Sixty Meters to Anywhere

by Brendan Leonard

  Well, at least this trip to Lee’s “secret crag” ought to get him to stop bugging me about it, I thought. It was scary to climb, and insecure. The rock was good, but it was missing cracks to place protective gear. Still, Lee was right—the whole place was practically untouched by climbers. It was exciting to climb a legitimate two-hundred-foot route that was an open canvas. Wherever I said the route goes, it goes. And right now, I hoped it would go up this seam.

  I smeared my shoes across the granite and plugged a cam in halfway, wondering if it would even hold me if I fell. Fifty feet of climbing later, I worked my way onto a ledge, and the angle of the rock backed off. It was the end of the route. My new route. My first-ever “first ascent.”

  It was exactly what I needed, Meridian Hill, climbing untouched granite in the sunshine, even if it was on one-star routes that no one would ever repeat. It was the last day of September, and work had been insanity. I hadn’t been sleeping well at night, sometimes waking up to respond to an email or make myself a to-do list.

  That morning when I’d met Lee to drive to the crag, I had forgotten my belt and my socks. As I plugged in gear to build an anchor so Lee could climb up to me now, I checked the shoelace running through my belt loops to make sure it was still tied.

  A slight breeze blew on my face, and sitting on a ledge of granite that has likely never seen a human foot or hand, I leaned back and watched a golden eagle hang in a thermal, just sitting in the air, wings out. I rested my helmet against the rock and took in rope as Lee started to climb up, one hundred feet below, out of view under the bulge of the rock beneath me.

  The words “This is what I do” rolled into my head as I watched the bird.

  I climb. That’s what I do.

  I work at a nonprofit, and I’m a writer and a brother and an uncle and a son. But this is what I love, what inspires me. I am relaxed for the first time in weeks because I am out here on this ledge, finding a line up a granite wall and following my instincts.

  I am a climber, finally identified by something I do instead of something I don’t do.

  FOREVER

  I WATCHED GRANDMA PICK AT THE Maid-Rite sandwich from the shop down the street. She was only interested in the chocolate milk shake. I’d flown from Denver to Des Moines and rented a car on the spur of the moment. I felt like I had to do something, even if I just sat in the room and talked to her.

  A few days before, my mom had told me over the phone that Grandma was in the hospital, again, with an infection. She’d gotten a fever while staying with Mom and Dad. She was confused and had lots of swelling.

  “Mom, do you think I should come?” I’d asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she’d said. “It’s probably expensive, and you’re busy.”

  “I’ll get a flight for Tuesday,” I’d said.

  I had left my nonprofit job and had slowly collected enough freelance writing gigs that I could write full-time. I’d finally gotten bylines in a few national magazines, including Climbing, where I was now a contributing editor. In a month, I was flying to Norway with Forest, a photographer, and my old climbing buddy Chris, to explore a little-known granite climbing area.

  The freedom of self-employment meant I could work from anywhere, and I’d been living out of my van for almost two years, traveling, climbing, exploring, and writing stories and a blog from coffee shops and public libraries. I loved the idea of being a vagabond writer, even if it was frustratingly inconvenient at times. The freedom of making my own schedule meant I could go anywhere whenever I wanted—including a spur-of-the-moment trip home to visit my grandmother in the hospital.

  Every time Grandma got sick, Mom ran herself ragged going back and forth across the elevated walkway from the medical clinic where she worked to Grandma’s hospital room. She checked on her in the morning, then at noon during the lunch break she never took anyway, then after she left the office, late every day.

  This time, my uncle Dan drove an hour from Perry, where he ran a dental practice, to check in. We caught up while he joked with Grandma.

  “Mom, we’re so optimistic we’re gonna buy you some green bananas,” he said, and we laughed.

  I sat with Grandma for three days, arriving in the morning, leaving in the afternoon when she took a nap, and coming back again around dinner to stay in the room with Mom until Grandma went to sleep for the night. Mom wanted me to try to talk Grandma into moving into an assisted living home. Grandma was forgetting things, leaving food in the oven for hours. A handyman had come to fix her clothes dryer and found the vent clogged with feet of packed lint.

  I was supposed to help convince her that it was okay to leave her house. On paper it was the best solution: close to Mom and Dad, easy for her other kids in Iowa, and close to an airport so my aunts living in Florida, Ohio, and Oregon could visit. Things would be taken care of for her.

  I tried, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  “Brendan,” she said, “can you imagine me living in a tiny little apartment, giving up my house? I don’t want to go somewhere I don’t know anyone.”

  I couldn’t imagine it. The house was all she had left of her independence, and her sense of identity.

  Every time I walked out of the automatic hospital doors, I sat in my little red rental car and let tears stream down my face. My brother couldn’t get time off work to get here on such short notice, but if he were here, he would not be out here crying like a fucking baby. I was supposed to be planning a climbing trip in Norway in four weeks, figuring out how we’d come back with a story for the magazine—not losing my shit twice a day in the parking lot of a hospital in Iowa. It was easier when I kept my distance, just stayed in Denver and got updates from my mom. It hurt less.

  We went up and down the hospital hallways, following doctor’s orders, Grandma pushing a walker and taking five-inch steps forward while I rolled the IV bag next to her. We probably covered eighty feet in ten minutes, and she apologized over and over again for being so slow.

  “Grandma, I’m not in a hurry,” I told her. “I don’t have anywhere else to be.”

  “I bet you can walk anywhere you want.”

  “Yeah, Grandma,” I said. “I guess I can.”

  I thought about all the places I had walked, like the top of the Grand Teton and the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I don’t know why she had to say something like that shuffling along in a hospital gown. I don’t know why it made me so sad.

  Three days later, I loaded Grandma into my rental car and drove her to Mom and Dad’s. I took a photo of us in the car, both of us giving the camera a thumbs-up, and texted it to all her kids.

  A few weeks later, I flew to Norway and climbed enormous slabs of granite, a swath of gray rock two and a half miles long and twenty-five hundred feet high, tucked away in a dead-end valley inhabited by ten people. I battled up the hardest finger crack of my life, and on Forest’s birthday, we climbed a five-thousand-foot 5.4 to the top of a peak, and we slept on our ropes, piled on the rocks at the summit, and watched the sun set over the fjords as it dipped below the horizon for only four hours.

  As I was flying across the ocean from Bergen to Denver, Mom and her six brothers and sisters were moving Grandma and a small selection of things that reminded her of home into Glenwood Place, a big white vinyl-sided building full of sweet little old ladies and men at the southwest edge of Marshalltown. That was the beginning of the end for the woman all of us drew strength from.

  Two days after Christmas that year, we went to Climb Iowa for the day—Mom, Chad, Meg, and Mary, my then-six-year-old niece. It was becoming a Christmas tradition, climbing for a couple of hours until we were tired, then driving to the Drake Diner in Des Moines to eat ice cream. Some days Mary liked to climb a lot, and some days she liked it when I picked her up by her harness’s belay loop and swung her around with one hand. I wondered how many more years I’d be strong enough to do it.

  Mom tied in at the base of a 5.7 route, saying she felt a little queasy, but she’d try the route anyway.
She climbed to the top, and I lowered her. But at the bottom, she vomited, catching most of it in her hand. I hurriedly untied her so she could run to the women’s restroom. I found some paper towels and blotted up the small mess at the base of the climbing wall.

  Five minutes later, she came back over, saying she felt better, and maybe it was just something she ate. She climbed a couple more routes and managed to down an ice-cream sundae at the diner.

  As we drove back to Marshalltown, and I went with her to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription for Grandma, and Mom started shivering.

  “You don’t look so good, Mom,” I said. “Why don’t I drop you off at home so you can rest, and I’ll go check on Grandma at her apartment and drop off the medicine?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, but I insisted she go home. I won, maybe for the first time in my life.

  I texted Chad from the driveway: Make sure Mom goes to bed.

  She didn’t go to bed, instead sitting on the couch next to the Christmas tree with a blanket over her head, feeling like hell but not wanting to miss out on a minute of time with her grandkids—Mary and her little brother, Max.

  I drove Mom’s car to Grandma’s tiny apartment and found her sitting on the couch, confused, with a 103.5 temperature. I hit the button for the attendant to help me out and texted Mom, 103.5. She flew into action, off the couch next to the Christmas tree and down the street to Grandma’s, pushing her own fever somewhere else for a few hours in an effort to rescue her own mother.

  We began the slow epic of moving an eighty-six-year-old woman across icy sidewalks, into the car, and to the emergency room—me, Mom, and the attendant trying to gently get her to the passenger seat as she tried to get her feet to work, her brain cooking with fever.

  “Just shuffle your right foot six inches, Grandma,” I said. “Six inches. Okay, how about three?” In five minutes, we moved three feet.

  At the ER entrance, we couldn’t get her out of the car. “Grandma, grab my hands,” I said, “I’ll just pull you into the wheelchair.” I pulled gently, and she didn’t move. I felt like I was going to pull her arms off.

  “Okay, Grandma,” I said, “put your arms around my neck, and I’ll give you a big bear hug.”

  I pulled, and she said, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

  Mom ran inside the door and grabbed two paramedics, who lifted Grandma out in about thirty seconds, and we wheeled her inside, out of the icy night air.

  Nobody in the emergency room was happy: the couple with the screaming kid, the other people waiting in the chairs for news about their loved one. You sit in the waiting room, just wanting everything to be better for the person you brought there, so you can all get back to normal life where all your loved ones are healthy.

  I wheeled Grandma down the hall to room 11. Mom and I sat next to each other in two chairs next to the wall as nurses popped a blood pressure cuff on Grandma and plugged her into an IV. Mom mass-texted six brothers and sisters in four states.

  I sat there and thought, This Christmas is sad.

  “Why don’t you call Dad and have him come pick you up,” Mom said, looking up from her phone.

  “Bullshit, Mom,” I said. “You’re the sick one. You need to go home.”

  “When I’m eighty-six, you can come sit by my hospital bed. I get this one.”

  I gave up, sent Dad a text message, and stepped outside the sliding doors to wait in the parking lot. I leaned up against the brick wall next to the ER entrance in the dark, wiping tears away with the sleeve of my puffy jacket.

  In my van a couple of days later, with Grandma stable in the hospital and Mom feeling a little better, I asked Mom, “Do you think your brothers and sisters know how hard this is?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “On Christmas they say things like ‘We had a relaxing day’—and I think, ‘I want to have a relaxing day. I worked all day!’”

  “Mom, I think you’re like me. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a relaxing day in your life.”

  “No, you’re like me,” she said, emphatically. “I’m the mother.”

  We both laughed. I gently pressed the brake pedal so we wouldn’t slide on the ice at a four-way stop. She pointed out a tree with multicolored big-bulb holiday lights, the only thing decorated in someone’s spacious front yard at that intersection.

  “I like that tree,” she said. It was at the left turn to Mom and Dad’s house. She’d made that left turn hundreds of times that year, driving home from Grandma’s little apartment. Everybody else in the family, including me, got to drop in whenever our schedules allowed. But not Mom. She called every morning, at lunch, then left work late and stopped by to see Grandma every day. She drove past that tree with the big bulbs on it, got home at eight thirty, and went to bed about a half hour later every night.

  In June I went back for a week, as the whole family did every year. Chad and Meg drove the kids over from Wisconsin, and I drove the twelve hours from Denver. Mom and Dad took the week off work, and we hung out in the humidity and went swimming and goofed around, and Max, age four, and now-seven-year-old Mary called my mom and dad Grandma Kathy and Papa Joe, and called me Uncle Brendan.

  At the end of the week, Chad and Meg and the kids drove back to Wisconsin, and I flew to a friend’s wedding in the shadow of Mount Rainier. The next time I went back, my aunt Nora had arrived from Florida to hang out with Grandma, cleaning her apartment and sleeping on the couch five feet away from her bed. I hung around Mom and Dad’s for a couple of days, trying to ignore the itch to get back to Denver and get back to work.

  I had a ton of work to do before I was supposed to meet Chris for a climbing trip in the Wind River Range in Wyoming, a trip I had felt increasingly hesitant about but couldn’t figure out why. It would be an eight-hour drive to get there and an eight-hour drive to get back. I kept flipping through the Wind River guidebook and not finding the right combination of easy alpine climbs in an area that wasn’t in the Cirque of the Towers, which would be crowded with other climbers.

  On Monday evening, from the parking lot in front of Grandma’s apartment, I called Chris, asking how he would feel about maybe doing something a little less committing. Maybe five days in Rocky Mountain National Park? It was close to Denver, so a little easier on me. I knew he loved the park. He said yes, and I felt a little relieved. I hung up and joined Mom and Aunt Nora for a walk with Grandma.

  We rolled her around the man-made pond down the hill from her place. The park was one of those manicured bits of nature built into an expanding town, a few feet of hedgerow separating it from the cornfield behind, a busy street a hundred yards away across the water. The sun had dropped, sparing us the early June Iowa humidity—what Grandma always described as “muggy.” I walked slowly behind the wheelchair, pushing her over a bridge that crossed the pond’s outflow.

  “Look at the birds,” she said. They were the same ones we’d seen on our first lap, but she’d forgotten. She was a little confused, maybe already a little hypoxic. She didn’t eat dinner that night and declined a cookie for perhaps the first time in seven decades.

  The next morning, Mom knocked on my bedroom door, opening it a crack. “Grandma was unresponsive this morning when Nora tried to wake her up,” she said. “I’m going to the ICU now.”

  I threw on some clothes, ate a rushed breakfast, and jumped in my van.

  Grandma lay in bed, eyes closed and hooked to beeping machines, an oxygen mask strapped to her face as she tried to expel the carbon dioxide stuck in her lungs. A doctor talked to Mom and Aunt Nora, both nurses, and explained things in medical language they understood. There was a chance she would wake up and improve. Uncle Dan arrived, then Uncle Steve, my mom’s tall brothers, two of my earliest heroes as a kid. Mom and Nora and I left to get some lunch.

  Grandma battled all afternoon, waking up twice, opening her eyes and trying to form some words under the oxygen mask. Aunt Nora held her hand, wiped away Grandma’s tears, and told her, “It’s okay, Mom. We’re al
l here.”

  I had told Mom the day before that I didn’t think Grandma was having that much fun anymore, my way of saying maybe she’s ready. But nobody was ready, including Grandma. The tears that came out of her eyes in those moments she woke up to see everyone around her still haunt me.

  Her breathing became more erratic. I knew it couldn’t go on long. I held her hand for the last half hour of her life, watching her heart rate drop on the monitor next to the bed—105, 92, 71, 52, 27, 0—tears rolling down my cheeks. The alarm on the breathing machine went off, going for seconds, then what felt like minutes. I wished someone would come in and shut it off, but after a few seconds, I just reached up and did it myself.

  I let go of Grandma’s hand and walked out of the hospital to call Chad. My voice cracked into the phone. “I think it was time. Grandma wasn’t having fun. It was good she had all of us around her.”

  “Okay. Thanks for calling,” he said. “How’s Mom doing?” He sounded rock-solid. “We’ll see you soon.” His messy little brother hung up and melted down one more time in the hospital parking lot.

  I got in my van and drove north out of town, looking for some Iowa gravel roads to make me feel better, like I used to do when I was sixteen. I turned down the first one on the right and watched the sun roll toward the horizon in my rearview mirror. I knew so many things I hadn’t known when I was a teenager driving on these roads, and they did the exact same thing for me that they did back then: nothing, besides give me a place to go when I didn’t want to go home.

  There would be no more chances to ask Grandma about my grandfather, the Irish guy with the quirky sense of humor and the nebulous but often confirmed problem with alcohol.

  Still, I didn’t regret never asking Grandma about what was wrong with him, to verify the label I shared with him: alcoholic. I had been sober for a dozen years, and I had long ago rejected the idea that I could blame my mistakes on my family tree.