Osito with Golden Retriver's (his favorite non-poodle breed) pictured above as inspiration for healingLast year, during my first winter in New Hampshire, I made the mistake of asking what one does for culture in North Conway. Not that wanting culture in North Conway is a mistake--you can want it--you’re just not supposed to admit you want it. Especially not to someone like Freddie.

         When I slipped last winter and inquired about culture, Freddie and I were in a car driving back from climbing. I don’t remember what spurred me to ask him, but I do remember his answer: “That’s what we come here to get away from,” he said.

         I used the same line to my father last week. This time, I was the one defending New Hampshire. No one in my family has ever spent time in New England. They don’t get New England. I can’t say I do yet either, but I’m trying.         

         I have a mechanic here, I have a good coffee shop, and I have friends. I have a vet that drives me home from his office when my car won’t start the night after my poodle’s knee surgery. The night my poodle was supposed to spend in the hospital, the night my vet called and told me that the poodle was in no uncertain terms willing to spend the night away from his mother.

         Said poodle had just received the single most expensive operation he will have in his lifetime. He has a bionic knee now, of sorts. It was not the most practical decision of my life; knee surgery on an elderly dog with cancer is seldom referred to as practical.  But it wasn’t my life I was making the decision for. It was partially the poodles, and partially something greater.

         In the weeks it took me to decide to do the surgery, I watched Osito and processed the sinking feeling that loosing him will be the final bracket to a period of intense loss in my life. I resigned myself to this. I saw it. And then I saw it differently.

         This was something I could do something about. I could not go back and save any of my friends from getting killed, I could not change the course of their actions, say good bye to my grandmother, learn more French to tell her how much I admired her, stop the storm from coming or Charley from going. But I could fix the poodle.

         Rehab: Yes, that is a Zeebra in the crateSo I did. Ostio went into surgery and came out with a 15-pill regime for antibiotics, chemo, painkillers, and the one extra pill he has to take to make sure he doesn’t upchuck the other pills. The night he was supposed to spend at the hospital there was a party in town for Freddie’s engagement to Janet. All of my friends would be there. It was the NH culture event of the winter. The vet called as we were heading out the door.

         Poodle parents are not supposed to see their dogs when they are sedated and 4 hours post knee surgery. But Osito was determined. He was tearing his paws on the kennel door.  I brought him home with a leaky backside, glazed eyes, new lampshade cone, and a sling to hold up his rear end. I changed from my party clothes into my loungewear. I lay down next to the poodle and iced his knee. Together we shared a box of Annie’s Mac and Cheese, the organic kind because that is his favorite. We went to bed at 9.

An over-examined life threatens the chances of being content. I write this as if I understand and live this belief. I’m far from it. But every now and again, I get a part of it. I get that culture might not be what surrounds you weather you access it or not, but that instead, it might be what engulfs you when you need it. It might be the half-dozen friends who sign up to carry the poodle up and down the stairs, medicate him, and tell him, as suggested, that he really is the most handsome poodle in the world while you’re gone at work in Montana. It might be your mechanic suggesting that washing your van would be the first step in protecting it from the northeastern salt-erosion. It might be finding a support network away from home in your boyfriend’s family—for yourself, the poodle, and for him as he single-parents the poodle for a week by himself. And it might be learning that my kind of culture, this year, is somehow tied to a 60-pound poodle who’s two weeks post-op, and kicking ass.



Returning Home to the Portland, Maine AirportI started skipping winter without knowing it, a few years back. Today, 1.5-inches of rain into the New Hampshire afternoon, I’m making up for what I missed. The poodle has to go outside to go to the bathroom, and I promised him I’d take him once the rain let up. That was three hours ago. I’d let him out to go by himself, but all he’d do is wait for me at the top of the stairs, his back right leg permanently kipped up in protest against the pain.

This dog is teaching me lessons. They likely all do. Three weeks ago, I held all 60-pounds of him on my lap in the vet office in North Conway. The last time we were there was ten months prior, for what turned out to be a floating bone in his neck. When Dr Alfred asked this time how we are, I tried to let the information out gently. In between talking about Osito’s sudden limp and the skiing that day, I let it slip that he was diagnosed with cancer.

Later, I called three different vet offices to all fax their records over. I pictured a giant spool of information finally coalescing in New England. Surgery in Jackson, check ups in Boulder, drugs in Bozeman. I didn’t even tell the vet, himself, about Bozeman, I just tacked it on to the list for the receptionist, hoping no one would notice what suddenly seemed to be not, as I had envisioned it, the perfect life of a poodle who got to join his mom in the world, but the clear trail of evidence of a poodle trying to keep up.

NH Recovery ModeA week of leash walks, no deep snow, and opium (for the poodle) later, I left North Conway at 3:30 am and headed east to go west. I distrust anyone else who is driving at that hour. I always want to know where they are going and what business they have. But that morning, I am the one with faded license plates from 2200 miles away affixed to a large white van.

I listened to a rocky mountain serenade compiled by my Montana mother who wanted me to move to Bozeman as I passed towns I still cannot pronounce like Ossipee and Moultonborough. The aussie man on my GPS had a better new England accent than I did and I muted him in retaliation.

When I was seven, my father married my stepmother. I sang Don’t Fence Me In at their wedding. In someone’s defense (mine? theirs? the piano players?) it was one of my best numbers at the time. I repeated it that morning on my mother’s mix. I repeated it again for the rest of the ninety-minute drive.

12 days, three speaking events, one Waypoint Namibia film premier later, I came home to New England. I knew I was home because I have a toaster oven. I would never buy one, but the beauty of renting your 6^th home in a year is that you’ll eventually have one anyway. The poodle, with his limp and his chemo greeted me at the door. His regimen of eight pills at three different daily intervals was chronicled in the spreadsheet I’d printed out as a checklist when I left. According to the vet, the poodle should have been putting weight on his back leg by now. Instead, he had perfected the hop-along canine routine. Within days we were back at the vet clinic so that I could understand just how to be a mother to a cancer-fighting poodle with a bum knee.

Waiting in the office, I looked at Osito and asked him what he wanted. Would you be a happier poodle out west? East? Here? There? With each place I offered, his head tilted a bit more. Sri Lanka? Could he even see me through the tunnel of hair surrounding his eyes? By the time Dr. Alfred came in I had embraced the life stability that would come from the poodle’s terminal cancer. I pictured one home with one bed in which he would be surrounded by endless stuffed jungle animals to accompany him during his last months.

An hour later, the poodle was knocked out with a metal bar spanning his mouth. Dr. Alfred pulled out his tongue and Osito’s eyes rolled back. There was no more tumor. Not to the eye. Terminal cancer was suddenly conditional.

On the drive home I started up the CD player and Bing sang us home. It’s been twenty-five years and I still had no idea what a Cayuse is. I sang it anyways, and when I got home, I carried the poodle up the stairs and cut the hair around his eyes, going too close so that he now looks constantly surprised.

That was three days ago.

It’s still raining outside, today. It’s time to heft him down the stairs. One day, soon, I have to decide what to do about his leg. I have to decide what to do about our home. But for now, I’m carrying him into the rain and won’t stop him when he heads straight for the deep snow.



Where I started: Jima Airport, SW EthiopiaThree weeks ago I flew from southwestern Ethiopia to central Montana, in six flights. When I arrived at the Bozeman airport, at 11:45 pm. I’d been traveling for thirty-eight hours. It was -5 degrees outside, a 75-degree drop from where I’d started. My van, choked full of a winter’s assortment of climbing gear, files, and poodle food, was waiting in the parking lot. Peter and I tossed in our bags and, when the sliding door would not stay shut because of the cold, I held it closed on the drive to what would become our home for the next twenty-two days.

The next morning, mid-unpack, jetlagged, and missing my gloves, I met Gretchen, a friend of a friend for coffee.  I warned her of my state in my greeting. “This might be a bad idea,” I said. “I’m probably about as least like myself, or most like myself, as I could be.”

Gretchen smiled compassionately. “Transitions are always hard.”

This was the right thing to say, and true. I felt better from the validation. But then I thought about the coming months of homestead auditions in Bozeman and North Conway, and the previous months in Jackson, Boulder, aMidway: Spa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopiand Africa.  I’m not sure what that right ratio of excuse to action is, but it stands to reason that the 50% threshold is one not to exceed for the former.

When I first learned how to be a mountain guide, my mentor repeated one word more than any other: transitions. Transitions were the single difference between climbing and guiding, and the efficiency and ease with which you managed your transitions would be what set you apart as a great guide. Transitions were not something to use as a crutch, but something to master.  Transitions were not a state in which to wallow, or a state in which to call up your friends and tell them, for the sixth time that year, that you just couldn’t seem to switch time zones, climate zones, or terrain zones.

My father says I have always had a plan. As a kid I used to plan out our Saturdays with the most efficient order of errands, schematically maneuvering us between Target, the grocery store, the bookstore and the ice cream shop where I had a crush on the head scooper. Granted, it’s harder to manage all of adulthood so it lines up just so, but I certainly try.

Tomorrow I start packing up from Bozeman to head to North Conway. Last night on TV, Peter and I watched an ad for the Space Bag. For $19.95 we can compress our lives into ¼ the size. We just need a vacuum. They provide the plastic bags. This might be the new solution to cross country travel. I considered buying it just to fit in with the other TV shoppers in the world—some skewed sign of stability. And then I considered buying it as a way to perpetuate my increasing justification for the stuff that I deem necessary to buttress all of this movement. This time around, I have two printers and a giant ball chair. We’re not even going to talk about the climbing and skiing gear. Right now I’m running in a dead heat between everything being in use in a home and packed in the van.  But instead of calling the 1-888 number, I went to bed.

Last Stop: Bozeman Ice Festival, 2009It’s raining this morning in Bozeman. In the time I have been here, I have learned that I could call this town home. I’ve learned that the space between stability and permanence might only be in my head. I’ve learned that each friend I lose in the mountains hurts more than the next. And maybe I’ve learned that the real unspoken challenge is the transition from the transition. It’s the let down after the conquering of logistics. It’s the moment when you’re back in your tent with no other task to manage than the questions in your own head about the choices you are making each time you step outside. It’s the morning you wake up and realize that the only place you have to go that day is toward a more complete understanding of why you are where you are.



The trouble with having a blog is a sudden desire to take basic elements like your decision to go to Africa with shoes that suddenly feel too small, how to fix the squeak of your van with a wooden spatula, the death of your grandmother, the unexpected appearance of antivenin five months after you needed it, and an utter sense of self-imposed displacement equal only to the sleep-deprived elation of a new project, and put it together in a pithy way as some sort of logical explanation of life.

         Instead, I think I might just talk about the rodents. They were the least expected. On Monday I gave my first talk about Namibia at Colorado College. Somewhere between addressing the conservation work and the climbing, I talked about snuggling rodents. It was not planned.

    Up on the screen, there was a shot of Peter excavating what he later coached me to say “a large pothole.” Up on stage, however, I looked at the sunken muddy hole in the ground and all that came to mind was a coffin, for a raccoon.

     I’m relatively good at thinking on my feet. I knew I should not talk about raccoon coffins with this crowd, and I should really not mention the coffin thought as a launch point to explain just why I have a current propensity to think of things from the lens of loss and the mechanics of death.

    So instead I did what any well-trained public speaker would do.

    “And this here,” I said, “is a hole that is just big enough for two little rodents to crawl inside…and snuggle each other.”

    I flipped to the next slide. Beforehand, I may or may not have used my laser pointer to illuminate said snuggle spot. Soon, I was back to the subject at hand—Namibia. I would have fully forgotten about the slip had it not been for Peter.  A few hours later, driving north on I-25, he leaned over and patted my knee the way you do to someone whom you love, but someone who needs to be set straight. “Sweetie,” he said, “what was up with the rodents?”

    72 hours later, I’m in Minneapolis, at dinner with my father and stepmother. It is hour six of a twenty-four hour stopover en-route to Ethiopia. My dad and I have been planning on this time, and he, as he put it, wanted to “take my pulse." Since I was a child, I have understood this to be a poorly translated Polish expression for: grill your daughter.

   My father starts by placing his elbows on the table and stretching his fingers.

   “So, you left your house in Boulder,” he says, wiggling his pinky finger to represent, I am to understand, Colorado, “drove to Montana…”

   I nod.

   “And now you have a home in Montana?” he asks. His pinky is straight, and still, perhaps to represent northward movement.

     “I will,” I say, “For December.”

    His thumb starts wiggling. “And then, a home in New Hampshire?”

    I want to point out that if, technically, the pinky is Colorado then the thumb as NH makes no sense, and if NH is the thumb, then California should be the pinky, but certainly not Colorado.

   “Not yet,” I say, “But Peter is working on it.”

   His other hand starts to levitate and I know it’s about to be Africa. 

   “I know it’s hard to track me,” I say.

   My father smiles. He loves when I make his point for him. He grows quiet as he reaches across the table to hold my hands in his. “I just want to make sure this is what makes you happy.” And before I can reply, he adds, “It can’t make you happy. It is too much real estate.”

    Though my father has never lived in Boulder, he, like many who live there, think of it as the center of universe. His daughter leaving that center seems unfathomable. We debate this, on 50th and Penn in south Minneapolis, 4,671 miles from, and ten hours past, the death of my grandmother in the my father’s family home in Warsaw, Poland.

    Two weeks ago, Peter and I were heading toward our second take on a fall vacation. (You can read about our first at Edge Dweller). We were five hours toward Moab when my neighbor Sally called to say her husband Charley was not likely to make it another day.

   In the last stretches of daylight, Peter and I had ensconced our hands in white athletic tape and blended the seams together to forge some layer of protection from the anticipated stone. Four empty shells looked out on the dashboard the whole way back to Boulder. Charley died the next day. For the following weeks, I packed up my house and touched every item I own as if shifting possession like sand through my hands. With each trip outside, I looked across the street and saw some memory of Charley. If he were there, he would have weighed in on my packing strategy. He knew about my plan, and he would not have been surprised that I had four piles in my bedroom: Montana, Ethiopia, NH, and Boulder.

   Charley will never meet my dad, but if they had, they would have had four hands to track me on, instead of two.

   Maybe there is a phone app somewhere that will make sense of this all. It could graph me, predict me, explain to my father why his daughter, the one that was so hell bent on building a home and having all of her things in one place when she was 21, now asks him to please hold onto her childhood dollhouse for just a while longer because she has no where to put it.

   I don’t remember if, when I was little, I played house with singular focus, or if I made that house a home in a dozen different lands and landscapes. Or maybe I was like my niece and nephew who yesterday took my hands and led me into an entire mansion inside the space of my father’s guest bedroom. We had a kitchen, a garage with plenty of bikes, two dog beds, lions, and rocks to climb.

   Right now I’m in Amsterdam. There is an automated female voice telling Ashtan Koohleny that he is delaying the flight of a plane to Dubai. If he does not come soon, they will proceed to offload his luggage. They don’t threaten like this in Denver.

   Two flights to Warsaw have departed since I arrived. I am going to Addis Ababa, by way of Khartoum. My grandmother’s funeral is next week. My father will return to the land he left when he was twenty-one and start the process of understanding a new life without a mother, as a man who’s lived his whole adulthood away from his motherland. 

    And in the meantime, I will arrive in a foreign and familiar land. After this trip, I will have spent four and a half months in Ethiopia in the past four years. If you graphed it, it would be just as much of a home as I’ve had in that time.

    My life is about to consist of bright red coffee cherries and hot African sun. I'd be lying if I didn't say I was in it, right now, for the buzz.

Cathedral Ledge, Photo by Peter DoucetteYou might not believe what I’m going to tell you. You might—if you have read things I have written in the past months—think I have some perverse law of attraction with tragedy. But maybe the truth of it is that I am trying to turn the tragedy around. When you find a dead body on your second day of vacation, you might have no other choice.   

    Peter and I were in New Hampshire when it happened. We’d spent the day climbing cracks at Cathedral ledge that started off wet at the bottom, behind the shade of trees, and turned crisp and dry when the sun hit their full depths up higher. By four we’d ditched our packs in the car and walked along the base to survey other routes. The ground was spongy with slick roots and cavernous leaf piles.

    Peter saw him first, and put out his arm the way you do when you careen to a stop in the car, and you’re the driver, stopping, and want to keep the passenger safe, even though you know your arm will never accomplish that on it’s own.

    I walked right through his arm. I walked closer to the man’s crumpled and twisted body knowing I might never forget the image or the experience, but knowing it was part of my life already. Over the next two hours, we brought rescuers to the man and ran trips up and down the trail with supplies. Each time I returned, the man became real to me as a father or a brother, or a husband with the receipt from the hardware store still in his back jean pocket. He was not a climber, though I automatically envisioned him one with sticky rock shoes and a harness full of unplaced gear.  In the end, he was a man who’d driven to the top of the cliff the day before and made the choice to never return home.

                                                                            ----

    A few nights before I left for New Hampshire, I went to an impromptu anniversary celebration at my neighbors. Sally and Charley were toasting their 37^th year surrounded by a group of seven friends—none of whom were married. Charley held court on this fact, shaking his head at the rest of us in our 30’s and 40’s at some point along the decision course.

  “Just get over it, already,” he said. “That’s what we did.”

    Sally told a story about their meeting and Charley piped in about the dress she was wearing. Sally corrected him. Charley turned to the group: “See that?” he asked. “ I have two choices. I can argue about it, or,” he shrugged his shoulders, “just say, I love her. That’s marriage—if you do it right.”

    I met Sally and Charley four years ago in Mexico. They enveloped me into their makeshift family via surf lessons complete with stick figures drawn in the hot sand. It was two months after my marriage had ended. Since then, they have been my stalwart friends through singlehood, dating, and partnering. They know me. And that is why, at the end of the night of talking about choices and partnership, Charley looked right at me when he offered his last bit of advice. 

    “That’s what’s wrong with you people in your thirties,” he said, “you all think too much.”

                                                                        ----

    Cathedral Ledge, New Hampshire, is not a stranger to suicide. The cliff stands sentinel on the flank of town and you can drive to the top and walk a few hundred feet to get to her edge. There’s a guardrail there, but intentions make that irrelevant. Because of the climbing that takes place at Cathedral, and the location, climbers, inevitably, are involved in the rescues when people take their lives.

    A friend told me that over the past five times he’s been called to the scene of a death, he has realized that the people who take their life do so with two different paths—they scootch, or they jump.

    Jumpers take the leap, arcing clear of the corners and trees until the final contact at the ground. Scootchers inch their way on foot, on backside, or on all fours, slowly toward the edge, and even past it as it rolls away. They tumble to their end. Jumpers are easier on the rescuers. They are still intact.

   Am I trying to liken falling in love with suicide? I hope not. It seems wrong. It seems inappropriate. It seems astonishingly insensitive to the people who loved the man we found. But every morning since that Monday afternoon at Cathedral, I’ve woken up thinking of these things together. And no matter how hard I try for them not to, they keep lapping up against one and other in my mind.

   I have not wanted to write about this. I have desperately wanted to write about this. There is little sense in the understanding or comparison. If we take declarative action, is it easier on others? If we should-I-shouldn’t-I, would-I-wouldn’t-I, our way through life, love, and action, what do we miss while we look for every option? Or what do we commit to without knowing the other side?

    I tell my friends constantly that adulthood is not what I expected. My parents and all the adults around me just lived—or so I thought when I was a kid. I did not see the off-screen life of decision making, or weighing choices. I saw the results. Now I have to live on both sides.

    I asked my sister why she married her husband. “I loved him. I loved how I felt around him.”

    “That’s it?” I said.

    I had just told her I was thinking about going to therapy with Peter, not because we needed it for some particular issue, but just in case. I’d recently proclaimed that if there was some insurance policy wherein you could guarantee that the choice you are making in love is the right one—instead of guard against the wrong one—I would be it’s first buyer. And as I write that, I am ashamed of myself. What if Charley found out?

    My mom says I used to be a jumper—and thinks I secretly still am. I think I am a jumper who scootches to catch up with herself.

    Maybe we are always faced with these two options. Maybe adulthood is knowing which to do when. Maybe finding that man, twisted and crumpled but intact at the bottom of a 500’ cliff face was supposed to make me examine all of this. Maybe Charley would say I am examining it all too much.  And here’s the kicker: He—Charley—since that moment at the party, has gone from the person at the dinner table goading me into declarative action with love, children, and surfing, to a man in the hospital fighting a battle for life with a cancer that won’t let go. Explain that. Scootch that. Jump it.  Then again, if I said that all to Charley, he would probably tell me I needed a vacation, which, of course, is what I was trying to do in the first place.

Omega, Cannon Cliff, NH. Photo by Peter Doucette

In conjunction with Climbing Magazine and climbing.com. Read online HERE.

This is a story without a conclusion. Maybe that will change by the end. At this point, I’m not betting on it. Four weeks ago, I wrote a piece about trying to understand death in the face of more death, and in spite of life. I thought that, by writing it, I would move on from it—be released from it.  But here’s the thing about writing about death: it creates conversation about death. And when you write about death and climbing, it creates a roar.

I can’t fully understand it, but I also don’t know if I am that surprised. I wrote about being scared as a climber. I wrote about questioning my choices. And suddenly, everyone else seemed to question my choices as well. My best friend from first grade wrote to ask me to please stick around until we are both old and can swap stories of our different lives.

“Maybe it’s time to reconsider the danger level,” he said. “I hope you are open to interesting twists and turns that may keep you in safer territory.”

I wrote him back: “I will be careful. I am careful. I am paying attention.”

My New York writing friend, a new mother, wrote and said, “Maybe it’s a good time to take it easy. I’m serious.”

I sent her a similar response to what I sent my grade-school friend, and as I typed it, I believed it, but I also wanted to take it back. I didn’t really want to send a response at all. I didn’t really want the note from her in the first place. I didn’t want to be reproached. And even though I knew it was out of love, I didn’t want to be questioned. It might have been because I didn’t want the questions to get in my way.  But really, it was because all the answers I could come up with sounded hollow and weak. But I still typed them onto the white space on my computer. What else was I supposed to do?

My grandmother has known I “climb” for over a decade. I don’t think she’d ever really understood what climbing meant, however, until a close family friend was killed on Denali. Now, she wants details. This past weekend we talked on the phone:

“What did you do today?” she asked me.

“Oh,” I said, “I spent some time outside and then…”

“Climbing? Did you go climbing?”

I was in my van with my hands still caked in chalk. She was in her bed with an ice pack over her cataracts. “Well, Gram. You see. It’s different…”

“You did,” she sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I was rock climbing though, it’s safer and, well, it was close to home and…” I didn’t want to make the comparisons, but didn’t know what other choice I had. “It’s not mountaineering, Gram. Or ice climbing, or…”

My grandmother has had two quadruple bypasses and lives within a 300-foot radius of her nursing home bed. But she also has a master’s degree and all of her mental facilities.

“But Majka,” she said. “You ice climb.”

I was quiet.

“In the winter, you ice climb.”

We’d all like for what we do to be different. I want to explain to the non-climbers in my life why what I am doing is different than what the friends I have lost were doing when they died. I think this will help, or should help. This is likely a similar response to the old adage of climbing being no more dangerous than driving. Right now, however, it’s a load of crap. There have been too many people who have gone in too many ways. There is only so far one can split a hair. It is all climbing.

I had dinner this past month with a woman in her 40’s who has just started climbing.

“I love it,” she said. “I can’t get enough of it.”

She was scarfing down a burger and a beer. Her face had the telltale glow of her first wind scouring alpine route. I wanted to cloak myself in her excitement just as much as I wanted to rip it to pieces with inappropriate stories of death that she did not really need to hear.

When people tell me to be safe, I immediately want to ignore them. I want to tell them, in an exasperated voice, of course, leave me alone, do you think I’m not already planning on that? Maybe that resistance is bred into us early on as climbers. Maybe we have to be that hardheaded to do it in the first place. And then, that separation from danger keeps us doing what we love.

I’m not saying that from a factual standpoint, that we don’t know that what we are doing has inherent risk. But if we spend all of our time thinking about that risk, we wont climb. I know, I’ve tried. Everyone around me, it seems, is trying.

A friend told me over dinner that she is having panic attacks. “On 5.7’s.”

She can climb 5.12.

“Maybe,” I said to her, “you’re finally having the normal human response. It just took this to have it.”

Would this be any different if we lived different lives? Is it insensitive or incorrect to think about people in Darfur, people in the military, people who die from starvation? Is there any way not to? Is death any easier if you are surrounded by it daily, if you finish one funeral meal and prepare for another? These recent looses seem seminal in my life, and even more so in the lives of others. I am not suggesting they should have less impact. I’m just wondering what to make of the weight of this, in the context of the privilege it seems we have as compared to others for whom death comes much more often.  Maybe these two thoughts don’t go together. But they keep doing just that in my head. What do we owe to that privilege?  How can we fully absorb the responsibility? 

When I was twenty, my fiancé’s best friend was killed in an avalanche. I was new to climbing, and ever since then, climbing was always complicated by loss—or, at least, the threat of loss. And then, horrified, I saw it play out in all of those ways for others. I have lived on both sides of this since that moment thirteen years ago. I have been the climber, the climber’s girlfriend, the one who has the epic, the wife at home when the epic is going down who envisions becoming a widow, the ice climber who steps out of the way of the falling rock just in time, the climber coming home a day late with no phone call to the non-climbing partner, and now, again, the woman who alternates between her own climbing excursions, and being the one at home looking out the darkening window and waiting for her partner to come back from the mountains or the crag.

But no matter what the role, loss was something I feared being foisted upon me—not what I feared foisting upon others. I’d never really realized that until now—when I have seen the ricocheting effects of loss on brothers, aunts, friends, ex-partners, enemies, co-workers—when I have felt the collective weight of loss in a community. I see this, and I have to call myself out on my own myth that my fear is limited to loosing my partner. Equal to that fear is now the fear of the impact of my death on those who love me. And so I can’t help but have two sets of responses to this new heightened sense of danger. Part of me does not want the restriction that comes along with it. The other part of me wants to impose the same restriction on the ones I love.

Is this too dark? Is it too light? I told you I would not get to a conclusion. I haven’t wanted to write more about this, but each time I open my email I see another note, each week I get another phone call, each time I re-connect with a friend, it takes less than ten minutes for us to be talking about death. This was not the case five months ago.

Me, back when it all startedIf you are tired of all of this, I will say this: I am, too. But I am not exasperated. I am tired in the way that all adults rub their eyes like children when they need to go to sleep. Maybe we are supposed to grow tired so that we revert back to that state of infancy in our climbing. When those first normal moments of fear and apprehension were equal to the elation and excitement. Maybe we should spend more than a moment here. Maybe I should.

It has been a long time since I have been here. Back when I started climbing, all I wanted was to get rid of that moment of hesitation and grab the achievement and the ecstasy.  Perhaps growing older, in the midst of loss, and in recognition of the privilege of life, deserves a re-visitation to that very first point where fear was natural and the full meaning of danger was acknowledged—even if just for a moment. And if I truly do that, then I can’t tell my friends or my grandmother that what I do is not dangerous anymore.

I don’t really have a plan for what I will tell them instead. But for now, it seems like the right idea to listen to them with respect. And then, when I find myself looking up at a incipient seam of granite or ice, to take that same respect with me on my way.

Read Part One of this Story at: Screaming Uncle at a Whisper

Last week, I left Jackson. I’d lived there just long enough to have a hard time leaving. I’d lived there just long enough to call it a home, though, to other more stable people, it seemed a stop on a quest for home.

         Sure, I lived in an unfurnished house on No Name Alley while strangers called my home in Boulder theirs. I ate my meals sitting on the floor while they ate at the dining room table my mother made; I leaned against a dusty log wall and watched movies on my laptop while they sat on my purple velour couch and watched a flat screen. And I worked, every day, perched on a metal folding chair pulled up to a vinyl-covered card table. But that makeshift desk was perched in front of window where, if you looked past the hospital, the highway, and the hills, you could see the top of the Grand Teton.

         Three weeks is about my tipping point to form attachments—to place, people, or project. I was in Jackson for eight. I saw the mosquitoes come, breed, and go, I saw my dog Osito get diagnosed with cancer, be told that I would have to syringe feed him, and see him re-learn to use his tongue and feed himself. I was there long enough to have a friend visit, and to have her be the one who shared the news of the loss of Craig Luebben, my fourth good friend to die in the mountains in three months. I was there long enough to get a late fee on my brand new library card.

         I paid it. And then I left.

         Or, I tried to. My van acted up—I got a flat in our driveway, the spare had a flat, the heat pan got knocked off. My heart acted up, too. Because here is the thing: I was in Jackson, as it turns out, for a man. I hate admitting this. It’s somehow embarrassing to my feminist perception of action in adulthood. Sure—I worked in Jackson, I guided for Exum—or that’s what I told/tell people. But really? I sat at that card table and watched the weather change on the Grand while I typed away on my projects. I could have done that anywhere—but I did in Jackson because Peter was there. And so it makes sense that on my last night in town, after a day of van maintenance, that I was trying to get back to Peter for a final evening together.

         It was tourist season in Jackson—an easy excuse for poor driving, over-consumption of sweets, and regrettable decisions on wildlife art. I drove through town thankful I was leaving the mayhem while people honked up and down the street. The van was loud, but it was a van, and it was having issues, and so I didn’t question the road noise until I took a sharp right turn and felt air woosh across my neck. The view in the rearview mirror looked suspicious. I pulled over. The back door—a 8X6 foot panel, in this case-- was swung wide open, with all of my disorganized trappings of life perched in the exposed shelf. Based on quick math, and my recall of the last time I had opened the back, it had been splayed wide for five miles, at an average of 35 MPH.

         I closed the door. I called Peter to tell him I would be late. I retraced my steps.

         I’d like to say this was shocking to me. I’d like to say something like this has never happened before. But there was that time in Namibia, three months ago, where Kate Rutherford and I thought that all of the odd looks we coming out way were due to being two women in a truck. It turned out then, as it did now, that the latch of the back had failed (by my not shutting it) and we’d driven through a tiny town on dirt roads oozing climbing gear from our Nissan.

         Last week, in Jackson, I drove back to the garage and realized I had no idea what I was looking for in the road. I was in the middle of packing when I had left. All of my stuff, some of my stuff, or none of it, had made it in the van at this point. Every time I tried to remember what was where, fuzzy images of other packing ventures in the past year intermingled with my thoughts. All I could do was trust what I found in the road. And all I found was nothing—until I took the last turn into the mechanic’s driveway and saw the shoe.

         Peter didn’t believe me when I told him back in the house on No Name. “That’s all you lost?” he asked.

         “I didn’t loose anything.” I said.

         “Just promise me you won’t be a pilot.”

         “Who says I want to be a pilot?”

         “Pilots have to check things. It’s important.”

         “I check things.”

         Peter just nodded.

         We spent the rest of the night wiping down cabinets, scrubbing the tub, and cleaning our rental home better than I clean my real home. We crawled into our bed—a combination of three thermarests, two foam pads, and one air mattress all cinched together under a fitted sheet, and went to sleep. The next morning I drove away, with the back firmly locked. I kept my shoe in the front with me for the whole 8-hour drive home. I don’t know what it means. It seems more important that it was not the right shoe. It seems important, in a threatening way, that it was not both. It was just one left shoe. Facing away, ready to run, ready to go, ready to be found.

Home In Namibia, Photo by Peter Doucette

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Quick test: What’s the first word that comes to mind when I say the following four places: New Hampshire, Namibia. Spain. Wyoming.

Did anyone else answer home? I’ve been in Wyoming for five weeks now, before that it was Europe for three, Namibia for five, and New Hampshire for 3.5 months before that. I pay a mortgage in Colorado, but I’m homesteading everywhere else.

Visitation implies a temporary sampling of an area. Homesteading implies making an effort at living in an area. I think I’m doing the latter—through climbing.

It’s that realization of “oh.. this is what the Teton/Pyrenees look like? This is what limestone in Spain/granite in Namibia feels like?” Climbers are tactile people—we want to go experience places for ourselves, so that we can know what they truly offer. It’s addictive, really, because the more you do of it, the more you want to know and experience.

My friend Elena is debating law school. She wants to go, but she also wants to go climbing.

“Would this be a last hurrah?” I asked her last night. “Before your other life takes over?”

She nodded.

“Well,” I said, “take a month then.”

She frowned. “A month barely seems like a hurrah.”

“More like a hu--?” I said.Home in Jackson

“Exactly.”

For most people, a month would be a luxury. But to anyone who’s tasted the freedom in a six-month roadie, a month is not nearly enough. A grumbling starts up in the guts of those who have sampled that life when they have been stagnant for too long. For Elena, that stagnancy manifested in a 40-hour/week management job in Jackson. For Adam, it was a twelve-month lease. August is half over and people are making plans for fall road trips. We all want to be on the move. We all want to climb around the next corner and see what we’ve been missing.

It makes me wonder—is it climbing that makes us like this, or do the people who are like this become climbers? My sister lives in Minneapolis, where we grew up. I told her I was recently debating moving to Bozeman, but wanted to try it out first.

“Can’t you just move there?” she asked. When I didn’t answer, she added her favorite addendum: “Normal people don’t just try out multiple places to live.”

I wanted to ask why not, but I knew the answer. Instead I tried to explain to her that if I did my research, and spent time in Bozeman during every season, experiencing rock, ice and snow, climbing through it all, then I might know if it were where I wanted to live. When I finished making my case, she sighed.

“Isn’t that what you were doing in New Hampshire?” She asked. “Or was that Jackson?”

My friend Sara used to want a business card with her relevant dating facts in fine print to hand out to interested suitors to speed up the process. I need one for the people who ask me where I’m from. Yesterday, on a boat across Jenny Lake en route to guide a family of five, I answered the question five different ways. The Tetons loomed in the background and I thought about the desert in Namibia. I thought about ice in Crawford Notch, and about my full set of dishes in Boulder. I didn’t stop thinking about it all through last night, and until I got up this morning and did the thing that I knew would anchor me best. I packed up my harness, my draws, and my poodle and went climbing.

Maybe climbers are nomads. Maybe we’re misfits. Or maybe we’re just another version of the original issue humans with curiosity about new places and the desire to find them.

Photo by Peter DoucetteSunday, August 16th was Craig Luebben’s funeral. Four weeks ago, Craig was the last person I saw at a memorial. We had a long conversation about risks, coming home, what makes it worth it, and what makes you stay. We talked about how tired we were of going to climbing funerals. We talked about how much each life lost augmented the last.

Craig died on Sunday morning (August 9th), and on Sunday afternoon I sat at my computer and googled “Craig Luebben Climbing Accident.” Ten pages of articles came up about books and pieces Craig had written about how to avoid them, and what caused them.

Here are the other words I have slowly typed into the oblong oval google search bar on my screen in the past eight weeks: Missing, Denali, accident, death, Tibet, soloing. Andrew Swanson. Jonny Copp. Micah Dash. Wade Johnson. John Bachar.

When you write out the words that someone is gone, does it make it true? How long can you stave off this reality? How much reality can you face at one time?

Inside the climbing world, we are quick with celebrations of life in the face of death. Publicly, we proclaim strength, explain facts, ask people to cheer through their tears. I have done this at more memorial services that I want to count in the past dozen years. I am exhausted, I am afraid, and I am wondering: does this much death in the mountains make you numb, or make you pay attention?

I was with my friends Kristie, Silas, and Cheryl when we heard about Craig’s death. Kristie and I are long time climbing partners, Silas is a guide, Cheryl is his girlfriend — who does not climb. Cheryl watched the three of us — the climbers — reel with the news. When we mentioned Craig’s wife and daughter she sank to the floor and started crying. Silas crouched down next to her to give her a hug and she pushed him away and grabbed for him at the same time. In the silence of the room she asked her climbing boyfriend one question: “What is it going to take to stop?”

This is the question none of us want to be asked. This is the question I have long sidestepped through esoteric answers about the boundaries of risk, of car, motorcycle and horse accidents, and padded rooms. This question is the reason we don’t tell our families when our friends die in the mountains. But sometimes we have no choice. Sometimes, like for me this past June, it is our families who tell us that someone has been lost.

Andrew Swanson was my sister and brother-in-law’s best friend, and he was killed on Denali. Andrew was a doctor — a “normal” person who climbed. And so, to mourn his death, I went to a normal funeral in Mankato, Minnesota, and felt my worlds collide.

I did not wear fleece or down or gather outdoors. Instead, I stood in a long line of mourners in suits and dresses inside a mortuary. I felt the collective loss of Andrew on everyone in that room, and saw the profound loss and confusion take a toll on the person closest to me in this world — my sister. And the next day, I listened to her tell me in anger and in grief about how she could not sleep the night before because she was planning my funeral while still trying to understand Andrew’s.

Two weeks after Andrew’s funeral, I woke up from a hot sleep wrapped in a wet towel around my stomach in lieu of a fan or a breeze, in the mountains of Mallorca, and turned on my computer for the first time in 3 days. John Bachar. Dead. I was in a house with two other climbers, and I walked out of my room to tell Boone the news. They were friends, and Boone turned a shoulder covered in a shirt he hadn’t washed in 3 weeks to me. I patted it. I started to cry.

Miguel Riera, the inventor of psicobloc (deep-water soloing) came in from the other room “What,” he said, what is happening?”

“John Bachar died,” I said.

“Solo?” Miguel asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh,” he nodded. “A good way to dead.” Before I could comment he said, “I would like to dead that way.”

“To die?” I asked.

“Or on my Yetti Ski.”

He meant jet ski, but I didn’t correct him. At least he could talk about death in another language.

“But solo would be better,” Miguel continued. “Perfect.” He looked off into the distance, as far as I could tell all there was to see was a large television screen, but for all I knew he was picturing his perfect cliff.

Twenty minutes later, he showed us a video of the newest psicobloc area. It’s a cliff that is over 200 feet tall. “It is easy at the top,” he tells me, “6a. You wont fall.”

I started to shake my head.

He smiled, "And if you do, you dead. Solo."

He looked off into the distance, as far as I could tell all there was to see was a large television screen, but for all I knew he was picturing his perfect cliff. Miguel didn’t want to die — he loved being alive more than almost anyone I’ve ever met. But loving being alive, for Miguel, seemed to mean an acknowledgment of how close to death he could come. 

Micah Dash, Jonny Copp and Wade Johnson. Photo courtesy of AdventureFilm.org

A week after Bachar’s death, I came back to Boulder for Jonny, Micah, and Wade’s memorial. As Craig and I stood at the outskirts of the gathering, I told him the story of Andrew’s funeral, and of Miguel in Mallorca. We’d known each other for twelve years, and had shared an equal amount of memorials. “Do you think we value this all too much?” I asked him, “or not enough?”

Craig didn’t have answers. But what he did have was the perspective of a father and a husband, the perspective of a man who had knowingly taken great risks at one point in his career, and had decided to take far fewer, now, because of his love for his family. And now, he’s gone, too.

This is not an article. This is just me trying to understand the loss of too many friends. In closing, all I can tell you is this: I didn’t want to pick up the phone and tell my sister about Craig. I didn’t want tell her that another friend of mine had been killed, climbing. But I made myself call her. I made myself stare at the junction of loss and choices and questions and love. Maybe this will make me make different choices. Maybe it will make me ask more questions. What it will do, no matter what, is make me admit that these worlds we live in and the choices we make are all intertwined. It’s a basic understanding, for many. But sometimes, as climbers, we pretend otherwise. Maybe it’s time we stopped doing that.