"The Tooth" is a 5,605-foot fang of rock that thrusts up from the jawbone of a ridge in the Cascade Mountains of western Washington State. The east face of the rock rises nearly 1,000 feet above the ridge, the west side 300 feet, and the summit is a lovely smooth slab. One sunny morning in 1943, when I was fourteen years old, my brothers Barney and Louie and I set out to climb The Tooth with our climbing teacher, Tom Campbell.

     Tom was an experienced mountaineer who had lost an arm while serving in the U.S. Army's famous Tenth Mountain Division and now climbed with a hook screwed into his prosthetic arm. He had taught us the basics on Monitor Rock, a thirty-foot-high artificial wall of rock and cement in West Seattle, not far from our home. But this would be our first "real" climb. 

     That morning we hiked up a trail from Denny Creek through old-growth forest, crossing and recrossing the snow-fed stream until, after about three miles, we reached a big rockslide. Leaping from one lichen-encrusted boulder to the next, we gradually picked our way up through the slide. At the top, we followed game trails across scree and low brush, rising through open alpine forests to the west face of the ridge. Next, we followed a trail north through fragrant scrub cedar and, when the going turned really steep, roped up: Tom leading, then Barney, me, and finally Louie-the order in which we were born. We wormed up through stunted trees and between huge boulders, carrying the rope in coils between us, until we arrived at a notch in the north ridge. Above us, The Tooth rose skyward, still in morning shadow. Directly ahead was a short but nearly vertical wall of rock-the first pitch of the climb. Along the rock-face I could see good footholds and handholds. This would be easy.

     Tom hopped over a three-foot gap to the rock-face, climbed up a ways, found a good belay position (a place where he could brace himself to support the next climber), took in the slack rope between himself and Barney, and then called down: 

     "On belay. Climb!"

     "Climbing!" Barney called back, as we'd been taught, and started smartly across the gap. 

     As he did, I saw him look to his left and hesitate for a split second. Then his movements became slow and deliberate, as if he were climbing in molasses. I watched his moves, as I had been taught to, so I could use the same holds he used, but I was impatient, wondering what was taking him so long. Finally, he reached Tom and got 
into belay position. It was my turn.

     "On belay. Climb!"' Barney shouted. 

     "Climbing!" I yelled back. 

     The gap lay in shadow. I stepped up to its edge, began to move out over it to the cliff a few feet away" glanced down past my left foot. ..and froze solid. The cliff plunged straight down for what looked like a thousand feet.  Everything below was so tiny, so far away. I was absolutely terrified. 

     More than a half-century later, I can still see clearly every detail of rock, lichen, and shadow in that fearsome void. Scrambling around on a thirty-foot artificial wall in West Seattle had taught me a lot about climbing technique, but very little about what climbers call "exposure"-that heart-in-your-mouth surge of sheer terror when you first look down from a great height.

     I willed myself across the gap, struggling to resist the palpable gravitational pull of the abyss below. From that point on up the rock face, every move I made was measured, focused, deliberate. Moving only one limb at a time, maintaining what climbers call a three-point suspension, I crept ever so slowly upward toward Barney. When I finally reached him, my mouth was dry as dust. It took me a moment to compose myself into a sitting hip belay. Then I called down to Louie:

     "On belay. Climb!" My voice was a croak. 

     "Climbing!" Louie signaled from below. 

     "Check out the view below your left foot:" I added. 

     His eyes were as round as an owl's when he came up the rock wall to my belay spot. 
That day, Barney, Louie, and I all made the same vow: "Dear God, if you get me down off this mountain alive, I promise I'll never climb another mountain again." Barney, the older and wiser brother, kept his promise. Louie and I have spent the rest of our lives breaking it. That day, only moments apart, we had each crossed a gap within ourselves and, in the process, been exposed not just to danger but to our own destinies.

Copyright (c) 2001 by Jim Whittaker.  All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission from Jim Whittaker.