Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  But I do consider myself an exceptional recovering addict. I can deal with the challenges of addiction because of what I’ve learned in the mountains—perseverance, balance, endurance, patience, accountability.

  Alpinist and writer Kelly Cordes once said, “One of the cool things about alpinism is that you end up being responsible for your own decisions, which doesn’t happen in today’s world hardly at all anymore. There’s always someone else to blame. But you go climbing, it’s usually you’re the one to blame, as to whether you get up or down, mixed in with some luck . . . Nobody ever guaranteed any of us anything.”

  I see parallels in the personal responsibility of climbing and the personal responsibility of recovery. Relapsing, to me, is not an option, and if it happened, I’d have no one to blame but myself. At some point, every relapsing addict makes a conscious choice to give up and walk into a liquor store, or call someone who can get them meth, or steal their mother’s painkiller prescription. I sometimes imagined finding the words to tell my mom and dad that I’d relapsed, and I could never figure out anything that would sound like a real reason, besides “I gave up on myself.”

  After almost seven years of sobriety, it wasn’t just a number of sober calendar days I would lose, it was a whole belief system that would crash down. I figure if I’m tough enough to stay sober, I’m tough enough for anything. And if I’m suddenly not tough enough to stay sober, then what? In addiction, just like climbing, you can’t fall off if you don’t let go.

  Six months after I’d taken my mom on her first-ever rock climb, in Colorado, she decided she was going to check out her local climbing gym, completely on her own, with no suggestion or hint from me.

  “Kathy Stubbs and I are going to Climb Iowa next Saturday to take the belay class,” she said at the other end of the line during our weekly Sunday phone call.

  During my Christmas visit home a couple of months before, my brother and I had gone to Climb Iowa, the new climbing gym near Des Moines. I hadn’t thought to invite Mom to go with us. I wasn’t much of a gym climber anyway. I just thought it would be something for Chad and me to do during the snowy winter weeks.

  I smiled, imagining Mom sitting at her computer in the kitchen at my parents’ house, clicking around on the Climb Iowa website, finding the page about its classes, and then telling Kathy Stubbs at work about it.

  She was sixty now, going climbing. I remembered her being one of the more protective mothers in my circle of friends. Never overbearing, just cautious. And now she was going to the climbing gym to learn how to belay.

  “I think your mother’s getting more adventurous as she gets older,” my dad said when I asked him about it.

  I laughed.

  As my number of sober days stacked up into the thousands, I started to have less and less patience for drunk people.

  I liked to be safe at home on weekend nights before people got too out of control in the city, and I hardly ever found myself in a bar anymore; I think my friends didn’t see the point in taking me to a bar if they were going to be the only one drinking. But every once in a while, I’d run into someone who’d had a little too much. When you’re sober, seeing that can feel like defusing a mildly dangerous, unpredictable bomb that reminds you of yourself a long time ago.

  One night, Nick and I met up for a plate of nachos at the Irish Snug, a usually very low-key bar on Colfax. We grabbed two barstools and sat down, me scanning the bottles behind the bar and mentally checking off the taste of each one I’d drunk. I ordered a water.

  The guy sitting on my other side was just looking for a little conversation, but I was hoping he’d eventually stop talking to us and walk away.

  I’m too nice on the outside, sir, to tell you that I just came in here to get some food with my buddy and talk about life and catch up, and we actually don’t need you to lean into our conversation and my arm as you knock back your ninth beer or whatever it is.

  At first it was just annoying, but eventually I was starting to get mad enough that I was calculating which way to shove him so he wouldn’t land on a table full of people.

  And then, just like that, he said he had to go to the bathroom, and he shuffled off and didn’t come back.

  Take it easy, tough guy, I said to myself as Nick talked and I got back to listening.

  Every once in a while, I get this feeling that I’m missing out, and that it’s somehow unfair. I know it’s pathetic that after all these years I would feel cheated because I can’t drink. I know that billions of people don’t drink and they don’t care.

  But there’s everyone else. At five o’clock, they can take a load off and have a beer. Hell, maybe five. They can go ahead and pour a hot bath and a glass of cabernet, get a snifter of cognac with a cigar.

  It’s been a long day, they can say. Why not grab the sports section and an ice-cold one. Throw some steaks on the grill and toss back a couple while cooking dinner. Go to that place that always has the live music and get a gin and tonic with the good gin. Let’s toast life/love/women/our friendship/dead authors/the greatest living quarterback. It’s been a long week, right?

  Man, you know what’s been a long time? Since I relaxed like that. I don’t know how to explain to people that I get tired of walking this exact straight line and never deviating in the slightest.

  I realize that I could have been born with no legs or diagnosed with terminal cancer and that an addiction problem isn’t really too bad of a hand to be dealt in life. I remind myself of this when I get angry or feel sorry for myself.

  I still find myself out at two or three in the morning every once in a while. I see all the partiers as I drive my Subaru past the bars in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood on my way to the freeway, but I’m on the other side of my day—the end of their Saturday was the beginning of my Sunday. A big day in the mountains requires an extra-early start, and I sip coffee in my car as people mill around outside bars and stagger to or from parties.

  One of those 2 a.m. alarms for a 4:30 a.m. start was Quandary Peak near Breckenridge. I’d thought it was a great idea to climb up a snow couloir to fourteen thousand feet and then ski down. But it meant another bout of altitude sickness.

  I knew it was coming. I kicked my crampons into the steep snow, noticing the low hum of dull pain at the base of my skull. My ski boots were just barely small enough to squeeze into my crampons. Chris and Nick were behind, following in my footsteps, poking through the snow to the rocks underneath. The three of us slowly made our way up the north couloir, our skis A-framed on our backpacks and our ice axes in hand.

  Generally, when I was above twelve thousand feet, I was pretty miserable. It always started with a headache, and I knew I had just a few hours before I’d need to descend. The only thing that changed every time I went up high in the mountains was what else happened. Sometimes it became a full-blown migraine, with nausea plus lethargy, and I ended up walking with my mouth hanging open. Sometimes I had to make an emergency bathroom stop in a very uncomfortable place—a rock gully, as far as I could run from a campsite in the middle of the night and dig a hole, wherever.

  Chris and Nick were fine, as all my friends usually are. I don’t know what’s different about me, what makes me so susceptible to altitude sickness. Every time, I tried to remember what I’d done that morning and the day before, and swore to do something different the next time: Hydrate more the day before. Don’t drink a second cup of coffee the morning of the climb. Eat more. Drink more water. Maybe take a CamelBak so I could sip water all day instead of gulping it out of bottles whenever we stopped, which was apparently not often enough.

  Near the top of the couloir, I started to lose my appetite, despite having just climbed two thousand feet of snow. Chris took the lead as the snow started to disintegrate. The inch of quickly melting white on top of the talus made our ice axes useless. We popped out of the top of the couloir and looked west.

  “It’s still so far,” Nick said, sounding crestfallen, as Chris bolted off to the top.

/>   “Nah, it’s only a little bit more walking,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”

  I did not feel fine. I just wanted to get to the top so we could get down.

  “You know, I don’t even need to go to the summit,” Nick said. “I can just meet you guys on your way down.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You went through all that to almost go to the top?” It was only a few hundred feet of low-angle walking on a crust of snow.

  “Have you done this?” he said, now lying facedown with his cheek on the snow, arms at his sides, backpack and skis on top of him. “It feels so good.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “You can do it.” I trudged slowly in Chris’s footprints.

  Nick moved his arms to push himself up off the snow, and I knew he would follow me. Nick had survived exactly a decade of our friendship as of this month, and this is what it had gotten him, poor guy. “Let’s try rock climbing,” I’d say,” “Or mountain climbing. Or backcountry skiing.” And he would be game.

  The key difference was that I always wanted to summit, to reach the goal, no matter how meaningless it really was in the grand scheme of things. He couldn’t give a shit either way. I’d seen it many times, most notably on Devils Tower the previous summer. We’d run out of water and had a typical beginner epic on the Durrance Route. But he got to the summit of Devils Tower, I told myself. Maybe in some way, it was a good memory for him.

  I think he always came along because we were good friends with similar pain tolerances, and it seemed more interesting than sitting and talking at a café table in Denver all weekend.

  He typically forgot to bring a camera to every single beautiful place we ever went. “Where’s your camera?” I’d ask. “One of these days, I’m gonna make you a coffee-table book called Photos of Nick Bohnenkamp in Beautiful Places so you can fucking remember all these great trips we’ve been on.” And then I did, with forty-five dollars and eight hours of my time, for his thirtieth birthday.

  Chris was waiting at the summit when Nick and I slogged over the final bump. We took a quick self-portrait and started to descend. Chris clicked into his skis right on the summit and took off, and Nick and I walked a little ways down before putting ours on. It was tough to make turns in the late spring snow, pushing my ski edge hard into slush one moment, then punching through crust the next and bending my ski pole as I fell on it. My headache pounded even worse with the strain.

  At the base of the steep part of the east face, I skied out to the ridge to wait for Nick. I clicked out of my skis and sat down on a rock, waiting to vomit. No Nick on the slope, not even at the top. Where is he? I hoped he was okay. There was no way I was going to be able to climb up and find him.

  A couple, in shorts and jackets, hiked down the melted-out rock path on the far south edge of the east face, where the summer trail was. Finally, behind them, I saw Nick. He was walking, slowly, and carrying his skis over his shoulder. The couple hustled down the ridge, leaving Nick behind as he crept down. He had taught himself to snowboard during his first season as a ski bum/lift operator at Breckenridge six years before but hadn’t quite figured out skis. I was decent, maybe a little below average for Coloradoans, with just enough knowledge to survive easier backcountry ski terrain in variable conditions.

  I looked along the ridge below me. No one was coming up. I imagined Chris sitting on a rock in the sun down there, eating a sandwich and wondering about Nick and me. I closed my eyes, put my head in my hands, and pushed on my cheekbones, trying to relocate some of the pressure and mitigate my altitude sickness. I belched for the fiftieth time in the past three hours, wondering if I’d even be hungry for dinner when we got back.

  Altitude sickness was a nagging, recurring issue, a little reminder from the mountains saying, Hey, Iowa kid, you only think you’re a mountain climber. Maybe I had problems with my lungs because of all the cigarettes I’d smoked before I finally quit three and a half years earlier. Sometimes I felt like I should just find a new, lower-altitude hobby. But I wanted to be in those mountains so bad, bad enough to put up with altitude sickness a few times a year, I guess.

  The hiking couple reached my rock when Nick was still a tiny figure way up there on the ridge, working hard to not fall over in the wind, his skis becoming something of a sail. I said hello as they passed me. As soon as they were out of sight, I cleared out a hole in the talus behind the rock, pulled my pants down and relieved my altitude-induced digestion. If anyone else came up the trail and saw me, I was too sick to be embarrassed, or care.

  Ten minutes later, Nick walked up and announced that walking down the ridge with his skis was the single most terrifying thing he’d ever done. I figured in a couple of weeks it would seem less terrifying.

  Skiing a fourteen-thousand-foot peak was a funny thing, I guess, for a couple of guys who met waiting tables at an Applebee’s in Iowa. We weren’t necessarily good at it, but I was proud we actually survived all the things we’d done together.

  I went back to Quandary two and a half months later, this time with my mom. We had hatched a plan to get her up her first fourteener for her birthday. She was fit, I figured, and no matter how slowly we climbed up in the thin air, I knew she wouldn’t quit. We picked a Friday in September to try, and got a good weather forecast.

  It was dark outside the Safeway in Breckenridge at 6 a.m. as Mom and I walked around the aisles, looking at the potato chip bags swelled taut with the altitude.

  “You have to eat breakfast before we start hiking, Mom,” I had told her several times. “We’re going to burn through hundreds of calories in a couple hours, and you don’t want to run out of energy. I can bring you a fruit smoothie to drink in the car when I pick you up at 4 a.m., or whatever you want.”

  “I’m just not hungry right when I wake up,” she’d told me for the tenth time, and I finally gave up. Now, at Safeway, she poked around the donut case as I tried to look patient, but I worried that we wouldn’t be on the summit before noon and on our way down before the afternoon thunderstorms rolled in.

  “I think I’m going to buy one of those inflatable pumpkins for Mary,” she said. “Do you want one?” My niece, Chad and Meg’s first child, was well on her way to having fifty stuffed animals in her room. I had contributed to that. But an inflatable pumpkin? Whatever.

  “Nah, I’m good. Thanks, though,” I said.

  I’d tried to plan for everything on Quandary Peak, explain everything to my mom. It wasn’t a big deal for me, but for my mother it was, enough so for me to worry about it. And she was going to launch her summit bid on her first fourteener fueled by a nutritious breakfast of a single fucking donut.

  A mile into the hike, as the sun lit the upper part of the east face and we popped out of the forest, Mom slipped on a rock step, bashing her shin. “You okay, Mom?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said.

  When I looked closer, I saw dark blood running out of her skin right over the shinbone, a slowly growing drip. How does your worrying about your parents when they start to get older compare to how much they worried about you when you were a kid?

  I stopped and pulled out my first-aid kit, which consisted of a tube of Krazy Glue and two feet of duct tape in a small roll. We washed off her leg and wiped the blood off with a tissue from the pocket of her fleece jacket.

  “I always carry this, but I’ve never used it,” I said, holding up the Krazy Glue. “Is it safe?”

  “I think so,” she said. “I’m sure it’s similar to Dermabond or medical glue.”

  “I’m gonna let you do it, then,” I said, deferring to Mom’s medical degree and decades of experience as a nurse and nurse practitioner.

  After that, she charged up the trail just behind me, a little lady in white running shoes. I reminded her too often to drink water and eat, because we were at high altitude.

  We cranked out the three thousand feet of elevation gain, slowing a little bit near the top, and sat down on the summit in the sun to have a snack and stare at the repeating ridges
of high peaks to the east and west. I pulled out two cans of Starbucks Doubleshot and took a photo of us clinking the cans together, then asked another hiker to take a photo of Mom and me, on top of the biggest hill we’d ever climbed.

  When I arrived back at my parents’ house the next Christmas, Mom had both photos in a frame on the bookshelf.

  IDENTITY

  MY FRIEND MICK AND I had just jumped the safety railing at Point Imperial on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We were starting the approach to Mount Hayden, a three-hundred-foot spire popping up into the air above the deep pit of the most famous canyon in the world. Tourists who stand at Point Imperial with a telephoto lens can get a shot of climbers standing on Mount Hayden’s tabletop summit three-quarters of a mile away. That is, if they get lucky enough to see one of the fifty or so people who top out on it every year. Mick, twenty years my senior but tougher and fitter, had taken nine days off work from his tree service business to go on a desert road trip with me. Mick had climbed hundreds of trees to trim branches but hadn’t climbed much rock and wasn’t familiar with the systems for something like this. He was always up for an adventure, though. This was the one day on the trip I was nervous about.

  We had ten and a half hours of daylight to descend to the saddle between the North Rim and the base of Mount Hayden, then hike to the start of the route. We would tackle three hundred feet of roped climbing on questionable sandstone to the summit, complete three rappels down, and hike back up to Point Imperial.

  New Mexico locust trees, which sport sturdy thorns a half inch to an inch long down the length of every one of their branches, were packed into our route to the saddle as tight as the people in the first ten rows at a concert. There was no trail, so we aimed ourselves into what was little more than controlled falling down the steep slope of loose dirt, weaving between the trees all the way, wanting nothing more than to be able to grab a tree for support. The thorns didn’t care that we were trying to avoid them, jabbing through our leather work gloves and double-front Carhartt pants.