head to make sure Olive was asleep, and then gently cleared my throat.

“Come on, Uhtlas, it’s is the last chance I’m going to have for a while—and the Booty just said it would be okay.”

This is how Dade, a junior high science teacher, talks to me on the phone—always mispronouncing my name with a bad Scottish accent—though I’ve never been able to figure out why, since he’s mostly Greek and I’m mostly German.

He has twisted names like this for everyone. His wife, Beverly, a tenured physiology professor at the U, he calls the Booty; and their unborn baby he’s christened the Crackmeister because he thinks it will climb so hard (and not, he likes to say with a wink, “Of whence it will enter the world”). Usually he would feign the Scottish thing for at least a few sentences, but he cut it out this time. 

“Go on, tell him you said it’s okay,” I heard him stage-whisper to Bev, and then, faintly, I heard her yell, “Yes, Atlas, go! Get him away from me!” She was laughing, and I could imagine her tiny four-month swell of belly jiggling with the Crackmeister.

“What about my job lined up in New York?” I finally whispered, squinting at the still form of Olive again. Her breathing was even and light, but I could tell by the tense angle of her ear that she was actually awake. Listening, not laughing.

“They can wait or find someone else. Come on—we’ve been talking about getting back to Yosemite since the last time we drove away from it, over two years ago, right? It’s going to be that many years before I get time off from the Crackmeister, and by then my shoulders will be trashed from diaper duty. Why have we been training three days a week if we’re not going to go for it? It’s like we’re meant to do it and you can’t offer me one good reason not to go. Plus you can do Son of Sam on the way out there.” 

He was trying to push my buttons by dropping the name of a new route I was hot to do, but what he cagily didn’t mention (in a kind of reverse psychology) was that it might also be the only chance for me to find my “rockhead,” a.k.a. “letting the thing be the thing,” before I settled into the beige half-walls of the office gig Olive had found for me.

The rockhead is a state of intense focus that Dade claims he’s had while climbing, and he says it’s the thing that will let me rise to my potential and finally be the climber—and the man—I’m supposed to be. Olive thinks he’s just talking about an adrenaline ride or what adventure athletes call “flow.” But Dade says it’s bigger. Wider. Deeper.

“So what do you think? Three more weeks? You could fly out of San Fran,” Dade pushed. And then he said, as if it were ever a good idea, “Let me talk to Olive.”

“She’s asleep,” I said, still whispering, “And anyway, you know I don’t have any money.”

This finally got the bed shaking as Olive sat up to listen better. “Ha! that’s why I’m calling right now,” he said, exultant as if checkmating me, “I just landed a cherry roofing job—the special ed teacher from my school had some roof damage during the storm the other night and called me. No tear off —just a sheathing repair and re-shingling on one side. He’s getting a check for 8,000 bucks.”
​
“We’ll talk at the house,” I said, referring to the painting job we were just finishing. Then I hung up, his two years still ringing in my head; it wasn’t just how long we’d been away from the Valley, it was also how long I’d been with Olive. And about how long I’d been having the exact same dream every night. The dream Dade’s call had torn me from. 

In the dream I am flying through space at some incredible speed—close to the speed of light—and though I have no mass or shape at first, I begin to assume shape and then mass, and then I realize that I am falling above the earth through what seems to be warm, buoyant air.

As I fall, however, the air cools and thickens into a kind of transparent gel that gradually slows me down. The weirdest part is that I’m desperately trying to reach the ground— and I positively know I will. Nothing is more important than that I can touch it, and as I “make” myself heavier and heavier to get through the “air,” I grow so heavy I become something else, something without thought. Something not human. I become a hundred times my normal weight, then a million. But in some freakish ratio, the air-gel continues to cool and thicken around me, always just dense enough to slow—but not stop—my fall. 

Each time in the dream I am absolutely sure I will reach the ground, and each time when my body is only a single humming atom away from infinite mass, I realize that I will never reach the ground. Then I wake up.

I turned to look at Olive. I could barely make out her face, just the soft, lovely curves of her body inside one of my old T-shirts. She didn’t have her arms crossed over her chest, but that was just a trick—I could feel the weight of her disapproval squatting there along with the dozen packed boxes that filled up the room. In two days she would leave for New York for a job at a German TV station. I was supposed to drive out with her, but the house-painting job I was on with Dade kept getting delayed by Midwestern storms and I still had at least a week to go on that before I followed her in my little Corolla. As soon as I arrived, I would “interview” at the same station for a gig preparing weather reports if the present weatherman couldn’t get his work papers straightened out; really, though, the job was mine if I wanted it.

A “perfect fit,” as Olive said, where I could use not just one but both of my employable skills: speaking the German I learned at my mother’s lumpy shins, and applying my knowledge of physical geography and meteorology learned over my seven-year tenure at the University (where I’d taken summers and several autumns off to climb).
I cleared my throat, and then, after a dozen or so heartbeats of her silence, jumped in: “Dade just wants me to go climbing—to help him with a route he wants to fire off before the baby comes. He says it’s our last chance for a while. That I need to suck it up and go with him . . . to Yosemite.” 

“Yosemite?! Again? What about the job? What about your debt?” she asked, crossing her arms in spite of herself.

“He just scored us a roofing job—it’ll let me pay off what I owe you. Or most of it, anyway.”

She sighed. Then I sighed. Then we both sighed and she got out of bed. I could hear her rustling around in the dark and turned on the light to find her putting her hair up, which is what she does whenever she has to think hard. Or win an argument.

“Why don’t you want to move out there?” she asked. 

“I’m not saying I don’t,” I said, as a feeling of rising and spinning began to uncoil in my spine. It was a problem that had been growing worse for about a year and a half, and it had even started to mess with my climbing. I’d get hung up sometimes on easy stuff and actually panicked a few times on harder routes. Dade had given me some breathing exercises to do while climbing; I tried to do one this night, but then Olive was talking again and I couldn’t focus.

​“I can tell you don’t. I can tell that you’re not sure about us. You’re such a . . . such a waffler. You’re waffling now like you always do. It’s like you need your decisions made for you, so I’m telling you that this is the right thing. That you should come to New York with me and not give away that job. Jesus, Atlas, at some point you’re going to have to suck it up and work,” she said. 

That’s when the room grew still and tight, like it had been breathing, but then stopped. Then it all began to swim, and I spiraled upwards so fast my thoughts were flung away from me. Before I lost all my words too, I tossed out a few of them like little anchors: “I didn’t say I was going—I’m just telling you what he called about. Jeese.”

And then the dizziness began to slow, and then it receded to the periphery.
 
“I’m just not sure,” I should have said right then. “I’m not sure I want to work in a cube. I’m not sure about us.”

But I didn’t—and to defend myself, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. I’m not sure isn’t part of Olive’s vocabulary. She’s über-organized, slightly embarrassed by talk of emotions, and an incredible multitasker—she’s super smart, super capable, super logical.

Olive majored in English but minored in German, and the first time we ever spoke
German—at a student beer-drinking group—she corrected my grammar, though she’d only learned the language as an adult while for me it was a Muttersprache. I lost the argument to her persuasive, canted eyebrows (and all those soft curves), and even though it turned out later that I was right, it didn’t matter; she had managed to set some kind of precedent. She even talked me into saying that I was sure I loved her after we’d been dating two or three months, when I wasn’t sure at all.

I stood up and went to her—I always feel better when I’m in motion—and touched her face beneath her cheekbone, then laid a finger like a clasp upon her lips. Olive has the sweetest, most gentle lips I’ve ever felt, but I didn’t want any more words to come out of them just then.

“Do you love me?” she asked, her lips moving under my fingertips.

“Olive Juice,” I always said—my nickname for her—but this night, as if the German were somehow safer, I said, “Ich liebe Dich.”

She kissed me and said, “It’s going to be a big change, but it’s going to be great. It’s going to be an adventure.” Then she kissed me again as if to punctuate the sentence; as if trying to be sure herself.

We went to bed but she never got under the sheet, hugging me tighter and tighter as the night chilled. I don’t think she even fell asleep until daybreak, when I got up for work. I think she may have been crying.

She left Minneapolis two days later, scooping me with a tactical move by saying that she needed to take my hamsters Eenie Meany and Miney Mo “to ride shotgun” as protection for the
trip (maybe thinking that if I wouldn’t come for her, I’d come for them). We packed up her car with everything she needed, as well as the hamsters who were indeed riding shotgun, hanging tough.

We had made very sweet, “in-love” kind of love earlier that morning, surprising both of us, and for some reason making us both cry afterward. But when she left she seemed happy (or maybe just a little manic), cupping my face with her two hands and kissing me for too long on the lips—as if to impress something upon me.

“I can hold them off a couple days, but you have to come the second that roofing job’s done. See you out East!” she yelled as she drove away, her arm stuck out the window for the entire block. I was left standing on our quiet street, holding a hand high and squeaking goodbye to my guys, already missing them but feeling, strangely, happier than I’d been in months.

That morning I loaded what few possessions I had into my old Corolla and carted them over to Dade’s garage for storage until I left. Then I set up camp in “the Rig”—Dade’s green, 1980 Chevy Sportvan, also known as Makin’ Bacon because it had that faded bumper sticker on it when he inherited it from his uncle.

We’d been on a dozen trips in Makin’ Bacon over the years and had slowly turned it into the perfect climbing machine. There’s a tiny porcelain sink, a two-burner range, and an old-style icebox that came with the van originally, along with a series of padded wood panels that fold down and clap together to create Dade’s bed downstairs. Upstairs is a scavenged VW pop-top that we installed, which opens as a wedge surrounded by a fabric screen and zip-up canvas, making the front of the roof higher than the back.

It offers more room but is also more subject to the weather and car headlights and birds pecking at the soft screen. That’s where I sleep on our trips. The Rig has mostly gray carpeting except for the faded purple shag on the dashboard, and it has mostly white cupboards except that you can’t really see them for all the climbing photos and topo maps that have been put up over the years. Many of them are of routes that we’ve done, but some are of those that we hoped to do.

Lying downstairs in Dade’s usual bed, I had a vantage of the ceiling where Dade had hung a map of US climbing areas—the summer circuit through Wyoming and the winter circuit through Las Vegas, both dotted and linked together like constellations, their common pole star our Mecca, Yosemite Valley. We’ve been in the Valley five times, once for two months but never less than two weeks. And every time we’ve been on El Capitan.

Part of the attraction of El Cap is that few places in the whole wide world offer such high rock with such an easy approach. With over three thousand feet from toe to tip, El Cap is a mountain. But, then, with the climbing stripped down to its most technical side, with no snow-slogging or glacier aprons to deal with, it is also a crag. The vertical granite touches its sandy, horizontal base with the simple ease of a living room wall to a Berber carpet. And the transition to climbing is even more bizarre: one moment you are standing on the ground, where you can walk back to your car in twenty minutes, and the next you have entered a super-vertical wonderland, so huge and so different you’re an astronaut leaving the stratosphere for space—or a surfer in Nazaré, Portugal, dropping in on an eighty-foot wave.

It’s what Dade was dreaming about, and, it turns out, what I was dreaming about deep down too. A way to find my rockhead. But I didn’t have the time or the gumption to fight it out with Olive. At least, that’s what I thought that week while we finished the house-painting gig. But things changed when we started on that roof. We arrived just as the dumpster was being delivered and hauled our heavy, forty-foot ladder into the backyard, walking through piles of sawdust where the downed tree had been cut into pieces before being hauled away.

“Pretty nice house for a teacher,” I said after we set the ladder down.

“His wife’s some marketing exec,” said Dade, plucking a tiny apple out of his pocket and taking a bite. He wrinkled his face up: “Sour.”

“It looks like a crabapple—where’d you even get that?” I asked.

“Bev. From the co-op,” he said, biting into the apple again so that his teeth, as thick and utilitarian as a tiger’s, were suddenly exposed. His teeth naturally draw attention to his rough, hatchet nose and the notch on top of it; to the pair of awkwardly taped prescription safety glasses he always wears when working or climbing; to his wildly curly, tar-black hair.

Dade, who’s slightly famous in our circles for having dated over fifty women, certainly isn’t what you’d call handsome in the normal sense of the word, and he never takes a good photo, part of it simply from genetics and his mostly terrible posture and part of it from teenage years as a Golden Gloves boxer: that nose comes from a break during his fifth fight, when he was sixteen, and peeking out from behind the left side of his glasses there’s a little scar that curls out of his eyebrow and follows his eye socket for almost an inch.

It’s stupefying to straight men who don’t know him, but somehow his confidence and charisma let him flirt with abandon. And no one is exempt: the cashier at the grocery store, the retired gay professor who lives next door, the professor’s giggling, eight-year-old granddaughters.

Even Olive.

Olive and I were talking about what turned our respective cranks one night and even she admitted that she was attracted to Dade, saying he was like a half-tame wolf. In his cage he has too many sharp angles and looks too rangy, too awkward, too high-strung, but let him out—and let out a rabbit (or a woman or a hard route) for him to chase and he is bursting with fluid muscle and beautiful to watch. She made me jealous when she said that, and all I could think to do (not very smart, but then this was early in our relationship) was to ask her how she’d describe me.

She’d clearly thought about this already, and her eyebrows, much darker than her light brown hair, rose slightly as she spoke: “You’re like some lizard that only likes it in the sun.” She didn’t fill in the rest, though I saw her analogy: slow to act, a hibernator, something “lower” on the evolutionary bush. The thing she didn’t know, but which I would realize later that summer, was that lizards also have something powerful in them; they can give up a part of themselves for escape, then grow that part back again for another try.

Once Dade and I got up on the roof and looked under the huge tarp, we saw that the job was bigger than Dade’s colleague told us it was, with not only the sheathing punched through but at least four of the rafters destroyed.

Even with the extra work, we were going to make out like bandits, and by early afternoon we had already pulled off the old sheathing and repaired the rafters and were back up on the steep hip-and-valley roof with the first sheet of plywood. I was straddling the roof, and Dade was below me with one foot on a bare roof jack and the other stemmed into the valley. Our relative positions gave me a quick memory—like mini déjà vu—of being in some granite corner high on a wall.

“This dough should get Olive off your back,” Dade said. I thought he was actually being nice until he turned and  I caught the glint of his eyetooth, as if he had just sharpened it. I set a nail in the plywood and then, as Dade started talking again, drove it home with a few good whacks.

“Did you say something? I couldn’t hear you.”

“What are you going to tell Olive at the end of the summer after we’ve finished the Seven Seas and you decide you’re not moving out East?

“You know something I don’t?”

“My grandpa, the one who was a veterinarian, always said that if you’re going to shoot a horse, do it sooner rather than later--preferably in a place where you won’t have to move it.”

“I guess that’s better than beating a dead horse.”

“So you’re going to make Olive end it? When you’ve finally worn her out? That’s not fair, either.”

“Why are you riding me about her?” I asked. I snapped my hammer back in its loop and humped myself along the roof crest to the next rafter before I looked down at him.

Dade can somehow change the shape and color of his pupil and then make it even worse by causing that scar that hooks around it to hum at a violent frequency. It’s his “don’t bullshit me” look—his boxing look—and it shut me up for a second. But then it didn’t: “The fact that you need a belay slave for Seven Seas isn’t
helping any, is it?”

He frowned. “Atlas, the point is that you don’t love her enough and she’s crazy about you.” He lifted his hammer from the head, pointing the handle at me like a gunslinger: “She’s been holding back for a year and a half and you know it.”

Well, I couldn’t say anything to that, either. It was probably true, but I still didn’t understand how she could care for me so much. Looking at us from the outside, Olive with her drive and smarts was clearly the better catch. I was the lizard. The waffler.

“I did almost tell her last week,” I said, giving in, “the night you called about the trip.”

“And what happened?”

“I wasn’t sure if it was true or not,” I said, and then, trying to sound confident: “I really do love her, and sometimes I think I love her a lot.”

For some reason, this softened him: “Look, I’m not saying you’ve been acting badly, I’m just saying that if you don’t stop it now you will be.”

I set a nail and whacked it hard a few times as I wondered: Why was it that people like Dade and Bev and Olive could always be so sure about things so big, when I’d never known such surety in my whole life? Were they actually sure, or did they just decide they were and then sort of live their way into it? I didn’t know, but I set another nail and started pounding, then pounded in another. The pounding seemed to help.

Later that afternoon, on my last run up the ladder pinch-gripping a half sheet of plywood, I was caught by a rogue gust of wind and almost fell just as I reached the roof. I twisted weirdly to the side to recover but finally had to grab the gutter for balance—and drop the sheet—just as I saw Dade round the corner.

“Rock!” I called instinctively—it’s what you say when you’re climbing and something gets dislodged—and the plywood, as if encouraged to cause greater damage, flew away from Dade but in towards the house, landing edge first right on my backpack (destroying my cell phone and my coffee thermos, I’d later find out) before flopping onto the grass in front of him.

“Damn, son, pay attention!” said Dade, staring up at me. “You get hurt now and you’re going to ruin our trip.” Then, before I could repeat that I wasn’t going or even apologize for almost hitting him, he asked, “What’s that your mother always says about paying attention—‘pop-off ’ or ‘Passover’ or something?”

“Pass auf.”

​“Yeah, pass auf,” he said with a strangely good German accent.

​“Passing auf is key.”
​