by Jan Redford
My head down like a starving packhorse, I urged myself forward. Richie looked up from his stove with a big grin as I passed, his face swollen with tobacco. He spat a long brown stream into the snow.
“Way to go, Jan!
Every muscle in my body throbbed, but I smiled at him and straightened up under my load, making it the last few feet to my tent without falling.
* * *
—
Almost two months later, I sat cross-legged in the dirt with my group at the base of a cliff in Sinks Canyon, Wyoming. Mike, our climbing instructor, stood in front of us holding a red climbing rope that was attached to Lonnie, another instructor, who was waiting to lead us up a fifty-foot vertical crack in the rock.
“On belay!” Mike said.
“Climbing!” she responded.
We’d been camped at Bumfuck Butte here in the canyon for almost a week, and half of that time it had rained. It had even snowed one day. In May. So we’d spent hours practising knots and “pretend” belaying each other on horizontal ground till I was ready to pull out clumps of my tangled, overgrown hair. But we’d managed to do a few climbs, bombing between the sandstone and granite cliffs in the NOLS truck we called the Ambulance, and Mike had told me I was a natural. “Like a little piggie in shit.” Attributable, possibly, to my years of dabbling in gymnastics.
“Climb on.” Mike gave Lonnie the go-ahead.
Lonnie was demonstrating lead climbing. She would head up first, trailing the rope to set up a “top rope” above us. She was on the “sharp end” of the rope, the risky end. If we fell on the “blunt end” the rope would catch us right away. The follower can relax, climb and enjoy the scenery. The leader has to battle her demons because a fall on the sharp end is almost always scary, and sometimes deadly. The leader was what I wanted to be—a real climber, not some climbing groupie.
Lonnie slipped her hands into the crack, then the tip of her rubber-soled climbing shoe, and stepped up. Under her skimpy tank top, the muscles in her back popped. Broad shoulders tapered to a skinny waist. I wanted to look like that—lean and mean.
I looked down at my tanned legs and flexed my quads. I’d rediscovered former muscles from gymnastics and track. It hadn’t come easily. I’d just barely survived the three weeks of skiing with eighty pounds, and another three weeks of slogging up and down steep canyons in the deserts of Utah. With only seventy pounds on that trip, and no skis, I’d finally mastered the Beast. For the next two weeks we would be camped here in Sinks Canyon, and then we’d head off to go car camping in South Dakota to spelunk in the Jewel Caves. No more eighty-pound packs until our last section, mountaineering in the Winds.
Lonnie had both feet crammed in the crack now, and long, sinewy calf muscles almost burst through her skin. She moved up, then stopped, rummaged through the jumble of various-sized pieces of protection slung around her neck, decided on a tiny triangular wedge, slipped it into the crack, and clipped the rope so it ran through the carabiner. This protection, or “pro” for short, would catch a fall.
“So at this point, folks, imagine that Lonnie falls.” Mike’s voice boomed over our heads like a sports announcer. “That little stopper she placed in the crack can withstand a huge force if it’s placed correctly. And as long as she evenly spaces her protection she’ll never fall far.”
“Fuck me! You’d never catch me falling on that tiny thing!” Nancy was my tent partner on this trip. We’d been keeping each other sane by outshining the guys in the crude department.
“How far’s ‘not far’?” Dave pushed his scraggly blond hair off his face. We were all getting scruffy and smelly again, in spite of our last much-needed showers in Lander after the Canyonlands trip. Three weeks without a shower was a very long time when the school’s policy of no impact on the environment prohibited the use of toilet paper. At least here and in Canyonlands we could jump in the occasional river or spring if we were willing to freeze our butts and nipples off. On the ski section, with snowballs passing for toilet paper and each of us with only one pair of polypropylene underwear for the whole trip, there’d been no escaping the smell, wedged three to a two-man tent.
“She’s about three feet away from her last piece of protection, which means she can fall three feet to the pro, then three feet past it. Allow for rope stretch and this could be an eight-foot fall. Maybe nine. Unless her protection pops out. Then she could hit the deck.”
Dave made a face of mock horror at me. We’d just decided we were going to hitch-hike back to Canada together. We would hit the road in five weeks, after the last section, but I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Lander. I wished I were American so I could live here forever, get a job, learn to be an instructor. I had no idea what I was going to do or where I would go once I crossed over the border into Alberta. I had no work lined up and was almost out of money. Dave possibly had a job with Outward Bound in BC, but I had work to do on my navigational skills in the mountains before I dared apply to a program like that.
Lonnie continued up the rock like she was performing an upward dance, dipping hands and feet into the crack, twisting and locking them in place, stopping only to place protection. A few of the guys, including Vince and Dave, were going to get a chance to try a lead this week, but when I asked Mike if I could too, he hemmed and hawed, then finally said, “It takes a lot of judgment and self-control to safely lead. Maybe I’ll let you do a mock lead.” Which means placing protection in the crack as you climb, but with the security of a top-rope above you in case you fall. In other words, not really leading.
Judgment and self-control. I’d be an eighty-year-old with a walker before I was ready to lead. Even on the winter course I hadn’t exhibited an overabundance of leadership qualities. When it was my turn to be group leader of the day, I was so terrified of having to be the responsible one that I couldn’t sleep the night before. As a result, I’d slept in and when I finally crawled out of my tent, none of the guys would listen to me. They sat in their snow pits drinking tea and laughing while I tried to get them moving. The instructors glared at me when we finally skied past them three hours late.
Lonnie finally pulled herself onto a ledge fifty feet above us in one fluid motion, like she was mounting a vault horse. She had complete mastery over her body and, it seemed, her life. She had two dogs, Lucy and Willie, and her own pickup truck, and a NOLS instructor boyfriend. Everything I wanted.
“Off belay!” Lonnie yelled down.
“Belay off!” Mike relaxed his grip on the rope, then a few minutes later, lowered Lonnie till she was back on the ground. She left the rope so it was running through the anchor above, like a big pulley, so the rest of us would have a top-rope.
“Who wants to go next?” Mike looked into the crowd of students. My gut seized and my hand didn’t shoot into the air. This was the hardest climb yet. What if I couldn’t do it? What if I made a total fool of myself? With everyone watching?
Mike’s eyes met mine, and he smiled. Or was it a leer? Had Richie told him about what we’d done? Like a bunch of guys in a locker room, bragging about their conquests? My ears and temples tingled with heat. It was strictly forbidden for instructors to “fraternize” with the students, but Richie had said it was okay because we were finished with the winter course, which was the only one he was instructing. I’d been flattered that he wanted me.
“Vince, why don’t you go?” Mike said. “You can take a look at how Lonnie placed the protection before you take it out. Good prep for leading.”
Vince stood up. My shoulders relaxed.
I studied the crack and tried to visualize myself dancing up it, but I couldn’t focus. My mind slipped back to Richie. I’d told him I didn’t have any birth control and he’d said, There are ways around that. I thought he meant we’d do other stuff. Everything but that. So we scaled the fire escape of the Noble Hotel in the dark and snuck into an empty room where he’d produced a condom. Afterward, he fell into a deep coma, while I lay awake, feeling like I’d forced myself into it to
avoid admitting I was nervous. Even though I’d turned twenty on the winter course, my sexual curriculum vitae would barely fill a rolling paper: some heavy petting in high school; a debatable loss of virginity at seventeen followed by hours of drunken puking; one sober, and thus painful, session with a broken safe with my next boyfriend, which left no doubt as to the loss of my virginity; then a couple of alcohol-fuelled copulations with that BC albino cowboy logger.
As Vince tied into the rope, I started to squirm. My butt was going numb in the hard dirt and Mike’s instructions were starting to sound like the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoons—wah, wah wah.
“Could I bum a pinch off you, Nance?” A good hit of tobacco would settle me down. In Canyonlands, we’d started bumming snuff off Gunter just to gross everyone out and to prove girls could do anything guys could, but now we were buying our own.
After Nancy had taken a pinch, she handed me her tin of Copenhagen. As soon as I’d tucked a chew into my lower lip, a familiar buzz spread through my body.
“I can’t believe you two chew that shit.” Vince looked up from tying his knot. My dark stream of tobacco juice splatted into the rocks near his feet, à la Clint Eastwood, which sent Nancy and me into a fit of giggles. He shook his head and turned his back on us.
Vince had told us he liked his women to be feminine, which just made me want to cram a bigger pinch in my lip. Richie didn’t mind that I chewed. He chewed leaf tobacco, which was not as harsh as snuff, but he always had a big wad in his cheek like he’d just gotten his wisdom teeth out. He said he wanted to take me to Yosemite. Said it was the best climbing in the world. Right now he was away climbing Mount McKinley in Alaska, but he’d be back before our last trip.
“On belay,” Mike told Vince.
“Climbing.”
“Climb on.”
Vince climbed, stopping to take the protection out of the crack and clip each one to his harness. It wasn’t long before he was grunting with exertion, his feet scrabbling away at the rock. After Lonnie’s poetry, he made it look like hand-to-hand combat with gravity. When he finally fell out of the crack, he only dropped about a foot, as much as the rope stretched. He sat back in his harness with his feet on the wall and shook out his arms.
“Notice that you can’t drop far when you fall on a top-rope. It’s only the leader who risks a longer fall, not the second,” Mike said as he strained to hold Vince’s weight.
“Vince, use your feet, don’t rely on brute force. You’ve got to finesse your way up,” Lonnie coached.
Nancy and I glanced at each other. Vince was ten times stronger than we were. He was a lifeguard and bodybuilder and he’d hired a personal trainer to prepare for this course. On the winter section, when Sue had been pinned under her pack with her face in the snow and was starting to suffocate, Vince had picked both her and her pack up off the ground.
Vince finally made it to the top and got lowered to the ground red-faced and sweaty. He sat back on his rock without a word.
“Okay, who’s next?” This time I didn’t let myself think. My hand shot up. I wanted to beat Vince.
“I probably won’t get up it, but I’ll give it a go.” Better to put myself down first before someone else did.
“That’s the spirit,” Lonnie said.
I scooped out my mound of tobacco, flicked it away as Mike handed me the end of the rope. My fingers fumbled with a figure eight follow-through. Tying knots brought out my inner space cadet. The bowline was the worst—the bunny going in the hole and around the tree could be interpreted several different ways. I even screwed up the reef knot, which was the simplest knot of all.
But this time, when I finished, Lonnie turned the knot over and said, “Good job.”
“On belay,” Mike told me, and pulled his baseball cap lower to shade his eyes.
The wall of grey granite looked steeper when I was standing right beside it. Tiny diamond crystals and black specks sparkled in the sun. The crack headed straight up and there were only a few small edges for rest breaks.
“Climbing?”
“You’ll do great. You cruised the boulder problems yesterday.”
My neck warmed with Lonnie’s words and I took a deep breath, sank my hands in the crack. They fit perfectly. In high school I’d hated my hands—big and square with purple veins like my mother’s. For the first time, I appreciated their size. Clenching my teeth against the pain of sharp crystals digging into my skin, I cupped my palms so they could expand once they were in the crack, the way Mike had shown me on the first day. “Jamming,” he’d called it. Next, I stuffed my shoe into the crack and twisted, then stepped up.
Mike took in the rope to keep it tight as it ran through the anchor above, and I repeated the hand and foot jams, moving up the rock. The higher I went, the more exhilarated I felt, and the more natural the movement became. This was what I’d come to NOLS for. The rock climbing.
“This is so amazing!” I yelled down to my audience.
“All right! You go, girl!” Nancy shouted.
“You’re doing great,” said Mike.
“It’s because she’s small.” Vince spoke just loud enough for me to hear. I was tired of being Munchkin, the nickname he’d given me on day one.
“It’s because she’s using her feet, not relying on her arms,” corrected Lonnie.
I twisted around, gave Vince the finger, and almost fell backwards off the little ledge I was standing on.
“Keep going, Jan. The crux is coming up.”
The crux! Shit! The crux meant the hardest section, but I thought I’d already gotten over that bit. I took a deep breath and continued, moving steadily up the crack till it started to thin, and only my fingers would fit into it. My feet, smeared on the gritty granite, defied logic and held. When I pulled my fingers out of the crack and reached for another jam, I noticed a dark stain of red on the rock. Blood oozed from under a flap of skin on my knuckle. My first climbing wound! I loved the way climbers’ hands were covered in scars.
Strength drained from my arms the farther I went. I paused, looked up. There were no more little ledges to rest on, nothing till I got to the big ledge at the top where the rope ran through the bolts. The ground looked very far away all of a sudden. My feet started to slip, and panic swirled through me.
“Keep your eyes on where you want to go and keep moving,” Lonnie shouted up to me. “The worst thing you can do is freeze.”
I wasn’t afraid of heights. I loved being up high. And with a rope, I knew if I fell I wouldn’t go anywhere. My fear now wasn’t of falling, it was of failing.
“Don’t stop, Jan. Just trust yourself.”
Trust myself. This was what my mother had kept telling me, over and over before I left. “Trust yourself, Jan. You’re stronger than you think.”
Fighting off waves of homesickness, I took a deep breath and focused on the grey granite in front of me. I’d never wanted anything with this much certainty. Right from the first day with NOLS, dancing to John Prine while we packed our food in the Lumberyard, surrounded by mountain people, I knew this was the life I wanted. I wanted to be a gypsy like Jocelyn, with my own pickup truck and dog, travelling from climbing area to climbing area, totally free. For once, I felt like I fully belonged.
“You can do it,” I whispered into the rock.
As soon as I started climbing again, my feet stopped slipping and stuck to the sandpapery granite. Panic was replaced with a smooth calm. Lonnie was right. That was the key: keep moving. My body seemed to know what to do if I could get my mind out of the way.
When I got to the ledge at the top, I hoisted myself up, pushing down on the rock with my palms and bringing my knee close to my ear to get my foot flat on the edge beside my hand. Just like Lonnie had done. A mantel, she’d called it. Sitting on the ledge with my back against the rock, I basked in the sun and the cheers from below, felt my heart thudding in my throat. I stared off at the horizon, broken up by jagged mountains. Twists of soft cloud, like smoke, were strewn through
the powder-blue sky.
During our three-day solo in the Canyonlands, I’d read Annie Dillard every day, and my favourite quote was: 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.
I felt like I’d been sleepwalking through my life, and climbing propped my eyes open. Made me fully alive. I’ll be okay, because I’m okay now.
When Mike gave the go-ahead, I leaned back off the ledge into space and let myself be lowered gently to the ground.
Mike thumped me on the back, almost knocking me off my feet, and said, “Maybe you will be lead climbing on this trip after all.”
2
LION’S LAYBACK
“Shit, Niccy! You said these little fuckers couldn’t survive up here!” I flicked a tick, the size and shape of a burnt sunflower seed, off my red rope, and it sailed through the air, landing on the grey limestone in front of us. We were in the middle of a rock wall with very little greenery and no other warm-blooded critters around. Slim pickings for ticks.
“What do I know?” Niccy shrugged. “They suck blood. They shouldn’t be hanging out up here.” A brown curl stuck out from under her white helmet, glommed against her cheek. The sun was beating down on us. Perfect tick weather.
I grabbed a pointy stone, used it to grind the tick. Eight tiny legs wiggled under the rock. “Little bastard won’t die.”
Wendy leaned in to watch the execution. “Better do a good body search when we get off. Don’t want Lyme disease.” She felt the back of her neck. She’d just finished a wilderness first-aid course.
“Don’t be such wussies,” Niccy said. “They’re just bugs.”
“Right. Bugs that kill,” I said. A year ago, during the last three weeks of my NOLS course, the mountaineering section, we’d evacuated four people with Rocky Mountain spotted fever. All had been so violently ill we’d had to carry them out on makeshift stretchers. Lyme disease was worse. You could live out the rest of your days with bizarre neurological symptoms and finally keel over, never even knowing your health had been ruined by a bug.
