Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  I’d walk into a bar and order a Guinness, or maybe just a Budweiser. I’d have two beers, maybe three. Got to do it right this time, not get too crazy. That’d be on a Friday night, maybe happy hour somewhere. I’d go home afterward, kind of proud that I could stop at two or three, but with a tinge of sadness that I couldn’t just sit there and keep happy hour going until 2 a.m.

  The next week, maybe I’d do the same thing, only on Thursday night. Hell, everybody starts slacking on Friday anyway, right? Thursday’s the real start of the weekend. Three beers, though. Maybe four at the most. Got to take it easy.

  Friday, I’d probably try to go out again. Three, maybe four beers. Hell, maybe five or six, since it’s the weekend and all, right? I’d get a pack of smokes, too. I only smoke when I’m having a couple of beers.

  I wouldn’t go out on Saturday, though. Three days in a row, no way.

  By the third week, I’d probably get reasonably drunk—not like the old days, but enough that I’d be a little stumbly and I’d yell at people in the street to draw attention to myself. This is probably the point of no return. Three months after that first beer, tops, and I’d be a total piece of shit again. Next thing you know, I’d be fifty with cirrhosis. I wonder if anybody would still be around to care.

  On Labor Day, I quit eating meat for good. Seemed like the right thing to do, for environmental reasons, and for animals. I quit smoking on the same day, for probably the fortieth time in the past two years. I’d gotten a job at a division of the Rocky Mountain News when we moved to Denver, and I’d had a few informal “meetings” with my new boss when we went out for cigarette breaks, but other than that, it was hard to see any positives to smoking anymore. Along with the high altitude and the dry air in Denver, smoking was making me miserable. I was always thirsty, I usually had a headache, and it just wasn’t fun anymore.

  Two months later, Amy got sick of me saying, “Maybe I could just smoke a couple cigarettes a day,” or “Just when I have coffee,” or blah blah blah.

  “Why don’t you just go buy some cigarettes and get it out of your system?” she said.

  Wow. She would never say that about beer.

  So I did.

  Down at the corner store on Colfax and Gilpin, a block away, I bought a pack of Marlboro Ultra Lights, convinced that since I hadn’t been smoking lately, my throat wouldn’t be able to handle anything stronger. I sat on the top step of the porch stairs and lit a cigarette, sucking on the filter and wondering if it would feel as good as I had daydreamed about twenty times a day.

  It didn’t. It was as tasty as a bite of Styrofoam, empty. I went inside, disappointed that I had just thrown two pure months of nonsmoking down the drain.

  An hour later, I went back out onto the porch and smoked one more cigarette in the dark, out of a sense of duty to the four dollars I’d paid for the pack. I burned it down to the filter, sucking down all the smoke, all the chemicals, and wishing for a big rush of nicotine to slide into my blood.

  But it didn’t happen. I stubbed the butt out, flipped open the box, looked at the eighteen full cigarettes staring back at me in the dark, and walked down the steps to the sidewalk.

  I stood the pack right in the middle of the sidewalk so someone would see it and pick it up. I had done this ten times before, on this same spot on the sidewalk, every time I figured I was going to quit for good. Then someone came along and picked up the pack, taking it away, sometimes finding five smokes, sometimes twelve. This time it was eighteen.

  I had smoked for six years, starting back when you could still smoke in bars in Iowa. I’d told myself that if I was getting all that secondhand smoke anyway, I might as well get some firsthand. Like alcohol, it had quickly become an addiction, but I never had a rock-bottom moment that shocked me into quitting, like I did with alcohol. Smoking was a crutch, a safety valve I relied on whenever I felt uncomfortable. Eventually, I just did it because I felt like crap if I didn’t. That is the end of the fun phase of all addictions: maintenance. I tried gradually decreasing the number of cigarettes I smoked per day, then I tried nicotine patches, and both failed. Finally, I found the magic trick: cutting it out cold turkey.

  I joked with my mom about my career as a quitter—first alcohol, then meat, then smoking—saying maybe it was some sort of adulthood phase for me.

  She emailed me a story:

  Like many kids, you were comforted in your toddler years by a special blanket and sucking your thumb. You had a green blanket that I had replaced the binding on several times.

  Early in the summer after your third birthday, you came to me and said: “Mom, when I think that I am three years old and still suck my thumb, it just makes me sick!”

  That night, when I tucked you into bed, I found the green blanket folded on a chair in your room. You associated the green blanket with your thumb and knew by putting the blanket away, your thumb would be less enticing.

  A short time later, you became very sick with a high fever and strep throat. In an attempt to comfort you, I tried to give you the green blanket. You refused it, thinking you might start sucking your thumb again.

  When I walked out the front door the next morning, I glanced over to the spot on the sidewalk. Sure enough, the pack of cigarettes was gone. That was the last cigarette I ever smoked. But just to make sure it would be, I started training to run the inaugural Colfax Marathon, which started six months later.

  One January day at the newspaper office, under the Cubicleville fluorescent lights and white silence that seemed to numb any ambition to actually work, I took another one of those two-minute mental breaks from writing sentences and creating hyperlinks to click around the internet. I found a news story about James Frey. He’d admitted to embellishing some details in his memoir. Mother. Fucker. My heart sank.

  Maybe he wasn’t the grizzled tough guy he’d said he was. Maybe he’d never stood up to anyone. It was likely, really likely, that he hadn’t had a root canal without anesthetic. I had aligned that experience with the time I’d had the wires in my jaw taken out and had declined a general anesthetic, opting instead for twenty shots of novocaine; I’d laughed at myself in the rearview mirror as I’d tried to smoke a cigarette with numb lips on the drive back to my house.

  He’d said he did eighty-seven days in jail, when really it was no more than a few hours. I spent a grand total of nine days in three jails, only 216 hours, but I sure didn’t walk around acting like it had been six months.

  Fucking James Frey, you let me down. I bought your book for my mom so she could understand me. I recommended it to friends. And the guy in your story wasn’t who you made him out to be.

  “Well, it’s still a good story,” my mom said when I told her to not bother finishing the book. “It’s just a story.”

  “No, it wasn’t, Mom,” I said. “Unless you were . . . Never mind.”

  I had started this whole thing without a hero or a role model, anyway.

  UP

  “TRUST YOUR FEET,” THE GUIDE said. “Your legs are way stronger than your arms, so walk up the rock. Don’t try to pull yourself up with your hands.”

  More than a year after I had said I’d never rock climb again, Nick and I took a class from a guide in Colorado Springs. Our instructor brought us to Garden of the Gods, a valley of three-hundred-foot red sandstone fins and pinnacles sitting at the foot of Pikes Peak. He took it slow, focusing on technique. He showed us how to make the sticky rubber on our shoes cling to the rock on even the smallest features, taught us to find good footholds and move carefully up the rock. And he reminded us to breathe.

  Maybe he was a better teacher than my buddies in Phoenix, or maybe I was finally humble enough to really listen, but afterward I felt ready to go out and climb. I bought a couple more pieces of hardware and some guidebooks, and Nick and I headed out. We started with the places where we could walk up the back side of the rock, anchor the rope at the top, and climb the pitch with a rope from above and very minimal risk.

  A month and a half of
that and I was really ready to lead.

  We started at Red Rock Canyon in Colorado Springs, on a not-even-close-to-vertical route. I took it slow and easy, making sure to do everything right. Clipping a carabiner to the rope the wrong way could leave me basically unprotected if I fell, sending me all the way to the ground.

  In a few weeks, I was leading intermediate routes, climbing at the upper limit of my ability, and scaring the shit out of myself on a weekly basis. I was incredibly scared of heights, and of falling.

  But I couldn’t stop. When I climbed, I concentrated only on climbing—keeping enough friction between my hands and feet and the rock to stay on it, forty or sixty feet off the ground. Everything else fell away outside of the tunnel of my vision.

  In climbing, if you make a mistake, you can die. If your partner makes a mistake, you can die. Even if everything goes right, you can still fall, and during the one or two seconds after you come off the wall and you’re hanging in space, you hope or pray the rope will hold the force of your fall and your partner will hold the rope. For a second, you are dying, just before the rope catches and you slam into the rock, thankful for the workmanship of the rope maker and the accountability of your best friend. You always knew he would take a punch for you, but right now you’re just glad he’s willing to competently hold tight to a climbing rope when you’re tied to the other end, way up there.

  Four months after I learned to climb Garden of the Gods, I was hanging onto a vertical slice of granite called the Fin with my fingertips and the toes of my climbing shoes. I was about twenty-five feet off the ground, forty feet from the top, on a route called the Edge of Time. If I slid over to my right and peered around the rock, I would have a beautiful view of the Diamond on the east face of Longs Peak, five miles away as the crow flies. I couldn’t see that view, however, because I was about to fall.

  I was a few feet above the first bolt on the route, climbing above my ability. In addition, I was not mentally prepared to try this route, a sandbagged 5.9 climb in an area where I’d never climbed before. The handholds and footholds I relied on were tiny, sloped, barely helpful nubs sticking out of the rock. The next move I made could send me peeling off the wall. No one could do anything to help me.

  I went for it, upsetting the delicate balance of friction I had with my left hand and my two feet. I fell, mostly straight down, crashing through a pine tree, bashing my elbow on the rock. My throat sucked in a scream as I flew free.

  Nick tried to hold the rope and prevent me from hitting the ground, but he was sucked into the wall himself, and I fell a couple more feet.

  Then I stopped falling, with my heels about six inches off the ground. Nick and I ended up right next to each other, two guys coursing adrenaline, looking at a wall, both scared and relieved.

  “Holy shit,” he said after a second.

  My elbow was bleeding, staining my long-sleeve shirt. My pants were ripped where a tree branch caught them and took a three-inch long gash out of my ass cheek. Both stung. But I didn’t hit the ground.

  We talked about what happened and decided Nick should try to lead the rest of the route, since the first bolt was already clipped. I anchored myself to a small tree, and he roped up and started climbing, making it past the tough part where I’d peeled off.

  About fifty feet off the ground, almost at the fourth bolt, he started to get fatigued, badly, to the point where he didn’t think he could hang on. I told him to start climbing down, because he was easily eight feet above the third bolt, which meant if he fell, he’d fall sixteen feet before the rope stopped him. He tried to downclimb and got almost four feet closer to the third bolt before he sailed off the rock in an arc, away and to the left, slamming into the wall with his hip as the rope caught him and stopped his descent.

  I could see that this was the most scared Nick had been in his entire life. For a second, he thought he was going to die. Neither Nick nor I knew how to properly fall while climbing.

  I lowered him down to the ground, shaken. Then I gave the route one more shot, not thinking I’d make it very far. I made it past the spot where I’d fallen, then past the second and third bolts, when I really started to panic. I was easily forty feet off the ground. I had no reason to believe that every part of the system wouldn’t work—the rope, my harness, the bolts, the quickdraws holding the rope to the bolts, Nick and his belay, and the anchor holding Nick to the tree—but I was still hyperventilating. Shit shit shit.

  The fifth bolt was a piton, hammered into the rock God knows how many years ago, and what, about a fifty-fifty chance it was worth a shit and would actually hold a fall or rip out of the rock and let me free-fall another thirty feet? Looks solid. I guess it looks solid. I don’t really know.

  I slowly crept up the wall. The climbing wasn’t hard, just high and airy. I tried to breathe deep, yoga style. I clipped the piton and took a deep breath. Twelve more feet to the top.

  Easy climbing again, but still frightening. I slowly made moves, shifting my feet to the next hold only when completely sure I could make it. A fall from there would only drop me ten or fifteen feet, but it would still be fifty feet off the ground. If the piton actually held the weight of the fall, that is. It could be a thirty-footer if it didn’t.

  At the top, I clipped in to the rappel bolts, and my butt unclenched.

  “I’m off,” I yelled down to Nick. I ran the rope through the rappel bolts, and he lowered me to the ground. My heart glowed with adrenaline, and I laughed.

  There is nothing else when you’re climbing. There isn’t room for the mind to wander. No bills, no angry boss, no girlfriend, no debt, no depression, no heartbreak, no expectations, no questioning your life choices or career, no success and no failure; there is just staying on that rock and concentrating on safe, upward movement.

  On the rock, I’m still an addict, but I don’t crave a beer or a cigarette, not even at the top. I want to push myself to the top, then back down, then climb more—a tougher route, a tougher one, until my calves cramp up and my fingers are too weak to tug on my shoelaces.

  This was it.

  “Be careful,” my mother always says when I mention climbing. She never said that before I went on a drinking binge. Is it more foolish to risk your life or risk wasting your life?

  One day, my friend Becca wrote me and said that there might be a common thread, that maybe, over the course of five years, I’d traded one extreme, potentially deadly activity (drinking) for another extreme, potentially deadly activity (climbing). Maybe, Becca suggested, there was a reason for my behavior.

  She might be right, I realized. I didn’t drink a couple of beers and chill out; I drank as hard as I could as long as I could. I didn’t have a cigarette every now and then; I smoked a pack a day, all of them right down to the butt. I didn’t take up jogging; I ran a marathon. I dive into everything, and the job gets done, even when it’s not a job. When I find a song I like, I play the shit out of it, over and over again, until, after two weeks, I can’t listen to it anymore.

  Why? What makes me do that? Do I have an “addictive personality”? Is that really a thing? Or is it an excuse? Is it because I grew up in the Midwest, where we finish the job? Is it because my parents instilled a great work ethic in me? Here’s what I think: The defining event in my life was getting and staying sober, something that you can’t half-ass. If you go at it twenty-three hours a day instead of twenty-four, or fifty-one weeks of the year, you fail. I suppose there was inevitable spillover into the rest of my life. I just put my head down and give it hell, and believe that things will turn out all right.

  I left work early one afternoon and paced around the Denver Public Library’s journal collection, thumbing through bound archives of the Journal of Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and anything else I could find that I thought might contain something of interest.

  Finally, I found a study that mentioned a report called The Course of Alcoholism: Four Years after Treatment. As an alcoholic four and a half yea
rs post-treatment, I wanted to see how I stacked up. What I found was not encouraging: “Many lay groups accept the notion that the disorder is a lifelong disease that may be contained, but never cured. The prevailing view among physicians is similarly pessimistic.”

  Wow.

  I looked at tables of statistics, trying to translate clinical language to figure out what the numbers meant. To me, it looked like just about all of the 548 people studied who had been through treatment decided, at one point over the four-year period after treatment, that it might be okay if they started drinking again. Most didn’t binge drink all that often, but they still binge drank. Some fell off the wagon right away; some waited two or three years before doing it.

  On page 190: “Only 48 cases (9 percent of the sample) reported abstaining for all 48 months of the period, although many more reported abstaining between 24 and 47 months.”

  Nine percent. Basically, one in eleven people made it four years. Statistically, everyone I met in treatment was probably drinking again, on some level, and I was the only one still standing. I’ll take those odds, I thought as I copied the 9 percent sentence into my notebook.

  I never questioned the end—I got it; it made sense. I was so messed up the only option was to stop completely. I didn’t think everyone needed to do what I did, but the farther I got from it, the less sense drinking made to me. I had no way to self-medicate anymore. The hardest drug I used was caffeine, which isn’t the type of thing you binge on at a bachelor party or after you get dumped by your girlfriend. I don’t know if I dealt with my emotions in the best way possible, but I never considered that booze would be a better solution. It made me wonder why I even started, why we all start, and not in moderation, especially when we’re young.