High school can be hard on kids, but it wasn’t that hard on me. I just had a sad little tug on my heart all the time, a little brick tied around my ankle, pulling me down so my head was just barely bobbing in and out of the water—above it, a cool, confident young man, and below it, a kid wondering why he couldn’t exactly sync with anyone else in town.
I spent my adolescence feeling like I didn’t fit in. I was on the football team, decent enough to play a fair share, but not good enough to influence the outcome of the game very much. I was smart, but I didn’t identify as one of the smart kids. I aced the science portion of the ACT, but the University of Notre Dame rejected me. I missed having the magna cum laude photo on the cover of the local paper by three-thousandths of a grade point.
My senior year, I was finally fast enough to earn a place on the 4 x 100 relay team, but we missed the state track meet by two-tenths of a second. I graduated from high school a virgin. My friends were great, fun guys, but we were just leftovers, who didn’t quite fit in with the jocks or the cool party guys.
Drinking cured that, for a few hours a week. I couldn’t wait to get to beer number four or five, when I was just like everybody else: I had credibility. I was okay.
I was the least talented of any of my friends when it came to procuring beer, and on the occasions I managed to get some of my own, I couldn’t even drink a twelve-pack by myself. This earned me the nickname Single-Digit Leonard.
The summer after I graduated from high school, three things got beer in my hand every weekend: a fake ID, a twenty-seven-year-old coworker, and Saturday morning recycling duty, which allowed me to steal a case of bottled Budweiser from the restaurant a few times.
I got drunk every Friday and Saturday night that summer, wherever the house party was. It was the most incredible summer of my life—the music was great, my friends and I were closer than ever, and I could finally drink twelve beers and remain standing. I didn’t even want to leave town for college in August. I was so happy I could have stayed there forever, half-wasted in the summer warmth, music blaring and a few guys and girls around. I had the missing piece. There was no more little tug of sadness. There were no more bad days—just days I was drunk and days I was looking forward to getting drunk.
Five years sober, I stood in the aisle of Capitol Hill Liquors at Ninth Avenue and Corona Street in Denver, scanning the cooler. Look at all this fucking beer. There were so many microbrews since I’d quit drinking, so many different flavors, all these different companies. I couldn’t even imagine what all this stuff tasted like. Oatmeal stout, Tripel something something, India pale ale. Had I ever had an India pale ale? All those years of guzzling whatever I could to get fucked-up I had never suspected that this would happen. Maybe I could have had a taste of it had I just done things in moderation. I was missing out.
I opened the cooler door. Dale’s Pale Ale. Six-pack of cans. It would fit in my backpack for the walk back home. Nick would probably like it. Seemed like it was a pretty popular beer. Ten bucks.
Back at the apartment, I slid the six-pack into the fridge, bottom shelf, right at the front. It was a big deal for me, keeping beer at home, even if it was only for a couple of hours before Nick showed up for dinner. If he drank two beers, I’d send the rest of the six-pack with him when he left. Just a little gesture, flexing my sobriety muscles in the mirror at myself, seeing that they were still there, and maybe a little bigger.
I had started thinking about climbing all the time, buying guidebooks to areas near Denver, spending late nights researching routes on MountainProject.com, looking at gear, wondering what I should buy next, if I should get more precise shoes, maybe a new rope, or more quickdraws. Obsessing, obsessing, obsessing.
I started going climbing by myself, just bouldering—short, relatively safe routes, sometimes no more than ten feet tall. Above the town of Morrison, just outside Denver, I found one particular section of rock to fixate on.
One day after work, I hiked up the steep hillside above town, my crash pad on my back, looking for that spot in the cliffs. The air was chilly until I got to the base of the wall, where the south-facing rock had been catching winter sun all morning. The face of the cliffs is filled with bouldering problems, sequences of moves up or across the rock face, usually covered with copious amounts of chalk rubbed in by the hands of hundreds of people who have climbed there before.
Bouldering is inherently hard climbing. Most boulder problems don’t get more than ten or fifteen feet off the ground, so even though you aren’t roped in, the danger from falling is not nearly as high; there are usually more ankle sprains than deaths. The moves are more gymnastic—requiring tiny little holds and awkward stances. The winter I discovered bouldering, I spent too much time on that wall in Morrison, attempting a fifty-foot traverse that never took me more than four or five feet off the ground.
For the first move, I hooked the middle and ring fingers of my right hand into a lip of rock with a hole in the back just big enough for fingertips. I never saw the hole; I had to feel around for it. My left hand was three feet to the left and six inches higher, middle and ring fingers hooked into a two-inch-deep hueco. When I got comfortable, I lifted my right foot up onto a two-inch downward-sloping bump that provided just enough friction to hold about half my body weight. I swung my left heel around the arête, the corner of rock, where, after a couple of tries, I found a little flake that was perfect to hook the rubber heel of my climbing shoe on so I could pull myself around the corner. My butt was about four feet off the ground, and I hugged the rock. If my hands slipped out of the holds, I’d likely flop backward onto a rock that looked like a pirate ship. If I didn’t roll back and smash the back of my head, it’d be a miracle.
Fortunately, I had the first move wired by the third try. I pulled myself left with my hooked heel and slid my left hand down onto a hold the size of a thick coffee saucer, then flipped my right hand out of its hole and onto the saucer hold. It was when I slid my feet over and shot my left hand out as far as it could go, desperately searching for a hold in the crack all the way over that I started to panic a little. I was just a stiff breeze away from peeling off the wall, and I almost never hit it on the first try. Still, almost every time I nailed it on the second try, and I stepped over to the crack, where I took a quick deep breath, exhaled, and moved left fast. If I didn’t, my forearms would be burning with lactic acid long before the end of the traverse, still forty feet away.
Each time I went to those cliffs, I threw myself into that problem. Every time, I couldn’t finish; I got a step closer, though. When I popped off the wall ten or fifteen feet from the end of the traverse, I dropped three feet onto the rocky ground. I cursed the small holds so close to the end that made me crimp both hands into claws. I cursed myself for getting soft from sitting at a desk all day and for not having the fortitude to finish the problem. Then I turned away from the wall and checked the sun, dropping over the shadow of Independence Mountain and Bear Mountain, and I wondered how many tries I’d be able to squeeze in before it got dark.
I had to rest before I tried again, and the more times I tried, the more minutes I had to rest in between tries. My forearms swelled with blood, and I felt like Popeye.
At twenty-eight, I had graduated from pointless shit like sitting on a barstool for hours at a time to pointless shit like crawling sideways across a meaningless rock face and wishing I could just get a few feet farther. It was exactly what I needed.
I tried to explain climbing to Amy, what I felt up there and why I loved it so much. It must have sounded so foreign, like the things she told me about her graduate courses in the social work program she had enrolled in full-time. I wanted her to try it, just to see if she liked it. Maybe it wouldn’t hook her like it had hooked me, but maybe she’d like it enough to join me half the time I went out. She loved hiking and didn’t seem to mind backpacking, though she gave up on snowboarding after one lesson, just letting her season pass sit unused. But climbing would be different: I had all the
gear, and we didn’t have to pay for a lift ticket.
We picked a Saturday. “I’ll take you somewhere easy, friendly,” I said.
I couldn’t believe how small the climbing shoes looked on her feet—the orange Five Ten rock slippers had only four lace holes, compared to the nine on each side of mine. I’d found them on sale on a website and bought them for her, gambling on her interest. She laced them up at the base of the sandstone wall on Grey Rock at Garden of the Gods, the same place Nick and I had taken a climbing lesson the year before and everything had clicked for me.
I scrambled around to the side of the formation and carefully worked my way over to the toprope anchor, ran the rope through a pair of quickdraws clipped into the bolts, and rappeled down.
I tried to be cautiously optimistic. Amy was terrified of heights, something she was quick to point out when I suggested rock climbing. I told her I was too, but that this was a good way to deal with it. Still, I knew it was different for her. The previous year, on the paved path cut into the side of Zion Canyon, she’d all but had a panic attack on the way up to Observation Point. At first diverting her eyes from the drop-off at the edge of the wide trail, she clung to the wall, cowering in fear, as I tried to convince her to take a few more steps. We turned around a mile shy of the viewpoint at the top of the trail. I did my best to hide my disappointment and assure her it was okay.
At the base of the crag in Garden of the Gods, I demonstrated footwork, and we traversed back and forth on small holds and indentations near the bottom of the wall. I explained the system—I’d run the rope up to two bolts at the top, and it would come back down to her, so if she fell, she would only fall a foot or two as the rope gently stretched and caught her.
“Do you want to give it a shot?” I asked. “No pressure. Just go as high as you want, and I’ll lower you whenever you say you’re ready to come down.”
“Okay,” she said, tense.
I tied her in, reminding her to concentrate on her feet and breathe. The rock was low-angle at the bottom, becoming a little steeper near the top, but had more features for handholds and footholds.
She stepped onto the slab, cautiously easing her way up.
Be patient. No matter what happened, I was determined not to be like one of those people at the crag who picked a fight with their spouse, one of them hanging thirty or forty feet off the ground and the other holding the rope. All I wanted Amy to do was keep moving upward and eventually get to that anchor sixty feet up, even if it took all day and ten tries.
She moved slowly, not looking down, not shaking, not hyperventilating. She looked almost comfortable—not quite overjoyed, but dealing with the fear and pushing herself. Soon, she was twenty feet off the ground, an achievement in itself. She studied the rock above, and looked at her feet smeared on the wall.
I called up, “Doing great!” for probably the tenth time in as many minutes.
“Okay, I’m good,” she said. “I’m ready to come down.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “You can lean back on the rope and hang right there, and then start up again when you’re ready.” Baby steps, I reminded myself.
“Nope, I’m good,” she said. “I’ll come down.”
“Okay,” I said. “Nice job. Just gently lean back and put your weight on the rope.” I pulled in all the slack and slowly let rope through the belay device as she began to inch down the wall toward me.
By the end of our climbing date, she had made it to the top of the route, slapping the anchor and letting me take a couple of photos before she came down. It was huge, all-time, in the history of good sports in relationships.
But she didn’t love it, and I knew it. She did it once, for me, not because she wanted to do it. She survived the climb all the way to the top, and a while later, when I asked if she wanted to do another lap, she declined.
I guess I still thought of climbing as some sort of hobby, just a thing I did but Amy and I didn’t do together—although I would have loved it if we could have. I don’t know if, at the time, either of us thought it was a sign that we shouldn’t be together anymore.
With six months to plan, we had decided to get married in June—not a big traditional ceremony, just a small family-and-friends event in Zion National Park. She didn’t even want to wear a white dress.
It made sense: We had been together for eight years, on and off, but had been happy living together the past three years. I was twenty-eight, she was twenty-nine, and if we were married, she could get on my health insurance. There was no engagement ring (she’d said she didn’t want one), no big proposal, just a few conversations in the kitchen that led to, “Well, let’s get married then. Where should we do it?”
In the months leading up to the wedding, my mom pressured me almost weekly to cut my increasingly unruly ponytail-length hair. When maintained, I had Shirley Temple curls, but usually my hair was a big collection of tangled split ends poking out under my bicycle helmet. My mom really wanted me to look nice for the wedding, she said. Then she said it again the next week, and the next.
“What if we gave you some money?” she asked.
“Mom,” I said. “I can afford a haircut.”
Then the offer came via my dad.
“Your mom wants to give you some money to get a haircut,” Dad said one Sunday a couple of weeks before the big day.
I laughed. It had come to this. “Like how much money?” I asked Dad.
“Five hundred bucks,” he said.
“Holy shit,” I laughed. “She really means it.”
“I’ll throw in some too,” he said, not laughing but not dead serious either. “Two hundred bucks, plus a little money to pay for the haircut.”
“I think we might have a deal,” I said.
We weren’t throwing an extravagant party and asking our parents to pay for a venue, a DJ or a band, an open bar, or any of that stuff. Seven hundred bucks would be enough money to buy some climbing gear—a handful of cams and chocks, enough to get me started up some longer traditionally protected routes. It probably seemed like a good investment to Mom and Dad, since they figured you only get married once. At the time I thought that too.
We went to Zion, said our vows underneath the sandstone peak of the Watchman, welcomed all our friends to this special place in the desert, and drove back to Denver, back to Amy’s studies and my mountains.
With my parents’ haircut money, I bought myself a wedding present, just for me: eight cams, a set of wired stoppers, and a bunch of shoulderlength slings—the beginning of my trad rack.
Shortly after the wedding, my friend Lee talked me into my first alpine climb. “I’ve been looking at the north ridge of Mount Toll for years,” Lee said. “It’s only 5.6, three pitches, up in the Indian Peaks.”
I said yes instantly, excited to actually climb actual mountains. Holy shit.
Lee, a forty-eight-year-old aircraft mechanic with decades of climbing experience, had become my mentor in trad climbing. He took me up the multipitch rock routes near Denver, showing me how to place cams and chocks, how to climb cracks, and how to build anchors at belays. We liked each other’s bad jokes, and when he needed a partner, I always happened to be available. On Mount Toll, I’d only have to follow him up the three hundred feet of technical climbing just below the summit, belay, and listen.
Midway through the third pitch of climbing, I thought to myself what a hero I looked like, deftly picking handholds and footholds, climbing up the side of that mountain with an ice ax strapped to my pack (an ice ax!), roped up to my partner perched eighty feet above me on a ledge, with nothing but air around us, the granite-and-snow waves of the Indian Peaks as a backdrop.
I followed the pitch easily, removing all the gear Lee had placed on his way up, and we packed up the rope and started traversing south across the west face of the peak to head for the summit. It wasn’t my first time in the big hills; I knew enough to step carefully and check every rock I put my hands on. A slip on a loose stone or a handhold breaking co
uld send me tumbling a steep fourteen hundred feet off the Continental Divide to the talus slope above Pawnee Lake. When they retrieved my body, it would be lucky if my head was still attached.
I moved slowly, carefully. When I got to a rock about the size of a pillow at about 12,800 feet, I prepared to step around it, my back to the void. I gave it a little tug, assuming it would hold.
At that elevation, it’s a little harder for your brain to get oxygen, because there’s about 40 percent less of it in the air than at sea level. You have to take in almost two breaths to get the same amount of oxygen you’d normally get from a single breath if you were standing in, say, the Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines. Your heart works a lot harder up high, sometimes so hard you can hear your neck pulsing. The upside is, when you scare the shit out of yourself by doing something that could kill you, your heart jumping into your throat feels pretty much normal.
As I sidestepped to the right, the rock I hung onto ground out a rock-on-rock groan and started to slide, ready to take me for the ride of my life. My stomach leapt upward as the rock slid down onto my bare ankle and my climbing-shoe-encased foot, and it stopped.
I didn’t scream, I didn’t pee my pants, and I didn’t barrel down the side of Mount Toll into Pawnee Lake. I stood, just like that, with the rock sitting on my foot, both hands on it, and I took a couple of breaths.
Lee had turned around. “You’re not hurt, are you?” he asked.
“No, I’m fine,” I said, looking at the rock like it was an old television I had dropped while walking up a flight of stairs. “I’m just trying to figure out how to get this thing off my foot without falling off.”
If I pulled my foot out from underneath it and couldn’t get out of the way when the rock rolled, it would take me down the mountainside with it. I maneuvered my body as far to the right as possible, then pushed the rock up slightly. I gingerly pulled my left foot out from underneath it, then lowered the rock an inch to rest, however tenuously.
Sixty Meters to Anywhere Page 12