This is an entry for a contest asking what ice climbing meant to you that Alpinist held. It was not chosen, but nicely sums up my relationship with this improbable activity.
My ice climbing had an ignominious start in the bunk of a
crab boat bobbing listlessly on the wine-dark sea. Words stolen from Kiss or Kill under my
diesel-flavored pillow resonated with the intensity of a young deckhand with toughness
to prove.
Vox clamantis in deserto originating in her ego, crying for the
world to hear: No, I am more than the Betty you see. No, I will not accept your mediocrity.
Last moments of warmth from a pickup that barely made it to
Montana from the Westport docks. Tang of
cold air stinging my lungs and the sluggish restart of limbs too long folded into
bucket seats and galley benches. Blood
half coffee at least. Movement in the
cold and roiling doubts silenced: Wait
and see.
The further we went into the canyon the further I went back and back into the part of my past
in which delight lived. Perhaps delight
was not just in childhood innocence lost but here in the powdery climbers’
trail winding up creek drainages and around outcroppings, under cliffs and
around cobbled corners. The sun had yet to rise, but its glow arced in a
diffuse corona over the sheltering walls of Hyalite. This forest was home to mystery. Small blue flows peeked through dark timber
and promised beautiful challenge luminous from within. So much light and shadow. So much sweat and fear, heat and cold,
exhausted shaking and delight. Everything
flowed out of me hot and froze hard with the water suspended in cold on the
face of the rest of the land. It was a
dance with so many forms of water. And there
we were in the midst of this vast cold.
Little pockets of heat at the top of Mummy 2, watching curtains of
snowflakes add depth to the tops of lodgepoles in the approaching storm. Trailhead bullshitting, door-latch opened beers
and a hot, hot shower. I had found my
tribe.
It began as this.
Sometimes I was climbing to something - a higher grade, the newer and
more terrifying mental dance of mixed terrain, Alaskan summits. Pursuit of intensity is a dark game to
play. The ribbons of ice I rode grew longer,
higher, further away and my life off mountains spiraled down. When climbing, the ice demanded everything of
me. I left the cruel words and broken
doorframes of my man at home behind and lived at the end of sharp points. Attached by a v-thread, a thin cord. Nothing more.
It was another climber’s book, All that Glitters,
that validated ice climbing as the anchor that held my life from spinning apart
in the centrifugal forces of its own constant motion. I was climbing away, now – away from an abusive
relationship and its concomitant self destruction. Back and back beyond pain-fed
rage into a sharp cold gray jay morning under dark timber, racking up and swinging
onto an ephemeral road to the sky.
Shattering ice under my pick, rhythmic kick. The sound of my breath. Chasing delight.
