by Richard Schuler
When I quit smoking I needed something to do with my hands, so I bought an iPhone. That’s how I started checking my Facebook status and email every half hour. I used to gauge my stress level by the number of cigs consumed in a day. They were my friends, each and every one of them. That’s right, I burned my friends. No wonder they left me. Now, I check in with my real friends, or at least their internet avatars. At 10:43 p.m. on a weekday night I lit up my Gmail account and found a message from Rayce, the leader of my mountain climbing team: The Climbers Against Humanity. Rayce offered a chance to climb a peak in central Washington called The Tooth, to the first person who responded. He said it was a four pitch, trad climb, with a scramble-y approach, a bit of moderately steep snow, followed by some spicy rappels. It was a 5.4 to 5.6 climb with lots of exposure on a 400 foot block. In other words, it was well beyond my ability. Still, what an honor it was to even be considered. I imagined myself on the summit; the sun shining down on my strong, capable face. If I didn’t take the slot someone else would. Seconds were ticking. My heart raced a bit when I pressed the send button on the email. I’d said yes.
When I quit smoking I needed something to do with my hands, so I bought an iPhone. That’s how I started checking my Facebook status and email every half hour. I used to gauge my stress level by the number of cigs consumed in a day. They were my friends, each and every one of them. That’s right, I burned my friends. No wonder they left me. Now, I check in with my real friends, or at least their internet avatars. At 10:43 p.m. on a weekday night I lit up my Gmail account and found a message from Rayce, the leader of my mountain climbing team: The Climbers Against Humanity. Rayce offered a chance to climb a peak in central Washington called The Tooth, to the first person who responded. He said it was a four pitch, trad climb, with a scramble-y approach, a bit of moderately steep snow, followed by some spicy rappels. It was a 5.4 to 5.6 climb with lots of exposure on a 400 foot block. In other words, it was well beyond my ability. Still, what an honor it was to even be considered. I imagined myself on the summit; the sun shining down on my strong, capable face. If I didn’t take the slot someone else would. Seconds were ticking. My heart raced a bit when I pressed the send button on the email. I’d said yes.
The purpose of this essay is for me
to introduce to what I call the mountain
climber’s conundrum, and how I solved it. At some point in their climbing
career, every mountain climber will ask themselves the following question: why
in God’s name am I doing this? Or perhaps the atheist version: what in the
world made me think this was a good idea? Yet another version is the simple
mantra: get me out of here. Now. In
my case, the mountain climber’s conundrum is particularly challenging for two
reasons. The first is that I am afraid of heights. I became acutely aware of
this condition at the Shrine Circus of 1974. My family and I went to Busch
Stadium in Saint Louis, and it all started well enough. Proud parents and children
passed the ticket takers. The smell of popcorn and cotton candy perfumed the
air. My mother guided us up a ramp that led to the loge seating. Only a few
vertical bars separated us from the street, which got further away with every
step. I made it to the top with only a sick feeling in my stomach, but when we
ascended another ramp my heart started shaking in my chest. She pulled me by
the hand. Up and up we went. When at last we made it to the staircase on the
inner circle of the stadium, I looked up and thought, “There is no way in hell,
lady. I’m not going up that thing.” But I did go up. The higher we went, the
closer to the stairs I got. When we reached the top, I was literally crawling
on my hands and knees, grasping at each seat I passed.
When we finally got seated, I noticed men selling toys and
souvenirs in the aisle. There must have been pendants, stuffed animals, hats
and noise makers. I can’t remember any of it, because to me it was all hideous
crap. The only thing of merit was a sword. Evidently, I begged effectively
because I got it. The blade was a curved scimitar and the hilt had ruby on each
side. When I held the thing in my tiny hands, I felt that life was a good thing
because I’d arrived in a place where adults give swords to children. I have no
memory of clowns, trapeze artists or animals, because when I pulled the blade
from the scabbard, the whole world went black. I was intoxicated, like a teenager
with a bottle of pure grain alcohol. How we got home, I have no idea. The next
memory is that of my father holding the sword in our living room, breaking the
blade over his knee, and shoving it in the trash. My heart died like broken kingdom.
The sword was a fake, a toy made of plastic. Whatever it was, it was gone and I
loved it.
The next day, and each day until my
mother took the trash out, I went to the closet where we kept our can and
visited my broken sword. The smell of sour milk, coffee grounds and cigarette
butts insulted me. What a loss. I didn’t
deserve this. My bottom lip began to stick out. This illustrates the second
reason why the mountain climber’s conundrum is so challenging for me. Even
though I’m an adult now, and I know how to hide it, the voice of a petulant
child survives inside me. If Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves were written for me, they would all be named: Sulky,
Crabby, Peevish, Sullen, Moody, Huffy, Snappish and Touchy. But when I packed
my bag and left for the Tooth, I didn’t hear a petulant voice, or any voice save
that of confidence. When I put my foot on the trail I felt strong. It took
hours to get to the upper cirque snowfield, but when we did I was ready for it.
Strapping the crampons to my boots made me feel super-human. My helmet and the
ice axe looked like Bronze Age weapons, like something from a Wagner opera, and
the landscape was indeed an epic stage. Dark, Douglass firs pointed skyward, to
jagged stone giants. Each one showed its middle finger to the six climbers
posing for a picture in the snow. The pinnacle of The Tooth was somewhere
behind all those fingers, patiently waiting, but I couldn’t see it. Up we went,
over a sun cupped snowfield with red algae stains, and when we reached the edge,
we found a big, scary moat. It was so large, the space between rock and snow
could’ve sheltered a troop of refugees from a Burning Man festival, but it was
empty. I released sigh when we slid down the other side and put a foot on
Pineapple Pass. In no way did Pineapple Pass resemble a fruit from Hawaii. It
was just a notch in a rock wall, across which lay a slide to certain death, but
also a narrow path leading to pinnacle of The Tooth. Rayce called for a lunch
break, so I opened my Empire Strikes Back
lunch box and had a sandwich.
No seriously, I had an Empire Strikes Back lunch box. You can
call Rayce and ask him. It gives me feeling of levity in an austere place such
as a mountain range, and I like the picture of Luke, and Darth Vader flashing
light sabers. It was a movie, and in a movie the hero knows the battle is worth
fighting. Real life isn’t like that. In the world you and I share, there are
just ordinary people who don’t always know what to do. After I closed the lunch
box and pulled on my climbing harness, we moved as a team through Pineapple
Pass to the pinnacle itself. It was at this point that I realized what a
terrible mistake I’d made.
The Tooth was huge. One has to climb
about 400 feet to reach the top, but this is only half the problem. It sits on
top of a base that rises thousands of feet above the valley below, so the eyes
tell the mind to panic, a task easily done. Of the three rope teams, Rayce and
I went first. My bottom lip started to protrude. I pulled it in, but I knew
there was no way I could go through with the climb. What a loss. I didn’t deserve this. Rayce gave me a walkie-talkie
and a cleaning tool. He calmly tied off on the rope and went up the wall,
plugging in various anchors as he went. For those of you who don’t climb, an
anchor is a do-dad which holds a climbing rope to a rock face. The proper
placement of these anchors is what the climber’s life literally depends
on. My job was to follow behind him and
remove the anchors as I climbed. The yellow rope trailed behind him like a
spider’s thread. For the first fifty feet it looked like some pretty tough
going. Then he climbed over a precipice and was gone. In the absence of a
visible reality, the human mind will create an imagined one, and that reality
is usually the very worst kind. Where the rope went I knew that I too must go,
wherever it led. Seven sulky, crabby, peevish, sullen, moody, huffy, snappish
and touchy voices told me I could never do it. One voice came through the
walkie-talkie, it was Rayce. “The belay is on. Hit it,” he said. To whom should
I listen? Was the battle really worth fighting? At what point does discretion
become the better part of valor? Even if I got to the top, was it worth the
fear it would cost? I didn’t know. For some reason I put my hand on the rock
and pulled.
My internal dialogue went something
like this: Other people do things like
this, but not me. I look like someone in a granola bar commercial and I am
clearly not that person. My place is on a bar stool between Charles Bukowski
and Dracula. My hobby should be dancing tango with beautiful women in stunning
outfits, but instead, my whole body smells like a student’s armpit, and this
helmet makes me look like an unemployed miner. For a hundred feet I thought
this, until I found Rayce at the first belay station, smiling. My hands were
shaking when I handed him the rock anchors. Then the process started again. He
climbed up and disappeared. I looked down and saw a scene from a Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon, the one
where the Wile E. Coyote drops off a cliff and he falls so far that when he
finally hits, it only makes a tiny ‘piff’ noise and puff of dust. The ledge I stood on wasn’t big enough for two
large pizzas and an overweight tabby, but it was soon joined by three other
people, who obviously had no problem boogieing up the cliff I just panicked on.
When Rayce radioed that the belay was on, I was strangely ready to go higher.
There is a condition known as high
altitude flatulence. When the southern end of me started complaining, I decided
to let the northern end join voices. With each report I said, “Yeah. Uh-huh.”
*@#%! “Tell me about it.” @#%! “Oh, I
know.” This is how I went up the mountain, grunting, sweating, poozing and
kvetching, but I did make it to the top. There was Racye, shoes off, eating a
bag of niblinz. He was the Frodo Baggins to my Samwise Gamgee, the Don Quixote
to my Sancho Panza, and he said, “Welcome to the top.” I’ve often thought that
a mountain range looks very much like the sea when you view it from the highest
peak; all the ridges blend into one another, but these were not stone waves I
was looking at. This was a concerto, a great staccato upheaval. In such a
landscape only fantastic things took place. There were mastodons and Valkyries
out there somewhere, I was sure of it. I sat next to Rayce and took off my own
shoes. “Frickin’ perfect day,” he said. Climbers call days like the one we were
sitting in a ‘blue bird day’ because the sky is so blue. “It’s a good day to be
alive,” he said.
“It’s a good day to die,” I said.
His expression asked for an
explanation, and so I told him about a Lakota woman I once met at a pow-wow who
said the same thing. She explained that to Native Americans, a person wants to
leave this world when they are at the absolute top of their form. They want to
enter the next world when they have achieved their best in this world. To grab
ahold of fear, pure unadulterated fear, when it feels like warm granite, and
listen to the voices of doubt as you climb it to the top is only half the
battle. When one can hear the voices of fear and doubt, which only say, “You
can’t” and not respond with a defensive “Yes, I can,” but instead with the
simple words I’m sorry- I’m sorry you’re hurting, that is a good
day to die. This is how I solved the mountain climber’s conundrum for that
particular mountain on that particular day. Why did I climb it? To pull the
broken sword from the trash and carry it home. It was a good day to die.
