Going for Broke: An (Ir)Rational Pursuit of Every Climber’s Dream
(January 2005)

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It’s 7:30 a.m. and you’re at the parking lot of your local crag. Today you plan to finally get on the choice route on the cliff. You’ve been waiting for two months to do this climb, and the perfect finger crack is a siren beckoning to you again and again. Now you’re finally heeding her call.
    Today’s my day, you remind yourself as you cut your car’s ignition. Grabbing your coffee mug, you open your door only to have it hit the car next to you with a resounding thud. You look up surprised, since you hadn’t even seen the car, and lock eyes with the climber in the passenger seat. You know in an instant that the climber and his partner are headed for your climb. Scanning their bodies reveals that they’re fit, though you think you could out-hike them to the base. Climbing out of the car, you mouth an apology to your opponent and move to the trunk in three quick strides. Less than a minute later you’re buckling your pack when your partner announces that she has to use the facilities. You fake an under-standing smile and watch as the other climbing team seizes the opening and heads for the trail.
    By the time your partner saunters out of the bathroom you’re ready to sprint the thirty-minute approach and don’t care if she’d prefer to walk. The cold morning air burns your lungs, and your calves cramp as you power up the rocky trail. When you arrive at the route’s base, the other party is just beginning to climb. “We’ll be quick,” the leader mutters over his shoulder.
    An hour later you’re still waiting, and your left leg is falling asleep from the inactivity. You look up to gauge their progress, and note that the other climber and his partner still haven’t dialed their French-freeing. Since it’s obvious that they won’t be making it up the route in any other
style, you re-adjust you pack, remove the number four Camalot that’s been jutting into your lower back, and hope for the best.
    When you finally get on the route, you can’t seem to clear your head of the background noise of dogs barking and the shouts of “take” that signify the arrival of the hordes at the crag. Quiet! you say to no one in particular as you try and wiggle in a RP before the crux. Too late, your stemmed-out legs begin to shake, most likely from your rigorous approach. Looking down, you yell “take” to your partner, only to see that she’s flirting with the belayer next door. Pulling on the runner with your right hand, you repeat yourself louder and are relieved when you feel the rope come tight. Your on-sight blown, you stack an extra RP as you hang, cursing the fate of the weekend climber.
    The following Wednesday you drag yourself to the gym after work and
arrive at the parking lot at 5:30 p.m. You circle the lot, then the block, and end up parking four streets away. You start jogging as soon as you close the car door, and wait out a red light doing arm circles. By the time you’ve changed clothes its 5:45 p.m., there’s not an empty locker in sight, and the waiting list for a lead route is seven people deep. Thankfully, your partner arrived before you and is flaking out the rope as you walk over to the wall. Your warmup crosses paths with another climber, and you keep one eye on his trembling hands and the other on your route’s purple tape, praying he doesn’t blow your on-sight. Upon reaching the anchor, you lean back and feel momentarily suspended above the chaos. While you’re only thirty feet off the carpet, you pretend you are 3000 feet up El Cap, and wish it were so for the rest of the evening.
 
The next day at work you sit at your desk daydreaming about a never-ending road trip. Your climbing has stagnated, you haven’t increased a letter grade in over eight months, and you’re running out ofideas. Climbing fulltime seems like the most obvious escape from your rut. Your potential is thus far  untapped, and you’re convinced that you could be better, if not great, if only you had the time.
    By lunchtime you’ve decided that the only way to get better is to quit your job. After a morning of web surfing and dodging your boss, you’ve made a hit list for your new life. The desert first, Joshua Tree next, Yosemite in June, and then points beyond. Over a turkey sandwich on rye you make a list of what you’ll need for the trip, starting with a brand- new van. Fulltime climbers need vans, you reason. The few nights you’ve slept inside your Camry were worse than any night you ever endured on a wall. And not just any van, but one with perfect Tupperware-sized bins that are just right for each category of item, efficient drying lines for hanging wash towels, and convenient curtains to close on those nights when the van is sleeping two. A van is a must for my new life, you decide as you pick up the phone to call the local VW dealer.
    Five minutes later you hang up the phone and wonder ifyou might have a hidden trust fund someplace that you don’t know about. You briefly debate calling your parents to ask, but come to your senses before dialing their
number. Without a trust fund your dreams of a van become wed to having a job, and you wonder how you’ll ever climb hard with such limiting constraints.
    Having established the fact that you need an income, you consider changing careers. Professional climber seems like the most logical choice. Of course, you’d have to climb fulltime to break the 5.14 barrier and be at the caliber that attracts sponsors, but that small point aside, you’re not so sure about the pro life. You scour the magazines and catalogs, trying to discern if the facial expressions are smiles or grimaces. You think it could be hard to keep up the media image; the last time you tried to create an image was in high school when you ran for class president, and that ended with you demanding a recount, even though you lost 254 to twenty-three. Plus, you might have ethical issues with the available sponsors, for example, the local brewery (what would your Aunt Mabel think?).
    Scratching the pro-climber option off your list, your brain arrives at the next logical choice: mountain guide. Just another way of getting paid to climb, you think while taking a swig of the beer you’re sure would have been first in line to have you on their label.
    Four beers later, you remember a small detail about guiding: clients. You decide that this might throw a glitch into the otherwise seamless plan. You don’t like teaching, and in general, you don’t like newbies. Just last week you averted your eyes in embarrassment from the climber desperately trying to place his entire rack on a forty-foot 5.3 slab. The funny thing about guiding, you remind yourself, is that you need clients, especially those with generous tip money. You think back to the last guide you saw at the local crag, and you consider his 1983 Subaru wagon with rust spots like Rorschach ink blots and the muffler tied on with leftover ten-mill accessory cord. Definitely not your dream van.
    Better than a climbing job, you think next, would be a job with ample time off for road tripping. Teaching comes to mind, and you make a note to ask a friend if you had to have passed high school English to teach it. Nursing is also a possibility, and you think you could look good in a pair of blue scrubs, until you realize why they make nurses wear scrubs and remember that you’ve never gotten along especially well with the sick.
    Having exhausted your career options, you opt for the next best thing: a sabbatical. It takes two months, but eventually you convince your boss to let you take a month off, telling her your aunt is sick. You keep from feeling guilty by studying guidebooks to the cliffs on your hit list.

The morning you leave town, your Camry is packed full with every piece of climbing gear and car-camping equipment you own. You’ve lined up partners for each major stop, and you’ve given yourself time in between, just in case you meet other potential rope mates. Your first stop is Indian Creek, and you climb for five days straight. When you wake up on the sixth day you can barely get out of your tent and declare your first rest day, proud of your maturity. By 11 a.m. you’ve had your fourth cup of coffee and are bored with your book, so you start trolling the Moab café for an afternoon partner. After easily finding one, you buy an extra roll of tape and cover your strawberry-marked wrists and forearms, declaring yourself good to go.
    By the time you leave the Creek you’ve climbed ten out of twelve days. Holding onto the steering wheel seems more difficult than it used to, so you use your knees whenever possible on the long drive to Joshua Tree. On your second day there you hand stack in an offwidth and feel your shoulder pull out of its socket as you fight to keep your knee bar. That night your left arm falls asleep, and you wake up to an annoying tingling in your hand. By mid-afternoon your whole left arm is aching. You sit at a picnic table scanning the guidebook for tomorrow’s routes, trying not to wince as you turn the pages. Maybe slabs are the way to go, you think as you search for a likely route.
    By the next day you can no longer ignore the fact that your entire left arm is malfunctioning. For a fleeting moment you tell yourself that you can climb the moderates one-handed, until you realize you can’t even lift a water bottle. Your partner finds another rope mate for the day, and you lie in your sleeping bag wondering if your body is cut out for full-time climbing. Maybe, you think to yourself, I could do this if I’d started when I was young. Rationalizing that this is what has kept you from greatness comes easily, if not naturally, and you happily spend the rest of your day thinking about what might have been.
    After three days off from climbing your arm hasn’t gotten better and you’re tired of hiking for entertainment. You pull out your calendar and realize that you’re not even halfway through your sabbatical. You wonder what your boss would say if you returned early. Sure, you’d have to explain that your aunt miraculously recovered — maybe she could write you a note? You also wonder how the one-handed drive back home will feel, and you reassure yourself with comforting thoughts of stops for ice along the way.
    Two days later you’re back at home, having been diagnosed with tendonitis in your left forearm, compounded by a torn rotator cuff. When you arrive at physical therapy, the therapist takes one look at you before asking if you’re a climber. “Yes,” you say, feeling triumphant for the first time in a week. You gaze lovingly at your scabbed hands and wonder what other indicators might have given you away: your tapered waistline, or our ripped back accentuated by your tight t-shirt? The therapist sighs, interrupting your self-evaluation. “Does this mean you don’t have health insurance?” he asks. You meekly nod confirmation and assuage yourself by deciding to think of him as a mere hiker.

You return to your job on Monday to your boss’s surprise. Using her combined shock at both your early return and your dilapidated physical state to your advantage, you negotiate a four-day workweek with little effort. You amble back to your desk and stretch your shoulder as you walk, thinking that it might be better to start your new schedule after you’re finished with rehab. Back at your desk, you remove the power putty from your drawer. Small steps, you whisper as you methodically kneed the dark blue substance and scan the climbing web pages for inspiration.
.

Two weeks ago I was in New Hampshire. Again. I’d never been to the state until this February, and now I’ve gone on three trips to the North Country. It pulled at me the first time, and I knew it had something to do with the dreams of my younger self. Blanketed evergreens and hidden lakes. Winding roads and maple syrup. This is the land I wanted in my youth. It is the life I tried to create my first go around.
    Picture this: I sleep in half-finished cabins with caulk and insulation peaking out from the gap between the ceiling trusses and the subfloor, with warped bathroom baseboards and iron-stained sinks from where the water drip never stops. I visit houses with plans for garages, gardens, and chicken coops. I talk with people about to buy land and make their dream house their new life. And I get sucked in and think I should do the same. But then I realize that I’ve done it already.
    When I was in eighth grade, I petitioned all four of my parents to go to Farm School. This would be high school--with cattle milking and hay hucking thrown in. It was in Iowa, there would be outhouses, and I could wear Carharts every day. I was convinced I was the next Laura Ingals Wilder/Annie Oakley… until my parents got in my way and sent me to a college-prep Episcopalian school instead.
    As an emancipated woman of 19, I walked away from my upbringing and forged my own version of Farm School. I went for the whole kit: a strawbale house I built, my own version of Manly (my ex-husband, 12 years my senior), even an elderly town doctor. I topped it off by working at Williams Sanoma one holiday season so I could get a price break on the ever important matching crème brulee set and Le Cruset 14-quart roaster. I composted, collected gutter run-off for landscaping, and had a professional window-washing squeegee so as never to spoil the mountain views.
    And then I walked away from all of it.

    New Hampshire is lush this time of year. The vastness of it all pulls at me. Reminds me of what I used to want. Makes me want it again. On the phone, outside of a shop on the main street of North Conway, NH, I told my friend Victoria that maybe I would just chuck it all, move to the northeast, and start a lettuce farm.     
    “Okay, then what?” She said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Let’s put it another way,” she clarified, “how long, exactly, after you started your lettuce farm will you have written a book about lettuce and be on a lettuce tour?”
    
    For the first three years after I graduated from college, I casually omitted I’d even attended an institution of higher learning. Back in college, I’d completed every assignment I’d ever had a week before it was due, and then suddenly I was living in the world of the chilled out mountain people—I was trying to be one of the chilled out mountain people—and I was not going to blow my cover. I was going to make it work.
    Across the mountains from where I was in Estes Park, was Telluride, Colorado. Telluride has the highest rate of divorce in the state—usually due to couples who move there looking to get away from it all and then realize that once away from it all what they really wanted was to be away from each other. Do we all have this fascination with being more remote? Think that it will save us?
    

    I leave New Hampshire and get on a connecting plane in Baltimore. I am surrounded by successful investment bankers with Armani suits. and just like that, I want my own peony crepe ensemble and everything that goes with it. I do not make sense, even to myself. And maybe I am not enough in either of these worlds because I am trying to be in both of these worlds.
    When I started dating again, post-marriage, I had a friend give me advice I’m still not sure I understand. Just because someone likes you, he said, you don’t have to like them. If I can picture myself in a half-finished cabin with an Oscar De La Renta dress in the closet, am I supposed to make that my goal? What if I can picture everything? Then what? The best I can figure out is that it’s time to acknowledge the person on the would-be lettuce tour. That certain things are bound to come with me wherever I go. Besides, a lettuce book is not such a bad idea, really. Most everyone eats it, right?

I’m traveling again. Back on planes, pilfering free internet from sidewalk coffee shops, and cutting the top off my travel face moisturizer to eek out the last of the goodness. After eighteen nights in my own bed it’s time to leave and check out the mattresses of the eastern seaboard. It’s time to put on my game face, the one that gets me through security with nail clippers and belay knifes and does not flinch when Katherine, the gate attendant who cannot pronounce Baltimore, tells us it will be yet another forty minutes before our plane arrives.
    I live in a bubble. Boulder, Colorado, where everything is so perfect it’s imperfect. Most people agree with me on major political points. Everyone recycles. Volkswagen van drivers recognize other Volkswagen van drivers with a two-fingered wave. I had not left the bubble for the past three weeks and when I did last Friday I realized what I had been missing. Normal people. The pride in that normalcy.
    I’m flying over the flooded Mississippi looking at lakes that used to be towns. I’m watching a graphic episode of Sex and the City on my computer while the woman next to me reads the bible with an accompanying pamphlet, complete with exercises, entitled “Letting the scripture explain your life.” The kid on my other side has a head that is pulsating in time to the beat of the music seeping out of his oversized headphones. I don’t get this at home.
    On my next flight I elbow-joust with an elderly gentleman for an armrest until I finally turn to him, make eye contact, and offer to rotate the perch on a twenty-minute basis. He agrees.
    I have not spent more than twenty-five days in a row in my own bed since I left the bed I shared with my ex-husband three years ago. Maybe it’s time to admit that I am on the go. Maybe its time to admit that this life—this one of random seatmates and conversations and observations of the other, is what I am really after. Because if I look at my calendar for the next twelve months I cannot find a twenty-five day stretch anywhere. Maybe it’s time to settle in, get on a plane, and pull out my favorite seatback glossy. I did that today and flipped right to The Million-Germ Eliminating Travel Toothbrush Sanitizer. I earmarked it. Then I wrote this note. And then I went back and un-creased the page. What if there are two million germs? I want the toothbrush that will take care of that. I might need it where I am going.

I never went to my college graduation. I got out of Jersey as fast as I could back then, got out and went west to where my new life was waiting for me with all of the mountains and rock faces and sage brushes I could find. I skipped out of the east a full month before I was supposed to sit through a commencement ceremony, and told myself I was making a logical choice. But I’ve regretted it since. Each time I have thought about college I have this confusing pang of feelings that is impossible to decipher. So I went back, last week, for my tenth reunion to figure it out.
     Turns out I made good choices 10 years ago. As much as I wanted or thought I might have missed something back then, I’m either still missing it now, or figured out I didn’t need it. It was good to go back. To see friends, to see a space, to sit as myself in that space, and to realize that it was as much me as anything is me. Which means I didn’t really figure it out, or decided I did not need to.
    It was hot and rainy and beautiful in Jersey last week. Everything was green and popping. After 14 hours of a weekend-long reunion, everything also smelled of beer. Princeton’s reunions are New Jersey’s largest annual beer consumption event. Try that one on for size. I did. I went there at the end of this first push of my book tour, after speaking and touring all around the country. I was raw, exhausted, and vulnerable to that over-analysis of choices past and present. But even when I debated not going, I knew that I was in the perfect space to voyage back to my college stomping grounds. I didn’t want to be put together. I wanted to be stripped to see what happened. Talking to friend before going they asked me why I was going—it’s just an exercise in telling people how cool you are, he said. For me it was an exercise in the opposite. It was an exercise for sitting in a space and seeing what it felt like. This was not the reunion that all of my friends were at. I spent a lot of time be myself. I spent a lot of time looking around and telling myself that this, like everything, is part of me. Sure, I wanted it to bring upon some realization. I wanted the girl I was at 21 to look at the woman I am now and tell me something to make it all make sense. But when I got there I instead just shook my head at the girl still inside of me.  

I’m home in Boulder for the next five days, three days longer than I have been in town for three months. I’ve been looking forward to this week for a long time, but when I drove into town last night I felt empty instead of relived. I’ve become addicted to the road. The travel creates a sense importance. I need to be places, need to talk to people. Now I am just at home doing laundry.
    I wonder if I could do anything, if I just started doing it. And this is not about the skill, but more the tolerance. What can we get used to?
    A few weeks ago in Houston I was careening down the highway at 80mph and getting passed on each side of the 7-lane highway at 12:30 pm on my way to a hotel. The dome light in my rental car was out, and I used the slight glow from my dying phone to illuminate my directions. In the middle of it, instead of saying I was over it, I was trying to figure out if I could do it. But it really does not matter what you can do. It matters what you want to do. Or it does if you have the luxury of having the time and the resources to make changes from one to the other.
    I’m traveling around the country, at the tail end of the initial tour push. Along the way I am seeing everyone from my past, and just now figured out that beyond reconnecting with old friends, I am also trying on alternate versions of myself. There is the urban planner with his pediatric neurologist wife, the entrepreneur, the stay at home dad, the public defender. We all started from the same point. I know I’m lucky to do this. I’m lucky to do a lot of this. But it’s also incredibly tweaky to your head. Because after trying on every pair of jeans nothing feels good anymore and all you want is to just get out of the dressing room.
    And so I come home. And I did it even before Boulder. On Friday, my friend Sarah picked me up in her dying Previa Van at the end of the Commuter Rail outside of Boston. I sat on the floor in the back and realized I was breathing differently for the first time in weeks. I like to make things difficult for myself, always have. At one point I was supposed to go to the University of Chicago for college and the reasons I decided that this was the right choice were the following: everyone said it was the socially hardest place to go to school in the US, that it was impossible to have a life there, and that the academics were insane. Great, I thought, I am in. I will go and prove that I can do that.
    But proving that I can make it from the financial district to Lowell with 130 lbs of luggage is really not proving anything. I didn’t do this in my twenties, back then I was building a strawbale house on 4.5 acres bordering national forest land. When I left that house and that life, I thought I might have missed out on something else, that I might have wanted to be in central Boston or Miami, or that I should have been. But what I’ve come to figure out is that I might be in the right place after all. I get off the plane in Denver and think yes, this is home. But it only became home once I started going away.
    Choices are intoxicating. For all of us. Almost everyone I have visited with says the same thing. It’s like we try to limit them and augment them at the same time. I’d like to think that at some point we just chill the hell out and live them. Or that I will.