Across the flat dark water the lights of Seattle houses shine. Across Puget Sound lights lie low on the flat bowl of the Northwest sky. This is a maritime city. It is a departure point for many journeys past and present. I am standing on the edge of waters that hold the rivers of the mountains that have saved my life. It is the solstice and I am in Golden Gardens park in Ballard. There is not a soul in my sight.
I strip to sandals and wade in. My body is spare and toned by resistance to gravity and lack of superfluous calories. A constant new strength hums in it. There are lines and curves foreign to me. I am seeing the tangible results of my efforts. I am being shaped by the things I do. I once admired lean climbers throwing gear in cars hungry after big efforts. What enervated them to become thus? What were their secrets? What did they sacrifice to look like that – dusty, hollow-cheeked, strong and precise in their movements, muscle and tendon and swollen veins playing under limbs darkened from the sun? How, in my unformed and ill-disciplined body of youth, could I make the passionate need to understand the language of crags and ice and high places match my exterior?
I turn towards shore and dip into the salty clarity of Puget Sound water. Cold. I rise immediately and head to shore to towel off tingling and alive. “Welcome home.” I say to myself. I look back and the dark water shines with the light of the city I have decided to call my stage, resting ground, working learning playground.
Your own history layers upon itself in a city. It was on this beach I walked on a first date that ultimately fizzled. I ranted about the waste of edible plants while picking cress with my ex on a drunken walk from his little rented room across from Shilshole Marina to a punk party with a stolen keg up a closed Golden Gardens Park road. I sat across from my fellow deckhand from the crab boat I crewed on in Westport this last winter at a restaurant on this road as we talked about our own struggles as intense people in a dulled down world and continued the long series of conversations that have made us true friends. It is solstice and I am twenty eight. I am at the height of my powers and at a tangible turning point in this wild young life of mine. This year I forgot my Solstice cleansing ritual until I, reluctant to re-enter civilization, turned on my phone and checked my messages in the familiar comfort of the Ballard house I am coming, with no little surprise, to call home. My best friend’s voice apologized in advance for being sporadically available on the solstice and promised to catch up later. Solstice! I looked at the calendar, and indeed, it was. I had wondered earlier if I would be high on a glacier somewhere by now. This year that was not to be, though in a week and change I will be low on a glacier. In my warm room with Juniper bothering I thought back on my two stellar days of sparkling granite, sunshine, clean abundant flowing water, and alternating heat and cold wind. There were lots of moments when, charging hard from crag to crag, I could have roped my good friend and climbing partner into a solstice swim. The days were seamless, our drive to go up too strong, our banter both New-England caustic and light, our understanding as fellow seasoned climbers roped together for the latest few of many shared climbs solid and growing. We lived for the hold and the piece and the joke and the moment. We lived for the guidebook and the camping spots and the food and water and the friction and crack and temperature and the joy of leading. We lived for nothing more than the moment and I lost time, day, hour, year. I lived in sun and shade, muscle ache and decision point. I was, as has happened so many days this year, completely removed from anything but the exigencies of climbing. This is my happiness. This is perfection. Joy. I forgot about Solstice.
This night now finds me here, hurrying back into a shirt and pants lest someone walk the beach. Uncertainty, by now an old friend, looms bright as the lights at the last point of land I can see before the darkness of open water. Alaska, that mythical word and world-changing state rears its majestic and terrifying head. I am hesitant to respond with the rowdy enthusiasm I have had in the past. This hesitance to embrace the unknown again surprises me, but I know why.
This spring I have learned to temper my intensity and channel it into climbing, into training, into friendships with people who have learned to do the same in their own ways, healthy or not. I have stayed long enough for the Seattle climbing community to open some of its tight-sealed doors. I have calmed enough to keep my demeanor socially acceptable, thereby easing into friendships and climbing partnerships without my usual overwhelming onslaught of Aili-ness. I have turned up the volume by degrees and waited for a response, then ramped it up some more. I love what I have become and I know how to stay this way. I am in love with my friends and my house and Washington’s mountains (and I count Squamish too). I have realized finally that I could change my location a hundred more times but it wasn’t gonna mean shit until I changed what was inside of me.
I feel the change like a freight train and a whisper each time I walk these streets bike these trails or ride these roads in my stinky gassy pickup (anyone wanna buy a truck?). I can’t believe that this place I once derided at the side of my ex as a festering enclave of materialistic yuppy scumwads has become home. Why? Because in the city I can be, say, and do almost anything and most people will merely shrug and say ‘huh.’ Because I am forty minutes from excellent sport crags and two hours away from world-class granite, glaciers, ice climbing, and alpine objectives. Because I can walk to pho. Because I am sick of running and decided it was. The decision still feels arbitrary, as I am indeed going to throw myself to the demon-gods of chance and fate and big Alaskan summer bucks in a few weeks. But I have a place to return to. I have plans in the works to drastically alter my pattern of living and adventure into one that is both reliable and flexible. And I have people already saying “When you get back in September we can do….”
Gunsight Nooksack Slesse Squampton Warrior Wall Index Washington Pass
Those seeds of plans, coming from solid alpine partners, are worth more than any wild scheme.
