The trail went up almost immediately. No easy meandering path through the pines, no flowing creek—just a rocky dirt trail pitched at a constant slope. I took big steps.
Tim let me lead for a while, and I charged like I needed to get to the top before 8 a.m. By the time we passed the BYU kids, I was dripping sweat, despite the chilly air. I nodded hello to them and tried to stride ahead like it was the fifth time I’d been up this mountain.
A few minutes later, I prayed the trail would start switchbacking. There’s no way it can be this steep all the way up or I’ll never make it. We ran into another group of hikers and stopped to take our jackets off, then continued on. I let Tim lead, and he set a more conservative pace.
After about ninety minutes, the trees began to thin out and get shorter. We stopped again so Tim could take a shit. I wondered where he could possibly go, but he just started sidehilling across the mountain, perpendicular to the trail, and disappeared. He was back in a few minutes. I wondered if I would ever be able to do that, to walk off into the woods and take a shit like it was nothing. What did he wipe with? This is black magic.
The trees ran out, and there was nothing but rock above us. Big gray pieces of jagged rock, all the way to the top. From the road, Borah had looked like it was chiseled out of one big slab of granite, but from halfway up, I realized it was a big pile of boulders. I was surprised my legs had held out so far.
We caught up to an older couple, and Tim started talking to them. I kept quiet, since it was my first time in the wilderness, I guess. They were maybe in their fifties, and they were from Pennsylvania. They had come to Borah on a “highpointing” trip—they were climbing the highest mountain in each of several western states. The day before, they had left New Mexico, where they had climbed Wheeler Peak, and they had driven up to Idaho in a rented RV. They figured they had enough time to climb Borah before they had to catch their flight back to Pennsylvania the next day.
Ahead of us, I could see where hundreds of people had stomped a gravel path up the ridge. Then, as the sun rose over the mountain, the rocks got larger and larger until we had to start using our hands to crawl over huge boulders.
We tried to stay as close to the top of the ridge as possible, weaving back and forth to pick our way across the rock Mohawk with a thousand-foot drop on either side. I realized that if I lost my footing I would tumble down an almost vertical wall of rock and my parents would have to arrange a closed-casket funeral back in Iowa in a few days. I took a deep breath, and thought, Holy shit.
In front of us was a snowfield that I’d seen pictures of in all the guidebooks. It was about forty feet across and looked like bad news. How slick was it? Tim went first. To get down to the snow, he had to swing around a big rock and climb backward down to the snow. Then he walked across carefully, but he didn’t look worried.
I swung down by my hands off the stacked boulders, hoping not to find out what would happen if I were to slip, then I stepped onto the snow. It was mushy enough to get good footing. Not a good place to fall to the left or the right, but not nearly as scary as the ridge. I stepped carefully, slightly hunched over, ready to dive onto my stomach if I lost my balance. Two guys came up behind us and verified that we had survived Chicken-Out Ridge.
The trail traversed the face of the peak, then disappeared as we started to pick our way through another boulder field. Ten feet in, I was done having fun. It was now all about getting to the top. There was no easy way, so I put my head down and kept going, stopping to rest every minute and a half. Tim got ahead of me and didn’t wait, but I didn’t mind. Up, up, up. Jesus Christ.
Then I heard Tim talking to someone else, and I knew I must be close. I walked up the last few feet and stood atop Borah Peak. The mountain fell away to the east, and I looked out over a frozen sea of rock. I had made it.
I sat, letting the slight breeze blow on my face, sucking on water that didn’t even taste good and chewing on tasteless energy bars.
One of the guys who had crossed the snowfield after us offered to take a “hero shot” of us with Tim’s camera. We stood together on the summit and smiled in the sun—me with long hair flipping in my face, thinking for sure that this would be the coolest photo I’d ever be in. I couldn’t wait to show it to everyone back in Iowa. I looked at Tim, relieved and said, “Well, it’s all downhill from here.”
I stumbled almost all the way down the mountain. My legs, not prepared for a task one-tenth the magnitude of what we had just done, had nothing left. I nearly tripped onto my face dozens of times, with Tim conveniently far ahead of me. It was steep going up, but at least if I fell going up, I’d stop. Going down was scary. My mouth hung open as I fantasized about a helicopter rescue.
Back in Idaho Falls, Tim and I hit up a fast-food drive-through and went back to my apartment to take turns showering. While Tim was in the bathroom, I called everybody I could think of, acting like, oh, today was just a good day to get caught up on my phone calls. “What have you been up to?” I asked. “Me? Oh, nothing. But my buddy Tim is in town, and we just climbed a twelve-thousand-foot mountain.”
Of course, over the phone, no one had any idea how nervous I was the night before, or how miserable I was on the way up, or how clumsy and utterly wiped out I was on the way down. I assumed they pictured me with ice ax in hand, rope around my waist tethering me to earth, at the top of a desolate snow-covered giant, possibly even sporting a beard with icicles hanging off it, maybe planting a tattered American flag at the top.
Safely back at home, I knew I wanted to be a mountain climber—whatever that was.
A week later, I packed up my apartment, worked my last internship shift at the newspaper, and drove back to Iowa, stopping in Denver to see a friend and hike up 14,433-foot Mount Elbert, Colorado’s highest peak. It proved to be no easier than Borah Peak, but at least I’d known more about what to expect.
I drove the fourteen hours back to my hometown in Iowa for a wedding. Weddings were starting to become a sort of regular test of my resolve to stay sober.
I stood with the other groomsmen at the front of the Jericho Lutheran Church way out in the country in northeast Iowa, sweating in my tux, hands clasped in front of me, ponytail tied back. Jarrett was the third generation of his family to get married in that church. He and Angie said their vows, and I tried to stand as motionless as possible. I saw lots of people I knew. I didn’t really want to talk to them after the service, not because I didn’t like them, but because I didn’t know what to say. I snuck out quickly and smoked a cigarette in the hot sun.
For the trip to the reception hall fifteen miles away in Lawler, I boarded a small charter bus with the rest of the wedding party. Everyone cracked open beers like, whew, they were relieved to have that whole thing over with. I watched them drink and loosen up, laughing and joking. I tightened up. Watching people drink was still about my least favorite thing to do. I stared out the window watching the humid countryside go by.
I would not have said it at the time, but this was when I started to close the door on an adult life in the Midwest. It became the place I grew up, no longer home. I wasn’t just doing a two-year stint out in Montana; I was gone—too in love with the open spaces to ever think about coming back to Iowa. Even now, I wished I were in Idaho, on a distant mountain ridge where there were no people drinking. Everyone else on the bus had a cold domestic light beer in hand, sweating condensation on the aluminum, or stuffed in a can coozie. I just kept my hands folded on my lap.
Where I grew up, lots of people had a favorite drink, or sometimes only one thing they ever drank. At the bar where I worked, many customers had an allegiance to either Miller Lite or Bud Light, refusing to even drink a free pint of the other stuff when offered. Some grandfathers I knew drank only 7 and 7s; some guys drank only Old Milwaukee when they went fishing. Some people drank only Captain Morgan and Coke when they went out. Over the eight years I drank, I tried almost everything.
One day after I quit, I sat down with a notebook and a pe
n and tried to remember it all. The list generated a bittersweet nostalgia, like finding a box of old baseball cards I’d collected when I was twelve. The list ran onto two pages, then a third, dozens of brands of whiskey, gin, vodka, and beer, names of cocktails, winding through memories—that four-pack of Olde English 800 while driving to the 1999 Tibetan Freedom Concert, nasty cans of Hamm’s beer we’d appropriated from Tony’s grandmother’s basement when I was seventeen, the eleven White Russians I drank the day after I got my first DUI and drove to Omaha without a driver’s license, just a piece of paper saying it had been confiscated and I had nine days left to drive before it was illegal.
For years after I made the list, if I had a minute to myself in a bar or restaurant, I’d scan the beer taps, the glass doors of the coolers, and the racks of liquor behind the bar, and mentally check off all the things I’d drunk before. If I got really into it, I would try to remember how something tasted, like Newcastle or Budweiser. I would often wonder why I did that to myself. But it reminded me of the epic length of that list. Do you really need a beer? In a short number of years, you had hundreds, probably thousands. You did that. So you don’t need another one, or fifty.
At the reception hall, before dinner was served, Jarrett thanked me for being there, because he knew it was difficult for me to hang out in places where free drinks were served. I told him it was really hard—like you have no idea how hard—but I was glad to do it for his wedding day.
I walked over to chat with my mom and dad, and Mom introduced me to a couple I’d never met before.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“You live in Montana,” the man, named Herman, said.
Yes, I live in Montana. I was prouder than shit to say I lived in Montana. I have a ponytail full of long curly hair. I live in Montana, and I climb mountains.
“Tell them about mountain climbing,” my mom said.
I had no idea what she wanted me to say. I just said that over the past few weeks I’d climbed a couple of pretty big mountains—Borah Peak in Idaho and Mount Elbert in Colorado. I explained how high they were and how we’d had to leave very early in the morning to avoid afternoon lightning storms.
Herman and his wife nodded and listened, but I could see they had no way of relating to what I said. I might as well have been talking about my recent trip to the moon. I liked the idea of people from back home seeing me as a “mountain climber,” but while I was talking to Herman and his wife, I realized that probably nobody from back home had any idea what a mountain climber really was. Not that I had any idea either.
Before the toast, I asked the waitress to please fill my champagne flute with water, not champagne, or to just not fill it at all, thank you. But when I came back from the bathroom, I saw a flute full of champagne sitting in front of my chair just as Jarrett’s brothers, co–best men, started their speeches. Shit.
The groomsman next to me, David, offered to chug my champagne. After he emptied it, I filled the glass with water, we raised our glasses to the happy couple, and I took a big sip. Fuck. There was still champagne in the glass. Not much—less than a quarter ounce, and it was very watered down—but it was the first booze I’d tasted in seventeen months.
My stomach knotted. I didn’t know what to do. I set the glass down, took a breath, and moved the glass a foot farther away from me on the table. There was no champagne in the flute when I poured the water in.
“What’s wrong?” David asked.
“Oh, there was a little sip left in there, and I got a taste of it,” I said. “It’s okay.”
How much champagne could have been hanging on the sides of the glass? I didn’t drink more than an ounce of water. But it tasted like alcohol. Did I just fall off the wagon?
No.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette, one of my little sobriety sticks, and I hung on. Maybe this is what people feel like when they’ve seen a ghost.
For most of the rest of the night, I sat in a folding chair on the edge of the dance floor, drinking water. I was determined to stay until the end—for Jarrett. A breeze drifted in through the window, carrying with it the smell of hog manure, and it reminded me that this was where I was from. I recognized dozens of people on the dance floor, or standing near the bar, drinking cocktails out of plastic cups or beer from cans, and I felt suddenly like they were from another lifetime.
Four years ago, with eight beers in my stomach, I’d have been having the time of my life, catching up with old Dan Crooks, who I hadn’t seen in six years, or doing shots with Shawn Hackman, reminiscing about the summer seven years before when we’d been fighting over a girl. (She ended up marrying someone else a couple of years later.) Give me a beer, and then seven more, and I could have been part of all this, possibly even the life of the party.
Now, though, a lot had changed. I was a brooding outsider, most comfortable sitting out on the front steps smoking another cigarette by myself. I was feeling homesick for Montana, or Idaho, or anywhere out West that had a horizon that wasn’t flat.
But back in my hometown, a lot had not changed. My dad decided that while I was home, we were going to build a fence in the front yard, over by the grove of trees that I’d been flicking cigarette butts into each time I’d visited over the past four years. It would be about 110 feet long, requiring eleven ten-foot-wide panels of fence and twelve posts. To dig the two-foot-deep holes for the posts, Dad had a plan: he’d rent a skid loader and use an auger attachment to drill them out. The fact that he had no experience operating one was no deterrent.
“No problem,” he said. We would borrow it from Stan, who, in addition to being the skilled owner and operator of New Hampton Auto Body and a sometime Wednesday afternoon golf partner, apparently had a skid loader sitting in his garage.
Stan’s price? Eight steaks from my dad’s meat case and a few cases of Busch Light.
“Jesus,” I said. “Why don’t we get him some good beer? The guy’s saving you three hundred dollars.”
“Because,” Dad said, “they don’t drink good beer at New Hampton Auto Body. They want Busch Light.”
Beer was often used as currency in my hometown. When I was in high school, I used to gamble for it with a twenty-six-year-old guy I worked with. I bought my first car for $500 and two cases of beer from a guy who worked for my dad. Dad once paid a guy a twelve-pack of Miller Lite to grade a fresh pile of gravel on our driveway.
We built the fence, and I painted the whole goddamn thing in one long day, finishing in the dark and aggravating the carpal tunnel I’d given myself designing newspaper pages six days a week all summer.
Those two weeks in Iowa felt too long. There weren’t many high school friends left in New Hampton, and my college friends lived too far from Mom and Dad’s house. If I’d been a little bored here when I’d been able to drink, I struggled even more when I couldn’t drink. I stayed around to maximize the time with my parents before I would drive the thirteen hundred miles back to Montana, and I counted down the days until I could point my car west again.
Before I left, I drove two hours to go see my grandmother.
“You know, Brendan,” she said from her cozy kitchen table as we sat down for lunch, “You’re the only grandchild I have who’s ever driven out here to come visit me.” She was my mother’s mother, 100 percent Irish, just like my mom. Grandma lived in Emmetsburg, Iowa, a sister city of Dublin, named after the Irish hero Bold Robert Emmet. They had a blarney stone in front of the courthouse, shamrocks painted on the water tower, and a parade every Saint Patrick’s Day.
“I know I’m the only one who’s driven out to see you,” I told Grandma. “That’s why I’m your favorite grandchild.” I thought of the year and a half when I’d had all the time in the world to visit but I didn’t have a driver’s license because I got caught driving drunk.
Over the years, Grandma had said to me more than once, “Brendan, you’re half-Irish, and that’s the only half you need to worry about.” She never said, “Being Irish means you’ve
got something to be proud of when you’ve got nothing else,” but I understood it anyway. I think that was why I got the claddagh tattoo on my arm on my one-year anniversary of being sober, after five years of telling people ridiculous things like, “I’m Irish, that’s why I drink so much whiskey.” I thought about showing her the tattoo. I thought she might like it. I tried to think of a way to bring it up.
Mom didn’t ever tell Grandma about my drinking problem, maybe because of my grandfather. Mom always said I reminded her of Grandpa. She’d show me pictures of him when he was young and say, “Look at Grandpa’s curly hair. It looks just like yours, doesn’t it?” After I went into rehab, Mom never told me I looked like Grandpa.
Grandma and I drank coffee in the kitchen after lunch, and I opened the fridge to get some milk. I saw a six-pack of Michelob Light in there, and I said, “Grandma, what the hell is this? Have you been tossing back a few?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I bought that for you. I thought maybe you could have one or two of those tonight if you want.”
“I quit drinking, Grandma,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”
“Oh,” she said. “Good for you.”
I decided not to show her the tattoo, because I didn’t want to tell her I got it because I grew up to be just like Grandpa.
I drove back to Missoula a week before the start of classes, feeling a warm welcome pulling me the final miles down I-90 through Hellgate Canyon, the town buzzing with energy as thousands of students returned to campus.
The first nice Saturday of the fall, I convinced Tim to take me up Lolo Peak, the 9,096-foot mountain that dominates the sky west of Missoula. It’s the first place snow appears in the fall and the last place it melts in the spring. Every time I turned my car southwest onto Brooks Street, it sat right in the middle of my windshield.
Sixty Meters to Anywhere Page 8