I didn’t cry at Grandma’s funeral, or at the cemetery.
I drove back to Colorado a few days after the funeral. Chris came to visit, and we drove to Estes Park. In five days, we climbed three multipitch routes at Lumpy Ridge and the north ridge of the Spearhead, high up in Glacier Gorge. But I never once felt right, not even at the start.
Heading up what I thought was the third pitch of Pear Buttress on our first day, I struggled to get my fingers into a tiny crack, desperately placing a cam around a corner and hoping it would hold, then falling, not at all surprised when it blew out. I was off route, off balance, climbing like shit, and scared more than ever of dying in the mountains.
Ten minutes after we finished the descent of the Spearhead, scrambling down the loose west face, a boulder ripped free. It sounded like a freight train as it tumbled, maybe where Chris and I had just been.
Two days later, we climbed Nun Buttress, the most perfect twin hand cracks I’d ever led, and I moved confidently, without quite feeling comfortable. At the top, we walked cross-country on the top of Deer Mountain, the early evening sun washing through the pine trees. I told Chris that maybe I don’t like climbing so much for the climbing, but for that calm you feel when the dangerous part is over.
A month later, halfway around the world, in Switzerland, I stood on the bench out the back door of the Sasc Furä hut, looking up at the stars, after coming downstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. Above me, even without my contact lenses, I knew what the black spot in the sky blocking the stars was: the immense north ridge of the Piz Badile.
We had given up on climbing it in the morning—the upper half of the three-thousand-foot route had iced up, and no one had summited in weeks. The trip had been kind of a flop. It was the rainiest summer the country had seen in fifty years, maybe even seventy. In four days, I’d managed only a day and a half of not-classic climbing, getting hardly any usable photos for my magazine assignment. But I wasn’t ready to write off the trip entirely. Even though I had flown thousands of miles and might never return here, I had never gotten shut down in my entire climbing career. I figured I was due. And it was a hell of a place just to see.
I pulled up the hood on my jacket and put my hands in my pockets and thought, I bet my dad would think this was pretty fucking wild. Rock climbing in Switzerland. Listening to bus-size swaths of rock rumble and rip off the sides of ten-thousand-foot peaks in the night, standing down here at this little hut with a fence of granite and glaciers separating me from Italy on the other side. And it could have never happened. I’d been this close, really, to a way different life.
I’ve written letters to my parents in some incredible places, thinking about them as I watch the sun set on the Dolomites or listen to water drip off raft oars on the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or sit on top of a thousand-foot granite dome near the US-Mexico border, staring off into the desert as I pull in rope and have a few quiet moments before my climbing partner arrives.
The letters exist only in my head for a few seconds, and then they flit away as I come back to whatever I’m doing. But they’re always the same, always something like this:
Sorry about the times when you felt worried, humiliated, disappointed, and sad about me, when I was getting arrested and crashing cars and intent on wrecking my life. Sorry you had to drop me off at jail and wonder if the whole town knew about me hitting rock bottom, and the group therapy nights, and the times when I let you down, and the other times when I made you worry if I was safe or even alive.
If I had told you back then what would be on the other side of all that terrible stuff—the things I’m grateful to do now, that I can’t believe happen sometimes, that I snap photos of so I won’t forget them—I don’t know if any of us would have believed it.
I never send the letters, or even write them down; I just send postcards, and articles that my mom and dad read in magazines or on the internet. I call home every Sunday, and hope they know I’m happy.
Privately, I think about change, and how it’s the hardest thing—the story we’ve been telling ourselves might not exactly be true. We lose a job, or get a life-changing diagnosis from a doctor, or someone comes home one day and tells us they don’t love us anymore. We have to pick ourselves up off the floor and try to wrap our head around how to go on with life.
Plenty of recovering addicts who have stayed sober long enough will tell you, “If I hadn’t quit, I’d be dead or in jail.” The thing I realize, though, the longer and longer I stay sober, is that the bigger injustice would not be a life cut short, or a life inside a prison. It would be living the sadly ordinary life of a career alcoholic, sitting on a barstool and telling the same stories to the same half-friends for years and years, spending all that money on just enough drinks to get into a cozy haze every night.
Now, instead, most days, especially when I’m in the mountains, I feel good—not like something’s missing.
If I hadn’t quit drinking, yeah, maybe I’d be dead or in jail. But probably I’d just be missing out on an extraordinary life. And that would be a tragedy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, thanks to my parents, Joe and Kathy, who didn’t deserve the bullshit. They deserved a story with a happy ending. I hope this is it.
Thanks to Nick Bohnenkamp and Jayson Sime, my two closest friends, who have been there since the partying started, stayed through the hard times afterward, have never said no to a big day in the mountains, and have never been too busy to help move a couch into a new apartment.
Thanks to Hilary Oliver, who has edited everything I’ve written since we met, is my favorite adventure partner, and doesn’t mind talking with me about big ideas in the grocery store instead of shopping efficiently and effectively.
Thanks to Fitz and Becca Cahall for always believing in my voice and believing in most of my story ideas, and for publishing the first version of this one, The Dirtbag Diaries podcast episode “Sixty Meters to Anywhere,” in 2009.
Thanks to John Fayhee, who published the first story I ever wrote that ever mattered to me, “Alcoholism and Other Mountains I’ve Climbed,” in the Mountain Gazette in 2006.
Thanks to my brother, Chad, for knowing I needed a climbing rope when I didn’t know it.
Thanks to Judy Blunt, who was the first person to encourage me to write about the things that became the early beginnings of this book—jail and substance-abuse treatment—and workshop them in her creative nonfiction class at the University of Montana.
Thanks to Emily White, Kate Rogers, Laura Shauger, and everyone at Mountaineers Books who made this story come to life, as well as Kiele Raymond, who pushed me to write more after I thought the initial story was done.
Thanks to Lee Smith for teaching me to place trad gear and opening the door to so many long days in the mountains. Thanks to Chris El-Deiry, Jack Sasser, Alan Stoughton, Teresa Bruffey, Brian Williams, and Tom Riley, who shared a rope with me during some of the most memorable moments of my climbing life. Thanks to Dustin Ewald for being the first person to convince me I might actually like climbing, and for taking the time to teach me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRENDAN LEONARD is the creator of Semi-Rad.com and a former contributing editor to Climbing magazine. His writing has appeared in Alpinist, Outside, Backpacker, Adventure Journal, National Geographic Adventure, and many other publications. He has cowritten and coproduced films that have won awards at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival and the 5Point Film Festival. He lives in Denver.
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