by Jan Redford
We sat without speaking, only the kids’ laughter tinkling through the silence. I forced my breath in and out, pushing tiny puffs of cloud into the cold air. I didn’t trust myself to speak. I was scared if I opened my mouth a little yes would pop out, just to take away his hurt.
Maybe this meant he was starting to see the benefits of my having a profession. As a teacher I could live in Golden, have the same holidays as the kids, and he could finally get out of logging. And if we got back together I wouldn’t have to do this on my own. Mid-terms had almost obliterated me and finals were next, on top of all the assignments, presentations and readings, the volunteering in Jenna’s class, and gymnastics on the weekends. Maybe he was right.
Before I could speak, Grant straightened up, as though he’d made a decision. “Look, this is ridiculous. If you quit school, come back to Golden and look after your family, I’ll take you back.”
His voice worked on me like a hypnotist snapping his fingers. Poof! My sympathy was gone. Shrivelled up like a leech laid out on the rocks to dry. I knew this voice. He’d been using it on me for the past six years. Even if I came back to Golden and did everything his way for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t change that voice.
Saved by the stupid shit that keeps coming out of your mouth! I jammed my fists deep into my jacket. My anger was back. It inflated me, like a limp balloon filling up with air. It was just what I needed. “Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen.”
“Look, if it was just the two of us there’s no doubt we’d split up, but you’re messing up the kids.”
“That’s your way of trying to woo me back? By telling me I’m messing up the kids?”
“Yeah, you are, because I’m willing to work on this. To compromise.”
The kids sat at the top of the slide, watching us.
Detach, detach! Don’t let yourself get reeled in like a great big tuna fish. I stood up, held my hands in front of me as if to ward off his words. “I can’t do this. I can’t fight anymore. I just want to go home.”
Ultimatum after ultimatum. For years. Each time I received an acceptance letter from the university he’d said, Tell me where to send the money. Well, now I had a place for him to send the money.
“Just think about it,” he said.
“I’ve got to go. I don’t want to drive in the dark.”
Sam landed on his diaper at the bottom of the slide, put both arms in the air. “Up!” I scooped him up, settled him on my hip.
Jenna flew down the slide in a swirl of billowing white lace, pink satin, and gumboots.
* * *
—
Driving along the four-lane highway, I clenched and unclenched my hands around the steering wheel. Flecks of white rushed toward the windshield.
“Oh, look you guys! It’s snowing!” I forced my mommy voice, trying to get Grant out of my head.
Jenna and Sam leaned in to look out the front window. Their blond heads touched.
“Ooooh, pretty!” Jenna said.
“Ooooh, pwitty!” Sam parroted.
A soft thunk! as Sam’s bottle landed beside him on the seat. I adjusted the rear-view mirror to watch him reach for it. It was just beyond his fingertips.
“Bubby!”
My neck muscles tensed up and I turned my eyes back to the road. I was going a hundred kilometres an hour on a highway and my child was about to have a meltdown.
“Shit!” It popped out of my mouth involuntarily, like Tourette’s.
“Thit!” Sam said, laughing.
“No, no, Sam, that’s not a nice word. Mommy shouldn’t say it either.”
“Thit! Thit!”
“Shit!” Jenna joined in on the fun.
“Jenna. Give me a break here. You know that’s a bad word.” I could just imagine some of my less savoury vocabulary coming out of her mouth in kindergarten. That would definitely be cause for another meeting with the teacher.
“You say it. Sam says it. Daddy says it.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
Sam chewed his fingers. “Bubby!”
Jenna put down her blanket, strained against the seat belt to lean over Sam, plucked the bottle up from where it was wedged beside his car seat. She plugged it in her little brother’s mouth and he turned back from a time bomb to a harmless toddler.
I let out my breath. “Thanks, sweetie.” I smiled at her in the mirror.
She shoved a corner of her blanket and half her hand into her mouth.
“No pwoblum,” she slurred through her fingers.
After all the dips and bends around mountains and lakes, the highway straightened and flattened as we passed through the foothills. I glanced in my mirrors, almost expecting to see Grant following us, like in the movies, the hero barrelling after his one true love in a shiny white pickup, but all I could see were black mountains silhouetted against the fuchsia-pink sky. Grant was driving west, into the sunset, while we were driving away from it. And somehow, no crevasse had opened at my feet to swallow me whole.
I took one more peek at the Rockies as they receded in my rear-view mirror, then fixed my sights on the glow of the city to the east.
EPILOGUE: SECOND CHANCES
Mexico, February 2013. With the tip of my purple climbing shoe poised on a foothold, I step up, reach for the edge of a deep hole. The grey limestone is prickly, like everything in Mexico. Even with my eight-year-old climbing shoes, my feet feel secure on this rock. Holes pockmark the wall, some deep, some shallow, providing great handholds, and the rope leads from my harness up to a bomber anchor and my new-ish husband, Dan, a hundred feet above.
Yes. My new husband’s name is Dan. Serendipity, if you believe in that shit, which I try not to, but actually do. It’s almost as if my first Dan somehow played a part in this. Maybe he got tired of watching me sabotage myself and said, “Enough already!” Picked Dan up and plunked him down in Golden, where I’d returned after university and was working as a grade-three French immersion teacher, living with Jenna and Sam in a white house on a hill not far from my school.
Pulling up with my fingers, I feel the regained power in my forearms from the past two weeks of climbing. From day one I surprised myself with my strength. Here I am, in my fifties, and climbing almost at the level of difficulty I was climbing in my twenties. I’m not sure where the strength comes from—we only climb about half a dozen times a year now. Maybe from gripping the brakes of my mountain bike. Certainly not from my blue rubber doughnut, the one I’ve been intending to squeeze to strengthen my forearms. It still has the price tag on it.
Mexican pop music pulsates up the long, cactus-filled slope to the base of our climb from the speakers of a row of pickup trucks at the bottom of the canyon. Whole families from Monterrey, an hour south of here, come to El Potrero Chico, a world-class climbing destination, to watch the climbers. It’s a noisy weekend ritual. Bring the beer, the tortillas, the BBQ, the kids, the binoculars.
Potrero was not my destination of choice; northern Mexico is not exactly getting the best press these days. As Dan booked the flights to Monterrey on his computer, I googled Mexico and murder on mine. The first hit gave me: “Nine bodies hung from bridge in northern Mexico as drug war rages,” with a photo of a blindfolded guy hanging right under a big green highway sign that read: MONTERREY.
But I knew my fear of being raped and tortured and murdered and chopped up into little pieces by the drug cartel paled beside my real fear: leading. Lead climbing is the main reason I’ve traded rock climbing in for mountain biking. My head still can’t keep up with my body. But the airline tickets were booked, so off I went to buy a new rope for our trip. At the climbing store, serendipity struck again; the book, A Rock Warrior’s Way: Mental Preparation for Climbers, almost leapt off the shelf into my hands, and I thought, Yes! The perfect rubber doughnut for my mind! At home I opened it up and the first line I read was, “How you live your life is how you climb.”
I almost slammed the book shut, but instead I attacked it with my highlighter an
d vowed to get my butt back on the sharp end of the rope, force myself into that zone where I had to commit or fall. Who would be revealed when I pulled back all my layers of defence? A chickenshit or a rock warrior?
* * *
—
At the top of the pitch, I pull myself up beside Dan, clip into the anchor, and we stand squeezed together on the small ledge partway up a four-hundred-foot pillar, looking out on a canyon flanked by towers of limestone, some as high as two thousand feet.
“That was fun,” I say. “Good job.”
“You want the next lead?”
Before we left Canada, I asked Dan, “Why am I still such a chickenshit when it comes to leading, but I can do scary stuff on my mountain bike?” and he said, “Probably because you haven’t been leading.”
Duh. Such simple logic. I can mountain-bike because I mountain-bike. I could lead again if I wanted to lead. Bravery takes practice.
Then he said, “Don’t pressure yourself. Plan to just follow for the first few days, don’t even consider leading, then you’ll be chomping at the bit, needing to lead. Like in the old days.”
Like in the old days. He must have been thinking of that first week we were together, about ten years ago. As a single mom and full-time teacher, I hadn’t been doing much climbing, but with Dan holding my rope and watching, I pulled off the hardest lead I’d done in years. It was like some bizarre climbers’ mating ritual. Other women don makeup and high heels, I show off on the rock. Unfortunately, my newfound courage must have been fuelled by pheromones, because I duly went back to my yo-yoing: two moves up, paralysis, one move down.
* * *
—
“So, Jan. You want the lead?” Dan is handing me the rack of quickdraws, short pieces of webbing with a carabiner in each end. I glance at them, then tilt back my head to study the route.
It’s longer than the first pitch, well over a hundred feet. More time to be scared. It’s also steeper. I count the bolts, trying to gauge the distance between them. The farther apart they are, the longer the fall. And I’ve seen some pretty scary bolt placements here. Ones placed by guys over six feet tall with very long arms who gave absolutely no thought to a terrified, middle-aged, short, perimenopausal woman having to make all the hard moves before clipping the just-out-of-reach bolt, instead of after.
“The bolts look far apart.”
“It’s only 5.8. You’re not going to die on 5.8.”
I glance sideways at Dan, my eyebrow raised. I’ve heard that one before.
I look back up. Do I want this lead? I want to want it. I want to feel like a real climber again.
We’re seventeen days into our trip, and I’ve done only two leads. Leads I would have taken beginners up back when I was working at the cadet camp. Leads that barely produced a ripple of fear. And we only have eight days left for me to test myself.
Dan is still holding the rack out for me to grab. “Are you leading or am I leading?”
“Okay. What the hell. That’s what I’m here for, right? To scare the shit out of myself?”
I grab the quickdraws, start clipping them to my harness before I can change my mind. They clink against each other, metal on metal.
“Got me?” I dip my hands in my chalk bag, clap off the excess with a puff of white.
“Yup. You’re on belay.”
I scramble up the first few feet quickly, pulling on the edges of deep holes, hoping they don’t house the red ants, tarantulas, rattlesnakes or scorpions described in the guidebook. The moves are easy, the rock low-angled. I reach the first bolt, clip my quickdraw, then clip the rope. Now I can’t hit the ledge if I fall. The second bolt is a good fifteen feet away, but the climbing is still pretty casual. I feel smooth. Balanced and poised. In control. I feel like a climber. I reach the bolt and clip another quickdraw.
“Looking good, Jan.” Dan encourages me from twenty feet below.
It was a fluke Dan and I even met. He had planned to go paragliding, then at the last minute changed his mind (he’s a Libra) and decided to go climbing near Golden with a friend of mine instead. They invited me along, and when I met him that first time, he felt familiar to me. Like home. Maybe because he has that typical, craggy climber look—fit, weatherbeaten in a good way, after years in the mountains. When I told my friends I’d fallen in love with a stuntman in the film industry, they shook their heads, picturing me with an Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike. But Dan is no Arnold. He’s laid-back, unassuming, calm and calming.
I climb smoothly to the third bolt, clip it. By now I’m starting to feel downright cocky. I’ve still got it in me! After I clip the fourth bolt, I come back down to a little ledge and study the route. This must be the crux. A pinnacle bulges out for the next thirty feet, more than vertical. There are two cracks on either side. The bolts go up the middle, so I could go either way. Between my clipped bolt and the next bolt is about fifteen feet. If I fall just before that bolt, I’ll drop thirty feet.
“The next bolt is really, really far away,” I say.
I can still back down. I could lower off the bolt.
“Don’t feel like you have to do it, Jan. I can finish if you want.”
Of course he could finish it, and with barely a twinge of fear. When I climbed with my first Dan, that knowledge used to vaporize my motivation. But one thing I’ve figured out over the years is that one woman’s molehill is another woman’s mountain. This is my Everest. Besides, I didn’t come to Mexico to follow Dan around the mountains. I came to get back in touch with my rock warrior.
So no. I won’t lower off the goddamned bolt.
My palms are sweaty so I dip them back in my chalk bag for the umpteenth time. I climb off the ledge, up the left-hand crack in the pinnacle, up to my clipped bolt, then one move past it. I pause. A twinge of the sick I’m gonna die feeling roils in my gut. If I make another move I’m committed. It’ll be too hard to retreat after that. I waver a good few minutes in that spot, then climb back down to my comfortable little ledge. To the right of the pinnacle looks no easier. I chalk up my hands again.
“This looks fucking hard!” I yell down. “It is not a 5.8.”
Dan rubs the back of his neck but doesn’t say anything. This Dan is more tolerant of my fear, but that might be because he’s made it to fifty-four. My first Dan would have been fifty-three this year, but he never got past twenty-seven.
One more dip into my chalk bag. I look up at the bolt but stay glued to my spot. I don’t want to go up and I don’t want to go down.
How you live your life is how you climb.
Now here I am, up and down, up and down, waffling, expending my precious energy on stasis. A replica of my first marriage.
* * *
—
My dramatic marital breakdown in that first semester of university was just the first of three. We jumped back into the ring for another brief round while I was still in school, then separated legally, then after four stressful, adrenal-blowing years I returned to Golden, a single mom of a five- and eight-year-old with my long-sought-after degree in a cheap picture frame. We moved into an uninsulated rented house twenty minutes out of town, and I started teaching full-time in my second language, which I had not yet fully mastered. Grant was looking ruggedly handsome, helping me with firewood (I needed eight cords), and the kids and I could see his beautiful house, formerly our beautiful house, on the hill above us from our window. I missed him like hell, and the kids missed him like hell and he missed us like hell. Just before the snow came, we were back in that little home on the hill, a family again.
It took less than a week to know nothing had changed, but I stuck around for five more years with one foot in the marriage and one out. What allowed me to leave for good was that hard-earned degree in education. If I could get through four years on my own in Calgary, a full-time student and single mom, I could get through anything.
* * *
—
“Just go for it, Jan!”
I look down at Dan, now ly
ing on his back to ease the strain on his vertebrae. He broke his neck once on an ice climb near Field, in an avalanche that killed his partner. He also broke his back paragliding when his wing stalled. He’s seen his fair share of tragedy in the mountains, but it’s made him gentle and appreciative of life, not angry.
I shift from one foot to the other. I can’t hang out here forever. I climb back up to my bolt, and this time I go one move past it till the bolt is at my feet. The moves feel awkward. The rock wants to push me off, and the holds are tiny, just pinch holds. I now know that this is much harder than 5.8. That I probably should have gone the other way around the pinnacle. But no, as usual, I had to inadvertently choose the hard way up.
Fake it till you make it. My first Dan’s motto. Not that I was ever any good at faking it before Alaska. Certainly not after.
I take another step up, and now the bolt is a couple of feet below the soles of my shoes. There’s no going back. It’d be too hard to downclimb. I’m committed. The bowel-releasing zone.
My eyes are fixed on the next bolt, well out of reach. The farther I go, the longer the fall, but if I don’t climb, the fall’s a certainty.
I can climb or fall. It’s all up to me.
I reach high, pawing the rock for a positive hold but they’re all sloping. There should not be slopers on a climb of this grade. My foot slips slightly, enough to send a sharp sliver of fear through my whole body.
“Watch me!” I yell so that Dan will be prepared in case I fall.
“I’m watching. You’re almost there.”
I look down, then immediately wish I hadn’t. Dan is staring intently. He must see what I now see. The ledge I was just standing on is right below me. If I fall, I’ll hit it from twenty feet up. It would be the same as hitting the ground.
Fear settles around me. Not just a tingly fear. This one’s cold and heavy. I could end up with a broken neck in a Mexican clinic in Hidalgo. A paraplegic. Quadriplegic. Or worse.
