Amy and I ended up sitting next to each other on a bench in Cheesman Park, crying and talking about how much we still cared. I didn’t care if all the joggers and cyclists in the park saw tears rolling down my face; I couldn’t stop it.
I hugged her good-bye in front of my apartment, and she said she’d call when she was ready to talk again. The door had closed on our relationship. It was the first time in nine years that the door would be all the way shut.
Now, at the base of the Third Flatiron, eight hundred feet of sandstone above my head, I chalked up. I stepped one foot onto the stone, smearing a stance, grabbing a handhold, then the next one. Pay attention. I moved left out onto the enormous east face, as wide as a football field. I traversed, and the exposure opened up underneath me. I pictured myself falling, rolling into a bag of blood and broken bones onto the talus below. I stepped up, keeping three points of contact at all times.
Only a few people I knew would make sense of what I was doing. I was out here climbing on my own to take me away. In bed the night before, unable to sleep, I’d thought about going somewhere for a drink. A bar for a few beers. Hell, a park bench and a bottle of cheap red wine. Whatever. Six and a half years of sobriety, gone. The crushing feeling of failure, gone, too. It was just for a second, for a flash, that I’d considered it a serious option. Then it had disappeared.
In twenty minutes, I was halfway up the face, out of breath. I stopped to rest, looking behind me for the first time. I was slowly leaving Boulder on the ground, with all my problems.
I turned, kept climbing, and then I stopped. I was in a strange spot, where the handholds are far apart, and I’d have to step high to grab the next one, leaving only one foot and a few fingers on the rock. I started to go for it, and then I slowly lowered myself back down. This wasn’t the time to take risks. I made two moves to the right, then up, then back left to my line. All secure moves.
And just like that, I was on top of the Third. The first time I climbed this, with Nick, it had taken us hours to get to this spot. I pulled my skinny rope out of my pack, put on my harness, zipped down the west face, and was on the ground.
On the walk back to the car, I realized I didn’t really enjoy climbing by myself. It was too risky, and there was no one to share the views with, talk about the moves, the rock, life. It was my first ropeless solo climb ever, but maybe my last as well.
I had gone to a few appointments with a therapist when Amy and I were deciding whether to get divorced, and my therapist had recommended I do some sort of ritual to give closure to our relationship—burning some clothes, cutting off my hair, something like that. I looked back up at the Third, towering above Chautauqua Park, wondering if I’d really gotten closure up there. I still felt terrible, and I would for over a year. But when it got tough, I looked to the mountains for answers instead of in a bottle. That was a different type of closure.
That was the day I started to try to forget all my memories with a person I loved. The day I started to adjust to a new part of my life, the part when I’m not in love anymore, the part where I’m alone.
The afternoon after I climbed the Third, my parents arrived from Iowa for a three-day weekend. My mom said I looked thin, and I think we both knew it was the type of thing that comes when you are so heartbroken you don’t think about food often enough. My hair was chopped down to a half inch, making me look even thinner.
“You don’t have a TV?” Mom asked, looking around my tiny fourhundred-square-foot studio on Marion Street the next morning.
“Nah, Amy kept ours,” I said. “It’s okay. I don’t feel like I need one.”
“We can buy you one,” she said. Dad nodded.
“I can afford a TV, Mom. I just don’t feel like I need one.” I had been in the studio four weeks, and although it was small and I was sad, I didn’t think the apartment was sad. The east wall was all windows, so there was lots of sunshine in the morning. I had a small desk—the kitchen table from my apartment with Amy—a bed, and a place for my bicycle. There was a small storage unit in the basement for my skis and backpacks.
I suppose it didn’t feel like much of a home to my mom, who hadn’t lived in an apartment in thirtysome years, let alone a tiny one. I finished toweling off the breakfast dishes while my parents sipped coffee on the stools next to the kitchen counter.
“Should we head up to Boulder Canyon then?” I said.
I drove Mom’s sedan up the winding canyon road to the parking area across from the Boulderado, a short low-angle granite slab on the north side of the canyon. My friend Lee jokingly called the crag “the fierce Boulderado,” but I loved taking people there. It had four really beginner-friendly routes, a 5.4, two 5.5s, and a 5.6, all with toprope bolts.
I shouldered a pack and looked up canyon and down canyon. When traffic was clear, I led Mom and Dad across the road.
“Be careful on this trail,” I said, turning around to Mom as she walked right behind me. “It’s pretty loose.”
The Boulderado had one of the easiest approaches in Colorado, maybe sixty seconds of walking and scrambling from the parking area across the street, a blip that I could probably negotiate with my eyes closed at this point. I had spent hours and hours in the mountains doing scrambling like that. But Mom and Dad were getting older. Sometime while living out West, I had crossed the threshold where you start looking to take care of your parents instead of them taking care of you.
They waited on the wide ledge twenty feet above the road as I went up to the back of the formation, climbing down and setting up a toprope on the anchors above the easiest route. I rappeled down the ropes and, out of the corner of my eye, saw Dad take a photo of me.
Dad was just along to watch, but Mom wanted to try climbing. She put on the climbing shoes I had bought for her, and I took her around to some low-angle slabs at the base of the crag to show her how the rubber would stick to even the smallest feature. I told her to keep her butt out away from the rock to ensure maximum friction on the low-angle slabs. “Remember to use your feet, not your hands, Mom,” I said. “You can stand for a long time on two tiny footholds, but you can’t hang your entire body weight on your hands for very long.”
She was fifty-nine, five foot two, maybe 110 pounds, and had started bruising easily the last few years. I certainly had no illusions about her hanging from one hand Sylvester Stallone–style. I just wanted her to have fun, and understand what I did in the mountains every weekend, if just a little bit.
I gave her my extra helmet, helped her into my extra harness, doubling back all the buckles, and tied her into the rope.
“Okay, Mom, if you get tired, scared, or your hands won’t hang on anymore, remember, you can come off the rock and just sit on the rope,” I said. “I’ll keep the belay tight, so you won’t fall more than a foot, and the rope will stretch a tiny bit and catch your weight. You ready?”
My mom was a lifelong flatlander, her blue eyes—the ones she had given me—matched the blue plastic of the helmet. She said, “Yep!” and started up her first rock climb.
When had this happened before, but in reverse? A swimming pool twenty-five years ago, a roller coaster in Kansas City, a tennis court in southwest Iowa, on a plastic sled somewhere at the top of a hill when I was three feet tall and covered in so many layers I looked like the Michelin Man.
Mom was not the smoothest, most natural-looking first-time rock climber. Probably like I did on my first climb, she reached in jerky movements, feeling the rock with her feet instead of looking for features and then carefully placing her toes. She was not a natural athlete, but neither was I. Mom could walk you into the ground, though. And she ran for years and years. Friends always told me, “I saw your mom out running today”—in the rain, in the snow, whatever. She finally gave it up after her knees started hurting too much. But then she just went for walks, flying up and down hills at four miles per hour.
We lived at the top of a big hill in a town in southwest Iowa until I was fourteen, and Mom would ride her bike ba
ck from the tennis courts with me as I battled my bike up the hill. We never got off and pushed; I just stood up in the pedals of my heavy black-and-gold Huffy Thunder 50 BMX bike, legs burning, until we got to an intersection about halfway up the hill. Instead of stopping, she’d tell me just to ride in circles until my legs felt better and I could go on. Two decades later when I became a mountain climber, I walked up trails and talus fields until my legs and lungs were on fire, and I just kept going, grinding it out until there was no more mountain to climb—just like my mom taught me.
On the Boulderado, Mom found the holds in the granite, working her way up, around the tree a third of the way up, into the dihedral, around the bulge to the anchors. She didn’t get pumped, didn’t tremble once, didn’t ask to come down. She kept going until she stood up on the big ledge at the top.
“Mom, you have to touch the anchor,” I yelled. “Reach up and slap it.”
She did. I laughed.
“Okay, I’m going to take in the slack,” I yelled up. “When you’re ready, pull your hands off the rock and lean back on the rope.”
She took a quick look around the top of the fierce Boulderado and leaned back. I slowly let out slack and talked her down the route until her feet were on the ledge next to mine and Dad’s. She turned to us with a huge smile.
Maybe it was watching Mom float up the climb so easily, or just curiosity, but I said, “Dad, what do you think? Want to give it a try?” I fully expected him to brush it off.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I can give it a try.”
He tried on all three pairs of my climbing shoes, squeezing into the purple Five Ten Spires. I helped him into the harness and tied a figure eight, Mom gave him the helmet, and he was off. He moved quickly up the granite, maybe remembering all the scrambling he’d done in Colorado when he lived in Poudre Park, a few canyons north, for a few months thirty-plus years ago. At the top, he tapped the bolts with one hand, and I yelled up the same instructions I’d told Mom.
He stepped to the edge of the big ledge, tried to lean back, then started to downclimb, then back up to the ledge, then started to downclimb the blocky gully to the right of the anchors, where he’d gone up. Once in the gully, he stepped down to a comfortable spot, where he tried to let me lower him again. But he couldn’t quite put all of his weight, and trust, in the rope that ran through the anchor above his head.
“Okay, Dad, you just have to trust the rope,” I yelled up, pulling in all the slack. “It’ll work. You just have to commit to it.”
He spent maybe five minutes in that gully—leaning back a little, trying to let both hands off the rock, resituating himself, never quite comfortable. Finally, he leaned back and gingerly sat into the harness, watching the rope take his weight, and I let an inch of rope through my belay device, then another one.
“Put your hands on the rope, Dad, and put your feet out in front of you and just walk down,” I said. “I got you. I got you. Gonna let you down really slow. Relax. I got you.”
He stepped onto the ledge next to Mom and me as I let out the last of the rope.
“I guess that was some sort of metaphor about trusting your son, huh?” I joked. “I gotta tell you, Dad, I understand your hesitation.”
We all laughed.
The next day, back in Denver, my parents drove me to the Best Buy on Colorado Boulevard and refused to leave the store until I picked out a TV. I got a small one, the size of a computer monitor, with a DVD player built in, and they were happy.
CAN’T
I DIPPED MY HAND INTO MY chalk bag for the fifth time in thirty seconds, and I heard the first of the two voices I hear regularly in my head. One is instinctual, looking out for my safety. It speaks up when I’m climbing. Sometimes it’s hard to hear anything over it, especially in a place like the first twenty-five feet of a route called Pear Buttress on Lumpy Ridge, near Estes Park, Colorado. The start of the route is what’s called “unprotected,” meaning if you fall, you deck; you slide down the granite and slam into slabs of rock that used to be part of the face above. This means whatever part of you hits first is probably going to break. Hopefully just your ankles, but it all depends on how you fall.
It was February when my coworker Chris and I took the day off work to try to climb Pear Buttress. Early in the week the weather forecast had made it seem possible—sunny and high of forty-seven. But by the time we were driving up to Estes Park, it had changed to partly cloudy and high of forty-three. Chris and I shared a desk at the nonprofit where we worked in Denver, and we had started to get out together more and more often to climb on the weekends. Everything about Chris was efficient and trim: his black hair always cropped to a quarter inch, his backpack tiny for whatever objective, the rack a little smaller than I’d like. He was comfortable pushing himself, and he pushed me to climb harder routes than I might have with other people.
At the base of Pear Buttress, I had a few hundred dollars’ worth of protective equipment clipped to my harness—a couple dozen carabiners, fifteen cams, and a set of wired stoppers. I was securely tied in, and Chris was belaying me. Yet all of this meant nothing until I could get myself to make a very delicate traverse across a blank slab into the security of a two-inch-wide crack that runs up the next thirty feet. I stood, hanging from the toes of my climbing shoes, on two nubs of rock invisible from the ground, fingers of my right hand clutching the only good handhold on the face.
To make the next move, you have to let go of this hold. That’s when I heard the first voice.
You can’t do it. That’s all it said.
That’s all the voice had to say, because I knew I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the courage, balls, skill, technique, the will, whatever. I was just a kid from Iowa who never should have left.
What am I doing up here? Trying to prove something? I’m going to fall off this rock and hit the ground so fast Chris won’t be able to do anything but maybe drop the rope to frantically run underneath me and try to break my fall.
I heard the voice again. You can’t do it.
I looked down. It was twenty-five feet, easily. I’d be scared to jump into a swimming pool off a diving board that high. Fuck this. I’m climbing down.
But when I looked down at the line I had climbed, I realized I had pulled my way up almost completely on friction footwork.
Where are the holds? How did I climb up that?
Trying to climb down would be suicide. I wasn’t even sure I could backtrack to the last tiny foothold I had used.
You can’t do it.
There were three options from where I stood: stand where I was until my feet became too fatigued to hold my toes at this angle and I slipped and fell to the ground; foolishly try to climb backward, again risking a fall, albeit hopefully a slightly shorter fall; or try to climb into the crack to my left.
To get to the crack, I would have to take my left toes off a thin smear, spread-eagle my legs, reach my toes out onto the flake of rock four feet to my left, and hope the rubber on my shoe stuck. If my foot slipped, I would likely cartwheel off the rock and land headfirst at Chris’s feet, like a lawn dart.
You can’t do it.
Fuck it. I’m doing it. I’m doing it. I’m doing it I’m doing it I’m doing it.
I pointed my left shoe toward the flake and slowly, slowly reached my foot out. My toes stuck. I quickly jammed a hand in the crack, pulled a cam off my harness, and plugged it into the rock, then hastily clipped the rope to it, hyperventilating. Now if I fell, I wouldn’t hit the ground.
When Mark, my counselor at the Horizons treatment program, told me that I couldn’t white-knuckle my way through sobriety, I’m sure this was not what he had in mind.
A couple more hand jams and I stepped out onto the face. I did it. I had finished the most terrifying fifteen minutes of rock climbing I’d done in my life, standing on a two-foot-wide ledge a hundred feet off the ground.
I hear the voice when I’m not climbing, too. It says the same thing, but it wants to wreck my life. It
speaks out more often—sometimes daily.
One morning at work, I got an email that contained the innocent phrase “pitcher of beer.” For some reason, that day, my mind latched onto that phrase, instead of skimming over it for whatever else was in the email, and I immediately visualized a pitcher of beer.
I saw a pitcher of golden American beer, Budweiser probably, with a one-inch foam head on top, and I could smell it that day, taste it—bitter, cool, musty. There were four pint glasses’ worth of beer in the pitcher, and I could get to the bottom of it in a few minutes, I was sure. I knew how heavy it was, and I could feel myself sitting up to lift it with both hands to my mouth, sticking my nose in the foam.
You can’t do it, the voice said. You can’t avoid beer. Not for the rest of your life. Maybe not even for the rest of this week.
More importantly, you don’t have to do it. You don’t owe anybody shit. You’re an adult. You can make your own decisions. Have a beer, like a normal person. Like a man. Hell, have ten. You deserve it.
And I knew if I did, the taste would feel like going home, better than going home.
It would be easy to say “Look at you—you used to drink a lot, and now you’re a climber. You’re just substituting one rush for another.”
I don’t think that’s it though. For me, climbing was about learning a different way to deal with the world, and the challenges of life. It’s no more heroic to spend your weekend hours climbing up some pointless rock face, risking death and injury, just “because it’s there,” or whatever, than it is to sit in a bar and get drunk all weekend. But it certainly takes a little more ambition.
I’m not an exceptional climber. Although I’ve kept myself alive and my name out of the Monday morning “Climber Rescued” headlines in the Denver Post and Boulder’s Daily Camera, I haven’t stood on top of the world’s biggest peaks or climbed anything close to the most difficult lines.
Sixty Meters to Anywhere Page 14
