I eventually completed the route from the standard "Birth Canal" start as well as the "Dean variation". 80 feet of dead horizontal roof, pumped in the inconspicuous muscles of my shins. Lap one hand over the other, one foot over the other. Cultivate a rhythmic breathing. Feet start to feel like hooves. Fists become stubs. I forget there are fingers attached.
Making sense of climbing is like making sense of the stars by drawing lines between them. Constellations are stories, fictional, arbitrary. Only there because we looked for them. Climbing is similar. By noticing the texture and quality of compaction, climbers follow discontinuity. Fractures, edges, subtle undulations on an otherwise smooth surface. Enticed to draw lines between them. Form a path of imperfections.
"Daddy?" My daughter playing in the cave in the dust looks up at me. Her dirty face. Not a bath in several days. The desert upended her world and the comforts she knew but she seems unaffected. Sometimes I feel like the modern iteration of a Puritan cult leader exiling my family from unorthodoxy. From a runaway world. The idea frightens me.
"Busy."
I pause, alternately dangle arms toward the ground, catch breath. Watch the veins swell with blood. Breathe deeply through my nose and mouth. Desert mouth.
The hush outside under a white blazing sun. Her voice a striking antonym. Breeze seems to whisper through me without engagement. Caught up in this challenge. Fixed to the rock.
"Um. Daddy?"
Wrapped in my down cocoon, expose my mouth to the dark. “An earthquake?”
“Yeah.”
“Hear that slide?”
“Yeah.”
“Should we get out of the tent?”
Ice crashing above us in the dark.
Fourteen days ago I saw my little girls. I saw Marni. Kissed them. Held them.
She was three years old. But I watched her mature in the weeks before I left. Watched her heart turn from me. Protect herself from an unsettled father.
In the dark inside my bag I lay with memories too singular speak. Seeing my daughter. I would hold her. Convince her of my affection. Be her daddy.
Thoughts that burn. Splice a new reel of thought. Something inert. Waiting in a storm lasting thirteen days. A stale, caustic span. In the morning I promise to work out. Promise not to let all the bacon and pancakes I eat every morning make me fat. The morning reveals thick frost lining the inner wall of the tent. Worm out of my bag. Flakes of ice fall into my hair and drip down my neck and I think of that little girl so many miles away as I stumble out of the tent.
The story I am writing breaks apart under her regard. Ideas carefully fostered into an image no longer worth the effort. I am living a fiction if I believe my absence is harmless.
It occurs to me that stories keep us from breaking. Prose like threads of dyneema connecting our existence to something more permanent. Metaphysical giving context to physical. Because fiction is reality that I am too fragile to accept, disguised for my comfort.
Gives new meaning to #livingthedream. But reality is persistent.
What happens if you wake up to the costs of dreaming?
Repeated hacking with my dull picks. The upper ice field of Mt Huntington is so much bigger than imagined. I remember the heavy swing and kick and calves burning, knees swollen. I remember my soaked gloves. I see Alaskan peaks arrayed like a dispassionate tribunal witnessing our ascent. Mountains that speak to me in sleep, that fill up my head with stories. Crowding out the people who belong there.
People, though less permanent, are more important than mountains.
Near the summit, my arms cramp. Cold hands. Cold feet. Uncertain my fingers will ever pry loose of these ice tools.
The hush outside under a white blazing sun. Her voice a striking antonym. Breeze seems to whisper through me without engagement. Caught up in this challenge. Fixed to the rock.
"Um. Daddy?"
 |
| Exiting the cave. Just before the crux. PHOTO: Marni Robertson |
A year before the desert I was camped on a glacier below Mt Huntington. Base camp was a cook tent, a sleep tent and a snow cave that, due to an incessant storm, was converted into a latrine.
In the black sleep something stirs below and I wake. The earthquake lasts a few seconds. The ground beneath insubstantiate, disturbing. Crash of avalanching snow.
Wrapped in my down cocoon, expose my mouth to the dark. “An earthquake?”
“Yeah.”
“Hear that slide?”
“Yeah.”
“Should we get out of the tent?”
Ice crashing above us in the dark.
Fourteen days ago I saw my little girls. I saw Marni. Kissed them. Held them.
She was three years old. But I watched her mature in the weeks before I left. Watched her heart turn from me. Protect herself from an unsettled father.
In the dark inside my bag I lay with memories too singular speak. Seeing my daughter. I would hold her. Convince her of my affection. Be her daddy.
Thoughts that burn. Splice a new reel of thought. Something inert. Waiting in a storm lasting thirteen days. A stale, caustic span. In the morning I promise to work out. Promise not to let all the bacon and pancakes I eat every morning make me fat. The morning reveals thick frost lining the inner wall of the tent. Worm out of my bag. Flakes of ice fall into my hair and drip down my neck and I think of that little girl so many miles away as I stumble out of the tent.
***
When I finally come home, my children are visibly bigger. Hair longer. I sit down with them and we play with toys I haven't seen before. My brain measures integrals of absence to find the value of what I missed; cold calculus that does not explain the sadness abiding my daughter's eyes. The story I am writing breaks apart under her regard. Ideas carefully fostered into an image no longer worth the effort. I am living a fiction if I believe my absence is harmless.
It occurs to me that stories keep us from breaking. Prose like threads of dyneema connecting our existence to something more permanent. Metaphysical giving context to physical. Because fiction is reality that I am too fragile to accept, disguised for my comfort.
Gives new meaning to #livingthedream. But reality is persistent.
What happens if you wake up to the costs of dreaming?
***
Repeated hacking with my dull picks. The upper ice field of Mt Huntington is so much bigger than imagined. I remember the heavy swing and kick and calves burning, knees swollen. I remember my soaked gloves. I see Alaskan peaks arrayed like a dispassionate tribunal witnessing our ascent. Mountains that speak to me in sleep, that fill up my head with stories. Crowding out the people who belong there.
People, though less permanent, are more important than mountains.
Near the summit, my arms cramp. Cold hands. Cold feet. Uncertain my fingers will ever pry loose of these ice tools.
 |
| Nearing the summit of Mt Huntington. PHOTO: Jackson Marvel |
