After four miles of hiking up through thinning pines, we passed by Carlton Lake, just before the final one-thousand-foot scramble to the summit. I was out of breath but undaunted.
We picked our way up boulders to the summit, where we saw Lisa, a photographer I knew from the campus newspaper, and her dad, who had grown up around Missoula. He reminisced about how they used to drive Jeeps most of the way up the mountain. I introduced Tim to both of them and thought how strange it was to run into someone I knew on top of a peak.
In the summit register, aside from the usual notebook to sign, there was a letter from a guy to a girl. Apparently, their first date was a climb of Lolo Peak, but they had since broken up. The guy wanted the girl back and had left the letter for her, on top of the mountain, in the hopes that she’d find it. About ten people had contributed responses ranging from You sound like a really nice guy. I hope she comes to her senses to You’re a moron if you think this is going to get her back. Why don’t you try calling her?
A few weekends later, I made my first real mistake on a mountain. I was hiking by myself on Trapper Peak, a jagged sawtooth of gray rock just south of Darby, Montana. With no one to talk to, I covered the four miles to the summit far too fast for my lungs to keep my brain supplied with oxygen. I scrambled over boulders to the top, where the mountain’s north wall dropped down a thousand feet. Three other people chatted on the summit.
I kept to myself and looked out at the sea of rocky tops fanning out for miles to the west and north. I sat down, ate a Clif Bar, walked around a bit, and finally asked one of the other three folks to take a quick photo of me. Then I started bounding down the boulders, sure I’d be back in Missoula in record time.
Down and down I went, until the rock suddenly became too loose to hold itself under my feet on the steep slope. I stopped. Where am I? I had veered off course and gone too far down. Where was the trail going to show up? Shit.
Shit shit shit.
Was it to the left or the right? How was I going to find it?
I pulled my map out of my pocket—it was nothing more than a photocopy of a hand-drawn map from an old guidebook page, not the USGS topo map they tell you to learn how to read before venturing into the wilderness by yourself. It was a few curved lines on a page, crude and useless. I was fucked. Lost and fucked.
Take a deep breath. Look around.
I calmed down, turned back uphill, and tried to climb. But the rock was so loose under my feet, I could barely take a step two feet up that didn’t slide a foot and a half down.
Okay.
I turned to my left to try to sidehill my way slightly up and to the north.
If I cut across the east face of the peak long enough, I figured, I would cross the trail eventually, since it had to go at least somewhat up and down the mountain. I walked, scanning the mountainside for a trace of beaten soil. I saw nothing.
Mountains are big. You can’t just start running down one and expect to magically end up exactly where you parked your car.
Then I saw two people headed up the mountain. A few steps later, I saw the trail. The right trail.
Thank you thank you thank you thank you.
Just below tree line, my head started to pound. I sat down, drank as much water as I could stomach, and hiked the rest of the way down with a sloshing belly.
In the car just outside Hamilton, about an hour from Missoula, my head felt like it was being split by an ax from the inside out. I chugged more water and smoked more cigarettes. I stopped and got a cup of coffee, hoping it was caffeine withdrawal.
No luck.
Aspirin, water, ibuprofen—nothing helped. I wanted to pass out. I knew it had to be altitude sickness. I had climbed Trapper way too fast, going up thirty-eight hundred feet in less than four hours.
I was in bed by 8 p.m.
After that, I gave up on mountaintops until spring. By November, it had started snowing, which made it tough for a guy with no equipment. I didn’t even try, figuring I’d need snowshoes ($100) at the very least, and maybe crampons ($80) and an ice ax ($80), not to mention some sort of knowledge of how to not slide to my death off the sides of snow-and-ice-covered peaks. I continued to cling to my packs of cigarettes ($3 each).
The next Tuesday afternoon after Trapper Peak, I stopped by Tim’s apartment on my way home from campus. “What have you been up to?” he said.
“Just working on my thesis,” I said.
I had been meeting once a week with Clem Work, the head of the graduate program at the School of Journalism, to discuss it. I had kind of decided on a somewhat vague topic: “Newspapers and the Internet.” It sucked. I was not looking forward to spending the next seven months researching and writing.
“What’s it on?” Tim asked. “Peak bagging?”
Huh.
I poked around the internet before my next meeting with Clem, and we talked through what I might be able to do. I remembered the folks from Borah Peak who said they were highpointers, and I found their club. The founder had died, and as part of his dying wishes, club members were trying to scatter his ashes on the high points of all fifty states, from Britton Hill in Florida to Denali in Alaska. I found another guy who spent all of his spare time obsessing over county high points—interesting out West, but charmingly tedious and even ridiculous in flatter areas, like the golf course in New York City that happened to have the county high point inside its fences, or the county in Illinois where you had to visit dozens of spots to make absolutely certain you’d touched the high point.
Before we closed out the semester and I got on a plane back to Iowa, I was well into the preliminary research for my project: a series of magazinestyle articles on peak bagging.
I was so excited about mountains and writing and the West that I hated to go back to Iowa. Winter was always tough there, especially after Christmas was over and just the dark cold days remained. But I was looking forward to seeing some friends. I flew to Minneapolis, made the ridiculous thirty-minute roundtrip walk through security to get outside for two rapid-fire cigarettes, then back inside before my connecting flight to Rochester, Minnesota, the closest airport to my parents’ house.
One of my high school buddies, Robb, called me at Mom and Dad’s house and said maybe we should go over to this party at our friend Scott’s.
“Sure,” I said. “I think I’m pretty solid. Damn near two years sober, albeit white-knuckling it. I can drive you guys around town, at least, make sure you’re not driving drunk.”
I clutched a Styrofoam cup of Kwik Star coffee and moved uneasily around the party, talking to old friends, who sipped their first or third or fifth beer. I hadn’t seen most of the people there in four or five years, and every person I talked to pointed to the cup of coffee.
I’d say, “Yeah, I quit drinking,” probably with all the confidence of someone who’d been sober for three days.
This, I began to find out, evoked one of two responses:
1.“Really? Good for you.” This was the nice response, but it made me hate—fucking hate—the person who said it. I hated them because they meant well but really had no idea what it was like. Sometimes it came out like I had told them I had decided to cut down on my salt intake or quit eating trans fat.
2.“Yeah, I don’t drink too much anymore either.” This was worse. You know who doesn’t drink too much anymore? Me. In fact, my entire existence has been dependent on the fact that I have had zero beers in the past year and a half, and will continue to have zero beers for the rest of my goddamn life.
Keith, however, didn’t say either of those things, during what was probably the first conversation we’d had since graduating from high school six years prior. He said, “Yeah, I heard you had some problems down in Cedar Falls. That was probably a good idea.”
Thank you, Keith. Thank you thank you thank you. You get it.
After the party, we went to a bar a friend’s father had opened after we graduated. Everyone was pretty well on their way to a good time. I ordered water and sm
oked a cigarette every fifteen minutes.
I had never kept track before, but I couldn’t believe how much my friend Bob could drink and not appear drunk. The last time we’d gone out, we had an informal Guinness-drinking contest at a bar in Cedar Falls and I set my couch on fire.
OXYGEN
ANOTHER SUMMER, ANOTHER SATURDAY IN a sweaty tuxedo, watching people drink to celebrate a wedding. This time it was my brother’s.
After graduation from UM, I had moved to Arizona to get back together with Amy, patching things up after a couple years of clarity, and missing each other. We were living together in her apartment in Scottsdale, both of us having fun but neither of us quite feeling at home in the sprawling desert city, especially during the summer, when it can hit one hundred degrees at nine thirty every morning. She was working as an aesthetician at a day spa, and I was spending most of my time applying for newspaper jobs, only recently picking up a couple of part-time gigs. But we were together, and not lonely. Chad’s wedding in Wisconsin was hot, but a welcome break from the oven-like Arizona desert.
I was three weeks shy of two and a half years sober, leaving another wedding reception early. On the walk to our hotel room, I passed by a window that looked out on the pool just in time to see Chad jump into the deep end with his tuxedo on, having a blast with his college buddies. I think my mother would have preferred him to drink six fewer beers than he did that night. Even two and a half years later, I would have gladly drunk them for him, especially in the nervous hour leading up to my best man speech at the reception.
My brother’s not an alcoholic. He’s never been through any sort of treatment. No one’s ever mentioned that he might have some sort of problem with booze. He can drink two beers every night for the rest of his life if he wants to.
We have the same genetics and pretty much the same upbringing, yet he was working a good job, raising a family, buying a house, and living a contented life in a Midwest town. Meanwhile, I was a tortured recovering alcoholic trying to figure it all out in the backcountry out West.
Chad had a hell of a time quitting smoking. He took his drinking too far at least a few times, too, and got arrested for drunk driving once in Minnesota. What makes me the certified alcoholic and not him? Is there some sort of drinks-per-week average that I exceeded? How close was he to that average?
I’m sure Chad drank too much during his college years, as most of my friends did. Hell, before he and Meg had kids, Chad still cut loose every once in a while and had to call Meg to pick him up at the bar.
But maybe he could put it down. Maybe he didn’t feel like he had to finish the bottle, or the night. Maybe he could drink too much without being an asshole and wrecking everyone’s lives around him.
We had never been that alike, as brothers go. He was good at video games, while I dove into books. Every once in a while, he would skillfully work his way through the levels on games like Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! or The Legend of Zelda, then hand me the controller and let me try to finish off the game. Sometimes I did okay, but mostly I sucked. Classes, especially reading and writing, were easy for me, and football and basketball were easy for him. He had a steady girlfriend, and his social schedule mostly revolved around her, while I struggled through high school relationships and mostly hung out with my troublemaking friends.
After college, our paths diverged even further. He got married, got a job with a big company, bought a house, and started having kids. He built things in his spare time and started house remodeling. I kept searching, never finding the right “good job” my sensible upbringing and education should have led me to. I never saved much money, never drove a decent car. The only “nice” things I had were photos and stories from the places I’d been and the things I’d done.
So what makes people so different when they grow up in the exact same environment? Sometimes I think that the shock of having to quit drinking when I was twenty-three might have been the most formative thing that ever happened to me. It forced reinvention right when I should have had the beginning of my life figured out: I am a guy with a marketing degree. I live in northeast Iowa. I like to drink beer. This is my path in life. I know who I am. This is what I do. But then all of a sudden it wasn’t who I was. Maybe if you find yourself questioning all those things at twenty-three, you never stop questioning them, and never settle on an answer. Or maybe I’m just really bad at growing up and that’s my pretentious way of rationalizing it.
Back in Phoenix, I tried to get a handle on my new job as a sales floor associate at REI, the best gig I could land with my new master’s degree in journalism. For three months, I had applied to every newspaper in the metro area, finally applying at REI after hearing nothing back. And on the sales floor, you can get lucky and avoid hard questions from customers for only so long.
I stood there looking at a dozen sleeping bags hanging from the ceiling, some guy asking me what the difference was in the insulation between this one and that one. I didn’t know. I felt around for the tags and hoped that some information would pop into my head. Or that the guy would just decide he liked the blue one because it was blue, and it would do just fine for his upcoming backpacking trip to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Sweat drenched the armpits of my T-shirt under my green vest.
I didn’t feel like I exactly belonged on the staff at the Phoenix REI store, with its thirty-foot climbing wall, huge inventory of mountain bikes, racks of sleeping bags, and tents and backpacks made of space-age ultralightweight, ultratough, and ultrawaterproof materials. All I knew about outdoor gear was that I needed to acquire some.
My first six weeks, I was scared to death. I thought it was only a matter of time before someone outed me for the poseur I was. I learned quickly about sleeping bags, tents, sleeping pads, backpacks, stoves, and water filtration systems—partly because I was nervous about talking to customers and partly because I was excited to buy a bunch of gear as soon as I had enough money.
My direct opposite at the shop was a guy named Brian who knew everything about outdoor gear and could so authoritatively tell you which tent was the best that you wanted to buy two of them. Brian had two jobs, one at REI and one at a web hosting company, so his free time was scarce and well utilized. He was fond of driving two hours up I-17 to Flagstaff at ten at night and hiking by headlamp to the top of 12,633-foot Humphreys Peak, just so he could get some altitude training for his upcoming Mount Rainier trip. He was a hard-ass. It was with some trepidation that I mentioned to him that we had the same Saturday off. He suggested we climb Humphreys.
Our jaunt up Humphreys would be Brian’s sixth or seventh in the past two months. Two nights prior, it had snowed on the San Francisco Peaks for the first time that season. We heard it was “a light dusting,” but the trail was piled with white slush, warming in the morning sun. Brian set a quick pace, slightly uncomfortable for me, and before long, we were nearly above tree line. The few remaining trees at that altitude were crusted with clumps of snow, more white than green.
At the saddle between Agassiz Peak and Humphreys, the wind started drilling us. On the east side of the peaks, the plains were a dry green and brown. We had emerged from the trees into a polar landscape sculpted by wind. A trail sign had foot-long icicles growing at ninety-degree angles from its sides. This was going to be cold.
I was sucking air. On the ridgeline to the summit, Brian got a couple hundred feet ahead of me, and my head started to thump with a thick, blunt pain. Altitude sickness—again. I tried to breathe deep and force oxygen into my lungs. I slowed down, and Brian went farther ahead, maybe a couple hundred feet. I knew I should turn around and go back down.
What could happen to me, this high, in conditions this bad? Was my body shutting down, or just getting sick? My hands were going numb, my pant legs frozen to my boots. Vomit sat just below my throat, ready to rise.
I plodded on, stopping every ten steps to take three deep breaths, then stopping every five steps. The wind blew harder, knocking me off balance. I was angry at the wind;
I wanted to put my fist through it. I counted off ten more shuffling steps. If I could just throw up, I’d feel better. Then ten more steps.
I was at the top. Brian squatted in a makeshift windbreak, a couchsize hole dug out of the snow. He took a quick photo of me with my disposable camera, and we started down.
Back in Scottsdale that evening, it was seventy-five degrees as I smoked cigarettes on the deck in sandals.
I got my first newspaper job in the fall, at a tiny suburban twice-weekly paper. I wore business casual clothes, even though I hated them, and wrote small stories, collected event calendar listings, and laid out pages of newsprint.
Amy continued at the day spa, helping the women of Scottsdale feel a little more beautiful. It was a shock to live in Scottsdale after I’d spent the past two years in Missoula, where every street seemed to end at a mountain or a river instead of a golf course.
I kept the part-time job at REI, pouring my paychecks from the store into discounted outdoor gear. I gradually stockpiled everything I’d need for backpacking and peak bagging.
I had never considered rock climbing, but once in a while, I would glance over at the climbing gear and ropes. One day at the store, a coworker told me he was headed to Mount Whitney in the spring to do the Mountaineers Route. I asked him what the point was of doing a technical route when there was a perfectly good trail up the back. I just wanted to be in the mountains, not haul all that metal stuff around to climb vertically.
Back in Iowa for the holidays, I pulled a microwave-size box out from under the Christmas tree: To Brendan, From Chad. Inside was a climbing rope, sixty meters long, blue, black, and green weave, BlueWater Enduro, designed to stretch and absorb the fall of a climber. It wasn’t neatly coiled or shrink-wrapped, like the ones we sold at REI; it was just piled into the box. Standard fare for Christmas gifts between brothers—we care, but let’s not get too mushy about it.
Sixty Meters to Anywhere Page 9
