Work took me there and the mere sight of the sign for Modesto, California, Pop. 166,430, wrenched me back to the picnic from hell, when we scarfed all the faithful’s food and ran for it.

A handful of us teenagers were spending our first summer in Camp 4, the climber’s al fresco flophouse in Yosemite Valley. We had no money so we frequently crashed picnics and barbecues put on by groups streaming into the park for weekend retreats. We tried keeping our numbers down, losing ourselves in the swarm; but this time a gang of Camp 4’s hungriest showed up for an orthodox affair fielded by the Arise and Shine Pentecostal Church out of Modesto, California. We’d never seen so much grub, spectacularly arrayed over half a dozen picnic tables.

We sang along, mouths watering through all twenty verses of “Fire Fall Down.” Then Preacher John drifted into homily, touching on the Eight Visions, and Daniel in the Lion’s Den. We wanted to chuck the Preacher in there with him, tortured as we were by the smell of those burgers and ribs. Then some laps through Glory Be, us gritting our teeth, so dying to charge those tables and all that golly that space/time threatened to blown apart.

When at last we rose and Preacher John said, “Ah-Men,” twenty climbers stampeded over the congregation and plunged bare hands straight into vats of barbecue beans and potato salad, shoveling huge and sloppy loads into their mouths. Faces were mashed directly into pies and layer cakes as tabletops of tacos and fried chicken vanished before the proper crowd had eaten a carrot stick. When the shocking news spread that the food was all gone, we scattered into the forest with so many franks and ribs and rhubarb pies on board we could barely stumble back to camp.

Now fifty faces glared at me from that road sign, asking how come? Faces I couldn’t flee till I looked up Arise and Shine on Google and drove there in search of Preacher John. I’d put down the bottle a decade before but these 9th Steps (making amends) kept wearing me out. Only thing worse than doing them were those faces.

[Read: Stonemaster John Long Comes Clean on Alcoholism]

Preacher John was not so old as I remembered. He flushed when I mentioned that weekend in Yosemite. The moment hung in cringeworthy limbo till I asked how I could make things right. He flashed a sideways grin, amused that I thought he’d send up a prayer and call it good. Instead, I spent Saturday and Sunday sanding and painting and pulling weeds behind the plain-wrapped chapel.

As we painted stairs and yanked thistles, Preacher John—blue jeans, black T, ragged Keds sneakers—started talking about the intractable challenges in his life. People dying. Too much month at the end of the money. Hearing someone talk so undefended touched on worlds I’d never suspected, just as Preacher John had never imagined a refuge like Arise and Shine. For going on fifteen years, his congregation of ex-cons, bikers, porn stars, and grifters kept stumbling into grace. Preacher John couldn’t explain how he’d come to run the operation, or how it all worked. Only that most of the time, it did.

Preacher John suggested that, during services on Sunday evening, I stand before the brethren and come clean on the Grand Theft Spare Rib and Shortcake Debacle I’d helped author back in Yosemite.

“Guess I owe you people that much,” I said, and Preacher John said, “It ain’t for us, man. It’s for you.”

Several in the crowd had been in the valley those dozen years before, and no sooner had I described that shitshow, and my part in it, than they swarmed round and pumped my hand and said God works in strange ways most of the time, so far as they could tell. Nobody earns grace. It finds you.

Once the congregation retired, leaving Preacher John and me to our lonesome, he hemmed and hawed, grabbed himself, fiddled with a cup, till he finally mumbled something about a dream. A picture in his head, really. Maybe just a silly idea.

Jesus, Reverend. Come out with it already.

“Half Dome,” he said. “Can you get me up there? On top?”

That meant hiking him seven miles up the rugged back-country trail to Half Dome, the most iconic granite monolith in Yosemite, and wheedling him up the cable route (along the Dome’s eastern shoulder) that, every summer day, tourists march up en mass to the summit. It’s an ass-kicker hike to get up there, and the Dome tops out at nearly 9,000 feet. But the Preacher seemed dead-set. And I often do my best with a mission. Now I had one.

That evening, we drove the 100 miles to Yosemite, shooting for a blitz ascent, since Preacher John had to conduct services the following Tuesday night. To simplify logistics, I copped a 24-piece Super Bucket Combo, with sides of mac and cheese, slaw, biscuits, and corn on the cob, from a KFC as we blew out of town. Plus two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew, infused with enough cane sugar and caffeine that after three mouthfuls, you’re ready to swim to Oahu (you’d make it, too). That was our trail and bivy food to get us up the Dome and back to the parish in two days flat.

It took us till late the following day to gain the summit. Barely. Preacher John had a bum wheel and hiked with a wince. We stopped many times for him to massage his leg; it took us over an hour to cover the last bit, up the cables, two of a hundred and some-odd people who climbed Half Dome that day.

On the summit at last, the narrow valley, far below, stretched down canyon through continents of light and shadow.

We strolled around the arching Dome, feeling like sky walkers, till Preacher John slouched back on the granite slab and muttered out some anecdotes, pulled up in shards. How during the Vietnam War, he’d spent 416 days as a POW in the Son Tay prison. Even the good Lord couldn’t see him through a few dark nights, when all that sustained him was a childhood memory of camping in Yosemite with his single mom, and an image of Half Dome, floating in the sky like a celestial atoll, beyond pain and conflict, and the shrapnel in his leg.

We walked out onto the Diving Board, a flat stone parapet cantilevered over Half Dome’s 2,000-foot North Face. An inch too far and you’re off for a half-mile free-fall with ample time to contemplate the landing. But a steady wind had picked up, gusting straight into our faces so we could stand with our toes out over the quick, arms outstretched, leaning into the zephyr and feeling like Friedrich’s classic, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog — except there were two of us, not one, and no fog, the Preacher and I fairly flying in an experience so attuned to our needs that I believed in something for a minute.

“I’m so famished,” Preacher John yelled into the wind, “I could eat the hind legs off the Lamb of God!”

Over at our packs, the Preacher retrieved the Super Bucket Combo of Kentucky Fried, and I watched him wolf down a cubit of greasy chicken, two tefachs of mac and cheese, an amah of slaw, and three baths of corn, washing it down with the Dew. Mighty gracious of him to leave me one measly drumstick in the bottom of the bucket, and nothing else. Fucker.

“Dude!” said the Preacher, two veins leaping off his neck. “You didn’t leave us nothing.”

Took him three days of painting and gardening and hiking with a wince for those hard feelings to geyser out of him. He wagged a finger in my face.

“We even now, or what?” I said.

“Getting there,” said Preacher John, who walked back onto the Diving Board. The wind had died and he gazed into the western expanse, which opened into rolling highlands spilling off towards the measureless brown plain of the San Joaquin’s.

We bolted the last of the Dew, pulled on our packs, and stumbled back down toward all the people, places, and things we could grab hold of and chew down to the bone, working up some strong regrets, come to terms—always a bar fight—then do it all over again.

This has been excerpted with permission from John Long’s newest book, Granite Mariner under the title “The Third Circle.” John Long is a regular contributor for Climbing, having penned the classics “Pumping Sandstone” and “Pumping Granite” in the late 1970s. He’s written over 40 books, with nearly three million copies in print.