by Jan Redford
We took off our packs and hunkered down for a quick snack, munching in silence as we stared out at the Purcell Mountains. The massive granite pyramids of the Bugaboo range jutted up against blue hazy peaks that stretched all the way to the horizon. Turquoise lakes looked like puddles a few thousand feet below, as though we were staring down from an airplane. The Himalayas of British Columbia. It had been one of my dreams to come to the Bugaboos, ever since I’d started climbing. World-class rock climbing in an alpine setting.
“So, you and Brad seem to be doing well,” Ronnie said as he passed me the water bottle.
Brad and I had been together now for three months. It was my longest relationship apart from my year with Jim, and none of the intensity had worn off.
“Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before. It’s like I’ve found my soulmate.”
I washed my chocolate bar down with fluorescent-orange Tang. The sugar buzzed through my veins.
“Good,” he said, and I hoped he meant it. But I knew he didn’t think I was a good match for his friend, that I was too possessive.
Ronnie stood and started to uncoil the rope. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows and his forearms bulged in the typical climber fashion. He was a talented guy. A pilot, avalanche forecaster, paddler, climber, skier, hang glider. The kind of guy I was normally drawn to: dark, remote, hairy-armed, older than me. The Heathcliff type. I took it as a good sign that I was finally attracted to someone like Brad—sensitive, able to talk about his feelings, an attentive lover. I felt safer around his blondness, his stature (under six feet), his age (only four years older than me). Finally, I’d chosen a man who was good for me.
“Brad thought we’d end up sleeping together on this trip,” Ronnie said.
The saliva in my mouth dried up and I couldn’t swallow the last of my chocolate. I grabbed the water bottle again, took a swig.
“You and me?”
Brad had actually given me his blessing to sleep with Ronnie before I left, but I’d thought he was joking. We were only out for two nights, and I was pretty sure we could all survive that long without sex.
“Don’t worry. That’s just Brad. He’s a free spirit. I’m sure you know what you’re getting into.”
“Hey, I’m a free spirit too. The last thing I want is some guy telling me where I can go and what I can do. Been there, done that.”
“Good,” Ronnie said. “Just making sure.”
Brad had told me he was into “unconditional love,” by which he meant free love, but I knew he wasn’t going to want to sleep with anyone else. He was in love with me. He’d already told me. I’d been paddling bigger and bigger water and once, as I’d surfed a big wave, I’d caught a glimpse of his grin of approval as he sat in the eddy, watching. But I did worry that we hadn’t yet talked about what was going to happen at the end of the summer. My tree-planting money was drying up. I’d have to figure out my winter soon.
The sky, solid blue all day, now looked like a blue-grey sheet slowly being pulled over a skylight.
“Altostratus clouds. We shouldn’t hang out too long. They mean bad weather.”
We threw the ends of the ropes down the rock wall and I set myself up to rappel. Because I couldn’t turn sideways with my pack on, I squeezed through the narrow slot face first, staring down through two thousand feet of air. Feeding rope through my rappel device, I swung out, hanging free a few feet from the overhanging wall. Never touching rock, I spun all the way down, a hundred and fifty dizzying feet to the first ledge.
* * *
—
The next afternoon, on our way back to Fernie, I noticed a familiar white van parked on the side of the road at the takeout for the Elk River, just west of town. Straps for kayaks hung from the empty roof rack. I steered my Dart slowly past. There seemed to be a mottled black-and-white cow pattern on the seat covers but I had to turn my eyes back on the road before I was sure. I watched the van in my rear-view mirror.
“Isn’t that Shelly’s van?” I said.
“I don’t know. Could be.” Ronnie stared out the window.
We continued east toward the Rocky Mountains and Fernie, and a few minutes later, I pulled up beside Brad’s truck in front of the sun-faded brown house. He lived in the basement suite.
The place was empty, so I grabbed a couple of beers and Ronnie and I started sorting climbing gear on the front lawn. Soon the big white van rolled up—with kayaks on top, one of them Brad’s—and parked right behind the truck. My breath sucked in sharply as Shelly and Brad stepped out.
“Jan!” Shelly said.
“Shelly!” I synchronized my expression to my friendly voice. “I haven’t seen you in ages!”
I hadn’t seen her since my first season of tree planting.
We hugged, my face squashed against her chest. She was like an Amazon, sturdy, the same height as Brad, with long, straight, almost white-blond hair. While she hugged Ronnie, Brad hugged me. I wanted to melt into his familiarity, but I couldn’t. I stood rigidly, arms at my sides, then pulled away.
“So that was your van on the side of the highway. I thought I recognized the cow print seats.”
“Just passing through on my way to Canmore. Thought I’d get in a quick paddle.” On top of the van, her big plastic kayak looked like a monstrosity compared to Brad’s high-performance fibreglass boat. She wasn’t a serious paddler. She liked to float.
“I hear you moved in with a boyfriend.” My smile was congealed on my face.
“Yes, yes. With Mark.”
We stood there looking at each other, till Shelly finally said, “Well, I better get going. I’ve got to get home.”
“I’ll grab my boat,” Brad said.
I turned to Ronnie, “I’ll get a couple more beers,” and escaped down the stairwell into the dim basement. I couldn’t watch Brad say goodbye to her.
As I headed toward the kitchen, I noticed through the door of the bedroom that the waterbed was stripped, which was unusual. In my two months in Fernie, Brad had never changed the bed, never cleaned a toilet, never vacuumed. And I’d thought I was a slob.
The sheets were crumpled on the floor at the base of the bed. I nudged them with my sandal. I wanted to hold them up to the light, check them for stains like they used to check sheets for blood after the wedding night.
A few days earlier, I’d been wearing one of Brad’s jackets and pulled a tiny piece of paper out of the pocket. On it, he’d written out a Van Morrison verse, about rocking a gypsy soul, and he’d written Shelly’s name a few times below, but I’d thought the paper was old. Pre-me.
Brad came up behind me. “Hey.” He wrapped his arms around my waist, pulled me against him, but I shook free, turned on him.
“Did you sleep with her?”
He only hesitated a moment. “Yes, I slept with her. You know Shelly and I have a special connection.”
A groan slipped out before I could stop it, the sound of a wounded animal. I tried to step around him to get to the door. I wanted my car, something familiar and loyal. I wanted to curl up in the back seat and cry where no one could see me. “I’ll start packing up my stuff.”
He blocked my way. “It doesn’t have to be like that. I love Shelly, but I love you. Don’t you believe you can love two people at the same time?”
“I don’t know.” I wrapped my arms around my head. It was starting to hurt. “I don’t know anything.” When he’d told me he was into “unconditional love,” I’d agreed in theory, but here it was in reality and it didn’t feel like love at all.
“Come here. Talk to me.” He pulled me into the living room onto his ratty orange couch.
“When we met, you said you’d never let anyone control you again,” he said. “You said you wanted to be wild and free.”
It was true. I remembered that conversation. Diatribe was more like it. How I’d never get sucked into a middle-class existence again, how it was a thinly disguised form of enslavement.
“You said you’d never shave
your legs for a guy again. I liked that.”
A tiny laugh slipped out as I looked down at my shaggy legs. But I’d noticed that Shelly’s legs were smooth and hairless.
“We’re the same kind of people, you and me. We’re free spirits. That’s why we’re together.”
My body loosened up and I leaned against him, remembering how, on my way to Hope that first week back in Canada, I’d stopped on the side of the Thompson River—a river I’d since paddled with Brad—and made a vow to never depend on a man again. Brad would not let that happen.
“I love you,” Brad said. “I want you to stay. We can ski all winter, kayak all summer.”
And then he was kissing me, and I was letting him. All I could think was, I have a home! My relief was like a flash flood in the desert, surging through me.
We moved back to the bedroom, peeling off our clothes, fell on the bed. The water swayed me, like I was in my kayak bobbing in an eddy. The bare plastic mattress was cold against my skin so I rolled on top of him, dissolved into his warmth.
7
WORLD’S TOUGHEST MILKMAN
Yosemite National Park, 4 Miles. The green highway sign whizzed past. Geoff shifted down to second gear and the Volkswagen van heaved and whined up another steep hill. Beside him, Rory was fixated on the scenery, waiting for a glimpse of the massive walls of granite. It was his first trip to Yosemite, so we’d made sure he got the front seat.
This was my fourth trip to the valley, and Geoff probably couldn’t count how many times he’d been. This time I was heading south to escape not only the early snows of Canada and the loose Rockies limestone, but also Brad.
“Christ, I can’t believe it. We might actually make it.” There was a hint of excitement in Geoff’s voice, but none of us would relax until we actually pulled into the campsite.
“Never doubted it for a moment.” Rory patted the dashboard and twisted around to look at me on the seat at the back of the van.
Geoff snorted like he was choking on a burrito. “Right.”
This was our sixth day into a journey that should have taken twenty-four hours. We’d left Calgary in a blinding snowstorm, in Geoff’s van with a classically inept VW heater, waving and smiling in kinship at other VW vans and their frozen, parka-clad occupants before breaking down three hours later in front of a gas station at Radium Hot Springs. With a new clutch, we headed south, only to break down in Reno. With new brakes, generator and flywheel, and our sense of humour drying up, we headed back out on the road, only to break down fifteen miles south at Carson City. Every time Geoff pulled out his charge card his already sharply angled face got more haggard.
I undid my seat belt and moved up to squat between the two front seats, supporting myself with the armrests. We passed through a tunnel of ponderosa pines, way bigger than our spindly little lodgepole pines in the Rockies, then the road plunged steeply downhill.
“I sure hope the brake guy in Reno knew what he was doing,” I said.
Rory looked at me with a gentle smile that moistened my eyes. Red tufts around his ears and the nape of his neck were all that was left of his hair, but what was lacking on his head he made up for with his bushy red beard. Our winter affair a few years back hadn’t affected our friendship, though he hadn’t been too popular with his girlfriend because of it. At the time I hadn’t felt any responsibility for her reaction, since I’d only met the woman once. But now I knew better. Brad had taught me well.
Rory ran his hand lightly over my hair. “How’s the heart?”
“The farther I get from the shithead, the better it feels.”
My tough words wouldn’t fool my friends. They’d seen me like this before. After saying goodbye to my Alaskan mountain guide. After the adventure with Jim in Indonesia. Whenever I came hobbling back to Alberta with a broken heart my friends were always there for me. Usually I bounced back quickly, but this time I was losing more than just a boyfriend. I was losing my home in Fernie, my paddling community, my ski hill job, and my best friend, Dede, who’d been my confidante through all of Brad’s indiscretions until she became one of them herself.
The Merced River to our right gushed white through the gorge and I felt the familiar pull of the rapids. Before I left Fernie, I’d contemplated jumping up and down on my kayak, the one Brad had given me, leaving it smashed in the front yard to symbolize what he’d done to my heart. Instead, I left the words to a Bonnie Raitt song on the kitchen table: That ain’t no way to treat a lady. That ain’t no way to treat a woman in love. I strapped my kayak to my Dodge Dart and escaped back to Calgary, and I’d been couch surfing ever since.
The first person to take me in had been Laurel, who’d been a friend since our summer together as counsellors at Camp Chief Hector four years earlier. She’d just split up with her boyfriend, so we’d drunk cider and danced to hurtin’ music, laughing and crying to “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Love Don’t Care Whose Heart It Breaks.”
Next I crashed at the big heritage house down the road from Laurel that Geoff, Rory, Saul and Martha, all friends from their McGill University days, were renting. But I couldn’t tolerate the city for long and headed back to the mountains to Canmore to room with Dave, my old NOLS buddy, and two Outward Bound instructors, in a condo we dubbed Heartbreak Hotel, because we’d all recently been dumped. But I couldn’t keep sharing a king-sized bed with two guys I wasn’t even having sex with, so I’d lined up another place with Sharon (the first accredited female mountain guide in Canada, whom I’d met a couple of years earlier) and soon I’d have a whole loft bedroom to myself.
Rory wound down his window and a flood of memories hit me with the dry scent of pine. I loved California. It felt right to be here, to put my focus back on climbing. For the past year and a half I’d latched onto Brad’s life. It was time to be a climber again.
“There she is!” Geoff pointed, as the pale granite of El Capitan peeked through the trees and then disappeared.
El Cap kept teasing us with glimpses of her brilliance till all of a sudden we dropped into the valley and there she was. White granite walls swelled three thousand feet from the valley floor, towering over the hundred-foot forests. On my first trip to Yosemite, Geoff and Saul had made me cover my eyes until El Cap had come into view for the full impact.
Rory let out a long, sinking whistle. “Well, I’ll be damned….”
We followed the Merced River—now slow, wide and subdued, unrecognizable from the wild turbulence just miles behind. Cliffs lined both sides of the valley, waterfalls gushed white foam over the edges, six hundred feet to the valley floor. We passed El Cap Meadow, a quarter-mile stretch of grass where climbers and tourists hung out with coolers of beer and binoculars to watch big wall climbers crawl up El Cap’s face. Most of the routes took several days to climb.
“Looks like a couple guys on the Shield,” Geoff said, his neck out the window, eyes half on the road, half on the rock. Rory and I squinted to bring the tiny red and yellow splotches, like squished bugs, into focus, about 1,500 feet up the face—halfway.
Gary, my Alaskan mountain guide, had been part of the first ascent of the Shield in the early ’70s, about the time I was in grade six in Whitehorse. I had no aspirations to do a big wall climb anymore. It didn’t seem to be in the stars for me. Two years earlier I’d made two failed attempts on the South Face of Washington Column here in the Valley. The first time, with Karin, a Swedish friend, I got halfway up. We climbed the hardest part, the Kor Roof, then left our ropes up and rapped back down to Dinner Ledge to spend the night. The next morning a Parisian couple who were also doing the route woke early and snuck up their ropes ahead of us. They were so slow we had to bail before we ran out of water. I made a second attempt at the same route with Jim on our compatibility-testing trip, and we’d screamed at each other for a few pitches till we finally rapped off. Now I just wanted to be able to lead moderate routes without shitting myself.
While Geoff steered us toward the campgrounds, I settled into the back seat, plugged m
y earphones into my ears, cranked my Walkman. All the way from Canada, Rory and Geoff had been hassling me about my singing too loudly to my Walkman. It was like hanging out with two big brothers, except they’d never given me a nosebleed, or painted my face with model paints, or emptied an ashtray down the back of my jeans.
“How does it feel to be on your own,” Bob Dylan whined in stereo. I tried not to sing along. I tried not to cry.
* * *
—
Smearing my rock shoe on a tiny edge, I locked my fingers into the crack. They sank past the second knuckle. I did three moves up before panic seized me and I reversed the process, three moves down, till my feet were back on the ground.
“This is fucking hard.”
“It looks desperate.” Rory eyeballed the crack that went for a hundred and thirty feet to a big ledge. This was one of the hardest leads I’d ever attempted. After three days in the valley, I was climbing better than I’d expected to after too much time in a kayak and not enough on the rock. I’d done some good leads and followed Geoff up a few really hard routes. I knew this climb was well within my physical ability. I just had to convince my brain of it.
“Jan. You can do this one. Just trust yourself,” Geoff said.
Trust myself. Right. How the hell could I trust myself after Brad? Brad and Dede’s betrayal of me wasn’t nearly as bad as my own betrayal of me. I’d stayed, like a kicked puppy waiting for another kick, for a whole week, trying to convince him to pick me. When Brad finally decided he was in love with Dede, not me, I’d felt dismissed. Erased.
I turned back to the rock, unclipped a small stopper from my rack and put it between my teeth.
