A History of Scars

by Laura Lee

  3 ALUMINUM’S EROSIONS

  After a recent climbing trip to Jackson Falls, in rural Illinois, I sorted through old gear in my apartment. I wanted to collect bail biners—the carabiners that allow a lead climber to bail off a pitch before reaching the route’s anchors, without forfeiting more expensive gear.

  As a teenager foraying into lead climbing for the first time, I blundered and made mistakes. As an adult, I’d accumulated wisdom and experience. It felt, in a tiny way, part of the great equilibrium of the universe.

  But life is never that linear. A climb that straightforward would be uninteresting—a climb’s unexpected detours and features are what make it worthwhile.

  After years in an MFA creative writing program, climbing only sporadically and experiencing a number of personal setbacks, I’d lost my confidence and my ability. I hadn’t led outside in nearly nine months. I didn’t have a guidebook to the area, and so I eyeballed a route that looked like a warm-up from the ground, but climbed several grades harder than expected in the air. I like strenuous, upper-body-intensive routes—this one required precise oppositional body positioning, balanced on the downslopes of bulges, reaching for damp holds I couldn’t find. It required, more importantly, mental strength, of which I had no reserve.

  My girlfriend tried the climb, made it a clip higher than I did, and then I took another turn before deciding I didn’t have the nerves to take multiple falls while working out the moves—and so I lowered off a biner I’d retrieved years ago from glowing white, pocketed limestone in Wild Iris, Wyoming.

  I remembered the man who’d left it behind. I was leading seventy-five feet of endurance, power, and flow, a classic for the area. A few body lengths below me he worked the neighboring route. His wife belayed him, as their child played nearby. We had chatted before we began. Twenty- to thirty-mile winds buffeted us, but that only added to the convivial spirit of the day. Their child spoke in a mixture of Spanish and English, tiny plastic toys spread in the dirt around her, and so we mimicked that. “Un pájaro,” my ex-girlfriend said playfully, after finding a bird that had disappeared from sight, tucked away in a naturally formed nook.

  His fingers were bleeding onto the sharp pocketed holds—later I could see the stains from above, had heard his commentary as he pulled regardless. Because his route was less trafficked, rock crumbled and rained near his wife and child. Neither wore helmets, and so he did the smart thing and bailed.

  On my way down I reached over and snatched the biner. Usually bail biners are a shiny prize you spot from the ground and collect on your way up, or something you stumble across. This was the only one I’d cleaned on the way down from a route, rather than picking up more “legitimately.” Usually they’re impossible to return to the original owner. I would’ve handed it back, but the threesome had already retreated to whichever campsite they’d staked for themselves, blending into the landscape around us, filled with blooming purple wild irises. They’d said their goodbyes before disappearing around the corner.

  Instead I strung this otherwise unremarkable biner—unpolished silver in color, D in shape—alongside others I’d picked up in different geographies, in Oregon or California, Wyoming or Thailand, each with its own backstory.

  On that day in Jackson Falls I didn’t regret quitting—I knew the climb would be waiting for another day, when I understood the area’s style better, after I’d warmed up. I did regret losing this particular biner. I struggle to part ways with old gear. A brand-new one would’ve been generic, unbranded. This I associated with good memories. Memory is funny that way—it imprints itself on whatever’s at hand, whatever’s convenient.

  * * *

  In sorting old gear, I came across my old set of quickdraws—two carabiners connected by a dogbone, or stitch-reinforced nylon sling. I’d used this set for nearly a decade before retiring them. Nylon degrades from UV exposure and abrasion. Metal itself wears thin. First the coating wears down, the purple varnish or orange paint, and the gloss of aluminum shines through. Then the aluminum itself erodes. I understand the aging process, but this wear on metal is what amazes me the most. It’s not insignificant.

  Friction from rubbing against climbing rope does its work, and grit and grime help the process along. On my most worn draws I can see a thick groove on the bottom carabiner’s elbow, developed because this is the snug spot that cradles the rope. I can rest my finger in the concavity formed.

  Notching my finger there feels a testament to something—to what, I’m not sure. To the passage of time, I suppose. To the repeated exertion that’s left its tangible mark on the sturdiness of metal.

  When these concavities get deep enough, sharp enough, they can slice through rope, in an alarmingly clean fashion. Rope is strong in terms of weight-bearing load, but it isn’t resistant to knife-like edges. Despite that, these grooves amaze me more than they disturb.

  I tend to be safety conscious. I follow manufacturer recommendations even if gear is visibly fine. I played around with an old dogbone that I’d never used, one that looked new, and the rubber meant to anchor a bottom biner in place snapped and fell off in my hand. A good reminder that age and deterioration aren’t always visible, that gear needs to be abandoned periodically, preferably before it’s too late.

  Fifteen years have passed since I first started climbing. I can track so much of time passing through the rock, even if the chronology is blurred. The timeline is peppered with the sorts of traumatic events that have kept me running away, for most of my life, until another pops up, and then I swerve in another direction.

  It’s peppered, too, with a flood of happy images. This has something to do with why I can’t part with old gear. Climbing has been a lifeline, tethering me to this earth. It’s been my way of retreating from failures and events beyond my control, to lick my wounds. Of testing what a romantic relationship is made of. It’s inflicted pain, bruises, injuries, loss, and it’s also healed. It has been the only activity the intensity of which matches the intensity of fear I’ve experienced elsewhere. The difference with climbing is the intensity of joy it also contains.

  These other images have recurred at different points in my life. It was really over a decade ago that I struggled with what felt like PTSD: persistent flashbacks of moments in which I was helpless, nightmares that haunted. But I grew up with my parents’ distrust of doctors, suffered the consequences of doctors failing to diagnose my mother with early-onset Alzheimer’s for over a decade. I grew up with their distrust of institutions, of systems, of neighbors, of “Americans,” of people, frankly.

  Rather than seeking help, my climbing obsession began—its timing a happy coincidence. I put minimal effort into my schoolwork, spent all my energy instead reveling in the intense body-feel of climbing, the physical act of problem solving, the challenge.

  Climbing has been the constant. It’s where I can occupy the best parts of myself, and battle with my worst. There are injuries, there are years I barely climb at all. But whenever I return, I feel free again, temporarily free from burdens. I can battle and fail, and if I walk away safe, laughing with my climbing partner, then it’s been a good day.

  I didn’t seek help until my thirties, didn’t receive a PTSD diagnosis until after I’d suffered a breakdown. The terms, the labels, the diagnosis helped me understand what was happening to me. But climbing is what has given me space to be. Climbing is my own.

  * * *

  Gearheads talk about how the new coatings or the new carabiners themselves aren’t built as they used to be—of how the carabiners wear down more easily than in the glory days of yore. I don’t know if that’s true—although I’ve had some biners inexplicably wear themselves down much faster, right from the get-go. It’s comforting, though, to think that things used to be different, before.

  I read recently about how we experience time differently as we age—how we compress experience, so that decades pass in a blur, where once a year was an eternity. The same happens with climbing—there’s a time when every le
ad fall means something, every improvement, every new texture and angle of rock, and then there’s a time when it all blends together, becomes as normal a part of life as routine coffee is in the morning, or the act of reading the paper.

  I read, too, about how trauma exists outside of linear time, outside of language, and this, too, feels true. Over the years I’ve read findings from psychology, from neuroscience, from writers and artists, always following this same repetitive path, in hopes of finding a way to construct meaning for myself out of a life that hasn’t made much narrative sense. The biggest relief I find now is reinforcement that when fracturing occurs, there is no continuity. We just make it up to comfort ourselves.

  * * *

  If you’re a certain kind of person, you can feel others’ pain exquisitely, and your own, but you lack the ability to vocalize it. You find other ways of expressing it.

  “Can she talk?” a private music teacher my mother had hired asked, on our first meeting. I was, from a young age, wordless. The pain I’d frequently felt was that of observation—of witnessing others’ traumas, suffering from their bad behaviors, and of feeling powerless to do anything about it. I didn’t just feel that way—I was powerless. I was young.

  To speak requires trust—that someone will listen. It was easier, then and now, to be silent instead. To be a jock. The one who lifted weights until it hurt to move, while men nearby stared, who ran until I landed in a walking boot.

  Even now that I can speak, silenced by each new inexplicable event, there’s so little meaning there. Each trauma suffered has pushed me back into that silence. They’ve felt endless, relentless. The cumulative weight has, at times, felt too much. It has broken me—physically, emotionally.

  * * *

  Climbing can be hard to explain to the uninitiated, hard to visualize: the ways in which rock is bolted every few body lengths with metal hangers, into which a leader clips the top biner of a quickdraw, into the bottom biner of which the leader clips the rope that is their functional lifeline. Below stands the belayer, or the climbing partner who feeds out rope through a belay device, watches for potential hazards, catches falls, and eventually lowers the leader back down to the ground. Of course there are variations: traditional, multi-pitch, aid climbing, bouldering. This is only the language of sport climbing.

  More than the mechanics, though, it’s the psychology of climbing that’s always fascinated me. The ways in which how someone climbs reveals much of their character, and the ways in which it reveals our more primal instincts relating to fear, trust, risk, and consequence.

  “What do you think we all have in common?” a fellow climber asked me once, someone I met camping, after she eyed the canned corn I was dumping into my pasta and offered to share some item she had, in exchange for some yellow kernels.

  I spent the next afternoon climbing with her and her husband. They, like me, were living on the road, sleeping in the back of a minivan, climbing full-time. They, unlike me, were deeply religious, had the innocent glow of a young couple in love. I envied the support they had in each other, that they thrived jointly off of this dirtbag lifestyle. “Why do you think we do it?”

  I didn’t answer her then, as was my wont—to stay invisible through silence, even though that silence only meant that people would project what they wanted on me. I couldn’t say with certainty—but my gut instinct was that every serious climber I’d met was acting out something that was beyond words, grappling with past traumas or demons. Or perhaps they were just built for a different time, when adrenaline and physicality mattered in a way that contemporary society doesn’t reward.

  This seems a question many of us grapple with, though. Why we’re different in this particular way, in this particular obsession. Another old climbing partner, a strong one, told me, “I wish I didn’t have to climb. I don’t like getting dirty. But I have to do it.”

  What compels us to continue in an activity that involves endless amounts of failure, not an insignificant amount of pain, and scrapes and scars and injuries and all the rest? I know only that it makes me feel more present, more alive. And yes, happy, in a way that feels earned.

  Just as traumas don’t make for polite dinner conversation, they don’t fit neatly into stories or narratives. But we have to escape somewhere, to grapple with them. For me nature was the answer. Had been since I was a kid. I grew up having seen my father’s faith in nature as a restorative. I spent little time with him in general, but those times involved camping near some national park, hiking some mountain.

  As a dirtbagger I marveled at the amount of wasted potential there was, in my fellow dirtbaggers and myself. Strong dirtbaggers are problem solvers primarily, with a high threshold for pain and discomfort. I’ve often marveled at how that energy might be channeled if redirected, even as so many of us want nothing more, perhaps, than to be left alone.

  Rather than process or cope, you can fill your head, instead, with all the minutiae that living a dirtbag lifestyle on the road entails. Where meals, rest stops, bathrooms need to be preplanned or figured out on the fly. Where training can be scaffolded. Where what might be junk mail in another setting becomes instead fire starter, or something else equally useful. Where dives can be discovered, adventures had. Where one can disappear from real-world troubles in favor of being off the map, in favor of the next pitch of rock. The meaning lies in what the pursuer can excavate, in self-discovery, in friendship, in healing. It’s not just the climbing that matters, obviously. It’s everything else.

  * * *

  I remember talking with someone once long ago, someone famous in climbing circles for the pizza shop he owns, which serves as a basecamp of sorts for that region’s crags. Like the dirtbaggers I remember from over a decade ago, the shop seems to have had an evolution of its own, seems to have matured to a different state of being. The shop’s façade and clientele has changed greatly over time, as its popularity has exploded in lockstep with climbing’s popularity, but its soul seems aged rather than altered.

  I remember him telling me, about the seemingly driftless dirtbaggers that lived, for $3 a night, in the campground he’d established behind his shop, “They come back in a year, and they’re scientists, engineers, back in school.”

  He knew his shop functioned as a rest and recuperation spot for certain lost souls. He knew I was one of those lost souls. He knew the dirtbag lifestyle is, for most of us, temporary. That some needed reprieve, as we ran away or figured out our next steps.

  He gave me a fat white winter radish to eat once, as he commented on the spicy mustard greens I’d gotten on discount. Not being from the South, I hadn’t known how aptly mustard greens were named. It was one of those small acts of kindness, of humanity, that made a difference.

  * * *

  There’ve been very few times when I’ve been numb to the fear of taking a lead fall. I remember sitting next to my oldest sister as red doxorubicin dripped into her blown-out veins. To fight the cold of the drugs, she draped over her the soft furry white blanket I’d gotten her, and on the tiny screen of her chair of that fancy Manhattan chemo ward, we watched the Williams sisters play at the U.S. Open. I remember going to the climbing gym during those months and feeling absolutely nothing as I took big lead falls. Climbing felt unimportant, irrelevant.

  Then there’ve been times, too, when I’ve been numb to everything else, and the fear rush of a scary climb has let me feel joy and pain and emotion again, rather than dislocating from myself. When I sort through climbing-related images, they don’t all make sense. So many injuries. So many sends (or successfully completed climbs, sans falls). They flood back with no sort of logic or chronology about them. The act of climbing mirrors trauma. The intensity matches the images I sought to flee.

  * * *

  Here in the Midwest I first objected to, and then resigned myself to, all the labels by which we’re meant to identify. These labels have, in Trump’s America, become part of the national conversation. I could say I’m bisexual, queer, Korean-Amer
ican, a person of color, fill in the blank with the terms of our time. Terms which I use now only because they’re a way in which I can be understood, because they’re true, and for the sake of others’ comfort.

  But none of those labels get to the heart of me. I can love a man, woman, nonbinary person, white person, brown person, black person, Asian person, American, not-American, whatever. Doesn’t matter. But I’ve never had a serious relationship with a non-climber. It’s too essential a part of me.

  There is no single narrative, for anyone or anything. The only narrative through lines I’ve been able to find in my work, and in my life, have been climbing and those I’ve loved, because everything else seems fragmented, distorted. Trauma does that—renders life meaningless, unwhole.

  Trauma memoirs thrive on the acting out. I re-enacted my trauma mostly through choosing a sport intense enough to mirror the past. Climbing grapples with life and death honestly, at least. Visibly. Climbing is what I chose.

  * * *

  As a writer I see trauma can’t be captured in isolation—it can be measured only in images, quantified only in its aftereffects. When you’ve grown up with a mother who has suffered from nearly every symptom of each of the seven stages of Alzheimer’s while remaining undiagnosed, who was often delusional throughout your upbringing, it’s hard to know what reality should look like. When you’ve suffered the abuses of family, it’s hard to know what decency and kindness are. When you are this silent, you become a mirror to others, partners and strangers alike.

  There isn’t a clear “before” and “after”—there’s an “again” and “again” and “again,” only each time different, new. It exhausts slowly, a war of attrition. It was long-lasting, started young, and it eroded my sense of self. It’s not easily understandable, because the images don’t come as clearly.