Risk

            When I leave the shelter of the small mountain community I call home and spend time with non-mountain sports people I realize that the way I organize my life around mountains is not the way most of the world does it.  I have chosen Jackson as my home base because the seasonal, driven way I live is somewhat normal in a place where so many have moved for the excellent alpine climbing and skiing.  I go about my business unquestioned.  I don’t have to spend energy explaining why I am so driven as a climber and guide and why I do such risky sports or jobs.  This post is my answer to that why.  You’re welcome, Mom and Dad. 

            I have had acquaintances and family ask me over the years why am I driving myself so hard.  Why do I have to climb such hard things, do such rugged jobs, go up such tall mountains?  Why do I have to exhaust myself to pay for trips to Mexico, to South America, to North American crags, to Alaska – since 2007, every year to Alaska! Why?  Why can’t I just take it easy?  Just take a break? 

            The most trite answer I have given is my own play on Sir Edmund Hillary’s famous Everest quote.  Because I can.  This doesn’t approach the truth of it.  There is no simplistic answer.  The ambition that motivates me has its root deep in any driven person.  It is something that transcends merely working towards a goal and edges towards something akin to a calling.  I was working towards a goal when I was finishing college at Evergreen, working and paying and taking courses, designing my curriculum and trying to get my piece of paper.  That was a goal.  I was not driven, not compelled.  I didn’t need to do it in the very fiber of my being like I need to climb mountains.

            Even I don’t fully understand it.  To understand something your rational mind must seize upon the logic of something, and my need to climb mountains is not logical.  I just know in the animal part of myself that I must do this.  I have the memory of the dozens of mountains I’ve climbed and the hundreds of days I have spent in what we humans define as wilderness, surrounded by self-governing systems and not human laws.  Here I have found a place where humans are not fully in control. 

Olympics, where I first found it

When I venture here it’s more a state of being that I am trying to achieve than a summit or a destination.  These places require the razor sharp Zen focus that occurs when life and death are on the line based on the movement of my body and the decisions made by my mind and by that semi-mystical part of my brain and consciousness that has developed after thousands of climbs.  Some people call this intuition mountain sense.  I go to re-activate and to continue developing that.  It is out of sync with the modern world and totally in line with a world that still exists all around us, the world where blizzards can shut down mountain passes and tornadoes and hurricanes can rouse us all out of our electronic stupor.  I keep going and returning, time and time again.  Whether it’s a day trip to a crag or a long expedition, I go to find that edge, that focus.  I have never known any purer state of presence.  I have never felt more connected and whole.  I find this when I am in the mountains doing something difficult, doing something that is just at my threshold.  Something where I feel like I’m in control, but barely - leading at the top of my grade, pushing my body to my known limits of muscular endurance or hours in motion without sleep.  At the end of these times when I push myself just a little further than the time before, when I am sitting on the ledge belaying my partner up or relaxing on the tailgate of my truck after a long push in the Cascades or Tetons I think This is what I’m for.  This is what the strength of my body and the quickness of my mind is for.  I’ve used everything I am today. 

            Perhaps you are fortunate enough to have a job where you can have that same feeling of using what you’ve got and still earning money.  I’ve worked a lot of different jobs – some physically demanding but intellectually boring, some intellectually interesting but not rigorous – and I have never used it all.  Maybe a few times, but this has only been because of dangerous situations that inherently arise when I was working in certain environments like the mountains or the ocean. 

Friends!

            Maybe I go for the friendships and the bonds beyond friendship that I have formed with the people I climb with.  Read any mountaineering book.  Pen-wielding climbers wax eloquent about that brotherhood of the rope.  Know why?  Because it’s real.  Whatever you get from the mountains – that sense of being present, of flow, of accomplishment, feeling on top of the world (and indeed, you are most often on top of something) – you are sharing it with someone.  You have navigated the dangers and reached the high point with someone you are literally tied to.  You hold someone’s life in your hands and she yours.  Shared risk creates a unique bond.  Powerful friendships form in the mountains.

Your typical douche

            Ego is a factor.  Every climber must find her own balance between having a healthy ego and being a douche.  Any climber who says, ‘Ah, I don’t need any recognition.  I don’t do this for the glory,’ is probably lying, even just a little.  I want to talk about what I have done, to share it, but I don’t want to start a pissing contest and I don’t want to stomp on peoples’ ambition.  As I have done more difficult climbs of late and speak of them it’s almost a little embarrassing.  I don’t want to be like the people who come up to you and immediately start spraying that they’ve sent Mt. Gnar-Gnar via the North Face Couloir Of Doom Route.   With their transceivers still beeping and their jacket open so you know it.  In the bar.  At 8pm.

Mountains have taught me humility.  Mountains have schooled me.  I have seen some terrible things happen up there and feel like I am dishonoring not the mountain but the inherent danger of climbing by boasting.  I know some climbers who develop an almost superstitious air when talking about the things they like to ski and climb.  Maybe I’m a bit the same way.  It’s a bit of a jinx to speak about mountains with arrogance.  Also, as your words go so go your actions.  If you practice humility in town you will practice it when it matters in the hills.  So I try to be humble.  I try to say it like it is.  I say what I’ve climbed.  Conversely, I don’t make my accomplishments vague in order not to make other people uncomfortable.  If they look threatened, I might add that I had to climb many other things before I reached that particular peak.  That’s my approach.  I came to where I am at today, which is by no means a high level of climbing achievement, by a long apprenticeship, a long road of learning, turning around a lot and gradually building my skill level so I can be climbing what I am climbing today.  Other people, I am sure to say, can do that too. 

            I satisfied my ego working on fishing boats and jumping off of little cliffs on telemark skis around Jackson and going to Denali the first few times.  Sometime around age 29 or 30 the need to prove myself kind of went away.  A fishing boat I was working on almost rolled over crossing the Westport bar.  Half our pots were pulled off the back and while one deckhand freaked out the other one and I frantically scrambled around the deck trying to get the balance of the boat right and the pots out of the fish hold.  Half the water was missing out of the fish hold, and we had to get the deck hatch back on so a big wave that might come over the side would not flood it, throw the ballast of the boat off and sink us. After that, I didn’t crab fish much longer.  I saved the risk for mountains.  Expeditions became more a part of my life.  But the ego, the need to satisfy it, went away as I faced real dangers I had only read about before.  I felt good about myself and about my climbing accomplishments.  I was not writing articles for sponsors on new routes I had put up, but these adventures were mine.  I had made it way further than I ever thought I could growing up in the green woods of suburban Connecticut.

Home away

Funny thing is, as the need to prove something and satisfy my ego has waned that drive has not gone away.  It has only become more intense.  That razor-sharp focus has gotten better as my ego has grown less important in the whole climbing equation.  It is like the fog has lifted.  It is me, my friends, and the mountain ecosystem.  I still keep driving thousands of miles to reach the next climbing area, to get one grade higher in my leading abilities.  A climb, just above my grade, catches my eye.  I think about it, study it, prepare for it, get there, and usually send it, even though I think I cannot.  I sandbag myself a lot.  I hate the first lead.  I am learning to master my own fear.  Maintaining a degree of composure when I am leading on the edge of my grade is one of many points of self-mastery I have had to strive towards because of climbing.  So is believing that I am not as bad as I fear.  I am a better person for my involvement in the sport.  In my early twenties I mostly backpacked, or did long solo scrambles.  I remember the day I found myself at the base of the Owen-Spaulding route on the Grand Teton and realized I needed to learn how to climb on ropes or I was going to kill myself.  Alpine climbing, more than anything else, has forced me to learn the ways of other people.  Nothing else that I needed another person for has mattered to me so much that I was willing to change my life for it.   Ten years into it climbing has given me a community where socializing has more to do with going to the gym or taking an early morning ski lap than drinking in a bar.  I’ve become a more focused and direct person.  I communicate what I think.  I have made my body and mind strong enough. 

Perhaps the most important reason I climb is that the danger inherent in the sport has taught me to value what I do have in the world.  If you do climb or ski long enough, you do push the edge.  You’re going to come to that moment where you don’t know if you are going to return safely.  You don’t know if you are going to get out of this one.  You’ve pushed it a little too far.  You’re a little out of control.  That moment, if you are religious and believe in God, perhaps you will pray.  But if you are not religious you will probably reflect on all the people who will miss you.  If you do not believe in a God who you can ask for deliverance, for safety, you might start making promises to yourself.  If I get out of this.  If I get out of this, I’m gonna go back and tell the people I love that I love them.  I’m gonna love the hell out of my family and my friends, and I’m gonna make this time I have here on earth a gift to everybody.  I’m gonna volunteer at the women’s shelter, finally!, and I’m finally gonna try to go to school again or start my profession, I’m gonna finally tell my boyfriend that I love him and that I’m ready to move in, my girlfriend that I want to get married and have some babies.  Whatever.  You start making these bargains with yourself.  Then the danger passes and you’re a little embarrassed.  Did I really think I was gonna die? Did I really think that?  I didn’t have any faith in my partners or in the situation. 

Those promises, though, they remain.  Yes, I have made those promises and yes, I have felt a little foolish afterwards.  But those promises have permeated my consciousness and I have lived my life with more presence and purpose because I have willingly looked at that danger.  I have gone up to it, put my toes at its toes and looked in its face.  And it’s been a choice I have made on mountains, on skis, on boats.  I have taken these risks voluntarily.

Is it fair to ask your family and friends to assume a risk that you find that rewarding?  That old risk versus reward talk is bandied about on ski tours and climbs, drinking whiskey with your friends, sitting in a hot tub or around a woodstove somewhere.  You get the reward.  Your family and friends share the risk.  Is it fair?  It’s not fair.  It’s not fair and you know it.  And I know it.  But this is what we do.  It’s what we do, as climbers and as people. We who would be halved, would be reduced, without these sports and without this physical exertion, without the razor-sharp focus, without the risk.  This is what we do.  Our families love us.  They have created us.  Our friends too.  We are all co-creating each other all the time.  A friend of mine says you are the sum of the five people closest to you.  Take a minute.  Stop.  Think of who those people are.  You are co-creating those people even as they are co-creating you, and they are all assuming the risks that you take.  I’m very aware of that.  Maybe I’m selfish, but it does not make me want to stop going into the mountains.  It does not make me want to reduce myself as a person, because then those people (and me too) only have a partial me. Is it worth it to have no me at all?  I’ve made that choice.  You’ve got to make that choice for yourself.