by Jan Redford
I dug my face into Dan’s sweater, trying to staunch the flow of tears. I had no right to them. I hadn’t known Alan well enough and Cathy had been my friend for only a few months. What was wrong with me?
“Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there, I did not die.”
When the poem finally, mercifully, ended, I sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. It sounded loud in the silence. Dan squeezed my fist and I noticed I was clenching a handful of his sleeve. Jeff passed me a Kleenex and in seconds I turned it into a wet clump.
Alan’s brother told the crowd that Cathy and Alan had been high-school sweethearts. Cathy had told me she’d never been with anyone else. Alan had been her first and only. They’d built a mansion up on the hill with a full gym and granite countertops and multiple bedrooms. They had a beautiful daughter, and now Cathy and Molly would be all alone in that huge quiet house, while everyone else’s lives went back to normal.
I pulled my fist from under Dan’s hand, wrapped my arms around myself and squeezed. I could feel Cathy’s grief as though I were in her skin. It could just as easily have been Dan. He’d climbed Slipstream more than once, and it was nothing compared to some of the crazy shit he was doing. Every day that he wasn’t working, he was hanging off the side of a mountain, exposed to avalanches, rock and ice fall.
I rested my hand on his knee, on the smooth material of his cotton, pleated pants. Like Alan, Dan could blend in, in both worlds. He knew how to dress for a funeral. He had a steady job while most of our friends worked only enough to collect unemployment insurance and climb full-time. He owned his own place. My parents and sister had met him and loved him. And he wanted kids someday. With me. The bastard had finally gotten me to fall in love with him, even wanted me to move in with him, and he was going to go out and get himself killed. I knew it. I could feel it in every cell in my body.
People stood and started to mill around. Dan and Jeff hovered over me. It was time to go to the Canmore cemetery, to bury Alan’s body almost within view of his house. I couldn’t stand up. I was crying too hard. What was wrong with me? This was ridiculous.
“Jan, we’ve gotta go.” Dan put his hand on my arm. He looked around, embarrassed. People were looking at us. He shrugged at Jeff.
“It’s okay, Jan,” Jeff said, patting my shoulder.
“What are we doing?” I could barely speak. “This is so stupid. We’re so stupid!”
Dan and Jeff shifted from one foot to the other. Dan put his hands in his pockets.
“What if something happens to you?” I said, glaring at Dan.
“Don’t say that,” he said.
The look on his face told me I shouldn’t have said that out loud.
“He’ll be fine, Jan, I promise,” Jeff said. “Nothing’ll happen to him. He’s too good.”
I turned to Jeff. “If he dies, don’t you dare say, ‘He died doing what he loves.’”
“Jan, let’s go.” Dan pulled gently on my arm. I reached for his hand, entwined my fingers in his and we followed our friends out the side door.
Maybe Alan’s death would slow him down.
10
ABERDEEN
As Niccy and I started up the trail from the Lake Louise parking lot, I shone my headlamp at my watch. Five-thirty. The guidebook said our objective, Mount Aberdeen, could take up to thirteen hours and we’d gotten off to a bit of a late start. My alarm had rung at 3:30 but I’d hit snooze until Dan finally rolled me off the bed onto the floor. Usually he was the one getting up in the dark for some long alpine climb, with me staying snuggled under the covers. It felt good not to be the one left behind this time.
Niccy, unlike me, had no trouble getting out of bed for a climb. For the past few years, while I’d had my romantic detours, she’d continued training to become an accredited mountain guide, and in the fall, she planned to take the guide’s exam. And now I was back on track myself. In one week, Niccy and I would start work as climbing instructors at the Banff Army Cadet Camp for the summer.
I lifted my head and my light reflected off a large green sign:
BE ALERT. MAKE NOISE. CARRY BEAR SPRAY.
HIKE IN GROUPS OF FIVE.
A picture of a grizzly hunched behind the words.
“Hey, Nic. Are we supposed to fight or play dead with a grizzly? I always forget.” I looked back over my shoulder and we squinted into the white light of each other’s headlamps.
“I think you’re supposed to play dead and let him chomp on you.”
I’d only run into black bears over the years and that had been scary enough. I wasn’t keen on staring into a grizzly’s flat face and beady black eyes. We yipped like coyotes for a few seconds. As long as we didn’t surprise one, we’d be okay. Maybe.
I tucked my thumbs into the shoulder straps of my pack and leaned into the switchbacks as we climbed. Our packs weren’t heavy, nothing like the eighty-pound monster I’d carried at NOLS. Just two ropes, five ice screws, harnesses, our axes, crampons, clothes, first aid, food and water.
We slipped into an easy rhythm, taking switchback after switchback through the trees, hooting and yipping every once in a while. As the darkness turned to pale light, we turned off our headlamps and tucked them into our packs.
“How’s it going living with Dan?” Niccy asked, after we’d been walking for a while. She didn’t normally approve of my choice in men, but she loved Dan, who was close to our age and had listened to Meat Loaf and Supertramp in high school, not Elvis and Buddy Holly.
“Good,” I said. “Except for the riff-raff eating all my peanut butter.”
Our place was Banff climbers’ central, and dinner seemed the most popular time for everyone to show up. From what I could gather from Dan, the climbing crowd had been one of the main reasons his old girlfriend had left him. I was starting to see her point.
“I like Dan. He’s a good guy.”
I liked Dan too. I thought maybe I could have his babies. But I didn’t like me with him. The more we climbed together, the worse my head got for leading. He was so much better than me that whenever I got scared, I could just hand over the lead. And on our spring trip to Yosemite I’d moaned so much about my back on a few ten-pitch climbs that we’d almost split up. No pain, no gain, was one of Dan’s mottoes. It was good to climb with Niccy again, to feel more like an equal.
The trees got smaller and scruffier the higher we went, reducing the likelihood of bumping unexpectedly into a bear, and after a two-thousand-foot gain of elevation we finally broke out onto the rocky, barren pass between Saddle Peak and Mount Fairview. Above tree line, it felt like we’d landed on the moon. There was Mount Aberdeen off in the distance, glowing in the early morning light, the snow on its col illuminated pink.
I took a deep breath. “Fuck,” I breathed out. “It’s gorgeous.”
Niccy dumped her pack and pulled out a water bottle. Her face was wet with sweat and brown curls clung to her round cheeks. Her mustard-coloured earflap hat dangled down her back by the string.
“Don’t think I’ll need this,” she said, pulling it off and stuffing it into her pack.
Niccy liked to be prepared, but sometimes she overdid it. I’d managed to convince her to leave her five-pound parka in the car. It was the end of June.
A marmot whistled its shrill warning to his buddies and I saw a brown hairy butt disappear into a hole in the rocks. The whistles followed us as we traversed through the scree on a faint goat trail skirting the lower slopes of Fairview Mountain. Eventually we started up the steep moraine toward the glacier. The thick ice disgorged from the mountain like a long, blue, swollen tongue, wide at the top, tapering at the bottom. Five hundred feet of forty-five-degree ice led toward a steep, heavily crevassed headwall. We could see the bergschrund from here. Once we got over that we’d be on the col between Aberdeen and Haddo. Then it’d be a long snow slog along the ridge to the peak.
When we reached the ice, we dropped our packs and stood together, studying the glacier. It was partially covered in sno
w, making the way through the crevasses trickier. Most people belayed each other for three rope-lengths from here. If a person slipped it’d be like jumping on a very fast, very long water slide, only they’d sail into boulders at the bottom instead of a pool of water.
Niccy looked up at the sun, already creeping higher in the sky. “Let’s simul-climb till we get to the headwall,” she said. Moving together on the rope instead of belaying would be faster, and the faster we got over the ice the better. The hot sun meant potential icefall from above, and it could also melt out our ice screws. If we took time to belay, we’d probably end up walking out in the dark.
“You want the lead?” Niccy asked.
“Yeah, okay,” I said.
We sat on a couple of comfy rocks to strap on our crampons, then unhooked our ice axes from our packs. When we roped up, we both flipped coils of rope around our necks and tied them off to shorten the distance between us. I clipped the five ice screws Dan had lent me to my harness and headed off, sidestepping on all points of my crampons. The ice was perfect, like sinking into Styrofoam. After thirty feet or so, I felt the rope tug and looked down to see Niccy start climbing. I still hadn’t put in an ice screw. It was feeling pretty casual.
As the ice became steeper my ankles were contorting like a Gumby, and I had to start an awkward mixture of front-pointing and side-stepping. I picked my way between the crevasses, trying to steer my mind away from the climber who’d fallen and gotten wedged headfirst into one. His partner couldn’t save him, so he’d shouted down encouragement until there’d no longer been a response. I paused, thought of putting in an ice screw, then kept climbing. Dan had done the climb in eight hours. If we moved fast, maybe we could do it in ten.
Niccy and I kept up a steady rhythm, our crampons and axes digging solidly into the ice. As the sun rose higher, rivulets of melt water started to trickle in a Celtic-knot-like maze down the glacier. By the time I got to the bergschrund the sun was white hot, almost overhead. I peered into the gaping hole and couldn’t see anything but black. The crevasse was possibly as deep as the glacier.
“Want me to belay you over the ’schrund?” Niccy yelled. I scanned the long crack and noticed a good snow bridge over to the left where I could cross. The slope above was steep, but it was snow, so we’d be able to kick steps.
“Naw, I should be good. You still comfortable?”
“Yeah, go for it! We’re making really good progress!”
I traversed left on the spongy ice, following the edge of the bergschrund, avoiding the embedded rocks sitting in their melted-out holes, watching above for more where they’d come from. We hadn’t heard any rock or ice fall yet, but we were in the heat of the day.
When I reached the steep snow bridge spanning the bergschrund, I paused. On both sides of it, the abyss.
“How’s it look?”
“Pretty thick!”
I sank the shaft of my ice axe into the bridge. It felt solid. I kicked my feet as softly as I could, creating steps in the steep snow, hoping the bridge wouldn’t collapse under my weight. With Niccy positioned lower on the slope like this, she would counterbalance my fall, but I had no desire to see how far into the hole I’d go before she caught me, and I refused to die upside down.
I kicked steps up the narrow band as fast as I could, then breathed out noisily when I was back on snow that was actually attached to the mountain. Niccy crossed and we picked through the heavily crevassed rolling glacier, following the edge of the bergschrund to stay in the snow, avoiding the more technical ice above. I kept looking into the gaping abyss a few feet below me, repeating in my head, Please don’t fall, please don’t fall! With us both above the bergschrund like this, we couldn’t stop each other’s slide. Niccy, in contrast, was the perfect picture of tranquility, looking out on the panorama spread around us.
Finally, we crested the slope that led to the summit. We dropped our packs, untied from the rope and removed our crampons. From here it was just a trek to the peak, as long as we didn’t fall off the ridge. We dug out our food and water, got comfortable on our packs, and stared out at the mountains. The peaks spread out, one after another, glaciers spilling over the edges in super slow motion. Puddles of aqua spotted the valleys here and there.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t have to belay any of that. We’ll be lucky to get back to the car by supper,” Niccy said.
As I looked back down at the route, a sudden, exaggerated chill shook my upper body. My shirt was soaked from sweat. I pulled out my pile jacket and wool hat. “Good thing neither of us fell.”
“Ah, I knew we’d be okay. It’s not that steep,” Niccy said.
I smiled. Dan would be proud of me. Somehow, I’d gotten through hours without my fear seizing me like a leghold trap. Once, on a climb, he had gotten so exasperated with my snivelling on lead that he’d said, “You were so tough when I met you. What happened?” With Niccy, I felt brave again. I felt like a climber. Maybe I was redeeming myself.
“We’d better get to the top. We’re only halfway,” Niccy said, standing up.
After the summit, we would still have the whole descent into Paradise Valley ahead of us. It looked like we could glissade for about 1,500 feet, but after that, it would take some careful route finding to downclimb several hundred feet of loose rock.
I started coiling the rope while Niccy stuffed gear into her pack.
* * *
—
It was 5:15 when we rolled into Banff. We stumbled into the kitchen and a table full of climbers swivelled around to greet us. Ian, Alain, Joe, Grant, Zac, Tim, Dan.
“They’re alive!” Dan jumped up from the table and lifted me into the air. “My little hog!” While some guys used terms of endearment like sweetheart or darling, which sounded old and bugged the shit out of me, Dan’s favourite was hog.
I pounded on his shoulders. “You moron, put me down! Of course we’re alive.”
“I was about to call out the cavalry.”
“We weren’t that slow. It took us twelve hours.” Niccy threw her pack in the corner. “It would have taken forever if we’d belayed each other.”
“Eleven hours and forty-five minutes, door to door,” I corrected.
Dan put me back on the ground and I placed my hands on his cheeks, got up on tiptoes and planted a big kiss on his lips. “It was awesome! The conditions were so good we didn’t use one ice screw.”
I noticed an exchange of looks around the table. The guys must have been impressed. I grabbed a couple beers from the fridge, handed one to Niccy, then opened my jar of peanut butter. Someone had been whittling away at it. I felt a tingle of irritation, but I was too stoked to bother trying to smoke out the culprit. I slapped together a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, handed one to Niccy, and we squeezed in at the table.
Even though I was perched on Dan’s lap, for the first time in a long time, I felt like one of the guys again, not their buddy’s girlfriend.
* * *
—
After the house emptied out and Dan and I were alone in the kitchen, I discovered what the look the guys had given each other really meant.
“I gave you a bunch of ice screws. Why didn’t you use them?” Dan asked.
“Because it was totally easy ice.”
“Then you should have gotten rid of the rope. If one of you had fallen, you’d both be dead.”
“We weren’t going to fall.”
“That’s probably what that girl said in Peru before she tripped.”
Two years earlier, my friend Kathy had been descending a peak in Peru with her partner, Wilma, someone I’d known vaguely from the Calgary Mountain Club. They’d decided to unrope on easy terrain, and Wilma had tripped on her crampon strap and fallen thousands of feet to her death. Some people had criticized Kathy for taking off the rope, and others thought she’d be dead too if they hadn’t. Kathy moved back to Ottawa. She never wanted to climb again or see another mountain.
I stood up. Started to gather glasses off the
table. The guys were all gone, but evidence of them was everywhere. “What happened in Peru was different. Aberdeen’s just a long slog.”
“Unless you fall.”
“I told you I wasn’t going to fall. I felt really strong.” I started filling the sink to do the dishes. Dan was bursting my bubble.
“Jan, I can’t figure you out. You’re scared shitless when you shouldn’t be scared, but you aren’t scared when you should be scared. Some guy slid the whole way down from the headwall last year, dragging his partner with him, then busted up both femurs on the moraine when they hit rock. You can’t stop a slide on blue ice.”
Ignoring him, I squirted dish soap into the water. I wanted to hold on to my feelings of triumph. I started washing the beer glasses.
“You seem to be able to climb with everyone else. Why can’t you get your shit together with me?”
I turned off the water, walked up behind him where he was still sitting at the table and put my arms around his neck.
“Because I love you,” I said.
“That’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.” I kissed the top of his head, the wiry blond hair. “I don’t get it either.”
Just a week ago, I’d climbed with my friend Barry at Lake Louise and led with no problem. My head was clear and no fear crept in to pin me to the rock. I’d also been climbing with Niccy, Wendy, Julie and Barb. It seemed I could climb with other women, I could climb with guys I wasn’t sleeping with, but I couldn’t climb with the guy I was in love with.
11
SHOW NO FEAR
Stepping from posthole to posthole in the snow, I was almost doing the splits. Way up ahead on the glacier, the lead guide, Doug, strode along with his abnormally long legs, his three cadets strung out behind him, stumbling with their heads down. Following Doug was like following a sasquatch, but those boys would never complain. They were in the army.
