WHEN I WAS ten or eleven years old, my father and I stood at the edge of a sea cliff, watching the waves strike the rocks below us in starbursts of white foam. On impulse, I asked for permission to leave the path and climb partway down by myself, past steep and broken ledges to a small alcove. I thought he’d refuse. I don’t remember whether I was surprised when he allowed me to go—or whether I was afraid. I only remember the sudden solitude as I began to descend, the way the world seemed to crack between each handhold and the next. When at last I reached the alcove, I sat there, still and quiet, enfolded by air and stone. And then I scrambled back up toward the sounds of tourist voices and the fading of the day. For a moment, the sunlight dazzled and the dried sea salt sparkled in all the crevices around me. Each crystal was as bright and luminous as frost.
IN MY MID-TWENTIES, I finally asked my father why he’d let me climb down that cliff. He said, “I was watching you.” At first, I thought his answer made no sense: my father had been standing too far above me; there was no way he could have caught me if I’d fallen. Later, he added that he thought it was important for children to have a sense of independence, to explore their surroundings, to take minor, controlled risks. Although he had a Ph.D. in educational psychology, his theories might not have accounted for the realities of height, gravity, and a child’s body.
I was a graduate student, by then, at the University of Iowa. Soon after that conversation, I transformed the scene into a story for a fiction class. In that version, I described the stone as red. And when I try to recall it now, I imagine a rust-coloured precipice above sharp, black rocks. But I could be wrong. We’d spent so many days at different places along the New England coast. Over time, the separate landscapes blurred: the stone might have been ashen yellow, the beach sandy and flat. I can’t say for certain, anymore, how high the cliff actually was.
Around the time I tried to put that memory into words, I’d already started learning to climb with traditional gear on the limestone bluffs near my school. There, as I searched for holds, my fingertips traced the relics of long-extinct sea creatures, the smooth arcs of shells encrusted with frost-white crystals, the intricate hollows of lost exoskeletons. Reflections of rivers flashed across the cliffs like the ghosts of ancient oceans. With each route, new layers of sensation accumulated between me and that original experience, until the sea cliff became more and more faint—the flicker of a distant shoreline beneath the edges of a dark fog.
“Her fear subsided,” I wrote about this child who was no longer myself, “and she felt something between pain and joy in the light on the waves and the rock, the water and the ledge reflecting and absorbing the warmth of the sun, a feeling of all-encompassing and incongruous safety.”
WHATEVER REALLY happened that day, these fragments of memory have lingered in my mind: inexplicable, ominous, radiant. When I began working on the fiction story, I wasn’t planning to climb ropeless again. Lead climbing seemed dangerous enough: I was still a novice, struggling to place protection in the rippling cracks and rain-filled holes of Iowa’s brittle limestone. One late-autumn morning, I put my writing aside and hiked with a friend through dry, yellow fields into the leafless woods of Indian Bluffs. At the base of a cliff, he opened his pack and realized he’d forgotten to bring any gear. We sat for a while, sharing a single cup of warm, sweet tea.
He asked me if I’d ever wanted to “free solo”—to climb without a rope. His face trembled a little as he smiled. He didn’t know that I already had. The sunlight spilled, pale and almost silver, across the fallen leaves. The rock shimmered in the still, cold air. In retrospect, I think he expected me to say no. By the time we finished the tea, however, it seemed inevitable that we’d both solo the route, one by one. I went first. Stone features separated into disjointed images: a dusty overhang; a narrow ledge. Dead plants crackled under my hands. Dirt filled the empty spaces in the rock. Fear descended and then drew back. Blue sky rushed down a stone chimney like a tide. Some light seemed to explode within me, shattering everything that was not itself. At the top, I held on to a tree, waiting for my friend, while the forest reeled.1
Back in Iowa City, I walked downtown alone, staring at the ginkgo leaves that swept like yellow paper fans across the sidewalks, forming and unforming tessellated patterns as wind and feet displaced them. It was like learning to see again. Shapes and colours lost their dulled, familiar meanings. Sunlight paled across the storefronts. Brick walls shone like the backs of oak leaves. Through the windows of restaurants and bars, the hunched forms of other people wavered, dim and luminous, as if underwater. I felt an expanding tenderness toward everyone and everything. It was as though I’d broken through into some secret, more essential and more beautiful world.
IN THE CLASSIC book Climbing Ice, the American alpinist Yvon Chouinard declared, “Most climbers are a product of their first few climbs.”2 Over time, my memories of those two initial solos transformed into a kind of personal myth, at once alluring and unsettling. Long after I left Iowa for bigger cliffs and real mountains, I found myself returning to easy, unroped, solitary climbs. Along golden alpine ridges or in shadowed blue-ice gullies, I’ve chased that brief, sharp sense of joy like the receding eddies of some vast and oceanic light.
Like most climbers, I’ve listened to endless debates about the morality of our pursuit. Often, the matter gets reduced to the same contrasts between selfishness and self-discovery, responsibility and freedom, ordinary existence and transcendence. Of all the justifications for climbing, I’m most drawn to the argument that “it’s not a sport, but a spiritual experience.” Yet I hesitate to use the word spiritual for actions that place my life at risk. And I wonder whether my early solos provided only an illusory shortcut, a trespass into a realm more genuinely and more respectfully reached through years of meditation or prayer.
During the late twentieth century, the American alpinist Gregory Crouch spent several seasons in Patagonia, revelling in the eerie music of storm winds, the fleeting pulse of sun on rime, the “full power of desire.” At the end of his memoir Enduring Patagonia, he asked: “Does alpine ascent have value? Is it a noble endeavor honored by the gods, or a sin against the will of God?” He concluded, “I do not know.” Perhaps, he added, “I have made an intellectual choice for sin, for by climbing dangerous mountains, I do not honor the divine sanctity of life.”3
Nonetheless, in many cultures, the impulse to climb strains with metaphysical longing. In 1977 an Italian Catholic priest, Don Arturo Bergamaschi, led the first ascent of Latok II, a 7,108-metre tower in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan. Gradually, his expedition left behind the last apricot trees and stone villages for an isolated realm of hanging glaciers, violent avalanches, and shining walls. There, he felt small and vulnerable—and yet deeply at home. In an article for Alpinist 30, he wrote, “Something [about the high peaks] attaches itself to us, inside. It’s a feeling we will never conquer.”4 He told one journalist, “To seek after the soul of a mountain means to seek God.”5 That same year, Ashraf Aman became the first Pakistani to climb K2. “Mountains are my soul,” he later told me. Atop the world’s second-highest mountain, he remembered a passage from the Koran: “O ye mountains! Sing you back the praises of Allah.” Below him stretched an immensity of bright mountains and winding glaciers. Everything, he said, seemed “busy with meditation and constant praise of their nurturer.”
As the mountain writer Maria Coffey researched her 2008 book Explorers of the Infinite, she became “increasingly convinced that extreme adventurers break the boundaries of what is deemed physically possible by pushing beyond human consciousness into another realm. Their experiences give a glimpse of those unimagined levels of existence.”6 Around the turn of the last century, the Canadian climber Barry Blanchard spent years attempting the Emperor Face of Mount Robson, which the Texqakallt people named Yuh-hai-has-kun, “the mountain of the spiral road.” High on its walls, he gazed at the frozen wave of a cornice and for an instant he found himself transfixed, dreaming of some “underlying pattern of existence: the plumed whorl of a storm, the snail-like shape of the inner ear, the trail of stardust whirling into a black hole; structure and chance; aspiration and destruction; hidden unity; increasing chaos.”7 In 2002, when he finally climbed the face to the summit, he howled.
If mountains can represent our inmost selves, as the psychologist Carl Jung once said, then how many climbers start up their flanks hoping they might see into the heart of life, into the unconscious universe itself? How many of us feel that the consequences of never seeking that vision could be worse than the chance of death?
EVEN IN backyard wild places, the line between the sacred and the forbidden seems to blur. To transgress, in English, doesn’t only mean to “violate a law.” It can also signify “to go beyond a boundary or a limit.”8 In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, the Protestant theologian Belden C. Lane describes high peaks as “dream symbols” of moments when people “transgress the limits of culture, language, all the personal boundaries by which their lives are framed . . . In stretching the self to its edges, the geography helps in forcing a [spiritual] breakthrough.”9
When I was a teenager, my mother, my little sister, and I trespassed for several winters on the large frozen reservoir near our house. A year or so earlier, a woman had drowned after falling into the cold water. Ever since, the local authorities had stopped people from approaching the shorelines. For my mother, it was as though a glass barrier had sealed off her favorite landscape. My father had recently left, and her days were filled with traffic-jammed commutes, bleak office work, and relentless bills. Gliding across the immensity of the ice provided rare instances of escape. And so, well after dark, when we were least likely to be caught, we packed our skates and stumbled along the forest paths toward the pond.
One evening, the temperatures dropped to an arctic cold. Under the full moon, the black ice shone like the night sky. Trapped far below the surface, air bubbles gleamed like galaxies of stars. Cracks spread in filaments of white. Midway across the pond, my sister and I looked back: my mother’s shadow swooped toward us in the silver air, her arms outstretched to the wind. “I never wanted that night to end,” she said, years later. “It was so vast and wonderful, so freeing. That pure joy of a child. You don’t forget those moments, and afterward, they become a part of who you are.”
CLIMBING WRITING is full of allusions to crossing thresholds: from tales of early explorations on imperial frontiers to modern catchphrases like “the cutting-edge” and “the limits of the possible.” A long tradition of lawlessness also exists within the margins of its history: trespassing, unpermitted ascents, drug use. In Straight Up, James Ramsey Ullman describes how the American mountaineer John Harlin II became obsessed with Aldous Huxley’s book on mescaline, The Doors of Perception: “The expansion of experience, and resultantly of consciousness, was precisely what [Harlin] considered the living of life to be all about.” Instead of using psychedelic drugs, as many of his peers did, Harlin relied solely on immersion in the natural world to push his mind past ever-farther boundaries—until, at last, he could emerge “from a sauna bath into the winter landscape and . . . [hear] the snowflakes falling around him.”10
After Harlin fell to his death on the Eiger in 1966, his friend Ted Wilson summed up his life: “Whatever [Harlin] was trying to be, always, was something he was.”11 If there is a peculiar redemption for climbers and adventurers, it may exist along those narrow borderlands between the audacity of our presumption and the humility of our awe. It may echo within us, in such bright and imperceptible sounds as the falling of the snow, in such moments when we truly are—a state too intimate to be expressed, justified, or understood.
In seventeenth-century Japan, the Zen poet Basho set off, one day, to climb Mount Gassan. Around his neck, he wore a bleached-cotton hood and a ritual white paper rope. Afterward, in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he recounted miles of scrambling through cloud layers, up glassy slopes of ice and snow, “till at last through a gateway of clouds, as it seemed, to the very paths of the sun and the moon, I reached the summit.” He recorded only pieces of what he saw there in a series of haiku: the wan sliver of the moon, the black shadows of the peaks, the disintegration of the clouds. Unable to reveal any more of the “holy secrets” of Mount Yudono, he burst into “reticent tears.”12 Again and again, his mountain stories broke off. He could merely take his readers to the limits of the sayable—and then into wordless light.
DURING ONE of the workshops of the 2005 Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing program, a participant pointed out that when climbing writers turn dangerous adventures into art, we commit another transgression: we encourage readers to take part in activities that might kill them. One woman replied that an author’s most important duty is simply to tell the truth, whatever it is, regardless of the consequences. Today, as I approach my forties, I’ve become increasingly aware of how elusive that truth can be; of how much is refracted by time, memory, imagination, and desire. I believe that children shouldn’t climb steep cliffs without a rope, that beginners shouldn’t solo technical routes. My only defence lies in the absurdity of beauty, a force that seems, at times, as unpredictable and overwhelming as grace.
The shape of my life still grows out of these transgressions. I don’t want my parents to regret what their actions have taught me: that in certain instants, wonder and joy take precedence over security and rules. In choosing beauty, thus, am I honouring or dishonouring life? The euphoria of adventure spills over into daily existence. The blue spark of a snowflake ignites on a driveway. A yellow band of evening light hovers on a neighbour’s wall. A stranger looks at me with a soft and weary face. All this, too, blazes with unveiled intensity.
With each climb, I feel a spreading calm, a growing quiet, binding me deeper to moss and stone, frost and ice, starlight and shadow. A hint of that incongruous safety still enfolds me on frozen waterfalls between the full moon and the snow, on those winter evenings when the rhythmic swing of an ice axe seems like meditation, and mere breathing feels like prayer. I clamber over the last narrow ice bulge through the thickening trees. A branch snaps, and the smell of pine fills the air, sharp and green. Something vast and inchoate flows through my mind like a faraway sea—full of so much yearning, so much love. And yet, like Gregory Crouch, in truly honest moments I have to admit: I do not know. And I’m also aware that I might be crossing yet another, more ambiguous boundary, in sharing these childhood secrets, with you, Reader, now.
1 Ives, Katie, “Afterimage,” Alpinist 11 (Summer 2005).
2 Chouinard, Yvon, Climbing Ice (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1978).
3 Crouch, Gregory, Enduring Patagonia ( New York: Random House, 2002).
4 Bergamaschi, Don Arturo, “Home: The First Ascent of Latok II,” Alpinist 30 (Spring 2010).
5 Bergamaschi, Don Arturo. Email message to author, February 7, 2010.
6 Coffey, Maria, Explorers of the Infinite: The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes—And What They Reveal about Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communication, and Touching the Beyond (New York: Penguin, 2008).
7 Blanchard, Barry, “Dragons in the Mist,” Alpinist 29 (Winter 2009–2010).
8 Merriam-Webster Online. merriam-webster.com.
9 Lane, Belden C., The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
10 Ullman, James Ramsey, Straight Up: John Harlin: The Life and Death of a Mountaineer (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968).
11 Ibid.
12 Basho, Matsuo, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, Trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (New York: Penguin Books, 1966).