Eight Feet of Air

Last tale I've got for you on this road. That tall one is the Grand, back off your right shoulder, so don't crane for it. It'll come up beside you before I'm done. In nineteen thirty-one a college kid from Idaho went up a new ridge on it, alone, in football shoes. Glenn Exum, his name was. He guided under Paul Petzoldt, the boy the schoolteacher talked into taking her up. Petzoldt said to go have a look at a ridge. So the kid went, carrying a length of clothesline for a rope, which would have done him no good. Not far along he was working out on a ledge, and the ledge quit, over fifteen hundred feet of nothing. Eight feet of air, then the ledge again, and not one place to put a foot. So he did what you'd do. He walked back to where the ledge began. Then he came out and looked again. And walked back. Nobody to see him do it, nobody to know if he quit. Seven times. The seventh time he turned around, ran at the gap, and jumped. A pal asked him later what went through his mind. "I was thinking," he said, "how bad it would be for me if I missed." He didn't miss. That ridge carries his name. He spent his life on these peaks, and before a first climb he'd gather the green ones in a shack at Jenny Lake. If the mountain's too much for you that day, he told them, turn back, and there's no cowardice in it. This from the fellow who ran at the edge. But he knew how it's done. He'd walked back seven times himself. Close to seventy, on the fiftieth anniversary, he went up that ridge again, humming. Look up at that peak now, off to your right. I won't promise you a thing. But there's an old man up there, humming, and way out ahead of him on the ledge, a kid in football shoes, starting to run.