THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022 39
vinced me that it’s so obvious—I thought,
it’s surely gonna come. It’s low carbon,
and you’re still doing world travel!”
“Except, what Greta did—she sailed
in a super-fancy, sixty-foot carbon-fibre
monster,” Biagioli said. “It can do thirty-
five knots. She needed to go fast, other-
wise it would’ve taken a month.”
“But why aren’t there lots of those
boats?” Robinson asked.
“I think they’re incredibly uncom-
fortable,” Biagioli said. “They bounce.
I mean, people wear helmets inside
the boat.”
“But what if they were bigger?” Rob-
inson persisted. “What if they were like
clipper ships?”
“Well, then, that would be fantastic,”
Biagioli said. He shared some cubes of
Parmesan from a small container. “And
they would be stable, and you could have
sailing ships that blow by diesel ships.”
“Club Med—they’ve been putting
sails on their cruise ships,” Robinson
noted. “And the whole technology of
sails, per se, is rapidly shifting, because
of computer modelling.”
“The problem is the weight,” Bia-
gioli said. “People cross the Atlantic in
five days, but that’s predicated on a boat
not weighing anything. So it’s like here.”
He gestured to his ultralight pack.
“Hmm,” Robinson said. He smiled,
enjoying the conversation. “Well, but if
you go back to—look, my Atlantic cross-
ing is gonna take me two weeks, and
I’m gonna be Internet-connected the
whole time. And say you have a big boat,
a passenger boat.”
“Then that would be no problem,”
Biagioli said. “I even think you could
do something really comfortable in not
even two weeks. It could be ten days.
The people who have a lock on the tech-
nology are the French.”
Robinson laughed. “What are our
billionaires doing?” he said. We talked
a bit more about the idea, and about the
prospects for dirigibles, which might re-
place short-hop jet flights, then went
to sleep.
In the morning, we set out for Thun-
derbolt Pass. The climb began imme-
diately. We ascended a series of steep
slopes to the vast, mirrorlike Barrett
Lakes, navigating around their rocky
shores. The pass looked serious: it was
about twelve thousand feet high, and
made entirely of rock and sand. We
started climbing, sometimes pulling
ourselves up with our hands, some-
times slipping between narrow gaps. I
looked back to find the lake where we’d
camped the night before; it was like
peering from an airplane and trying to
spot my house.
Eventually, we reached a rock shelf
about a hundred feet wide, where hulk-
ing boulders had been deposited by some
vanished glacier. We passed a lone
climber with a tent hang-
ing from the sheer rock
wall. The sun seemed to
radiate more strongly. It
was a long, challenging
climb to the very top,
where we rested in a small
sandy spot, closed in by
rock on two sides, like a
little room.
“Now, this descent,”
Robinson said, while we
drank water. “It’s the most technical,
meticulous part of our trip. There’s noth-
ing you won’t be able to do. But you’ll
have to go slowly, and be careful.”
I looked out over the other side of
the pass, which led back to Dusy Basin.
The landscape yawned downward over
a couple of thousand feet. A field of
boulders came first; beyond it was a rib
of rock, which we could use to descend
part of the way. The rib ended in a broad
slope of fine-grained talus. We could
navigate this by glissading—a kind of
sliding, as though we were on snow-
shoes. That, in turn, would bring us to
an ocean of smaller rocks. The first step
was to traverse sideways across the moun-
tain, over the boulders. I was nervous.
“Just go slow,” Robinson said.
We started to cross the boulder field.
The rocks were huge, with big gaps be-
tween them. Sometimes we clambered
forward over empty space, touching
four boulders at once. Then the rocks
got smaller. I turned to face the moun-
tain, my back to the sun. I moved lat-
erally to my left, wondering how far it
was to solid ground; I stepped carefully
onto a funny-shaped rock that moved
beneath me.
“Uh-oh,” I said, louder than I meant
to. “I don’t like that.”
All four of the rocks I was touching
were moving.
“Don’t look up!” Biagioli called.
I looked up. An apparent infinity ofsimilar rocks was stacked above me on
the hillside. By a trick of perspective,
they seemed ready to fall.
I moved along. We reached the rock
rib and crossed it to the long slope of
talus. We glissaded down in zigzags
through the lunar powder. At the bot-
tom lay the ocean of rocks, small and
sharp. They cast harsh shadows, creat-
ing pockets of darkness, and cross-
ing them required intense attention. I
had to remember to breathe,
and to blink. Hours passed. I
stopped to finish my water
and looked ahead to see our
destination, a lake glittering
in the far distance. Almost all
Robinson’s novels involve an
experience of this kind—a
long, difficult, rocky journey
through a mountain land-
scape, on Earth or elsewhere,
accomplished through sus-
tained concentration that lifts one out
of time. The main thing is to start, then
to keep going, finding your way one step
at a time. It never occurs to you to stop.
Even if the path isn’t set, the job before
you is clear: you have to get down the
mountain before dark.
Robinson had been right. The de-
scent had been difficult and doable—an
ideal combination. Back in Dusy Basin,
we watched the sun set from atop a high
rocky outcropping. The lakes far below
us glowed silver in the light.
“What a planet!” Robinson said.
The next day, we hiked out. It was a
long, easy walk, over Bishop Pass and
through the picture-postcard forest. Rob-
inson was sad to leave, and worried about
the wildfires.
“What do you think?” I asked, finally,
as we made our way down an ordinary
rocky slope. “Will we be all right?”
“We’ll have to make some big
changes,” he said. “I just hope that we
won’t have to make them so quickly that
we break everything.”
I wondered what he meant by “every-
thing.” Jobs? Currencies? Supply chains?
Coastal cities? Beaches? Food? Ecolo-
gies? Societies? I looked around at the
Sierras. Water stretched wide to my left,
and pines framed a blue sky overhead.
Songbirds were in the trees. It occurred
to me that he meant everything. The
whole world. All of it could break. Then,
lost in thought, I slipped.