Bahnson
around Mount Blanc, France. The early climbers used only one ice ax, but modem ice climbers, when climbing anything approaching vertical, require two. Crampons, the twelve-point spikes worn on the boots, provide purchase for the feet. Ascending vertical ice with modem gear is akin to climbing those peg-boards in 4th Grade Gym except the holes aren't pre-made-you create them as you go. Each solid ax placement provides a portable anchor from which to make the next swing. "Never move on a bad placement," Alex Lowe once told us. "Each placement builds on the last; make sure every swing is bomber." We plan to leapfrog each other, so when Hans reaches the mid-way point up the eel he stops, anchors himself to an ice screw, and waits for me to follow. My muscles are stiff from cold when I begin climbing. First one tentative ax swing, then another, until I hear the tell-tale Thwok! of a solid placement. I kick in a crampon. Swing an ax. Breathe. Repeat. The old comfort of vertical orientation returns. I slip into flow. CLIMBERS BUILD UP a kinesthetic memory bank, a repertoire of patterns from among which the body will choose when it meets with difficulty. This corporeal knowledge instructs the limbs to pull the body over an impossibly steep overhang while the mind watches, as if from a distance. To give oneself over to this innate ability for a few seconds, minutes, even hours is to know, however briefly, a kind of bliss. A release from the burden of conscious thought. Flow dissolves self-awareness. Gone are my flat-land pedestrian worries about jobs and girlfriends-or the lack thereof. Gone my doubts and fears, even my joys and elations. Those feelings will return, all of them magnified, but in flow I just am. The problem with this, of course, is the same one that plagues the heroin addict: the longer I remain in bliss, the less I want to come back. I grieve when that feeling-or absence of feeling-leaves. So I search for it. And over time I build up a tolerance to it. To feed the rat, I up the fix. I push harder, climb steeper, less secure routes. Climbing rope-less is flow distilled. To climb untethered, to set myself adrift on a sea of ice, is to achieve purity of form. Self-mastery. My life depends on the solidity of each ice ax placement, each crampon kick. The choices I make are entirely mine, and I become lord of my own universe.
I WORK MY WAY PAST delicate flutings and chandeliers of ice, now fifty feet up the couloir. Whenever the angle eases off-vertical, I switch to the 54
FUGUE.,30