Learning to Fly

by Steph Davis

  As soon as I landed, I wanted nothing more than to get back in the air. Each flight was almost a cruel tease, as the altimeter read pull-time just as I was becoming most aware of the sensation of flight. As soon as the parachute opened and let me down from the sky, I had an almost addictive yearning to get back there as soon as I could. I jumped and packed and jumped and packed at a frantic rate. The next few days went by in a blur of flight and credit slips.

  Only three months ago I was learning how to do my first skydive. So much had happened in that time. All summer I’d lived only six hours away from Moab with just the single bag of clothes and climbing gear I’d thrown into my truck last June. But I felt strongly that it was time to stop being a runaway, time to think about real life. September was almost over. I knew the time was coming for me to go home. Then, quite suddenly, with no warning, it was my last day in Colorado.

  Fletch was starting to falter every time she climbed up the steep cabin walkway. She didn’t appear to be in pain, but her back legs consistently seemed strange, unstable. I knew acupuncture worked wonders on humans, and alternative medicine was rife in Boulder. Maybe it would fix Fletch right up, as good as ever. I’d never had acupuncture, but people swore by it. I was willing to try anything to make sure she was healthy and happy.

  I took Fletch to a homeopathic vet, and he put some tiny needles into her while she patiently lay still. I waited anxiously for his opinion of the problem. He diagnosed arthritis and prescribed Rimadyl, the same non-homeopathic anti-inflammatory that I’d started giving her last year when her front shoulder had caused her to limp after long days. That was not enough information to ease my worries or to make a game plan to fix her. Why would arthritis make her back legs unsteady? She didn’t limp, she wobbled. I was starting to think this was serious. We needed to go back home to our real vet, Dr. Sorensen, a kindly, practical doctor who treated horses and cows as often as cats and dogs. He would know what was wrong and what I should do. I felt a deep unease. I called Dr. Sorensen’s office as we left the acupuncturist and made an appointment for the next afternoon, in Moab. We were going home.

  That evening in the cabin, I packed my few possessions and sat quietly on the floor with a glass of red wine, stroking Fletcher’s head. I’d had no idea I would live here in Boulder for three months when I spontaneously showed up for my AFF course. I thought about the summer, all the things that had happened—free soloing the Diamond, learning to skydive, flying a wingsuit, learning to pack a base rig. In two weeks, I would be in Idaho at the Perrine Bridge with Jimmy and Marta, learning to base jump at one of their first-jump courses. I reflected on all of those amazing experiences with satisfaction and was excited to have more to look forward to.

  But I felt surprisingly melancholy about leaving. I had loved living in this little cabin in Eldorado Canyon, in never-never land. It was strange to think of all the unknown moments to come, stepping out onto a truly unfamiliar road again, just when things seemed on a good track. Unexpectedly, the thought of death crossed my mind as I rubbed the soft fur on Fletcher’s pointed ears, and I wondered how it would be if everything just stopped right now, at this moment of contentment and anticipation. Okay, maybe. It could be okay. Somehow the thought of death wasn’t a scary thought, as it had been in the past. It didn’t seem fraught with a painful fascination as it had been more recently. It just seemed natural, a part of life like anything else that would happen, as simple as getting hungry. I wondered where life was going to take me, what was going to happen next. Whether the road stretched out long or stopped at the next curve seemed equally possible, equally fine. The road would be the road no matter how I felt about it. I no longer felt held back from going down it by a fear that it would end or split.

  It was dark. My truck sat outside, packed and pointing forward. I was taking the purple ottoman and the white coffee cups. I lay in the loft, looking at the stars above me until I drifted off to sleep. The next morning, I stood in the doorway with my sleeping bag and Fletch’s bed and pillow in my arms, feeling a pang as I scanned the empty space. I’d been happy here. Things were so different now from how they’d been when I rolled into Colorado three months before, bereft and directionless. It was hard to leave my new life. But it was a new life, this life I’d found. I could go home, and things would still be different, better. I was different now.

  Driving away from Just Rite

  I helped Fletch up into the passenger seat and started the truck, looking back in the rearview mirror at the cabin and the small wooden sign with the crescent moon as we rolled forward down the steep dirt driveway. We crossed the bridge over the creek and drove away from Eldorado, the smooth iron slabs receding behind us, going west, to Utah.

  Chapter Nine

  Learning to Fall

  Marta instructing a base student at the Perrine Bridge, Twin Falls, Idaho

  The drive to Moab wasn’t long, about six hours with a couple of stops for gas. I passed the turnoff to Rifle just after the halfway mark, and then I was on the familiar stretch of I-70, less than three hours from home. I wondered how the grass was doing and if any houseplants had survived. It was possible; most of them were cacti I’d found in the desert and put into pots. A few months of neglect and dehydration probably did them good. In that time, I’d become thoroughly settled in Boulder, as though I could just live there forever. Home had been hazy, almost an idea or a memory. Now the entire summer began to lose solidity as the highway spooled behind me and the vision of home became more and more real.

  When I was twenty-eight, I had decided I needed a base. It was getting too hard to live out of a vehicle and a storage unit. Paying rent seemed like a waste; going into debt would be unthinkable, a chain around my neck. Though I longed for some security, I would not take it at the expense of my freedom. Living in my car and spending as little as possible had allowed me to save a small nest egg. So with major trepidation, I bought a run-down, 1968 doublewide in a quiet little neighborhood near the Moab town park, just off Main Street.

  The only thing I liked about it was the price, which allowed me to get a mostly solid roof over my head without being strapped to a mortgage. Everything else was depressing at best, from the sinking porches to the fake-wood-paneling interior and mismatched carpet remnants that covered the floor even in the kitchen and bathrooms. The yard consisted of brown grass, two trees, and a battered chain-link fence providing a waist-high separation from the other neglected yards on all three sides. I could wave at all the neighbors just a few feet away in their own yards. Always private about my living space, I was perfectly content in a truck or tent surrounded by miles of empty space, but I felt deeply uncomfortable living at such close quarters to other humans. After years of dirtbagging it in tents, snow caves, and portaledges, I also discovered that I couldn’t tolerate ugliness, dirtiness, or disrepair in my official living space. Something had to be done. A lot had to be done—there was no question of that. And the budget had been busted in acquiring the place, so it was all going to have to be done creatively.

  The carpet clearly had to go, and the walls and ceilings needed to be white. I started painting on the first morning. I refused to take any “before” photos because I didn’t want to waste a single second taking them when I could be using those seconds at the hardware store buying discounted paint or applying it to siding, walls, doors, cabinets, window casings, heat registers, and the insides of closets. Also, the before was so dismal and so overwhelming, I didn’t want to be reminded.

  Because of my overall lack of experience with living in a structure with solid walls, I had no idea at first how to fix things, or how a house or a garden actually functioned. The kitchen stove and the refrigerator were daunting machines, with pilots that needed to be lit and filters that had to be cleaned. For the first few years, my decision to move out of my truck into the cheapest possible fixer-upper structure was a nightmare of trial-by-error, shoestring-budget home repair. Between climbing trips, I was tearing out carpet and eternally painting, nervousl
y replacing light switches and electrical outlets, or digging holes and hauling flat rocks from the desert for flagstone paths. Over time, I learned how to lay tile, install sprinklers, sew Roman blinds, fix the roof, change light fixtures, and trim windows, because I had to.

  The doublewide transformed

  Gradually, and at some unnoticed moment, the place changed from a decrepit, depressing trailer to a beautiful, peaceful home with wood porches and fences, tiled floors and counters, and a climbing wall in the backyard surrounded by flagstone walkways, flower beds, cactus gardens, and shade trees. Six years later, my house was not just pleasant and comfortable to live in; it was completely without burden, since I had no debt and the taxes and the bills were nominal. It was also conveniently located a few blocks from downtown Moab, one hour from splitter sandstone cracks at Indian Creek, three hours from steep limestone cliffs at Rifle, and twelve hours from the huge granite walls of Yosemite Valley.

  That was important, because my husband was not only less enthusiastic about home improvement than I was but also less enraptured with Moab. He liked the desert, but for him the sun rose and set around the big walls of Yosemite Valley. Moab was a place to migrate to for the winter, when the snow was too deep and the rock was too wet in the valley. He wanted to be in Yosemite as much as possible—in an ideal world without snow, all the time. His departure to Yosemite took place as soon as possible after the winter, usually around April or March, while I stayed in Moab with Fletch through the blooming, mild days of May, trying to soak every delicious moment from the desert spring with its perfect climbing temperatures.

  Moab and Yosemite are perhaps two of the greatest climbing destinations in the world, yet they could hardly be more different. Moab is the land of the eccentric, a little outpost that grew out of a uranium boom in the 1950s to reach its current population of five thousand. Being somewhat in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by miles of desolate desert canyons and a few strings of mountains, Moab seems to have natural protection against the real world. Which, being surrounded by the rest of Utah, it doesn’t have that much exposure to anyway.

  In Moab you can do pretty much whatever you want, and as long as you’re not hurting anybody, no one’s going to bother you either. Jeepers and ATV folk trundle along trails next to mountain bikers and runners, dogs are free to be dogs, ranch families live beside hippie artists and river rafters, and everyone simply coexists. It seems normal enough, until you step into the outside world, with all its feuds and people outlawing one another from things. About the only thing you’ll never see in Moab is pretension.

  When I first rolled into town in 1995, I walked into a restaurant and got a waitressing job just like that, parked along the Colorado River at night, and camped for free. Before too long, I had roots in Moab. I had a library card, a bank account, and a storage unit just off Main Street where I could keep all my extra climbing and camping gear so it wasn’t all cluttered in my car, where I was sleeping. I worked my restaurant shifts and went climbing and running in the mornings. I met Fletcher, and she moved in too. My boyfriend/future husband popped in and out to work a few restaurant jobs here and there, but mostly to climb the perfectly parallel-sided cracks that slice up through sandstone walls everywhere you look. When he was around, we tended to live in his big, old Ford Econoline van since it was roomier.

  Like any climber who’s serious, I made pilgrimages to Yosemite Valley, home of giant granite walls and the legendary Camp 4, where all the climbers live together among tents and picnic tables between climbing adventures. All those tips I got, in crumpled $1 and $5 bills, added up to road trips, when I could spend weeks or months living the simple life of traveling, eating, sleeping, and climbing without running around a restaurant all night. But Yosemite never felt comfortable to me, no matter how much time I spent there. After a few weeks, being there became a big headache of lots of people, lots of cars, lots of regulations, and lots of rangers enforcing them. Simple things like filling a water jug or washing clothes somehow always turned into multihour projects, with drives around and around the one-way loop road that circled the Valley floor, seemingly designed to multiply the amount of emissions put into the air.

  All the standard outdoorsy stuff I did in Moab, like picnicking or walking with Fletch, was apparently borderline illegal in the Valley. Like all the other climbers, I developed a habit of skulking around a lot and turning my face to the side whenever I saw a ranger car creep by. It made me edgy, defensive, paranoid. It also made me resentful that I was slinking around like a criminal in America’s showpiece national park out of simple necessity. I considered myself a pretty upstanding member of society. I had a master’s degree, I waited tables and guided to support myself, I paid my taxes and health insurance and the park entrance fees, and I was a dedicated athlete. I was offended at being treated like a second-class citizen in Yosemite, but decades of tradition seemed to be ingrained in the culture of the place. Dodging rangers was as much a part of climbing in Yosemite as hanging out in El Cap meadow or lying on a portaledge two thousand feet up on El Cap. The park rangers seemed hardwired to harass climbers, much the way dogs are mindlessly compelled to chase squirrels. I guess they just couldn’t help themselves.

  The hard-core Yosemite climbers, my husband among them, didn’t seem to mind the oddly symbiotic relationship with the rangers, disdainfully referred to as “the tool” in climbing circles. The climbers complained but seemed oddly comfortable with hiding out and being covert all the time. Sometimes I got the impression they liked it, in some perverse way, as if they didn’t get enough adrenaline from scaling vertical granite walls every day. Certainly, it didn’t stop them from enjoying every last shred of the legendary climbing that Yosemite has to offer.

  Freeing the Salathe Wall, El Capitan, Yosemite Jimmy Chin

  I just wanted to be free, in every sense of the word—for me, that was the whole point of being a climber and disappearing into the itinerant lifestyle. I wanted to mind my own business and climb rocks. Eat some soup in the back of my truck at night with my dog and wake up when the sun rose again. Such is the addictive power of good rock on climbers that, even before my marriage, I always seemed to find myself driving to Yosemite yet again, at least once a year, climbing as much as I could before I needed to escape and drive away, as El Capitan, Half Dome, and the whole strange social scene faded into an alternate reality that was impossible to explain to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. But in the Valley I was always looking over my shoulder and subtly becoming a social deviant through the power of suggestion, and I didn’t even like being there after a while.

  So I always felt conflicted in the Valley. It was like a climber’s rock fantasy with big granite walls all over the place, full of amazing routes to climb of all difficulties and lengths, a place you could climb forever and never finish climbing everything. Yet the atmosphere had the bizarre feel of living in the wrong part of LA.

  And after getting married, in what was frankly a last-ditch effort to smooth the tempestuous relationship, I realized with dread that I would have to try to live in Yosemite, at least for part of the year. Because that was my husband’s dream, never mind my painstakingly fixed-up home in the climber’s paradise of Moab. So I needed to make it happen.

  I always lingered in Moab as long as I could, in the achingly perfect early-spring climbing weather. Climbing is a demanding obsession, and good climbing conditions can be unbelievably elusive. You can almost always go climbing, especially if you don’t mind being too hot or too cold or too wet. But if you want to climb at your limit, things start to get more particular. Spring and fall are the prime climbing time almost everywhere, when the air is crisp but not too cold, your hands don’t sweat on the rock, and your feet don’t swell up in your climbing shoes. Winter can be frigid in the Utah desert if clouds cover the sun, but spring is invariably perfect. Flowers bloom here and there among the cacti, and moisture holds the red sand firm underfoot.

  When I was a kid, being half-Greek and kind of a
bookworm, I read a lot of Greek myths. One story was about a young goddess named Persephone (pronounced like Stephanie). One day she was out picking some flowers with her friends when Hades, the god of the underworld, swooped up from hell and snatched her away. She was quite beautiful, being the goddess of fruitfulness or something like that, and Hades was carried away by lust and decided that was a good basis for marriage. Persephone apparently didn’t feel in a position to protest, and Hades carried her down to the underworld to be his bride.

  Meanwhile, her mother, Demeter, the goddess of the earth and growing things, fell into a depression, which caused barrenness and winter over the whole planet. This became enough of a problem that Zeus sent someone down to hell to fetch Persephone back so Demeter would cheer up, and people could have some crops again and stop freezing to death. Unfortunately, Persephone had eaten three pomegranate seeds during this time, which seems as if it must have been months. I guess she got really hungry.

  However, to eat anything in the underworld meant you were stuck. Zeus tried to find some loophole and finally decided that Persephone could return to earth (so Demeter would snap out of it, and there would be some crops again), but she would need to return to her husband down in the underworld for three months of each year. Which explains how we got winter, because Demeter perpetually falls into a funk every time Persephone goes back to hell to see her husband. Who knows what Persephone does down there the whole time. Maybe climbs big walls.