Unlike Dade, who knew exactly what to do. He had somehow tempered his hot psyche during the approach into a cool concentration so that there was no more singing–or any other sounds for that matter–coming from him. He must have been looking for his Climbing Brain, getting ready to put it on or get inside it or whatever he did with it, and I saw him touch his wedding ring that hung from a necklace as he looked over the rack, making a last minute decision to ditch a few extra TCUs to cut down on weight.

Dade romped up the first easy pitch and I followed him up into the wind, pulling the three nuts he'd placed along the way. My pitch, the old finger crack test piece, was mostly vertical and hard, and I looked the route over carefully before I unclipped from the anchor chains. I knew from the guidebook that the endurance crux ended just below a dwarf pine tree that grew straight out of the rock, 100 feet into the pitch, and that things got easier after that.

I slipped my hands into the crack, finding the inside quite a bit cooler than the air, then lifted my right toes to twist them in and—prepared myself for the panic, for my body to freeze. This is what had happened every time I'd gone climbing since that spring, when I took the way-whip on Son of Sam, a vicious little cave route. Anytime I started a climb, in my body, more than in my mind's eye, I would live through the fall again: my fingers peeling off the cave roof, my body swinging down and backwards as the gear at my knees rips out, the next piece catching me in its pendulum so that in the end I whiff my hair against the cold edge of the belay boulder—only inches from splitting my skull.

This attack normally only lasted a minute or two—until I'd used up all my little mind games and got enough chalk on my hands to whitewash a fence—but this day, at Devil's Tower, I didn't feel the panic at all. There was no frantic energy, no head-whiffing, no gear popping out. Weird.

I looked at the sky and saw a few huge clouds floating above us and it seemed like I could actually hear them moving overhead—like a giant yawn drawn out but slowed down and very far away—and then I cranked my toes into the crack again as if I were mounting the stirrups of some familiar beast. This time there was no thought about anything, not even Olive or Ruby. This time it was like there was a ‘me’ that was always climbing, and I was able to simply step over and into that me.

Twenty-five smooth feet and two nuts later, I came to a rest big enough to shake out my forearms and looked down to see Dade staring up at me, exuding calm and strength by the way he held the rope. Far beneath him, down past the talus on the asphalt path, I could see a family bunched together, passing binoculars back and forth, and dozens of miles away I could see another outcropping of rock, maybe another volcano core.

I placed a solid nut, yelling “Slack!” down to him and suddenly the air and the rock and my body all felt of the same stuff for a second, and for a little while there was nothing else. I was all myopic and all climbing and I was fearfully strong, sure of every move, yarding on the crack as if I were hoisting a sail. For a while I had that queer sensation that comes when you stand in a doorway and press the backs of your hands against the sides—then step away to feel them magically rise up. It felt like I were wearing some space-age levitation suit—an anti-G suit to elude the Big G.

I climbed like this for maybe twenty feet, then placed a good nut and kept chugging. I had pulled on Dade's Climbing Brain I was sure; I was cruising in control but not on cruise control.

"Pay attention!" Dade yelled. I was over twenty feet out from my last piece—180 feet above the base of pitch one—hanging on only my thin hands and toe tips in a crack that was just too hard not to be putting gear in. And with his words—like a novice fisherman so excited to get a bite that he forgets to set the hook—I scared my own moment away.  I misjudged a swelling in the crack, couldn’t get the nut in, then fumbled with the next size trying to make it fit when I noticed that the compact pine tree that had been so far away was now only ten feet above me.

I took off for it, cranking my fingertips as deep as I could get them, my forearms and calves cramping up, and managed to reach the tree and grab hold of it, forcing myself through its stubby branches. The tree, its trunk as big around as my neck, was uncomfortable and it tore my shirt as I scrambled through it, but it was super solid—my new best friend.

"What was that all about?" Dade hollered.

"The climbing was just so good I thought I was OK," I lied, wrapping the trunk with a sling.

He looked down and away and said nothing more, and after a short rest, I finished the last fifty feet of the pitch, following a corner which ended on a two-by-two foot ledge.