Praise for Lighting Out
“In a sort of nouveau Dharma Bums, drifting in and out of Bay Area counterculture and the High Sierra, young Californian Duane combines a climber’s journal with a memoir of the year following his graduation from Cornell. . . . Seeking some kind of logic and order to his life, Duane, under the tutelage of his father and uncle, both of whom are middle-aged and in better shape than he, sets himself the painstaking task of preparing for, and climbing, the biggest and most dangerous rock in the Sierra—El Capitan. On the granite faces of Yosemite, Duane’s prose comes most alive. In the arenas of sport and love, he learns patience, understanding, and how to confront his fear. Lively and engaging.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“This captivating debut offers a glimpse at the ‘Generation X’ counterculture on the West Coast. . . .The contrast between the slacker-climbing crowd and the New Age poseurs is enhanced by a wonderfully deadpan writing style that is rarely too technical for those unfamiliar with the sport. Highly recommended . . .”
— Library Journal
“A must for rock climbers under age thirty.”
— Willamette Week
“. . . told so straightforwardly, by such a young craftsman, that you will be grateful and smiling about having been along for the climb.”
— The Sunday Oregonian
“. . . [Duane] explores with fine irony and rare depth his awakening into manhood, love, and conquest . . .”
— Isabel Allende
“This book marries earth and sky in a mysterious kind of reverse mirror-imagining, the gorgeous spellings-out of the manifold, gripping, everyday concrete world subsumed under the majestic, empty, serene peak views of mountain climbing. . . . A splendid and central achievement surpassing anything I have yet seen of its kind.”
— A.R. Ammons
“From John Muir to Jack Kerouac, writers have endowed the mountains of the far west with deep and sometimes transformative powers. In Lighting Out, Dan Duane takes to the limit this ongoing love affair. Yosemite is his cathedral, and scaling its monumental walls is much more than a rite of passage; it is an act of passion, reverence, and awakening.”
— James D. Houston
“Lighting Out is an immensely entertaining read. Whether it’s charting the terra firma of the heart, or scaling big walls in Yosemite Valley, Dan Duane’s narrative, on a climber’s scale, is a 5.14.”
— Page Stegner
LIGHTING OUT
LIGHTING OUT
A GOLDEN YEAR IN YOSEMITE AND THE WEST
DANIEL DUANE
| Mountaineers Books is the publishing division of The Mountaineers, an organization founded in 1906 and dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and enjoyment of outdoor and wilderness areas.1001 SW Klickitat Way, Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98134800.553.4453, www.mountaineersbooks.org |
Copyright © 1994, 2015 by Daniel Duane
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 151 2 3 4 5
Design: Jane Jeszeck, www.jigsawseattle.com
Layout: Jen Grable
Cover photograph: El Capitan at sunset with Merced River (Photo by Weston Wade Photography, iStockphoto)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Duane, Daniel, 1967-
Lighting out : a golden year in Yosemite and the West / by Daniel Duane.—
Second edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59485-921-2 (pbk)—ISBN 978-1-59485-922-9 (ebook) 1.
Duane, Daniel, 1967- 2. Mountaineers—United States—Biography. 3. Graduate students—United States—Biography. 4. Mountaineering—California. I.Title.
GV199.92.D93A3 2015
796.522092—dc23
[B]
2014030915
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-59485-921-2
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-59485-922-9
For my parents,
Dick and Kit Duane,
and for
Thomas Farber
“But I reckon I got to light out
for the Territory
ahead of the rest,
because Aunt Sally
she’s going to adopt me
and sivilize me
and I can’t stand it.
I been there before.”
Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1
On my last day before flying back out west, I had a final beer with the campus literary journal. A cold spring rain washed the windows of the old Albatross Pub as we toasted our fiction editor’s acceptance to grad school at Yale. Post-Marxism, postmodernism—Drew was on his way. At an oak table under an autographed oar he told us about the honors thesis that got him in—political repression and human anatomy in two early British novels. Obscene and fascinating, it had been an unplowed field. Greek letters carved in the tabletop lay preserved beneath a coat of polyurethane; old photographs on the walls of pale rowing crews and muddy football teams were strictly black and white. Both California graduate schools I’d applied to had just axed me; two paper-thin envelopes had arrived together.
“Why only West Coast schools?” asked a diminutive and anxious grad student from India. He’d just dropped out and supported himself by handing out the Workers Vanguard and ghost-writing essays—eighty bucks for an A, sixty for a B. I filled my cheeks with Ivy Stout and thought over how to answer without exposing my less-than-total commitment to the life of the mind, my flakiness. I just wanted to get away from angst-ridden winters and state parks the size of football fields. After I’d quit the fraternity, college had certainly improved—our journal had made a splash when Drew used margin text to create resonances between eco-feminism and fascism—but now I wanted to go home.
“I mean,” Drew demanded, “you did only apply to West Coast schools, right?”
Grad school back East? My twenties in Providence? New Haven? Princeton? Baltimore? These were dying cities, but how to say to people who forgave my fraternity sins that I needed to live near mountains more than a few thousand feet high? And without farms and turkey hunters in them? So I swallowed my beer and said offhandedly that I just liked it better out there. Things were just, I don’t know, more beautiful. Wide open spaces, and all that. The whole western world out of sight behind you if you wanted it there. And what a dump upstate New York seemed that afternoon—drizzling and cold in May; muddy, owned, farmed, crowded, fenced-off. Even after four years I couldn’t get rolling hills and Appalachian villages to feel like home. And that morning my type-A