At Home In The World

this is a picture of a drilling rig

        Back to mudlogging in Frack Land and its concomitant boredom.  I arrived with that nervous trembling of still being in motion after driving a thousand miles or more by yourself in a matter of days.  I had to take a walk on the road this afternoon (as the other rig hands think: what a weirdo! or more likely: OMG A CHICK SHE’S HOT and stare at my ass) to center myself in the heat, crickets, waving wheat and slow rhythms of the Dakotas once more.  I had to jump in the back of a rig hand's pickup to make it back for my shift on time.  I am in the dream-world mindset of both 4 months of crappy sleep and switching from a day to a night schedule.  It is my Great Seasonal Slowdown, mentally and metabolically, travel-wise and everything else.  I am trying to approach this return to my Other Job with a certain degree of mindfulness and intention.  This is to combat the inevitable let-down and mini-depression that occurs at the end of the guiding season, ie the sadness after I go from living my most authentic life as my best self to living in a more money-conscious, goal-driven, tough-it-out reality.  I love one and hate one but the one I hate makes me strong and financially stable for the other.  It doesn’t feel good but it makes me better.

with the right kind of eyes

         I try to live where I am and not in the happier future of my next climbing trip.  It’s hard out here.  It is a groundhog day kind of job.  Every well is like every other well, save a few things that could go wrong.  I establish a strict routine.  I greet the sunrise and let my feet touch the burnt rock scoria of the straight-grid roads that connect farm to industry out here.  I use a broader vision and see that despite the gas flares that dot the night landscape it is still a harsh beauty that underlies the farmland of the Dakotas.  It is as if the ice age just ended and the glacier just receded.  With the right kind of eyes you can see huge herds and bands of people following them.  That is what this kind of landscape can sustain.  For now it is tanker trucks kicking up plumes of dust and rows of four oil tanks on a pad next to a horsehead pump and a gas flare.  Quiet.  Pump, solar powered, squeaking up and down, pulling the light sweet crude out of the ground.  Post-production.  Harvesting oil with horizontal drilling technology.  With fracking. 

         So I plan, and drive, and visit.  When I am talking to my family back East about a typical plan for a big loop they marvel at my itinerary. From the rig I am going down to visit my friend in North Dakota who keeps bees, then to Taimi and Phil's in Longmont on the Front Range.  Then I have to visit my friends in Boulder and Vail before I head to Red Rocks to meet my friends from Bozeman and Washington that I also climb with in Alaska, before a stop in Fresno to climb with my buddy from Seattle...(notice how this resembles an ideal fall route to the Rock Instructor Class in Joshua Tree? I mention all these people to illustrate the forthcoming point but will probably not get to visit everyone on this next trip.)  My nuclear family marvels at how I seem to have friends everywhere I go.  This is not true.  I go where my friends are.

eating grass fed beef and veggies like a bunch of hippies

         My friends know that aspartame is a poison.  They don’t clean their houses with toxic products and try to eat real food.  Their homes are full of meaningful items from their travels and self-created art and climbing gear.  The driveway or couch or guest room of any of these folks is as much home to me as my little apartment in Jackson or the back of my truck.  I have forged these relationships out of necessity, and so have they.  I travel according to my plans and ambitions, and this takes me to many new places.  I must create community everywhere I go, or I will live the majority of my life lonely.  More than a decade of this has led to my having friends in many places, both ones that I have lived and ones that they have moved to while following their own ambitions.  They are islands of sanity in a world that is largely asleep, a world whose beliefs and values I have consciously chosen not to accept. 

back into asphalt hell

         Life on the road can be lonely.  I am not a counter, but if I was I might tally as many afternoons in distraught, heat-shimmering asphalt Wal-Mart or K-Mart or similar Death-Mart parking lots as I do in the pristine wilds, running into the store for hair bands or paper towels or cat food from my rarely-seen kitty, ear buds dangling from my iPhone, exhausted.  These times the vast dessication of strip-mall America stretches before me.  People with little kids staring look askance at my windblown hair and raccoon-eyed sunglasses tan.  They do not know how to receive a wild woman on the dream-trails of climbing culture, roaming the land in purposeful circles of ambition and home.   I wear my difference like a cape.  I was supposed to become like them.  Grad degree and a nice man (a woman would be acceptable as well, as long as she meets the right criteria) who is of my same socioeconomic class and level of education.  Move in together.  There is a dog and a ring somewhere in there, a garden and a promotion, a gradual move away from these wild dreams into What Is.  I’m not saying it’s bad for anyone who freely and joyfully chooses this.  I am saying it doesn’t work for all.  For me.  I am surprised and unsurprised at who I have become, and not sure what to do with it next.

what i've built since then

         Last year I thought I had it wrapped up.  I was a square peg, sure, but I found a man who was willing to shave those sharp corners off and make me nice and round like everybody else.  Settling down into a lifetime of abuse and misery, disguised as domestic bliss.  Mooching disguised as his support of female liberation (you are free to work so I can be a stay at home dad and do my ‘inventions’ in the garage and one day we will be RICH AND FAMOUS baby!)  I escaped several thousand dollars in legal fees poorer and spent a dark winter licking my wounds with strong women on the sides of mountains blanketed in quiet dying forests and soft powder snow.  Skinning up and clicking in.  Reading the avy forecast on my phone and opening my senses to whumphs and cracks, to the telltale recent slides.  The fight and float down, jump turns and hip-wiggling waist-deep pow.  The hitch back to the top of the Pass in vans or the open backs of pickups.  These were rituals I understood.  At the core was my home, a warm pocket of friendship and solitude, a woodstove and healthy-living roommate and kitty, a door I could shut and a space that was only mine.

         I found myself again.  She was huddled under a rock in the Bakken just past an oil rig, terrified and trembling, friendless and hung-over.  She had given up.  Canyons, mountains,

but how could i lose this?

glaciers that move like rivers a hundred miles or more and flow like highways to the sea, deck-loaded fishing boats, remote basins bursting with wildflowers in the North Cascades, little belay ledges and raunchy jokes with my climbing partners, hip-hop night at the Fairview, the friendship of everyone who opposed his presence – she had lost it all.  She had A MAN.  She BAGGED A MAN.  She was going to BUY A HOUSE.  And HAVE A BABY.  Maybe a few.  Her future was crumbling, set.  Build Rome to watch it burn.

         The price was her wild, wild soul. 

         So it crawled under a rock and tried to die.

         There is a passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in which Janie, the main character, realizes her lover Tea Cake does not want to kill that autonomous, free, wild part of herself.  ‘…and her soul crawled out of its hiding place.’  So mine did.  And there was so much shame that I had not been strong, but my friends did not care.  There was so much shame for the drama, for the lengths I had to go to to escape, for my self-destruction before I could begin to heal.  My family was right there, despite all our differences in the past.  My friends began to invite me again.  I started to go.  Then I started to climb again.

one of these years i will finally send this peak

         Skiing is one thing.  Backcountry skiing is not safe, but for me it is familiar.  Ice climbing and mixed climbing are not.  After living in the terror of an abusive relationship the constant fear of the vertical winter realm was calming.  I had lived in that fear and uncertainty.  Just as the monotony and low-level threat of constant harm for hours and sometimes days that exists while working as a deckhand on fishing boats prepared my mind for the rigors of expedition life my drama-filled life with my ex-fiance prepared my mind for a very surprising shift in my winter climbing. 

         Not to say I wouldn’t get scared on route.  I always get scared on route, and usually vocalize it.  I am working on this, and have had some patient belayers.  (You know who you are.  Thank you.  Also: I can’t fucking hear you.)  The point here is I took a horribly negative experience and turned it into an asset.  I used it for climbing.  And this is what climbing has done for me, more than anything else: it is the center.  Some find the center in another person, or in a job.  For me, it is simply returning to the challenge and scaring the shit out of myself on something new.

decompressing from ak LIKE A BOSS

          I don’t mean sending.  Sending occurs when you are well-trained and mentally prepared for the challenges of the climb.  Sometimes you surprise yourself and send something above your grade, but a smooth send is often in control.  Stani and I sent the Harvard Route.  We were not out of our realm.  This was a really big surprise for me, but a pleasant one.  It confirmed I had been doing it right since my breakup.  That despite those moments when I feel out of step with the rest of America for being 32, unmarried, childless, and living out of a tent or on a couch or in the back of a big red Toyota Tacoma most of the nights of my year I am dwelling on the right dream trail for once in my life.  I have tried so many.  I am not chasing ice or big mountains or anything anymore.  I am going there.  I am returning to these places with an open heart.  There is so little yearning for what I cannot do, what I cannot have.  I don’t feel deprived, only busy, tired, terribly amused, occasionally euphoric.  I try to express gratitude and send the poor-me self pity feelings on the first train to nowhere when they show their whiny little faces.  I do not listen to a popular culture full of materialism and its never-ending quest for more and the despair and soul-poverty which underlies it all.  I do not dwell within the ‘shoulds’.  I have cast them into the dented plastic garbage can on the way into Target to buy a toothbrush and a picture frame that will hang on my wall as I dwell within the pictures I create, occupying my space, at home in the world.

lake coeur d'alene on my 4 state swimming odyssey