Hoarding the Collection

It takes two people 94 days to use 36 rolls of toilet paper. This is pure science. This is my life. Or it is give-or-take the two half rolls I left behind in North Conway last week.

My friends Jim and Sarah came over on my last night in New Hampshire to load my van for me. They each went up and down the stairs a dozen times with me trotting/limping after them. I’ve been placed on carrying restriction by my friends, let alone my doctor, pre-back surgery this week. So Jim and Sarah carried big bins and boxes, and even scooped up the poodle when he was making a run for the van. I carried, well, nothing.

“Jim’s having van envy,” Sarah said, on one trip.

I followed her down the stairs to the parking area. Jim’s been climbing twice as long and twice as hard as I have, or will. “Think this looks good?” I asked him.

He harrumphed. The van was chock full of bins, boxes, skis, rice cookers and salad bowls.  “This used to look good,” he said. “Can’t say I envy it now.”

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Post Op

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.

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Transitions in Paradox

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.”

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Common Denominator

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.

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Edge Dweller

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 its 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 jeans 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.

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