Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  Out of the way, I pulled my hands off it, expecting it to thunder away in a quick exit. Nothing. It just sat there, content. It had sat on top of that mountain for a million years before I disturbed it, and now it was going to sit for a million more in its new spot.

  Okay okay okay. Exhale.

  I picked my way up the final one hundred feet to the summit at greatgrandmother speed. At the top, we switched out our climbing shoes for boots. Two minutes before we started down, it started to sleet and thunder. I secretly beamed at the adventure my life had become.

  A month and a half later, I stood in the parking lot of the Safeway in Seward, Alaska, snapping photos while Amy munched a bowl of granola on the tailgate of the car. The lush green slopes and sharp northeast ridge of Mount Marathon towered over the store, climbing a steep forty-six hundred feet from sea level in two lateral miles. In the other direction, a fence of glaciated peaks lined the east shore of deep-blue Resurrection Bay.

  We were at the midpoint of our honeymoon, living out of a rented Dodge Caliber station wagon that happened to be just long enough for us to sleep in the back every night. At the city campground, instead of pitching a tent in in one of the sites far back from the bay, we paid for an RV spot and backed the car up to the shore in between forty-foot motor homes, taking in the view of the water and the mountains through the open hatchback.

  I was in heaven, living cheaply out of a car, sleeping in the back, driving and hiking all over the southern part of Alaska. We’d seen Denali from the highway, rising 17,000 feet above the road, so tall and huge you thought it was a cloud at first. We had backpacked into a backcountry cabin on Crow Pass and been visited by mountain goats, kayaked in Resurrection Bay, and hiked up to look at the enormous Harding Icefield. The car, a place to sleep safe from Alaska’s legendary grizzly bears, had kept Amy happy. Until our last night of sleeping out before the end of our trip.

  At a campground south of Anchorage, I pitched our MSR tent, which four of my friends had bought us as a wedding gift—and the only item on the registry I’d been excited about.

  After we ate dinner, Amy said she’d rather sleep in the car.

  “But it’s a nice night,” I said, “and it doesn’t even look like it’s going to rain.” Plus, I’d already put the tent up.

  “I would just rather sleep in the car tonight,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Bears,” she said.

  “I think we’ll be okay as long as we don’t bring food in the tent with us,” I said. “Bear attacks are rare. And attacks on people sleeping in a tent are even rarer.” Plus, we were really close to civilization, a couple hundred feet from the highway. Plus, we had bear spray. “You slept in the tent for two nights at the campground in Denali National Park, and we were fine, weren’t we?”

  I didn’t let it go, didn’t say, “Okay, I’ll just sleep in the car with you.” We didn’t argue or get mad. I just went to sleep in the tent by myself while my wife slept in the car thirty feet away.

  In the morning, it was a little weird, but we both let it go and wrapped up the trip—me in love with Alaska, feeling like I’d just scratched the surface. Alaska was a dream come true for me, maybe the jumping-off point for other things, bigger things.

  Maybe I should have seen it, an obvious sign of something bigger, that I was falling in love with one vision of life and Amy was falling in love with another one. I was enamored with road trips, living out of a car, climbing, exploring, getting dirty, drinking morning coffee in a puffy jacket, and looking down at dirty toes poking out of my sandals. She wanted a backyard, a garden, and a dog.

  Back in Denver that fall, at a happy hour event I had to attend as part of my newspaper job, I met a guy and his wife from Iowa, and the guy told me he’d had three drunk-driving arrests but that he quit drinking for three years, and now he has three kids. He was sitting next to me, drinking his second beer of the night.

  We were in a restaurant that had about a hundred beers on tap, and I instantaneously, genuinely wondered:

  if I am making a big deal out of this whole “alcoholism” thing

  and

  if maybe I’m taking it too seriously

  and

  if I should order a beer.

  Just take it in moderation—one or two, that’s all. Just to loosen up. No big deal. No big deal.

  I was five and a half years sober.

  Maybe five and a half years is enough. Just to loosen up. No big deal. Actually taste the beer this time around, enjoy it, not guzzle it to get drunk. Can I do that? I probably can, right? This guy had three DUIs. Three. Hell, I only had two. And it’s not like I killed someone.

  Just one, to loosen up.

  What goes well with these nachos? Microbrew? Stout? IPA? No big deal. Whatever he’s drinking looks good. Amber something or other. He’s got kids, and he’s drinking here, on a weeknight, with his wife. How bad can it be?

  I am not listening to what you are saying right now. I am thinking about a beer.

  Just one? Of course not. I can’t do things half-assed—especially that. I cannot live the life I’ve found and have a few beers here and there.

  I am a climber and a writer and a dreamer, and already there isn’t time enough for all of it. There are mountains and sunsets, miles of trails and rivers, grizzly bears and marmots. Smiles and heartbreak, and love and loss and pain. I want to take it all head-on, to go for that next handhold, even when I don’t know if I’m going to stick the move or take a wicked screamer down the face of the rock.

  My life wasn’t in here, sitting on my ass with this guy. It was out there, thanks to sixty meters of climbing rope, with my heavy pack and all the heart and courage I could dig up. It smells like that rope and pine trees and sunbaked skin, and it fits like a finger lock in a centimeter-wide seam in perfect granite. It’s in my dad’s smile when he gets a photo of me standing somewhere in our beloved Rocky Mountains, with the sun low on my tired but happy face, after another long day of running out my demons. It comes out in hour-long bursts of longhand, frantically inked in all capitals in a beat-up composition book. And when it’s good, really good, it puts a lump in my throat.

  I wasn’t going to miss out on any of it, no matter how low or how high it got, just because, what, I wanted to remember what good beer tasted like, or how it made me feel? I’d have missed a life.

  I picked up the glass of water in front of me and drank the rest before politely excusing myself and pedaling my bike through the dark streets of downtown Denver as fast as I could, weaving in and out of traffic, dodging potholes, not touching my brake levers.

  CLOSURE

  HALFWAY UP THE THIRD FLATIRON, the iconic twelve-hundred-foot rock tower above Boulder, Colorado, I started thinking that I could definitely slip and fall. If I fell from that height, I would certainly die, and everyone would think I did it on purpose, because I had just filed my divorce papers sixteen hours before and I’d climbed up here without a rope.

  But everyone would have been mistaken. I was up here, hanging onto this red-brown sandstone, because I needed to clear my head. I had the week off work, and I couldn’t sit in my tiny postsplit apartment all day. That would have been unhealthy.

  Of course, this could turn out to be really unhealthy. I looked down at my feet, clad in my tiny sticky-rubber-soled climbing shoes. As long as they stick to this rock for another hundred moves or so, I should be just fine. Then I can get back onto flat ground and back to feeling like someone punched me in the stomach.

  Amy and I had been together for almost nine years, through all my problems, and hers. Through Christmases and rehab and jail and counseling. When we’d met at a bar when we were in college, I was already an alcoholic, and she was an anorexic/bulimic sorority girl.

  Since then, we had changed. She’d lived in Omaha and western New York, and I’d lived in Idaho and Montana. We got back together in Phoenix and then moved to Denver. She was a makeup artist before deciding on a career in social work. I worke
d at small newspapers before landing at a nonprofit that took inner-city kids on backpacking trips.

  I wanted to climb, to get out there and see it all—snow-covered peaks, rivers that cut canyons, the moonscape of the American desert—to bring it into myself and see what it made me. When I asked Amy to go hiking and she said she had to stay home and study, I went climbing instead. Each conversation we had, I lost more hope for our marriage and got closer and closer to calling it dead. She studied her new passion, and I had the best climbing year of my life, attacking routes with a sad and angry ferocity that pushed past my normal fear.

  We moved out of the apartment we had shared for two and a half years, the longest I had lived anywhere since I had left my parents’ house in Iowa. I broke down going through my things, not knowing what to do with photos of the two of us having a great time, photos from our wedding, gifts she had given me, notes she had written, things that you save when it’s forever and don’t have a box for when it’s suddenly not.

  A backpacking trip with five at-risk teens from East Palo Alto, California, already scheduled for the days right after we moved out of our apartment, had turned out to be the perfect solace for me. It took me into the mountains south of Yosemite and forced me to slow down.

  I was eager to introduce these city kids to mountain sunsets, real silence, and big peaks, and talk to them about their lives, which were infinitely tougher at seventeen than mine was at twenty-nine. I had to focus on getting them through their first-ever week in the wilderness, where they were living out of a backpack, drinking alpine lake water, and crapping in holes in the ground. I had to forget about my divorcé studio apartment, where I didn’t have a blender or a toaster or a space in bed next to someone who believed in me.

  In the mornings before anyone else woke up, I sat and took photos of Chittenden Lake, so placid and flat just after sunup that it held a perfect reflection of the granite slabs and skinny pines around it. For those few minutes, the tension in my shoulders eased, and I felt the tiniest bit of calm. When things are good, that view and that quiet don’t melt into you as deeply.

  I had asked Amy to pick me up at the Denver airport at the end of my trip, since we were going to try to remain friends and she had the afternoon off. We had agreed to file the divorce papers after I got back from California.

  At 2:40 p.m., I got in her car and she said we needed to hurry because the city clerk’s office closed at four. She’d filled out all the forms for the divorce and put them in a yellow folder in the backseat. I tried to make sense of them as Amy drove.

  At 3:20, we were still a mile from the City and County Building in downtown Denver. I asked Amy if she had brought a checkbook, knowing we needed to pay $200 in fees. Shit, no, neither of us had. We drove to my apartment building, I ran up the stairs to my still-not-lived-in apartment, and ripped out a blank check. We parked as close as we could and hurried through the building to room 280A, getting there at exactly 3:40.

  We had failed, fucked it up, gotten all those people together for our wedding. We had stood there in front of everyone and said it was forever, that we loved each other. And we blew it. I hated myself, even though Amy had told me it wasn’t anyone’s fault, that people change, people grow apart. When she’d said that, worse than crying, I instead felt sick to just below the point of tears, like someone was sitting on my chest when I tried to get out of bed.

  Amy had never liked climbing, which I realized now was a perfectly normal thing. We’ve spent thousands of years devising systems to avoid risk and maximize safety and comfort; it seems pretty natural to not try climbing up something from which you could very easily fall to your death.

  But climbing worked for me. The nuances of holding onto rock features with only the friction and balance of toes and fingertips, the crucial placement of safety equipment every few moves, keeping the rope at the right tension—all these things demanded full attention, forcing me to leave my problems on the ground. Climbing taught me to persevere through debilitating fear, when I hyperventilated and was so overcome with the likelihood of falling that both legs shook hard enough to jackhammer themselves right off the tiny footholds, but I kept it together and kept going.

  That kind of simplicity was appealing when I sat in my apartment on the one chair I’d kept in the split. I was sure I’d just made the biggest decision of my young life, but not sure it was the right one.

  The morning after we filed the divorce papers, I woke up early, not hungry; I was too nervous to eat. I stuffed a small backpack with everything I needed: a harness, a belay device, a chalk bag, climbing shoes, a light static rope—usable only for rappeling, unsafe to use for climbing. No climbing partner. No helmet—a helmet wasn’t going to do anything for me if I fell this time. This was going to be my first ropeless climb.

  I had climbed the Third Flatiron twice before, roped. It was easy, low-angle, like a thousand-foot ladder into the sky. It wasn’t much of a challenge for many climbers in Boulder—they would leave from the Chautauqua Park trailhead, run to the base of the climb, slip on their climbing shoes, and race up the face, rappeling off the back and returning to the car in less than an hour.

  For me, though, this time was serious. No matter how easy the climb, it could still kill you. One move, upsetting your balance, one foot slipping, one hand greasing off a hold, and you’re rag-dolling down the rock.

  I walked quickly up the trail from Chautauqua Park, breaking a light sweat in the warm early fall air. Near the base of the rock, the trail steepened, and I wove up the switchbacks, arriving at the East Bench in just under forty minutes. I popped off my hiking shoes, pulled my climbing shoes out of my pack, slipped them on, and tried to focus.

  I thought about my friend Bruce, who had once, wrestling with a heavy life decision, made it all the way up to the top of the wall at a climbing gym before noticing he had never clipped himself into a belay line. Trying to traverse across the plastic wall to a safe spot, he slipped and fell thirty feet. He was in the trauma unit of the hospital for five days with a collapsed lung, broken ribs, and a broken elbow.

  I sat there at the base of the climb, the Standard East Face, and tried to get my shit together. I stood up on one foot, pulling my other foot up and resting it against the inside of my knee, brought my hands together and pointed them above my head, a yoga tree pose. This will quiet things down. I focused, kept my balance for ten breaths, then switched to the other foot.

  I looked up at one thousand feet of sandstone and took a deep breath.

  Boy, if I fall off this thing, no one will know that this morning is the lowest I’ve ever felt in my life since that first year after I stopped drinking.

  Deep breath.

  Was the divorce all my fault? All the damage from my drinking, too?

  Deep breath.

  Take it easy. It’s not that simple.

  And there I was, looking up at this gigantic rock, a giant sandstone skyscraper tilted into a mountain.

  The answer is up there.

  It wasn’t like I expected to get a message from someone at the top or have an epiphany about the course of my life—but maybe the answer was in the process.

  I had come here to pull myself up this rock, to interact with it, and to think about nothing else besides what I need to do to keep moving up and not fall. I moved up, running a filmstrip of what happened yesterday in the back of my head.

  Back in 5 Minutes, a sign taped to the door at 280A had said. But almost immediately, a woman came out of the office across the hall and let us in. We sat down at a desk with her and watched her go through our forms. Are we really killing this?

  Another woman stuck her head through the door and said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  The woman looking at our forms said, “Yes, come on in and have a seat.”

  No privacy for us.

  The woman with our paperwork asked, “Do you have any assets? Children? And there isn’t a pregnancy?”

  She labeled a couple of the forms and explained th
at we needed to take them across the hall to the Office of the Clerk and Recorder and have a notary watch us sign them. We’d already screwed up and signed one of them before she told us this.

  As we walked into the hallway to look for the notary, Amy started to get choked up.

  “Are you okay?” I said. “Are you going to be okay?” I still care about you, you know. I don’t want you to be sad while we’re filing our divorce papers. I was dizzy.

  “Yeah,” Amy said. “I’m okay.” But the way she said it I knew she was two breaths away from a sob.

  My throat was in a knot. Why couldn’t I make this right?

  On the forms, we’d had to write the city where we got married. Springdale, Utah, it said in Amy’s handwriting. I remembered the excitement of our wedding, and the couple of days leading up to it, and—

  Stop.

  Amy swallowed.

  At the notary counter, the woman said to make the check out for $220, and that we needed to make copies of all the forms on the copy machine behind us. A bike messenger was in line behind us, but the notary wouldn’t wait on him until she was done with us. He sighed. Amy ripped the staples out, saying it would be faster if we sent everything through at once.

  I started to argue, but then stopped myself. Jesus Christ, can we just get through this, the last thing we ever do together? We had rarely fought until six months ago.

  We sent the stack of pages through, restapled them, and turned around and gave them to the notary. We watched her stamp everything.

  I was sure I heard the bike messenger say, “You gotta be kidding me.” I was ready to shove him through the glass door.

  On the happiest day of your life, you get a best man and as many groomsmen as you want. She gets a maid of honor and a bunch of pretty bridesmaids. That’s the beginning. But when it ends, you get this hollow government hall and this fucking asshole bike messenger. I gritted my teeth.