by Matt Samet
Nothing changed; being a “5.14 climber” changes nothing. I still feel exactly the same inside. I still want more. I’m not taking drugs and I enjoy being clean, but I still want more. Two days after Zulu I’m already sniffing around for the next project, the next redpoint campaign, the next big rating. When you set out to look over the horizon, you find only more horizon—it’s no different with drugs, no different with rock climbing, no different with anything. If you don’t immerse yourself in the process, you will never stop craving.
Then something happens: A tick bites me, perhaps at the organic tomato farm where I work, planting and tending to a one-acre field. I’m living hand to mouth, uninsured, dirtbagging, and so let days elapse, a week, until a rash covers my belly and the headaches are so fierce I can’t peel myself off the floor. I lie facedown on an area rug by the TV, moaning, until my buddy Charley, out visiting, says, “Man, we need to get you to the doctor.” At the clinic they find a tick-borne malady and put me on Cipro, a strong floroquinolone antibiotic. It quickly kills the infection, though I’ll suffer joint pain and hot aches for months. I’m back to climbing within days, but what I don’t know is this: “Quinolone antibiotics … displace benzodiazepines from their binding sites and should not be taken by patients on, or recently on, benzodiazepines,”1 as Dr. Ashton has written. And I have no idea, as per the collective benzo wisdom I’ll find on one Web site later, that “Floroquinolones are probably the worst type of medication to be taken during withdrawal or recovery and should be avoided at all costs,” as they have a “very strong antagonistic effect” on GABA receptors and can cause adverse reactions.2 I have unwittingly sabotaged myself.
The anxiety and the depression return with a vengeance. As autumn thickens into a marrowless, necrotic gel, I feel a black screen creep over my eyes, develop a nervous stomach, take to running the country lanes around Rifle to pound back the fear footfall by footfall. I mourn the separation of each leaf from the cottonwoods lining the roads: the absence of spirit as each yellow-brown folio shivers to earth, there to dissolve. I move back to Boulder to find work, look up my therapist Jack, and ask for a psychiatric referral. Just Paxil at first, ten milligrams to help with the depression—I tell this new doctor, “Dr. Porridge,” my Valium story and we both agree that benzos should be a last resort. I begin landscaping for a climber friend, a bon vivant with no “off” switch, like me. He’s always holding, and after an eight-year hiatus I start to smoke cannabis again. Just a little at first, to help with aching muscles and job-site tedium: moving rocks, stacking them, unstacking them, restacking them, digging holes, filling holes back in. But I’m soon puffing with gusto when my old friend Ativan returns to dull the weed paranoia. I’ve talked it over with the psychiatrist, and we reach an agreement that since Ativan is a different benzo than Valium, and since I’ve never technically abused Ativan, it’s worth a cautious try. Just twenty or thirty a month to help with anxiety. No big deal.
Have the doctor and I been totally honest with each other? I can’t answer, even now. We both know my history. On my end, I should have been open enough with myself (and him) not to request benzos, ever. I should have taken this opportunity and walked away from tranquilizers for good. When he agrees to prescribe them I do feel a little dirty, as if I’ve put him in a spot. Yet he, the medical professional, might have known better as well, and when I try to quit the pills eight years later I will wonder if his insistence that the benzos have stopped working because of comorbid substance abuse and that the mortal terror I feel as I taper is a rebounding panic disorder—and, later, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder—has more to do with him covering his ass than with any clinical certainty.
In June 1998, the twenty or thirty Ativan a month become sixty-two: two per day, every day. I take a single one-milligram pill in the morning, and the second at night: two white blips barely larger than pinheads, what the doctor calls “prophylactic treatment” or “benzodiazepine therapy.” The idea is that panic attacks are prevented before they can start. This is precisely how patients often find themselves trapped: A doctor prescribes “anxiety medicine” on a daily, long-term basis, until down-regulation and tolerance withdrawal set in. Then to offset the tolerance withdrawal, often misdiagnosed as a worsening of the underlying anxiety condition, the dose—and attendant problems, from worsening anxiety and depression, to “emotional anesthesia” or emotional blunting, to gastrointestinal issues, to bizarre neurological issues like tinnitus, parasthesia, and perceptual disturbances—begins to climb.3 This is what happens to me: Despite my past history of Valium abuse, I will not horde or recreationally abuse the benzos I’m prescribed during this period. Just like a good patient, I will take them only as directed (with only a rare few exceptions—out climbing) like so many others who, despite no prior history of or concurrent substance abuse, find themselves hooked. Take a study group of fifty consecutive patients (ten men, forty women) referred to a National Health Service clinic Dr. Ashton oversaw from 1982 to 1994. Located in the Wolfson Unit of Clinical Pharmacology (part of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) and run as part of the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne, Ashton’s clinic was originally called the Clinical Pharmacology Clinic but later simply became the Benzodiazepine Clinic. More than three hundred “brave and long-suffering men and women,” as Ashton writes, passed through during those twelve years; most were outpatients, and about 90 percent successfully came off the pills while working with Dr. Ashton on tapering schedules that she and each patient had customized. The patients had been referred by their general practitioners, mostly upon requesting referral help with prescribed-benzodiazepine problems that they themselves had noticed. Dr. Ashton was the clinic’s sole physician and worked with each individual on a week-by-week (and sometimes day-by-day) basis, with the aid of supporting nursing staff.
In Ashton’s study group, all the subjects had been on benzodiazepine therapy for one to twenty-two years, none were drug or alcohol abusers, and all presented with symptoms so troubling that they wished to be rid of the pills. Their issues were not mere chimeras of hypochondriasis: While on benzos, ten had taken drug overdoses requiring hospitalization, yet only two of these had a history of depression prior to benzos; after several years, ten had developed “incapacitating” agoraphobia; nine had had exams for GI complaints ultimately chalked up to irritable bowel diverticulitis or hernia; three had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a diagnosis not later confirmed; most complained of parathesiae in conjunction with panic attacks; and two had “constant severe burning pain” in their hands and feet.4 Yet in general, after these patients freed themselves from tranquilizers, the symptoms abated over time—a clear indication of the source of their woes.5
I’m neck deep within a month, though I must confess that benzodiazepine therapy rather suits me. My little orange bottle makes me feel special, simultaneously confers something that not everyone gets to have—a psychiatric diagnosis: anxiety—and a “cure” I happen to find chemically agreeable. Like each weekend’s project rock climb or prospective alpine adventure, so, too, do I use the pills as enticements, as carrots-on-a-stick to get through the day. At work landscaping, I start each morning with Ativan and a “hippie speedball” (espresso and kind bud) with my boss, smoke all day in the work truck or at the rocks, come home, take my second Ativan and drink Malbec, and just keep that buzzed, glowy feeling burning like a well-stoked ember. I come by my addictions honestly—it’s almost a family tradition. On my father’s side, his older sister drank herself to death by her mid-sixties; she’d struggled with panic attacks, including periods of benzo addiction, all her life. On my mother’s side, she’d had the eating disorder, her mother was an alcoholic, and my uncle died of a heroin overdose in his mid-thirties after years in and out of jail.
Everyone, apparently, has his vice.
Thudd-idd-bupp.
After six years of the long-distance dance, Luisa and I end it. She’s a city girl and wants to be in Torino or New York, and I’m a misanthropic
urban-agoraphobe. We still love each other dearly, but it will never work. I put her on the bus to Denver International Airport; it seems simpler this way, no hour-long drive full of “what-ifs” and “I’m so sorry, amore.” The pain is startling, a suture clear to my heart. I’ve taken a job as an HTML coder, sipping Theraflu at my desk for a sneaky office-drone high, strapping on earphones, trying to tune out the thirty-odd telemarketers with whom I share space in a big, open office in downtown Boulder, trying not to cry when thoughts of Luisa come crowding in. The end of your first love: It’s a grief like no other. I’ve started coming back to my climbing roots, the so-called “traditional” climbs in which the leader places removable protection—nuts, cams, and so on. In sport climbing, the only mental battle lies in psyching yourself up to try the same climb repeatedly, because every fall is at essence safe—onto a preplaced bolt guaranteed to hold thousands of pounds of force. But in trad climbing, the head, the nerves, are everything: You have only yourself to rely on to protect a lead and in cases where you must “run it out”—climb great distances between available points of protection. You also need to develop technical proficiency at quickly sizing up and placing the gear, which hangs in a “rack” off a padded shouder sling, and at hanging out in strenuous stances—sometimes by the fingertips of one hand—to tinker with placements. Even then protection can fail; the rock can break or the gear can skate, or you can have neglected to put a long sling on a piece around a sharp arête and your rope might sever in a fall. There are so many variables. It’s like chess mated with Russian roulette: skill and savvy + a dash of dumb luck. For this reason, I know 5.14 sport climbers who refuse to lead 5.11 traditional climbs. I take up with trad friends, aficionados of Eldorado Canyon, the local sandstone bastion known for its death routes—climbs with legendary runouts. Something about the calculated nihilism these climbs require appeals to me, of panting twenty feet above micro nuts smaller than pinky nails, committing to a shaky reach off some embedded crystal as I plead with my belayer to “Watch me!” I lead climbs like Night and Inner Space and Clear the Deck, barely protected 5.11 horror routes that might go years without an ascent, collecting dust and bird droppings. Other friends and I get into highball bouldering, trying difficult problems twenty feet or taller over a nest of crash pads, flying to earth when we fail, pounding the cartilage out of our knees. I’m smoking weed nonstop, speeding down Boulder’s thoroughfares without a seat belt, cruising home from friends’ houses fucked up, downing three glasses of red wine a night, not giving a whit about personal longevity.
And I’m free soloing. I’m taking Ativan, smoking dope, and free-climbing without a rope.
Free soloing is climbing at its purest and most fatal: Alone, without a cord, you free-climb the rock, risking a fall to the ground should anything go wrong—should you get pumped and slip, miscalculate a move, or break a hand or foothold; should a rainstorm slicken the rock, or a pigeon fly from a crack and thump you in the chest, causing a startled release. Climbers die soloing, even the best. Most ardent soloists will at some point either quit, realizing that they can’t continue to tempt fate; have a soloing accident but survive only to dial it back; or perish in the act. Soloing polarizes climbers like no other discipline, with some celebrating it as the highest form of vertical poetry and others reviling it as pointless, juvenile, selfish, and suicidal. I once had a woman, packing up to leave below a 5.8 crack I’d been waiting to solo, tell me, “Hold on, I want to get my backpack out of here before you splatter blood all over it.” It’s impossible to watch someone soloing and not have a reaction: The act is so naked. I’d dabbled with soloing as a teenager, in that vulnerable period in any young climber’s career when experience has not yet taught you that you’re mortal. I quit my senior year in high school after witnessing a friend, Pete, nearly fall what would have been 150 feet beside me in the Sandia foothills.
In 1998 and 1999 in Boulder, I took to it again, mainly in Eldo and the Flatirons in a disinhibited demi-deathwish frenzy. Many of the solos were onsight—sans prior knowledge of the climbs’ particular nuances and sequences. In other words, unlike the “safer” brand of soloing in which you first practice a climb on a rope, I’d go for it with limited foreknowledge, heading up after a cursory glance at the guidebook. I had an oversized gray chalk bag with a bottom zipper pouch for holding sundries like car keys. In here I’d also shove my Ativan bottle and a one-hitter. If anything went wrong, went the reasoning, I could swallow a pill or find a ledge and get high(er). The drugs were my “belay.” I never did anything world-class—my solos were in the 5.9 to 5.11 range, though often on slippery, licheny, pigeon-droppings-covered friable rock. I never catalogued or documented any of them; I don’t keep a route journal like some climbers. This commando approach often landed me in trouble.
In spring of 1999 I set out to free-solo a 5.10 called The Serpent, which meanders along a hanging arch on Redgarden Wall, which, at eight hundred feet, is Boulder’s highest cliff. The Serpent is a two-pitch route, but I’d only ever done the first pitch, the 5.10 crux, which made a series of undercling moves along the belly of the arch, your feet dancing across tiny rugosities below. The guidebook confirmed that the second pitch was “only” 5.9, so I paid little attention to where it went. Screw it—I could sort it out when I got there. I climbed through the first pitch to a ledge separating the two ropelengths, regrouped, then set off along a layback crack that dead-ended at a blocky overhang—a “roof.” From the crack, I could extend up to a poor, downward-sloping hold over the roof’s apex, but saw nothing above, only blank lime-green sandstone. I moved up repeatedly, matched hands on the sloper, stabbed my right foot onto a crumbly red sugar cube of rock, and groped blindly for hidden grips. Nothing. I was starting to get tired, my forearms tight, alone one hundred feet above a tilted ramp that sloped down to a three-hundred-foot plunge to the base of Redgarden Wall. Climbers die this way, in stupid situations like this, and then mountain rescue has to come along later and piece together what happened from the chalk prints and bloodstains. I soon steeped in a hot rush of fear, what climbers call “getting gripped.” When fight-or-flight hits and you’re unroped, you become keenly aware of your surroundings. You leave the “bubble” of concentration you’ve so far cultivated as a buffer against your naked peril. Time slows, and you must let the moment pass before continuing. I call this the “sea of rock” effect—a sudden realization that you’re trapped on this unnatural vertical plane, surrounded in all directions by nothing but cold, hard, unforgiving stone; a tabula rasa forged eons ago beneath the planet that could care less if it sees your limbs ragdolled and brains spilled across its flanks. The shadows deepen, the calls of darting swallows echo on into infinity, lichens grow more vibrant, vertigo spins the ground ever farther away, and you can feel each air molecule around the cliff, the cooler, emptier ethers climbers associate with exposure—with the drop-offs we fear just as instinctually as everyone else. Then come the thoughts: Man does not belong here. You’re walking on the moon without oxygen. Get down NOW! But you must shove them into the background and move into autopilot to find a quick exit, be it up, down, or sideways.
Up-down, up-down, up-down, up-down: I grew ever more gripped, suddenly, painfully, cognizant of the cruel red slabs, lightless maroon corners, and bottomless black huecos all around that mocked my plight, Ha ha ha ha ha! Die die die die die! Die, loser, die! This seemed way harder than 5.9; maybe I was missing a hold. I shook out each forearm, chalked up, and reached to the lip a final time. As I came halfway over my right foot, my quadriceps started to quiver with “Elvis Leg.” No, no, no, no, no. I had no right to be here, threshold-soloing like this; I was going to crater and die right here right now. I reversed from the roof in a chattering frenzy, and sprinted down to the ledge like a rat fleeing floodwaters. Perching my buttocks on the sloping platform, I sat, took off my rock shoes, and popped an Ativan, letting it dissolve on my tongue. The pill tasted sweet, like a Smarties candy. I must have rested that way for fifteen minutes, an owl o
n a tree branch. In time, I spotted an escape left onto an easier climb, a 5.8, and moved across until I could reverse to terra firma. I asked around later and learned that The Serpent’s second pitch went hard right, and that the roof I’d been trying was unclimbed, a possible 5.12. I wish I could say this was the only time like this, but there were others—like the day I came millimeters from falling fifty feet to my death alone in the Flatirons, barely catching a fingertip slot as I, quivering and off-balance, began to “barn-door” (swing) off on an unfamiliar 5.11c I had sequenced poorly due to fear-fueled haste.
Thudd-idd-bupp. Thudd-idd-bupp. Thudd-idd-bupp. Thudd-idd-bupp. Your heart can only handle so much adrenaline.
Two questions you probably want to ask are, “Were benzos performance enhancers? Did they let you try climbs you otherwise never would have tackled?” The answer is complex: It’s both “yes” and “no.” “Yes” in the sense that, like marijuana, Ativan can be disinhibiting: It removed certain barriers to self-destruction that might have otherwise remained in place. And “yes” also in the sense that, in these early months of daily benzo use, the drug—at least the first dose of the day, which always came on stronger—had enough of a sedating, anxiolytic effect that it did dampen fear … at least until early afternoon when the pill wore off and I felt panicky with interdose withdrawal. And “yes” also in that there were a select few climbs for which I took extra benzos, knowing how much fear I needed to face. In 1998 for example, at Hueco Tanks, a few of us crossed into Juarez and purchased ninety Valium directly from a crooked pharmacist. I burned through my allotted thirty pills by the second week, when we found an untapped labyrinth of caves and boulders atop West Mountain, Hueco’s tallest mound. We called this area The Realm, both for its surreal, otherworldly feel and for the mentally foggy “realm” of substance abuse in which we dwelled. All day at the boulders it was pills, homegrown crippler and hashish, and Carlo Rossi jug wine. We climbed boulder “problems” that were fifty-foot miniroutes over black, yawning chasms, over lightless caves that spilled off cliff edges, over tilted, ankle-shattering slabs and punji-stick dead trees. I believe that two of the first ascents I made, difficult “super-highball” problems called Chewbacca and Big Right, remain unrepeated. The former climb is a thirty-foot flat brown face cooked into terra-cotta plates, your only holds the minuscule razor-crimps at the joints. The landing is a canted rock ramp, and once past the overhang you must steel yourself for a thirty-foot 5.10 slab, dancing from declivity to declivity, the void at your back. I’d been so out-of-body gripped as I lunged for an incut flake near the end of the difficulties, at twenty-five feet, that I’d had to scream at myself—“C’mon, Matt!”—as if in the third person. The latter problem, Big Right, navigates an overhanging slot from which the landing drops catastrophically, with the hardest moves—dynos to flat, bricklike holds—coming over the worst possible fall. Both problems were done drunk, stoned, and pasted on Valium, in a fearless fog so thick I had to jump-start each morning with a “crappuccino”—a one-liter Nalgene bottle filled with four tablespoons of instant coffee, four tablespoons of nondairy creamer, and four tablespoons of sugar. My friends thought I was nuts.