by Jan Redford
PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA
Copyright © 2018 Jan Redford
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Redford, Jan, author
End of the rope : mountains, marriage and motherhood / Jan Redford.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780345812315
eBook ISBN 9780345812339
1. Redford, Jan. 2. Redford, Jan—Marriage. 3. Redford, Jan—Divorce. 4. Women authors, Canadian (English)—21st century—Biography. 5. Women Mountaineers—Canada—Biography. 6. Self-actualization (Psychology).
I. Title.
CT310.R42A3 2018 305.4092 C2017-905413-9
All photos, except those credited, courtesy of Jan Redford
Text design by Five Seventeen
Cover design by Five Seventeen
Cover images: courtesy of Jan Redford;
(background mountains) © Hero Images / Getty Images
v5.2
a
Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.
ANNIE DILLARD, PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
You’ve got to jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
RAY BRADBURY
For Dan Guthrie, Ian Bult and Niccy Code,
who will forever be part of my story.
And for Jenna and Sam.
My wildest, most meaningful adventure was having you.
And for Dan, who has always believed in me.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue: First Climb
1 On the Rocks
2 Lion’s Layback
3 The Rescue
4 Speed Ruts
5 Learning to Roll
6 Bugaboo
7 World’s Toughest Milkman
8 Fragile Ice
9 We’re Gathered Here Today
10 Aberdeen
11 Show No Fear
12 Climbing Girlfriend
13 The Final Last Straw
14 The Memo
15 In the Arms of a Mountain
16 The Underwear Drawer
17 Teetering on the Edge
18 Pink Wedding Dress
19 The Waiting
20 Miracles
21 Into the Shadows
22 Back on the Sharp End
23 Yodel Village
24 You Lead, I’ll Follow
25 Carsick
26 Die Young, Stay Pretty
27 Grant’s Lunch
28 Fractured
29 Playing Dead
30 Mama Spiders
31 Remember the Lilac
32 Power Surge
33 Leaving Chaba
34 Only Four Years
35 One Little “Non”
Epilogue: Second Chances
Acknowledgements
Photos
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The events in this memoir happened a long time ago and the people you’ll meet in these pages have all matured. We now all behave much more appropriately. Just in case that caveat is not enough, I’ve changed several names to protect people’s privacy. I’ve also recreated conversations and events to the best of my ability based on my elephantine memory, multiple boxes of letters, and passages from the angst-ridden journals I’ve kept since I was eleven.
PROLOGUE: FIRST CLIMB
“Load me up.”
I stretched out my arms and my father passed me a liquor-store box marked Bacardi from the back of the station wagon. We were hauling our third load of gear a whole mile on foot to our cabin. We’d already dropped off sleeping bags, boxes of food, propane stoves, paint, tools and building materials. My little sister, Susan, and my mother had decided they’d had enough physical exertion for one day. They’d stayed at the cabin to clean.
My parents, in cahoots with my two uncles, had recently bought a dilapidated little shack on Crown land in the Laurentians. Finally, they’d done something right. A cabin in the woods was my dream come true. Three years earlier, in 1972, we’d moved from the Yukon to Ontario, and I still yearned for the snowy mountains, pink fireweed and wild rivers of the north. I was fourteen and counting down the years until I could escape, throw a pack on my back and hitch across Canada, all the way back to the Yukon to live off the land.
“Drop this box and I’ll have to thump you,” my father said, then made a rumbly, Donald Duck–like noise in the back of his throat to show he was just joking. This noise signalled a good mood, something of a rarity with him since we’d left the north.
As the weight settled into my arms I admired the bulge of my biceps. I was the only girl in gym class who could do the flexed-arm hang. My physical strength was one of the few things about me that impressed my father, though he had gone ballistic when I tried to show him I could do ten pull-ups on the shower curtain rod. On the drive here, he’d promised I could help repair the siding and replace a few missing cedar shakes on the roof, saying I was handier with my hands than my mother’s nincompoop brothers.
Dad threw a full pack on his back, scooped up a large plastic box, and we headed up the trail with me in the lead.
It was quiet in the woods. Just the sound of our feet shuffling through the leaves and pine needles, and the muffled clink, clink of the bottles in the box. The maple, beech and birch trees were just turning colour, crimson and gold against the deep green of the conifers. This was a real forest, so unlike the flat fields of hay and corn surrounding the bland, unincorporated town of Munster Hamlet, Ontario, where we now lived. The only wilderness I could find there was a scruffy clump of deciduous trees by the sewage lagoon where I’d sit on my favourite boulder surrounded by bulrushes, composing restless poems and writing in my diary while trying to ignore the smell.
My uncles Steve and Dunk wound through the trees ahead carrying the cooler between them. I didn’t want to catch up to them; it would break the spell of this special camaraderie I was feeling with my father. Moments like these were scarce. At home we walked on eggshells. Here in the Laurentians, I wanted to enjoy walking on a soft path of decaying maple leaves as long as I could. I wanted to enjoy my “nice” father.
I had two very distinct dads. The one here in the woods with me was my “breakfast” dad, who I could charm and joke around with. My “after-work dad” locked himself in his den with a bottle of Scotch after he got home every night. We had to stay the hell out of that one’s way. Suppertime was so explosive that my big brother, Eric, no longer ate with us. My mother took his food down to his bedroom. On the rare occasion he and Dad found themselves in the same room, they ended up screaming obscenities, even shoving each other around. Eric had refused to come this weekend, saying he’d rather have his toenails pulled out with pliers.
When we arrived at the cabin, I placed my load on the picnic table where my uncles were settling in beside the cooler. My father unshouldered his
pack and leaned it against the table. He looked outdoorsy in his plaid shirt and the boots he’d dusted off from his days of hiking the Chilkoot Trail—just like he did in his Arctic photos, looking out from the hood of a fur-lined parka with miles and miles of white spread out behind him. In the sixties, my father had worked as an “Indian agent,” living in Fort Chimo, Frobisher Bay and Inuvik, travelling to all the tiny Inuit outposts by dogsled and Ski-Doo. When I compared the old photos of him in the north to those of my mother sitting indoors on a government-issue sofa with a baby in one hand and a cigarette in the other, it was obvious who was having more fun. I wanted my father’s life, not the one my mother led, following her husband from community to community, popping out babies along the way, cleaning floors so cold they froze the mop. I intended to be the adventurer, not marry one.
Dad opened the cooler and pulled out three beers. Handed two of them to my uncles, lit up a cigarette.
“Go see if your mother needs a hand,” he said to me.
“I don’t want to help Mom.” Through the hazy glass of the cabin window I saw my twelve-year-old sister’s blond head bobbing around. My throat tightened. “You said I could help you.”
“Go see what your mother and sister are doing. This is men’s work. You’ll just get in the way.”
Anger surged through me like adrenalin. “I don’t want to see what they’re doing.”
“Well, just do something, for chrissake.” He shooed me like I was a pesky Yukon mosquito. And just like that—poof!—his promise was forgotten. Just like always. He never kept his word. Especially with a beer in his hand.
Betrayal closed my throat. Stole my voice. I spun away and stomped over to the cabin, holding back my tears. When I stepped out of the sunshine into the dim light, the musty scent of decaying forest was replaced by the harsh smell of clean. With a Windex bottle in one rubber-gloved hand and paper towel in the other, my mother was scrubbing the layers of grime from the windows, while Susan swept leaves and dirt into a pile by the wood stove.
“I’m going for a walk.” I grabbed my daypack full of my father’s books on plant identification and wilderness survival, my mother’s Robert Service poems, and my diary.
“Can I come?” Susan dropped the broom.
“No, I’m going by myself.”
“I want to go for a walk too!” She turned toward our mother.
“Oh, Jan, why can’t you take your sister?” With pursed lips, Mom gave me her don’t-be-so-dramatic look.
I flipped my pack on my back and pushed open the door. “I need to be alone,” I said.
“Don’t go too far!” Mom called after me.
I charged into the thick forest, away from the cabin, away from my family, trying to get as much distance between me and them as possible. As I zigzagged through the trees, branches etched thin lines of red across my bare legs and arms, but the physical sting was nothing compared to that sting of betrayal that was becoming too familiar. On some days my father would goof around with me, teach me swear words in French, confide in me, telling me all about his hard childhood. On others, he’d turn into a wild-eyed lunatic and chase my sister and me through the house with his father’s old cane. Or push my brother into the wall.
Just a few weeks back, in the summer, when my mother was on night shift at the Ottawa hospital where she was a psychiatric nurse, my father had started to cry in front of me, telling me I was the only one he could talk to, the only one who loved him. I told him we all loved him, but I knew Eric had quit school to work at a gas station so he could leave home to get away from him, my sister was too scared to even go near him, and sometimes I hated him so much it made my stomach ache. But it was a love-filled hate, or maybe a hate-filled love. I felt sorry for him because he’d grown up in poverty with six siblings and a father who wore a scowl as permanent as the limp he’d acquired from a piece of shrapnel in the war. I suspected Dad’s mother had died young just to get away from her husband. My whole life, I’d wanted to protect my father. Love him better. Make him happy.
I knew he had been happy. I’d seen photos of him in his twenties, laughing and holding a beer and cigarette, surrounded by friends, a girl on each arm. Before we were born.
I wove in and out amongst the trees, swiping branches away from my face, carving my own trail through the woods. But stomping over a forest floor cushioned by thick, spongy moss and rotting maple leaves was like stomping on a camping foamy. Not much drama. I slowed, then paused and looked back, wondering how far I’d gone. I could no longer hear voices, could no longer smell the smoke from the fire my father had started in the ring of rocks. Just the musty scent of decay under my feet. It would serve them right if I disappeared and they never saw me again.
I carried on until, finally, I had to stop—at the base of a cliff about four times as high as my house. I had a strong urge to climb all the way to the top, blow off some of this fuck you! anger. I knew I could do it. I’d been told just that summer that I’d make a good escaladeur. A rock climber.
It was Jocelyn who had told me that. He was a climbing instructor at the outdoor centre where I’d spent a weekend during a month-long high-school bilingual exchange near Quebec City. A real climber. I kept a photo I took of him in my diary and looked at it every night before I went to bed. There was a wildness to him, with his dark, scruffy beard and ponytail and the red bandana tied around his forehead. Every part of his body bulged with muscle, his biceps and forearms, his tanned, hairy quads.
He was supposed to take us climbing but it had poured rain so we’d gone caving instead. As we hiked up a hill above the lodge, I’d pretended I was heading up Everest with my climbing boyfriend and three Sherpas. When we came to the cave entrance, a hole in the rock the size of a St. Bernard doggie door, the other kids wouldn’t go near it, but I said, “I’ll do it!” and Jocelyn said, “Ah, Janeese,” making my name sound so exotic. “You are tough, n’est-ce pas?”
I stuck my head in the hole and squeezed through, praying my butt wouldn’t plug it, then wormed along on my belly through a long dark tunnel toward a dot of light with Jocelyn right behind me. We had to squeeze through an even tinier hole on the other side and when I got stuck and panicked, he said, “If the head, she goes, the body, he follows.” And he was right. I finally popped out the hole, and that’s when he told me I’d be a good climber.
Then he said, “You come to my room. I show you my mountain climbing equipment.” Warm tingles rose through me, like bubbles, starting from my toes. I wondered if maybe he could fall in love with me. But he was old, at least thirty, and had a girlfriend. Why would he want a five-foot-nothing, 110-pound, flat-chested fourteen-year-old anglophone tomboy from Munster Hamlet? After a whole year of high school, even the boys my own age weren’t exactly lining up at my locker.
Back at the lodge, Jocelyn led me through a side door and down some dark stairs into the basement, to a room with a narrow cot that took up half the space. The log walls were studded with long nails, and on each nail hung climbing gear: brightly coloured ropes, harnesses, odd-shaped pieces of metal, bunches of shoes with black rubber soles. A photo was pinned into the wood above his bed—Jocelyn clinging to a steep wall of rock, a bright red rope dangling below him. If he could cling to that blank wall, I figured he could do anything.
And now, standing at the base of the cliff among the boulders, I thought of Jocelyn and almost doubled over with longing. This was bigger than the longing I’d had for some of my brother’s friends. I didn’t just want to marry him. I wanted his life. I wanted his freedom. I wanted to wear grubby clothes and a bandana and hiking boots and not have anyone telling me what to do. I wanted to cling to a rock face like that, in total control. I wanted to be him.
I studied the cliff. It wasn’t blank like the one in Jocelyn’s photo, but broken up. Crumbly. There were lots of places to put my hands and feet. And it wasn’t as steep. Narrow ledges, some with stubby, twisted trees, interrupted stretches of smooth rock all the way up.
I placed my
hands flat on the rough, grey rock, dotted with black lichen. I could climb this. Of course I could. I was a gymnast. And a sprinter. And once, in gym class, I’d rappelled down the brick wall of our school.
I reached up and grabbed two outcrops, stepped up on an edge big enough for half of my sneaker. Step, hold, search for another handhold, like ascending a staircase to the sky. The movement came naturally.
I reached a stubby little tree growing out of a crack in the middle of the cliff. Standing on a ledge about the width of my feet, I held on to a spindly branch and looked down. It was a long way to the ground, maybe thirty feet, but instead of feeling fear, I tingled with excitement. My toes and fingers and skull felt pinpricked by millions of tiny needles, the adrenalin zinging through me. I’d always loved heights. At school in Whitehorse I’d gotten in trouble for going down the boys’ slide, instead of the tiny girls’ slide beside it. I could climb higher trees than any of the boys, and jump off the tallest cliffs into the quarry not far from Munster. I loved standing on the edge, wide awake, looking down at the water, knowing I was going to jump.
The top was still a long way up, and the rock was smooth and steep right above me, so I shuffled sideways, my chest touching the rock, traversing along the ledge to find an easier way. Then I continued straight up. Higher and higher. My mind was uncluttered. My father’s voice gone. I felt graceful and light, the way I felt in gymnastics in that split second during a layout on the vault when my body was fully extended, flat in the air. A moment of flying.
The farther I climbed, the more crumbly the rock became, and a few holds broke off from the cliff face in my hands. I started testing each handhold before I trusted it with my weight. I eventually hoisted myself onto a ledge, two feet deep, that spanned half the width of the cliff. The top was just above me. Reaching high, I groped around for something to hold on to, but all I found was moss, dirt and loose rock. I took a deep breath and looked around. To my left was a pile of rubble, so I shuffled to the right till the ledge narrowed to the depth of my feet. I reached again and tried to pull myself up, but a softball-sized chunk of rock broke away and released a cascade of greenery and dirt, narrowly missing my feet and bouncing off the cliff to the boulders below. I stared at the ground, so far away, and imagined my body splatting like a water balloon.
