Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  What the hell am I going to do with this? Might as well be a sweater.

  “It’s a good rope,” Chad said. He had bought it a year ago, before deciding he wasn’t going to be a rock climber, at least not outside a climbing gym. It had never been used.

  I didn’t think I needed it either. I was starting to fall in love with the exhilaration of the high-altitude environment—the wind blowing across rocky ridges, the exposure to the elements, and the grit it took to keep pushing forward and up despite exhaustion. Yet I felt content to stay on terrain that my hiking boots could stick to.

  To me, the rope seemed like a regift, like, Hey, I was cleaning out my garage, and I found this rope. I’m not using it, so here’s your Christmas present. I had never climbed with a rope before and didn’t think I was interested in trying it anytime soon. I’m from Iowa. We’re sensible people. We don’t go looking for new, crazy things in our late twenties. We settle down into good jobs and start getting the pieces in place to raise a family—reliable car, decent house, 401(k). We don’t become adrenaline junkies or whatever the hell you call people who go rock climbing. Still, I wasn’t going to not take the rope back to Phoenix with me. It was, after all, a $200 rope.

  I mumbled thanks, like you do, and we moved on, watching my mom open her gift from my dad, a pair of jeans with a hundred dollars in the pocket.

  When you talk about things that change your life, you think about having kids, finding Jesus, getting a job opportunity that skyrocketed your career, stuff like that. You don’t think about some crap your brother threw in a box three days before Christmas. But I suppose I should have known by then not to expect the predictable.

  I could have stayed in Cedar Falls, Iowa, after college, drinking four or five nights a week at Toads and Berk’s, watching my belly get bigger. I could have made excuses about my two DUI convictions, about how the cops had it out for me or how I was unlucky. I could have hit on college girls until my mid-thirties, maybe convinced one of them to marry me. Maybe that would have been okay.

  But I couldn’t help but think about this one saying that people like. Part of it is attributed to Henry David Thoreau, but the second half is likely a paraphrasing of something Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote.

  Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

  I heard that and I wondered if I was one of those people who was headed to the grave with the song still in them. I think I was on my way there at twenty-three. There was passion inside, but I didn’t know where to direct it, so I just poured whiskey on it. Now I was bouncing off the walls, pacing around a tiny room.

  Still, I thought I was pretty happy. I was about to turn twenty-six, I lived with Amy, and I could pay my rent, if not my student loan payments, with my first newspaper job. I hadn’t had a drink in almost three years. I felt strong.

  But I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t solid, or confident. Sobriety was like an itchy sweater I had been forced to wear to some formal event. I was treading water in life, rudderless, coasting. I didn’t know what I was or what I was about. I knew only two things: I couldn’t drink anymore, and I wanted to write.

  And then I opened that box. That rope would change my life.

  Most of the guys who worked in my department at REI climbed. They talked about it a lot, and I learned that the “rock” in “rock climbing” is silent if you know what you’re talking about. They all climbed a couple of times a week at AZ on the Rocks, the climbing gym in Scottsdale, and went to Flagstaff or Queen Creek for real rock whenever they got a chance.

  They knew the difference between the ropes we sold, not to mention the shoes and the carabiners and all the other hardware. The sixty-dollar Black Diamond cams had value, but to me, they might as well have been fishing tackle.

  My coworkers John, Trevor, and Dustin had said to me, “You should go climbing with us,” like guys at the golf course wanting me to join a threesome for a round. Golf wasn’t scary. But climbing?

  I took my Christmas gift rope back to Phoenix, and when I mentioned it to Dustin, he said it was a really good rope. With that big expense out of the way, he said, I might as well get the rest of the gear and he’d teach me to climb. So I bought climbing shoes, which looked like ballet slippers with supersticky rubber on the bottom, a harness, and a belay device, as well as ten carabiners I didn’t know how to use.

  Dustin and I met after work at Camelback Mountain, which was right in Phoenix and happened to have a few easy climbing routes. He taught me the basics—how to rappel down a rope, how to belay someone who was climbing, and how to communicate with my partner.

  After a few weeks of climbing with Dustin, I tried my first lead climb—clipping the rope to the rock as I went up. The stakes are raised when leading climbs: If the leader falls, he falls below the last place he clipped the rope to the wall, and most of the time farther, sometimes as far as twenty or thirty feet before the rope catches him.

  This beginner 5.8 route wasn’t difficult until I was almost at the top. After climbing up to the second-to-last bolt, thirty feet off the ground, I couldn’t work up the nerve to attempt the final move. I hung there, staring at the rock above me, knowing my arms couldn’t pull me up and over the lip to the top. And if I fell trying it, I’d whip in a ten-foot arc and slam into the wall.

  I was scared. I sat right next to the safety of the bolt, where I couldn’t fall more than a foot or so, and talked myself out of it. I yelled to Dustin to let me down.

  Back on the ground, I knew I wasn’t good enough. I had climbed, and led, even, but quit when it got scary. I hadn’t risked anything.

  My third anniversary of getting sober arrived. I didn’t plan to celebrate, but Amy baked me a cake in the shape of a giant beer. We ate it and laughed. I felt good, and kind of proud. Three years ago, I was still reeling from waking up in jail. Three years before that, I had probably put another hundred-dollar bar tab on my credit card and missed my Friday morning class.

  Three years sober and I was a little more solid, but I still wasn’t quite sure what to do when people asked me if I wanted to go get a beer and I often divulged too much of my personal history when turning down their invitation. I decided to go climbing again, determined to push myself a little more.

  It was my idea to go, but I knew I wanted to have climbed more than I actually wanted to go climbing. I was nervous on the drive out with Nate, a coworker from REI, and then on the hike up to Pinnacle Peak. I secretly hoped we wouldn’t find the routes we were looking for.

  But we found a route, and Nate offered me the lead. I said sure.

  Getting to the first bolt took all the self-control I had. The rock seemed featureless; all that held me was my fingertips and the friction from the toes of my shoes, which felt ready to slip at any second. I clipped the first bolt, assuring that I at least wouldn’t plummet all the way to the ground if I did slip.

  Above the bolt, where if I slipped I’d fall until the rope ran out and stopped me, I started to panic. I hyperventilated quietly. I couldn’t go up, and I couldn’t see any holds to try to climb down. I wanted to cling to something secure, anything, but there was nothing.

  “Breathe,” Nate said from the ground. Because I wasn’t breathing.

  When my legs began to shake, I instantly wanted to be in bed spooning my girlfriend or sitting out on my deck smoking cigarettes, anywhere but on that goddamn featureless rock, about to fall who knows how far. My hands were soaked, but I couldn’t move either of them to dip into the bag of chalk hanging from my waist.

  This is insane. If I can get down, I never want to climb again. It’s not for me. I don’t have the balls for it.

  Then I fell.

  I slid down the face of the rock, clawing at it, trying to stop myself, breaking my fingernails as all the air disappeared from my lungs.

  The rope caught me after about ten feet, and I finally followed Nate’s advice and breathed. My shoulders unclenched as Nate lowered me the rest of the way to the ground, maybe
eight or ten feet. I untied from the rope, he tied in, and I belayed him as he led the pitch. He made it look easy, gracefully finding tiny holds and moving up the rock. He wasn’t scared.

  He set up the belay at the top, and I followed. From his top belay, I wouldn’t fall more than a foot if I fell. The climbing was difficult, but not that hard. I was a little embarrassed about my freak-out. I was still happy it was over. I still didn’t want to go climbing again. We drove to a restaurant and ate cheeseburgers.

  While shopping for groceries with Amy a few days later, I bought some off-brand orange juice in a one-gallon jug. By the time we got it home in the trunk of the car, the jug had started to swell up. By the time I got it inside the kitchen, the jug was so swollen it almost wouldn’t stand up on its now-round bottom.

  I unscrewed the lid to let some of the pressure out and poured myself a glass. I began drinking in large gulps. I didn’t notice a funny smell, although there probably was one, because it turned out the orange juice tasted like it was full of alcohol. It must have been fermenting somehow, there in the store cooler. My heart jumped when I tasted it.

  “Holy shit!” I yelled, dropping the glass on the kitchen table.

  “What?” Amy asked.

  “This orange juice has alcohol in it,” I said. “It tastes exactly like a fucking screwdriver.”

  My heart pounded, way too fast for someone innocently trying to get his recommended daily allowance of vitamin C.

  My freshman year in college, my brother had given me a recipe for home-brewed hard apple cider. I had skipped the part in the directions that had said to periodically relieve the pressure in the cider jug, and it had exploded in my closet, waking my roommate and me in the middle of the night.

  I had somehow failed to see the parallel here, or notice that the orange juice was three days past its expiration date.

  I explained this to Amy.

  “Did you just fall off the wagon?” she asked.

  I don’t know, did I? Jesus.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it doesn’t count if it’s accidental.”

  They’d never covered anything like this in treatment, and I never went to AA meetings to ask other people what they thought. I didn’t have any friends in recovery. But even accidental exposure to alcohol scared me.

  I avoided beer cheese soup, Jack Daniels barbecue sauce, beer brats and tiramisu, which I had tasted for the first time while eating dinner with my brother during my first year of sobriety.

  Not eating tiramisu made sense, because it actually contains and tastes like liquor. Those little liquor candies, too. The Jack Daniels barbecue sauce thing made me feel a little ridiculous, but I still couldn’t bring myself to buy it, or even hold the bottle in my hand in the supermarket.

  After eleven months in Phoenix, Amy and I left for Denver to be closer to the mountains. Nick, my old roommate, had left his first office job in Iowa and moved to Colorado to work as a ski lift operator at Breckenridge in the winters, then settled in Denver and convinced me it was the place to be with a pitch about the three hundred annual days of sunshine the Front Range supposedly had. On our way to Colorado, Amy and I spent a week in Moab, Utah, in the heart of desert canyon country. We rented a cheap cabin at the Lazy Lizard, a hostel at the south end of town, spending our days in Canyonlands National Park and our evenings in Arches. I remembered Edward Abbey’s words, from his book Desert Solitaire, about the stark beauty of the desert, and tried to capture in my camera lens the sun and the long shadows on the rock formations at Park Avenue, Courthouse Towers, the Organ, Balanced Rock, the Windows, and Chesler Park.

  On our last day in Moab, we hiked around the Fisher Towers. We watched three climbers slowly make their way up Ancient Art, a route famous for a twenty-foot walk across a narrow ledge hundreds of feet off the deck, and up to the summit tower, a twisted glob of muddy red sandstone with hardly enough room to seat one person on top.

  On the drive back to the cabin, I remembered that I had signed up for a rock-climbing class the first semester of my freshman year in college. I had missed the first class because it didn’t meet at the indoor rock wall in the rec center, where I’d thought it would. I had called the instructor to ask him where I should go for the second session, and he explained that I couldn’t take the class after missing the first—they had covered too much for me to catch up.

  I dropped the climbing class and took weight training instead. Then I spent the next four years getting drunk and the next two years after that in Montana trying to figure out who I was without booze, and didn’t discover climbing until I was twenty-six, nearly eight years after I missed that first rock-climbing class at the University of Northern Iowa.

  I wondered out loud in the car, if things had been just a little different my first year of college, would I have seen Moab earlier in my life, fallen in love with its rafting-mountain-biking-climbing-four-wheel-drive soul, its red rock desert backdrop, and its dirtbag ethics, and perhaps moved there and become a climbing guide or a rafting guide?

  Amy and I took showers at the Lazy Lizard and split a plate of nachos at the Moab Brewery. And as the sun dropped over the Moab Fault, I was proud and grateful that I had ever made it to Moab at all. After all, if things had been just a little different, I could have still been drinking beer and nursing impotent daydreams from a barstool in Iowa, or serving a mandatory prison sentence for my third drunk-driving arrest. Now, we were moving to Denver.

  My first summer in Colorado was straight out of the lyrics from “Rocky Mountain High.” Just like the guy in John Denver’s song, I moved there in the summer of my twenty-seventh year, comin’ home to a place I’d never been before. I went as high as I could as often as I could.

  For our first hike in Colorado, Amy and I picked a seven-mile loop that summited three fourteen-thousand-foot peaks: Mount Democrat, Mount Lincoln, and Mount Bross. I was near vomiting almost the entire time thanks to another bout of altitude sickness. It finally subsided in the last half mile back to the car.

  By the end of the year, I’d climbed—mostly with Nick—ten mountains. I’d put almost three hundred miles on my hiking boots, hiking, climbing, and scrambling fifty-four thousand feet of elevation. I had slept on mountainsides and had drunk from mountain lakes full of melted alpine snow that had been filtered through rocks. I’d seen moose, elk, and, once, a porcupine, and gotten close enough to touch mountain goats and marmots.

  I was a mountain man, as far as I knew. I’d become the person on top of a rocky peak as the camera zooms out to show infinite waves of mountains, strong, courageous, wild.

  DOUBT

  ONCE I OPENED A Million Little Pieces, a book about a guy going to rehab, I couldn’t put it down. I loved James Frey instantly and intensely. The extremes of his addictions were far above mine: I mouthed off to cops; the cops beat him down with batons. I got beat up twice; he beat a man so badly he may have killed him. No question he could drink me under the table, even with the coke and the weed and the gasoline he was sniffing. I admired his consumption, his depravity, his addiction, and his pain. So much so that I started to wonder if I’d really had a problem when I quit, three years and four months ago. Should I have even quit?

  My cousin Dan quit drinking when he was twenty-one. He told me this when I was eighteen, and I thought he was nuts. His dad, George, my dad’s brother, worked at a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant his whole life and was one of those guys who had a few beers after work, no big deal. Five or six beers, hang out, watch a little TV—no problem. Didn’t make anybody unhappy, never got arrested, never really took it too far. I figured since his dad had kept it under control, Dan probably did too.

  I never asked Dan what made him think he needed to quit drinking. But I always found myself justifying my own choice, as if I owed people this explanation. Sometimes they asked, so I told them. Sometimes they didn’t ask, and I told them anyway, because it was such an odd thing to do in your twenties, not drink. I just assumed they were wonde
ring: Are you Mormon? Do you just smoke weed instead? Are you straight edge? Or are you just weird?

  My friend Jayson, one of my best friends and most enthusiastic drinking partners from college, came to visit Amy and me in July, a couple of months after we’d gotten settled in Denver. Jayson had clawed his way up to a director position in the Iowa Democratic Party after growing up with dyslexia and an absent father in a broken home, his mom raising six kids on her own. He survived an adolescence in the tough river town of Burlington, Iowa, and earned everything he ever got. Jayson had been maced by the cops, handcuffed and pushed around, and could scrap his way out of a pack of hyenas.

  “Do you really think you had that bad of a problem, Leonard?” asked Jayson, the guy I always think of when I miss having beers with my buddies. “I mean, you weren’t any worse than I was back then.”

  I defended my sobriety, all three years and five months of it. But inside, I wondered the same thing. I missed Jayson, and I missed the smile on his face when I’d walk into Toads or the OP and meet him for the first beer of the night, sitting on barstools, doing shots with the bartender, believing we would never die.

  That version of me did die, and Jayson had also changed. He was more responsible, fun, outgoing, positive, enthusiastic. I became a recluse, a cynic, unstable, depressed, old. I missed my friends.

  On the last night Jayson was in town, our neighbor threw a mojito party. Out of fifty people in his backyard, I was the only one not drinking. I smoked cigarettes and met a couple of people. Jayson, of course, was a big hit. If I did decide someday that it was okay to have a couple of beers, what would happen?