The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)

  Nearing Slade, the hills and valleys gnarl with vegetation. Rhododendrons and enormous beech trees occupy the lowlands, their trunks spiraling clockwise from years spent following the sun’s path low in the southern sky. I am entering the Red River Gorge, an intricate canyon system spread over forty-four square miles and much of the Daniel Boone National Forest of eastern Kentucky. The Red is marked by natural sandstone arches, waterfalls, and rivers still carving out canyons. This is why I am here, for the sandstone walls of the gorge that cater to venturous desire as much as geological wonder.

  Many of the walls are overhanging, forming stretches of caves along their bases, and riddled with holes of incomprehensible dimension. Some pockets are the size of human bodies, and some as small as index fingers. It is amazing how people hang faithfully from that one extremity until finding something more positive to grasp. The most remarkable routes up these walls look like stretches of golden honeycomb; others are laced like flower buds where iron deposits have bedded in the rock. The cliffs of the Red emanate the wooden warmth of a kitchen counter and all the terror that a chopping board is to turnips and chives. As a climber I am drawn to them like strange insects are to the nectars that sustain their lives. I may distract myself from this passion for a while, go out seeking love or pollen, but after a time I return to see what I can make of the rock, or rather, what it can make of me.

  It’s not explicable, this attraction, why it affects some of us and not others. I’d say that climbing feeds an instinctual desire, and that I am better for it, but I’d also say that the manifestation of fear is a great deal of what makes climbing so stunningly beautiful. This is an uncomfortable realization to come by. Why must I endanger my life to feel that I am fully living? Is this recklessness a byproduct of youth, or unsound humanity? No, maybe neither, for being on the wall, hanging on for life (or greater self-preservation) is more akin to a dance than a battle, and the polka and tango are no plagues of the mind. When I move vertically, other troubles are left on flat earth. I don’t remember the names of many climbs I’ve done, but I remember the lines and the moves I had to pull in order to finish them. I remember how I’ve shifted my weight on arêtes to reach the next hold, and how it felt to reach an arm in darkness toward the heart of a cliff, each crack characterized individually.

  Driving into Slade I am but one in a car of four, a group of fourteen, and a community of hundreds that flocked to a backwoods small town in Kentucky this week for the promise of fear and adventure. So the sun lifts higher, burning away the smoky fade of the hills, and we begin to dance.

  III. MOONSHINE AND MIGUEL’S

  Of all the climbers who spend their days scaling the walls of the Red, a good number spend their nights at Miguel’s Pizza. In this little oasis for dirtbag athletes, one can find a restaurant, gear shop, basketball court, camping, showers, and laundry service (though use of the latter two is largely frowned upon—I myself was pressured into relinquishing clean hair for the nine-day duration of my stay). The restaurant front is painted sunbeam yellow with the iconic blonde and mustached image of a face blazing over a hand-carved door. Picnic tables are scattered out front, and down a small hill stretches a field crosshatched with puddles and bamboo. Everything about the place beckons, yes, you are tired and hungry, your hands are dirty and your biceps are sore. Come, pitch a tent, order your pizza with avocado, olives and mango salsa, yes, we have vegan options too. Come, come let us take care of you so you may do again tomorrow exactly what you’ve done today.

  Our ragtag group sets up camp on an oblong knoll next to a marshy pond. A cardinal watches us from a thicket of bramble bushes; it is the first colored bird I have seen in many months. There is Jimmy, with his long curly hair that earned him the nickname Chewbacca for the trip. Cassandra: our token Californian with long legs, a blonde braid and easy attitude. Then Timmy and Sel, both wearing muddy hiking boots and pleasantly smelling like they have been playing outside since the snow first started melting up North. The others are off cooking, shooting hoops, and flipping through the guidebook, already searching out tomorrow’s place to climb.

  When night falls, we build a fire on a high patch of ground between two marshes, burning dead branches and pizza boxes. A bottle of moonshine is passed around in a glass jar; pale cherries bob around like eyeballs in formaldehyde, tasting of welding torch and orchard. I hand off the jar and someone chirps in, “Dontchya worry about the germs, that moonshine’ll kill any kinda bacteria.” I believe him, and I don’t doubt that it would kill me too if I fell into the jar, or, its contents in entirety fell into me.

  A group of Tennessee climbers begins to sing and strum a guitar.

  “Oh yeah, Chattanooga is the best,” one tells me. “You can climb all year long, and in the summer when it’s hot, you can climb the cliffs out over the river and jump off ’em!”

  “So what are you doing here?” I ask. No one has a good answer, but we all know that no matter how good the climbing is at home, climbing in the Red is probably a little better. Every time a pizza box is tossed on the fire it throws heat into the circle, burning my face and melting all memory of snowdrifts left behind up North.

  “Aslan! Aslan!” another kid from Chattanooga yells at a giant Pyrenees mountain dog.

  “It’s Ivory,” the owner corrects, not amused. A couple talks about the latest hard climbs to be done in Yosemite and several groups compare this morning’s road conditions on the approach to different crags. Another pizza box pitches embers against the backdrop of night. The crowd moves a few steps away, the cold of early spring at their backs, then gravitates forward as the fire cools. Moonshine stirs remembrance of the day’s climbs. I think back to the thick forest that surrounds us, and the giant cavern within the PMRP climbing area; standing way back inside and looking out, the gorge framed by an enormity of rock. My eyes start to close with fatigue, and so I move through the darkness toward the little patch of ground I’ve claimed with a sleeping bag and a pile of fleece for a pillow.

  In the morning we wake to a carnival of tents in every shape and size that sprang up overnight in Miguel’s fields like the first colored daffodils of the year. It takes me some time to wrestle off my sleeping bag and reach out into the cold for my boots.

  IV. A CONSTELLATION OF SCARS

  “You know, studies have been done that show that cities grow in exactly the same way as disease,” Jimmy chirps in on our way back through Cincinnati. He says it with conviction, and we don’t disagree. We’re all a little bitter to leave our sandstone jungle gym in the woods and return to the cold. In Ohio I awake to snow whirling across the highway lanes.

  I curl up against the car door and look out the window at opposing lanes on the flat highway and the country unfolding without ripples behind. My body hurts all over from nine days of abuse on rock walls. My shins are bruised, my knees are scabbed, my hair is woven with enough chalk dust, twigs, and grease to make a suitable home for baby raptors. I look down at my hands, and they are in the worst condition. The polish is entirely gone from my nails, and my knuckles are scattered with scabs like cosmos. Every climbing trip renews the rawness of my skin; I don’t mind it really, even if I am beginning to look more like a dappled fawn than a girl. These scars are the mark of the breed, and tied to each is the weight of the history of a climb.

  I start to think again of the why. Why do I do this to myself? It is scary, yes, and fun. But it is also a way to move in this world. The climbing community is a mobile one, and for many the only restrictions they place upon their freedom are the ones that keep them safe. I think that by climbing routes, and sending them, that is, climbing them clean without falling, I feel as if I have conquered something. Though I’ll never really possess the places I visit and am too transient a rambler to settle into one as a home, the send gives me a sense of ownership. But the reality of this feeling exists only in the way that I own my dreams, because I can’t really, they are not mine. What happens in the night and on the rock is not tangible enough to be stamped,
only treasured. I think that is why I keep beating on, because there is something shadowy and recalcitrant in climbing, and no matter how hard I push myself, there are ways unknown to push harder.

  V. RETURN TO HORIZON

  “Gotchya,” Sel yells back.

  My rope is tight to the anchor, and just in time, for my muscles and tendons have nothing left to give, and when they release, I sit back into my harness and rest. The sense of relief ushered in with the completion of every climb spreads through consciousness of my physical self. I push my feet against the rock, colored with unmixed tones of flesh: raw umber, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, cad red. Below, the forest undulates over the uneven terrain of the gorge; green evidence of life returning to the flora. I am aware of the pallid white sky and the landscape of what I just climbed, but the pain that will come to my hands has not yet returned, and though I am conscious of cold air, adrenaline forms a second skin. I look down the expanse of rock to Sel, his head still resting on his shoulders. I lean back and push out from the rock.

  “O.K., ready to lower,” I call down. The rope runs through the carabineers of the anchor, and when I put my cheek against it, I hear the vibrating whir of fibers rolling over the metal. I come to the ground and steady myself on two feet; now my fingers are stiffening, and goose bumps are elevating my skin.

  “Nice job, dude.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “So what’s next?”

  Jessica Normandeau was raised in Vermont where she pilfered cherry tomatoes from her mother’s garden, chased cows from the back yard, and waited for the snow to fall each winter. She spent last summer driving a Volkswagen Beetle converted to run on recycled vegetable oil (from dive bar frialators) on a rock-climbing trip across the country. She currently resides in Canton, New York, where she is studying English Creative Writing as an undergraduate at St. Lawrence University.

  AMY GIGI ALEXANDER

  The Bloom of Cancer

  Matters of life and death send her packing.

  Fifteen years ago, I wrote a wish list at a time when I thought my life would either be taken by cancer or by my own hand. I’d been ill for several years due to tumors growing like trees in my body, their branches twisting my organs until they stopped working. Many surgeries later, the tumors had all been removed except for small pieces, which I had hoped would die on their own. But instead they returned, stronger and hungrier, consuming everything, consuming me.

  My body was not owned by me during that time. I was only an anxious observer, who worried about bills that lay unopened on the kitchen table next to printouts of platelet counts. Exhausted by medications, angered by doctors, I spent my days terrified, my nights in a dull dreamless sleep.

  Cancer is a lonely business. People don’t really understand what cancer means: sometimes it means you will die. It’s not popular to say so, but it’s true. Everyone tells you “you will beat it,” but no one wants to talk about the fact you might not. But you, you have this truth with you every day: you wake up in morning, and it is there. It follows you wherever you are, this unnerving feeling that you are rotting inside. It stares back at you in your vanity mirror as you brush your teeth, making you cover all the mirrors in your house. It sits next to you as you drink your liquid meal replacement because you can’t eat solid food anymore. It crawls into the phone line as you try to talk to friends, contaminating the conversation until you give up and stop calling anyone at all.

  One morning, I realized I had to make a choice: end life or find life. I remember that day so well that I can recall details from it still. I was lying on the floor of my living room, and I’d been lying there for a long time. Overnight. I was cold, because the fire in the wood stove had gone out, but I didn’t care. I was so ill I’d soiled my clothes with urine, because by then, I’d become incontinent. My hair was tangled and dirty, since I hadn’t showered in over a week. I had on a maternity dress that someone had given me, an ugly flesh-colored peach dress, the color of a Band-Aid, and I hated it. My tumors had come back and my abdomen was so swollen I couldn’t wear any of my own clothes.

  My dog was hungry and pawing at the back door, and I made myself get up to feed him. Then I saw how he looked at me: his eyes were wide and alert to a stranger. Me. I went and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw someone in hell. Right then I knew I had to pull myself together. There was no one else to do it but me.

  I cancelled my chemo. I threw away the medications. Driving out to the countryside with my journal and a blanket, I stretched myself out in a field surrounded by sheep and sunshine. It was in that same field that my bucket list was born, a list that kept me alive and saved my soul from sorrow.

  From the start, I knew my list had to be that of a visionary: impossible tasks, a maze of places and things that required my full participation, a belief in the magical qualities of the Universe. Choosing tasks that were far away or took a long time to accomplish meant promising myself to be healthy and whole again. I knew I needed a list that would propel me out into the world, shot like a cannon into a neighboring country, led only by the desire to have more time.

  I wrote until the light dimmed, the grass buzzed with night insects, the way back to my car hard to find. But while creating that bucket list, my pain, aloneness, and my fears were replaced with the gift of forgetting. I forgot who I was and decided who I would become.

  Once home, I taped copies of my new bucket list everywhere: the refrigerator, the bathroom mirror, the dash of my car. I tore the list into narrow strips, one task on each bookmark, placing them in every book I owned, my wallet, the silverware drawer.

  Slips of paper, everywhere, reminding me that I needed to live, scribbled with jumbled words, wishes:

  • Skydive solo in the Nevada desert just after the sunrise.

  • Spend an entire day at the top of the Empire State building and have a five-star meal delivered.

  • Jump off a pirate boat into the sea.

  • Build a cross on the top of a mountain along the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

  • Nap in Vita Sackville-West’s white garden while reading Virginia Woolf.

  • Become a Buddhist monk.

  • Feel quicksand.

  • Join a Catholic order of nuns.

  • Be entirely alone in a desolate landscape of another country.

  • Snowshoe in Canada.

  • Be the star of a parade.

  • Eat dinner with a famous artist.

  • Work on a banana plantation.

  • Plaster a city with poems in the middle of the night.

  • Ride a train car to an unknown destination.

  • Spend the night at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with an astronomer who can explain the stars.

  • Travel around the world alone, taking my time.

  • Be an artist.

  • Experience nature.

  • See everything.

  These and hundreds more prompts to do the things of my wildest imaginings, crazy dreams that required endless resources of time and money I didn’t have.

  I was still sick, but my days were full of plans and preparations, and I began whittling down the list with surprising success, in no particular order. Some things were hard to manage, but explanations usually opened doors. Money was useful, but not entirely important: the sheer will needed to actually do something seemed to make it possible to do it, whether it was expensive or not. Other tasks proved impossible or ridiculous in retrospect: pirate ships were terribly hard to find, and the top of Empire State building didn’t allow food of any kind, so I’d had to make do with a hastily gobbled hot dog that I smuggled in under my jacket. Sometimes I changed my mind: being a nun sounded lovely until I had realized I couldn’t even wear lip gloss, and snowshoeing turned out to be more torturous than fun.

  The list kept me alive. I didn’t think about being sick anymore. I treated my body like it was well, forcing it to do things it had never done: skydiving, white water rafting, ballroom dancing. And six months later, somewhere
between talking stars with an astronomer in the Grand Canyon and almost getting arrested for plastering poems on streetlight posts in my city at two A.M., I felt better. The doctors told me I was better, too: the cancer was gone.

  The bucket list had become a tool that changed me from someone who had obsessed about mere surviving . . . into a strong woman who didn’t care so much about living as she did about thriving.

  I’d bloomed.

  Five years later, I found myself traveling around the world alone, with a single task left to complete at the bottom of my bucket list. It sat, dangling like a loose thread, demanding to be pulled. Part of me wanted to pull that thread, close the chapter, and start a new story that had nothing to do with cancer. The other part of me was scared to complete it, thinking that once the list was finished, my life might be finished too.

  The final thing on my list was to spend a month at the Louvre in Paris. I’d never even been to Paris, I didn’t speak French, and all I knew about the Louvre was that it was filled with beautiful art that most people only had a few days to see. A month at the Louvre. Impractical, luxurious, out of reach.

  Yet despite an utter of lack of funds on my round-the-world adventure, I suddenly had an unexpected delay in Paris, forced to stay there for three months as I awaited a visa to arrive for India. I knew no one, except for a glum Parisian art student, who had scribbled her telephone number on a napkin one night as we both tried to sleep in the Mexico City airport on our way to other places.