Sunday, January 16, 2011

In It For the Long Haul

There is a delicate, invisible line that has been forming ever since I started working in the mountains. My life is more public now. The things I say and post carry more meaning. So I write the following with restraint based on this knowledge. I think it is important to say - this is part of my story, as much as fishing or Denali or relationships. However many decades or generations after the feminist movement began (or has it always been going on?) there are still many professions that are male-dominated. Being who I am, I seem to have gravitated towards them: fishing is FAST AND FUN! Climbing is TOTALLY SWEET! Now give me a job, suckas, just like that guy you gave a job to over there!

Ah, it's not as easy as that. I have found that oftentimes I have to prove myself more than my male counterparts when seeking employment in these arenas. There is great reward in it later - I remember walking back into the bar in Westport a year after I worked on the Betty Lee and having the bartender and some other fishermen tell the others in the bar how I could lift and stack crab pots. They claimed me, in a way - I know this chick! She can do the job! It was a great feeling to have proven I was up to the task. I had exceeded the expectations of what a female could do. In the end, though, my friend Ginny in Seattle was right. She once told a younger me fully entrenched in butting my stubborn aggro short-cropped tele-skiier head against sexism in another mountain job that I could perhaps gain a special place within the group for being a woman and undertaking difficult tasks, but I would always remain different from the guys in the group by virtue of my femaleness. She works in the computer gaming industry - a similar world - and I listened to what she had to say. I have found since then that I will not ever be one of the guys - but by focusing on excellence and just being my strange funny self I will invariably become part of the group. If I was a guy I also don't think I would ever fit in any conformist sense. My place is there, I just have to create it. People are wary of something they have not seen before, but after a time come to appreciate that which is new and different. I'm not what people expect. Only part of that is due to my gender.

In fishing, I never quite found my place, though I did get that glow of validation from co-workers. I had some great times with the guys I worked with and the people I met and saw some strange and amazing sights that I doubt I will ever see again (if only by virtue of the fact that they were made so amazing by my degree of exhaustion and sleep deprivation and this is not a state I seek to duplicate outside of single-push alpine climbing). But in the end, I would always wait for the clouds to clear so I could see whatever mountain range lay across that expanse of gray moving water: the Chugach, the Olympics, the peaks of the snowy Katmai peninsula, hell, even the Willapa hills. A wise friend in Westport told me that successful fishermen are in it for the love of fishing. Bad year, good year - they love the ocean and love catching. If I loved the mountains, he said, go back to the mountains. Ride out the bad and see the good doing the thing you love in the place you want to be anyway. He had musical ambitions he put aside to go fishing, and I felt his sense of loss in not pursuing this goal when I spoke to him about important things. I am pretty sure he was telling me to get out of fishing before I felt that sense of loss. I am honored to have received this advice, because it is among the best I have gotten in this lifetime.

This brings us back to here. I am pissed as hell at some of the attitudes I am now butting heads with in the world of earning a living in the mountains, but I'm in it for the long haul. In the end my personal climbing comes back to the upward motion, the slice of a well-sharpened pick into solid ice, the placing of a piece, the puzzle-completing joy of navigating a tricky route in the mountains. Guiding comes back to a group of clients laughing, enjoying the trip and focusing on their own goals and expectations without realizing the planning and constant vigilance occurring in the mind of the guide. I want to continue my growth as a climber and as a guide, constantly seeking new challenges and opportunities. The fact that I am a woman and want to make a good living from this while others have different ideas is, to me, just one more annoying detail to be attended to. Experiencing discrimination only makes me more determined to succeed, both to prove those fuckers wrong and to pave the way for other women, who, like me, want to make a life in the mountains. I am learning to navigate the politics of gender and not become bitter or closed off to my ability to be friendly and form emotional bonds with people. The mountains are just too full of joy for that.