(HBIBs).
I realized, after The Doctor debacle, that ever since The Great Unpleasantness I’d been dating out of fear. Out of a natural desire to love and be loved, yes, but so compulsively! Each guy would soothe that fear for a nanosecond, but when it would end, the fear and loneliness were worse than before.
So I’ve decided to just live with loneliness for a while. If I can live with it, I will be less afraid of it, and if I’m less afraid, I can make better decisions about my love life. (Or so I think in my more lucid moments. In my less lucid moments, I crank all the saddest country songs I know and soak the carpet with my tears.)
This dating-free period hasn’t made for the best blogging, but it has helped to clear my head. And I’ve started to wonder if perhaps it isn’t time to retire Breakup Babe. Because if I ever want to find a man who can commit for more than a week, maybe I need to stop looking for material, if you know what I mean.
It’s just a nascent thought, so don’t fret quite yet! It will take some time for me to send Breakup Babe to the great beyond, given that she (and you) saved my life this last year, and grew my confidence as a writer, and gave me the book idea that will rocket me to best-sellerdom (or at least the remainder table).
Meanwhile, all this plotting might be moot, because in three days I will be climbing a big-a*s mountain called Rainier. I might not make it down alive (and yes, GalPal #3, the red couch will be yours). If we do not meet again, please know that I
you all.
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A minute after I’d finished this entry, GalPal #2 walked into Victrola and sat down across from me. Her year-old daughter, Celia, was asleep in a sling. “They’re going to love it!” she said, putting my manuscript down on the table. “I was reading it at work today; I couldn’t stop! The third chapter is great. I have only a few comments.” She had thoroughly read my chapters and critiqued them, as had my sister and my writing teacher, Byron, whom I’d hired as a private coach to help me get these chapters ready for Myra.
I’d learned from hard experience that it was important to get feedback early on in a project. Back when I’d tried to write Temporary Insanity, I’d slaved away for a year and a half without showing it to anyone. When I finally did, the negative comments I got destroyed all my forward momentum. Breakup Babe the book, on the other hand, had been born in a community of people. So I wasn’t nearly as scared to let people critique it. Plus, I knew it was good. Or at least better than anything I’d written before. In his final comments on my third chapter, Byron had written:
You’re a very talented writer and this is great stuff; it needs to be published, and not just on a blog!
“So,” said GalPal #2, after getting her coffee, “if they like it, what does that mean? Will you get a big advance?” She leaned on her elbows on the table and looked at me, childlike in her anticipation and excitement. Her yoga-sculpted shoulder muscles peeked out from under a short-sleeved blouse that she’d borrowed from me a month ago and refused to give back.
“Oh, I doubt it,” I said. I thought, a bit sadly, how GalPal #2 would always have that blouse to remember me by should I disappear forever into a crevasse the next weekend. Celia, of course, would not remember me at all despite the good times we’d had together in her short life.
“But you would get an advance, right?” GalPal #2 seemed more than unusually pumped up, despite the decaf soy latte she was drinking.
“I think so.”
The truth was that even if my wildest dreams came true and Myra’s boss bought the book and gave me an advance, I would still (1) have to get a job and (2) spend at least another year writing the book.
At the thought of getting another job, I felt a stab of dejection. I was still traumatized by getting fired from Empire. Though I’d been sending out the requisite three resumes a week so the state wouldn’t cut off my unemployment money, I really had no idea what kind of job I would get next.
“What’s wrong?” said GalPal #2, who saw my expression change.
“I don’t know…,” I said. “I guess I just don’t know what I’m going to do for a living. I’m obviously not fit to hold down a job.”
“Oh, come on!” GalPal #2 rolled her eyes. Out of all my friends, GalPal #2 was the least likely to let me indulge in self-pity.
I sighed heavily. Suddenly I felt transported back to age twenty-two, when I’d just graduated from college, when it seemed so unfair that all I wanted to do in life was be an artiste, but I would instead have to work for a living.
“I thought you actually missed working,” she said. “Missed the structure and stuff?”
“I do, sort of. I just can’t go back to a job like that; it was so boring.” I glanced over at the cute barista. Wondered if he liked his job or was just doing it until he got his big break as an actor or a writer or something. He was as cute as ever, but in my current dating hiatus, I could actually look at him without getting all nervous or excited or desperate to talk to him. It was so very Zen of me.
“So don’t! This is your chance to do something else! Like teaching writing to kids. Isn’t that something you want to do? Or being a full-time freelance writer.
“Hey, look at that painting,” said GalPal #2, her attention span now stretched to the limit. She pointed to a piece from Victrola’s most current art display. It was cartoonlike, depicting a bright blue whale joyously jumping out of a vivid green ocean. An orange sun smiled down on the whale. “Wouldn’t that look good in Celia’s room?”
“Yeah,” I said, gazing at the picture, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was too busy telling myself what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t go back to Empire, even as a contractor. I couldn’t teach writing to kids—not enough money. I couldn’t be a full-time freelancer—too hard. So what was I supposed to do with myself now?
Funny how such all-consuming worries could disappear when one misstep meant falling to your death and bringing four other people with you.
All my earthly concerns were now forgotten. The void spread out below me as I walked farther onto the ledge. Don’t look down. I tried to dig my ice ax in as I walked, to secure myself in case I fell, but the ice ax barely penetrated the surface of the hard snow. So much for that plan.
“Rachel!”
God, what did he want?! “You’re walking too fast and creating slack in the rope. Come on, now!” The harsh tone in Noah’s voice stung me, even as I teetered thousands of feet above the ground. But he was right. In my terror, I’d been walking faster than him, and now the length of rope between us lay on the ground, limp and coiled in the middle. If I were to fall, the chances that he could arrest my fall were drastically decreased if the rope had slack in it. “You need to stop for a second so I can tighten up the rope. Then I want you to slow down!”
Are you fucking kidding! I wanted to say. I’m not going to stop! But I did. As if watching a movie, I saw myself—clad in black fleece pants, a black polypropylene top, a white climbing helmet and giant bug-eyed glacier glasses—pause on this sunny ledge straddling the abyss.
Then something strange happened. My mind became crystal clear.
This—right here—represented my ultimate fear, the thing I’d had nightmares about, the reason I’d never climbed Mount Rainier before.
But I stopped thinking about that.
The whole team would self-arrest with their ice axes if I fell. Still, it wouldn’t do much good on this section. Gravity would take over. We’d all go down.
But I stopped thinking about that, too.
There were times in life when it was good to think about the big picture. This was not one of them.
So I stopped thinking. Except about what I was going to do next. Which for the moment was stand here until Noah told me to start moving again. Standing was easy enough, right? I’d been doing it since age one.
“All right!” said Noah. “Let’s go!”
I took a step forward. That wasn’t too hard. I took another. Walking was another skill I’d acquired
a long time ago. Around me, the Emmons Glacier gleamed in the sun. Distant crevasses glowed blue. But I didn’t notice any of that right now. I was focused only on the next step. And the next.
Then, almost as soon as it had started, it was over.
“Good job, Rachel,” said Noah, under his breath, but now he was moving forward as the teammate behind me stepped onto the ledge.
“Thank you!!” I wanted to say. I resisted the urge to fling myself at him and say “I survived, I survived!” Most accidents happen on the way down, I reminded myself sternly. One of my fellow climbers could go plunging off that ledge. Or we could get caught in an avalanche on the way down. Or—I found my mind racing ahead again—I could fall and slip on the rocky Disappointment Cleaver, where there was no snow to self-arrest in. I couldn’t stop paying attention yet.
So I didn’t. Instead I followed behind Noah, trying to focus only on the next step.
An hour and a half later, we made it down Disappointment Cleaver and descended the lower part of the Ingraham Glacier.
We’d last been here at three this morning, which now seemed like a lifetime ago. I’d been too terrified then to appreciate the immense sky, the multitude of stars, the ghostly grandeur of the mountain. I could barely even enjoy the sight of the northern lights that Noah had pointed out to us, flashing white like a lighthouse beacon.
Now tears came to my eyes as the panorama of the Ingraham flats unfolded. The hardest part of the climb was over. I’d done it!
A celebratory mood overtook the group as we sat down for our last rest stop. People were laughing and chatting in a way they hadn’t been before. At the previous stops, everyone had been too busy stuffing food into their mouths, catching their breath, and worrying about the next part of the climb.
I sat down next to Noah. Now that I suspected I would survive, I felt self-conscious about how I looked. I wished to God I could take my helmet and my glacier glasses off. I remembered my gym-fueled fantasy, suddenly, about going to my book launch party in New York City with my hot mountaineering guide boyfriend by my side.
God.
I quickly opened the top of my pack and dug around for snacks. At least the sunglasses hid my embarrassed expression.
“So, Rachel,” said Noah. “What’s next?”
“Hmm?” I said, my mouth full of half-frozen Oreo crumbs.
“Well,” he said, turning to me, and I could see the summit of Rainier reflected in his glasses, “you said you’d been wanting to climb Rainier for years. So I’m just wondering what your next big challenge is.”
I paused. Debating. Should I tell him?
“I’m—um—writing a book.” I prayed he wouldn’t ask me what it was about.
“Oh, really? What’s it about?”
Right then.
“It’s about…” Blogging? Dating? All the lame men I’ve dated in the last year? Heartbreak? Writing? Giant cocks? “It’s a memoir,” I said, “about how grief can inspire us to do things we thought we could never do.” Not bad for the spur of the moment. I mentally patted myself on the back.
“Huh,” he said, smiling. “Will the Rainier climb be in your book?” He had a beautiful smile. His teeth were almost as white as the glacier.
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about that.” I smiled back. I hoped I didn’t have Oreo crumbs stuck in my teeth.
“Cool. Well, if it is, you have to tell me when it comes out. I’d like an autographed copy.”
The night before, Noah had ambled over and sat down next to me while I was eating dinner. Or trying to eat, anyway. Nerves had taken away my appetite. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. We’d have to get in bed by 6 P.M. and be up again by midnight to start the climb.
But his relaxed manner immediately had a soothing effect on me. As soon as he plopped himself down next to me, he said, “So did your friend recover okay from that trip? He seemed pretty stressed out.” Noah stretched out his long legs and leaned back on his elbows on the ground—the complete opposite of someone who was stressed out.
I, of course, had recognized Noah instantly when he’d been introduced to me two days before. A few weeks ago, I’d been surfing the Web, compulsively looking up horrible accidents on Mount Rainier, and had stumbled across his picture. No wonder he’d looked so familiar when Jake and I had run into him on the trail! About a year and a half ago, he’d been involved in a high-profile rescue on Rainier in which he’d single-handedly rescued four climbers who’d fallen into a crevasse on a winter climb.
When I ran across this article, a memory suddenly came back to me. I recalled watching him on the news while sitting on the couch next to Loser, thinking longingly about how handsome and windblown he looked as the news crews interrogated him about the accident. He was rugged and independent in a way that Loser would never be. Loser refused to put his Kenneth Cole–clad feet anywhere near a crevasse. No wonder we had always fought so much about outdoor activities.
When I found the article online and put the pieces together, I’d been thrilled and slightly embarrassed to realize I’d been “rescued” from Tiger Mountain by a quasi-celebrity mountain climber. (I toyed with the idea of e-mailing the article to Jake, then thought better of it.) I wondered, briefly, if he would be my guide for the upcoming trip, then dismissed that idea. Northwest Mountaineering was a huge guide service and that would be far too much of a coincidence.
So imagine my surprise when, voilà, who should be introduced to me as my head guide but Noah, aka Mr. Self-Sufficiency. He didn’t recognize me right away when we met, but he did say, “You look really familiar. Have we met before?”
Mortification took over and I almost didn’t tell him who I was. But in the end I did and he laughed out loud. “Oh, that’s right!” he said. “How could I forget? My daring Tiger Mountain rescue.” Had I been a blusher, I would have been beet red, but his tone was warm and I didn’t feel as if I were being mocked—not too much, anyway. “I’ll have to keep a close eye on you,” he’d said, then winked at me.
We hadn’t talked about it again until the next night at base camp, when he sat down next to me and asked about whether Jake had “recovered” from the trip.
“Well, I’m not sure,” I said. “We had a bit of a falling out after that and I haven’t talked to him in a while.” Might as well make sure Noah knew we weren’t a couple. In the distance, Mount Saint Helens blew the faintest bit of steam.
“Oh, that’s too bad.”
“Not really,” I said. He laughed a little, drawing squiggly lines in the dirt with a stick. It reminded me of the many hours my sister and I had passed on family backpacking trips doing the exact same thing.
“It was good thing you showed up,” I said. “If you hadn’t, we’d still be there!”
“Yeah, I’ve heard there are whole hordes of lost Seattleites dwelling under rocks and in caves in the Tiger Mountain vicinity.” Then we both laughed. He seemed so much friendlier now than he had that day; friendlier, too, than he had been on the five-hour slog up to base camp, or all through today’s climb.
Now as I looked at that heart-stopping grin again, I knew not to take it personally that Noah had transformed himself into a drill sergeant during the climb. That was his professional persona. I liked this flirty, friendly one better.
“Of course you can have an autographed copy,” I said. “As long as you get me down off this thing alive.”
“It’s a deal.”
I looked away from Noah and back at the equally stunning scenery. Nearby, Little Tahoma, Washington’s third-highest peak, shimmered like a mirage. Next to me was a beautiful man, all around me were mountains, and I’d just climbed the biggest one of them all. I couldn’t remember feeling this happy in a long time.
Then a pang of sadness penetrated my euphoria. I wished I could tell my dad about this. He would have been so proud of me! Better yet, I wished he were here. But, I reminded myself, as I drank the dregs of my Cytomax, he was always with me when I was in the mountains. It was his legacy to me. He h
ad taught me to love the mountains. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t even be here.
I plucked another piece of Oreo from my bag. I wished I could stay in this spot forever, this place of empowerment, with the hardest part just behind me and the triumph still to savor, with a hot guy by my side, who had not yet revealed any of the unsuitable qualities he undoubtedly possessed (i.e., commitmentphobia, alcoholism, inability to hold down a job. Oops, wait, that was me!).
I knew, when I went back down, that there would be more struggle. That my book might or might not sell. I knew that even if it did, I would struggle with the writing of it, and that I would fight with loneliness and boredom, just as I always had. I knew that I might fall in love soon, that I might not, that I would probably get my heart broken again. That I would have to find a job, and the process would make me feel like a worthless speck of dirt.
But, I thought, casting a sideways glance at Noah, who was now devouring a chicken thigh, happiness would come again. I was finally learning that it was not something that you could hold on to, but that it always came back sooner or later—sometimes for a short stay, sometimes for a longer stay.
I’d counted on Loser to bring me happiness, and he had—for a while. Then he made me very unhappy for a while, and now I was happy again.
A light wind blew across the glacier. By now we weren’t putting on the heavy parkas when we took a break. Most people just wore a single layer. We were baking in the bright sun, even brighter because it was reflecting off the snow. It was strange to imagine this place in bad weather, when the wind came howling through and a whiteout turned everything into a featureless mass of gray. The bad weather would come, though, that was certain. Then, after that, the sun would return.
“Everyone ready to head out?” said Noah. “It should be a quick trip back to base camp. We’ll spend about an hour there packing up our stuff, then we’ll take off.”
No one, of course, wanted to head down. But there were books to write, jobs to find, friends to celebrate with. We put our heavy packs back on and headed down the mountain.
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