Lighting Out. Daniel Duane

pale man with white hair appeared climbing below me in shorts and a T-shirt. No rope. The guy had to be nuts—one slip and he’d die. Dad nodded at me, as if to say, Damn straight that’s crazy. The guy smiled in noblesse-oblige friendliness, like he found us charming and wanted us to know it was OK to use ropes. Then he moved past. While I caught my breath, a man with a beer-belly in a powder-blue T-shirt and a wiry, muscular woman also appeared without ropes. Soon they were gone out of sight, walking down the backside of the dome.

      We stood for a while in the breeze and reorganized the gear. A thunderhead shadowed half the lake. Sean taught me how to coil a rope so it wouldn’t tangle and could be carried comfortably. I stood next to him and matched the movements of his hands until I got it. The views were ludicrous: ranges of white and alpine green reaching from the brown haze of the Central Valley and foothills off to the cobalt atmosphere over the barren crags of the higher mountains. Ten miles west, Dad and Sean’s grail: the huge rounded tower of Half Dome. Sean shivered with pleasant fear.

      As we walked down broad orange-and-tan ramps and boulders, muscles loose and tired, I saw the threesome who’d climbed past without ropes. On a block looking out toward Half Dome they sucked on a bong and smiled into space.

      6

      Across the street from People’s Park, in front of the People’s Cafe where the coffee was always free, someone with muddy hands slashed the roof of a badly rusted, green convertible Karmann Ghia and ran off with a backpack and sleeping bag. Kyla White, the woman who’d been robbed, was moving back up to Berkeley for the summer from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Looking for replacements, she came into the small, expensive mountaineering store where I’d just gotten a job. Formerly a Russian Orthodox church and wedding chapel, the old building had shingled turrets and stucco walls impregnated with flagstones. Inside, mountaineering equipment and Gore-Tex rainwear hung on racks on hardwood floors beneath vaulted ceilings.

      When I first noticed Kyla, she was chewing a fingernail where the wedding altar now held sleeping bags. She happened to be right under this absurd inscription in a crossbeam that read, “Love Never Faileth,” and I edged out another employee, our backcountry ski guru, to ask her if she needed help.

      “No thanks,” she said, without looking at me.

      “Any questions about anything?”

      “No, really, thanks.”

      I walked back to the register to regroup and took a sip of water. She had piles of curly blond hair, some of it corn-rowed, some of it dreadlocked, and her eyes were open and green, though slightly depressed. She wore a black leotard under a torn white T-shirt, ripped jeans and running shoes, and looked like she was in great shape. Probably jogged on some beach at sunrise daily to fight off whatever was putting those shadows under her eyes.

      “Dan,” the fascist manager said, irked and out of touch as usual, “why don’t you go make sure that woman doesn’t have any questions?” She’d moved into the backpack room and was reading a hang-tag on a red-and-black Mountainsmith.

      “Look,” I said to her, just doing my stupid job, “can’t I tell you something about packs?” This time she yielded, and I gave her this whole rap I’d learned about how most internal frame packs put the weight on the small of your back but, see, ours load it onto your hips, right there . . . and right there. She also wanted a warm new sleeping bag, but didn’t like any of our colors. She told me about the theft and I asked why she’d been in Santa Cruz.

      “Crazy story,” she told me. She leaned over to look inside a Dana Designs Hyalite pack.

      “I’d love to hear it,” I said, “I mean, shit. Lay it on me.”

      She looked at me a little curiously, at my khakis and electricblue tie-dye, then told me how she’d transferred down to the University at Santa Cruz after starting at UC Berkeley. “At Berkeley I lived in this hippy co-op,” she explained, “called Barrington where I really freaked out.” She shook her head a little at the memory, like she’d either had a nervous breakdown or had gone on some mad collegiate sex-and-drugs binge. She sat on a cabinet and played with the hair on her legs while I asked what the problem was.

      “Both the whole big city scene,” she said, “and how Barrington was more of a shooting gallery than a commune. There was always some random, freaky dude wandering the halls doing speed. At first I got off on it, like I knew I wanted strangeness but not what kind? People’d like disappear into the heroin dens upstairs and you wouldn’t see them until they showed up in the kitchen three days later eating cold hot dogs. And I’m like trying to organize communal vegan meals. What a joke.”

      She tried on every pack we had while I sat on the gray carpet and watched. She’d get one on her hips and feel it out, sort of walk around and bounce on each foot. She looked like she’d put up with a heavy load, but wanted it comfortable. While she took a spin around the shop with an ArcFlex Astral Plane pack, I got to thinking about how I was in sales. Just like my buddies in investment banking, except at the bottom. Working with great gear, but nonetheless, in sales, folding T-shirts and trying to laugh when a witty customer asked if we had Gore-Tex toilet paper. I asked what she had in mind after college.

      “I don’t know, just screw around. Definitely not get some fancy soul-death job in the city. My fantasy right now’s to live on an organic farm.” I’d never much thought about farming myself, but I decided on the spot I could be open to it. It turned out her folks were pushing for graphic arts or advertising, one of those feminine white-collar fields. “That’s why Barrington freaked me out so much,” she said, “here I’m coming from totally homogeneous Walnut Creek, with these dysfunctional conservative parents, my dad on the perpetual business trip, and like three black people in my whole high school. All of a sudden there’s homeless people sleeping in my hallway! I wanted to be able to deal with that, and I’d been dying to get out of suburbia, which I totally hate.” She stretched her arms up over her head and rolled her hips around in a circle, then said, “I realized, though, that I’m more looking for pretty places.” Suddenly she looked me up and down. “Why?” she asked, “Where are you from?”

      I told her I was from here but that I’d been gone for a while in upstate New York. She’d heard of a self-supporting women’s organic farm north of Ithaca and wanted to know if I’d been there. I hadn’t, but the poetry editor had told me about it; they had a uniquely stable blend of goddess worship and communalism. Kyla’d also done a lot of backpacking in the Sierra. Climbing sounded neat to her, and she was amazed I’d done it with my dad. She’d love to try it. I asked her again how she got from Berkeley down to Santa Cruz.

      “I felt so bad about all the privileged things I grew up with,” she said, putting weighted sandbags into a pack, “that I felt guilty about every homeless person I saw, until my skin was like totally breaking out and I was getting this big black hole inside. There’s also a stronger women’s community down in Santa Cruz. I’m just up here for the summer—moving back down in a month.”

      “Women’s community?” I started to snicker as I asked, then realized she was serious. She caught something of the tone and looked at me warily before answering.

      “Yeah. Just a strong lesbian scene,” she said, nodding affirmatively and searching my eyes. I tried to change my reaction fast—I was dying to ask her to coffee. “I’m not necessarily a lesbian,” she said, “but that kind of atmosphere’s really empowering.”

      I stuffed and unstuffed a few ArcFlex Terraplane packs, told her about the compression and stabilization strap, about the delta straps and the load nodes. I pulled out the pack’s aluminum stay and custom bent it to the curvature of her slender back. I had to place the stay against her spine and run my finger down her T-shirt next to it until I was sure the fit was flush. It took a few tries to get it right.

      “How do you like living in a small beach town?” I asked from behind her, meaning Santa Cruz. She had a purple-andblue yin-yang patch on the back pocket of her ripped jeans.

      “I have a beautiful life down there,” she said, “sounds like you’d love it. You should come down.