A TRIBUTE TO THE LIVING: JOHN LONG AS WRITER

The Coffee Table Book ”Stone Masters” came out in 2009, the chronicles and whispers of a cult of boundary bashing rock climbers in California in the 70’s. To be a ”Stone Master” required that you be the best in that elite group, regularly willing to throw caution (and sanity) to the wind, while climbing the hardest rock climbs in the land, with style. John Long was one of those harried ”Stone Masters”, but more than that, he registered the era with his brilliant and pithy writing. Long is one of the great Yosemite climbers of any era. Perhaps as significantly, John Long is among my favorite writers. It’s not just the adventurous subject matter that I love, it’s his style. His style is not like F. Scott Fitzgerald, but he keeps me riveted in much the same way. Long can write instruction manuals that will prompt spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter from me....no author has ever made me laugh as much as this guy...

Here is a chapter from the book, ”Stone Masters” that profiles one of those characters, a comet of that era. Long brings him to life, even while chronicling his self inflicted death. It’s too good to pass up - at least that is my opine.

Yabo by John Long

Seventeenth-century French author La Rochefoucauld said that supremely lucky people rarely amend their ways. They always imagine they are in the right when fortune upholds their recklessness. Like any exclusive community, the climbing world has always sported a handful of chosen ones who can literally get away with suicide. The late, great John “Yabo” Yabolonski was such a man, a climber, the rock refused to kill.

Yabo dug the odd ditch and washed windows here and there but he never held a regular job and seemed to survive with mirrors and blind luck. He’d go days without eating, then suddenly wolf down 10 hamburgers and a gallon of ice cream- if you were buying.

A right brained feeler, Yabo was generous to a fault, wonderfully childlike, and so naïve you’d swear he’d just stumbled from Mother Hubbard’s boot. His heart was solid gold. Europeans visiting the Valley were astounded by Yabo’s free soloing (climbing without a rope) and revolted by his caveman lifestyle. Yet his innocence drew the hospitality of many around him who relished the curious, spiritual grace one received while in the presence of this achingly candid manchild.

As a fellow Californian and Yosemite regular, I climbed on and off with Yabo for nearly ten years, and I cringe when I remember his countless narrow escapes during that time. But one episode seems in a class by itself.

After spending a few moments trying to dragoon a partner (Yabo had no rope or tackle), the energy swelled in Yabo’s loins and he set off jogging along the Buttress of Cracks, searching for an immediate adrenalin blast. Yabo stalked up to Frustration, the grimmest of these fissures, and booted up. A precarious medley of fingertip layaways and beveled flutes, Frustration had hosted countless ascents since the last rains. It was a cloudless, midsummer day. The mountain sun glared down. The crux initial stretch of Frustration seemed to fairly ooze sweat and suet. Yabo chalked, shuddered, and started up – with no rope. Several quarts of espresso sloshed around his otherwise empty tripe, adding a marked urgency to Yabo’s habitually frantic style.

Yabo jittered up the first 30 feet on brute strength, which he had in spades. Just above, the route transitioned from borderline pinches into a bottoming gash climbed by smearing a toe on nothing at all while yarding on a wet bar of Palmolive. Yabo smeared his toe, clasped the greased hold, started to yank, - and realized he was buttering off toward the Land of Harps. Had a witness not been standing by, nobody would have believed the sequence that followed.

Just as Yabo’s toe blew off the holds, he torqued his body round to face outward, thrust off the wall with his legs and dove into space much as Jalvert plunged into the Seine in the scene from Les Miserables.

As Yabo arced through the air, freezing Strawberry Valley with a mortal wail, the stunned witness knew she was watching the act of a man gone mad.

Yabo had vaulted perhaps 10 feet away from the wall and fallen the same distance when his arms shot out and his hands snatched the quick of a pine bough drooping from a nearby tree. Death-gripping the branch, Yabo continued his plummet. The branch bowed, popped alarmingly, and just as Yabo’s decelerated weight touched ground, snapped in two.

“Fudge!” Yabo scoffed. He pitched the branch aside and, noting the astonished witness said, “Hey, you want to do a climb?”

Such episodes were not the exception with Yabo, rather the rule. Yet for all his seemingly fatal solos, I never knew him to suffer more than a sprained ankle. In his strange and fatal quest he was able to squeeze more juice from the rock than anyone I have ever known.

Yabo climbed and lived on the razor’s edge, and it surprised no one when he eventually fell. The normal world rejected Yabo from the cradle, but the rock never would. Somewhere in the basement of Yabo’s psyche he longed to die. Throughout, the rock remained his staunchest ally and refused to make good on that wish. Ultimately, Yabo had to jump off himself. Into the void went a rogue Prince and a strand of memories I’ll laugh, cry, and tremble about for the rest of my life.

btw, John Long writes occasionally for 9025 magazine here in Malibu