JANE CAWTHORNE AND E. D. MORIN
E. D. MORIN: We’ve had some great conversations since starting this project. There were pieces we hoped we would get on certain topics, one of which was women who pursue sports in later life. We wanted to hear from and about women who were at the top of their game athletically. Or who felt physically and mentally liberated for the first time in their lives. Women who could devote their energies to higher physical pursuits to an extent that wasn’t possible while devoted to a career and a family.
My sister Lou Morin, whose “Hidden Talents” appears in this anthology, expressed how her own experience confirmed this phenomenon: “On a practical level, there are certain pursuits that are incredibly hard to pull off during childrearing years. Crazy as it seems, I wasn’t able to walk anywhere in the city for twelve years before my son entered junior high. And that’s not even mountain climbing! Until then, in order to hold a job, I had to drive my son to and from school. I had to drive everywhere.”
Somehow Jane, independently, you and I chose to pursue mountaineering when we were hovering around the fifty mark, right before our kids left home. There was something going on at that time. It was no coincidence, especially living near the Rockies as we both did then. I’ve noticed the recreational climbing world is populated with a significant number of women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. What do you make of that?
JANE CAWTHORNE: I can’t call myself a climber, but it’s true I got attracted to the sport in my late forties. I’d always been a hiker and wanted to get to places I hadn’t been able to reach before — real wilderness. My own story is complicated by cancer. Was it recovering from cancer that made me want this? Or menopause? It is impossible to know and impossible to separate the two. But yes, there is something to what you are suggesting. Or maybe it is because women our age have a deep need to get away from people, to go somewhere more elemental where the usual restrictions and expectations don’t apply.
E.D.: There’s something universal going on here beyond mountains and climbing. Maybe we’ve played out our roles as baby-makers and child-minders, as peacemakers, as love objects even. Maybe we’ve secretly despised these roles, even as we celebrated, endured, or encouraged them. At this point, we needed to unlearn all that. Maybe it was time to raise some hell of our own, but on our own terms.
I recently watched Pretty Faces, an all-female ski film by Lynsey Dyer. There was something absolutely novel going on there. The film highlighted the usual aerial stunts and epic ski lines (these so-called pretty mountain faces) but in an exuberant, infectious way. No lone-king posturing here. Instead these women were enjoying being powerful together, in pairs, in trios, having silly badass fun. It was about the narrative, about female friendships. In one fell swoop Dyer, an accomplished mountain skier in her own right, managed to humanize the entire ski film genre. One of my all-time heroes, backcountry ski pioneer Marion Schaffer (still rocking the slopes in her sixties) even has a cameo.
This documentary gives me hope. I have seen the possibilities in person. My best backcountry ski days have been with women. One of my favourite alpine climbs was on a female only rope-team. It turns out menopausal women can hoot and holler and give high fives at the bottom of a ski run or at the top of a summit as loudly and exuberantly as anyone.
Maybe what I’m saying is we are not our mothers.
JANE: No, we are not our mothers. Well, I don’t know about your mother, but my mother didn’t know what to do with herself after her role of caregiver and wife was over. My father died just as the youngest (me) was leaving the nest. She spent the rest of her life in limbo, looking back. And it was a long life too. I always wanted her to do something else, but she didn’t know what to do. It was hard to watch.
I think many of us face this question of what to do in this part of our lives. I still see many women return to their former roles. They become caregivers for their grandchildren. I realize how necessary this is. Times are tough and working parents need childcare. And grandparents love their grandkids and want to do it. But at the same time, I think it’s kind of a shame that many women are encouraged into the same old role they’ve always had. Maybe they are grateful for it — better the devil you know. But for me, I want something new.
E.D.: My mother took up silversmithing in her fifties after years of illness. She still has quite the grip, even in her eighties. I am so proud of how she remade herself. She was able to carve out a second, creative life after children. But she is not an outdoorswoman, not by a long shot. Who knows? Maybe she might have been one, if not for the chronic pain she’s suffered most of her life. And of course raising six kids! So I rarely talk about the things I do in the backcountry with her, because I fear it would stress her out too much. Story of our relationship. My mother worries about everything.
JANE: My mother worried about everything too. She worried about me on the simplest camping trips, so I used to keep my adventures from her. Her worried voice could really get into my head. But mountaineering helped me to break through the fear I was starting to feel. I could feel myself becoming tentative. I was feeling my frailty in a different way in my late forties, and I could see how fear could creep up on me and invade my psyche. I might fall. I might break my increasingly brittle bones. I didn’t want to become a worrier. I didn’t want to limit myself with fear.
Practically speaking, I faced a serious barrier to going into the wilderness. I was having random, excessive, impossible bleeding. Terrible. I always had a sweater to tie around my waist, like a teenager. It took some time but with the help of my doctor, I finally found a solution that worked for me. Once I had that under control, I could go out in the wilderness again without being afraid of having a sudden pant-destroying flood.
E.D.: I agree, it’s no fun having erratic periods at altitude with people you barely know. On a remote trail or on a glacier, there aren’t many sanitary facilities. There may be an outhouse, but it’ll be back at camp several kilometres away. Few men will admit how much harder we have to work as women, how many more steps it takes to live in our bodies, how much more paraphernalia we have to cart around. If you tell a man this, he’ll probably stare blankly. Maybe he’ll look away or change the subject or if he’s decent he’ll offer you dark chocolate. Most likely he’ll set off down the trail at a gallop.
And it’s even worse if you mention menopause.
JANE: Did you ever notice how Freedom of the Hills [the mountaineer’s bible] doesn’t talk about how to cope with menstruation? There are pages and pages about how to dispose of other bodily wastes but not blood. And blood is a real problem. Maybe that’s why some women finally try wilderness adventures after menopause. For the first time, they don’t have to worry about the blood.
E.D.: When you didn’t find anything about menstruation in the mountaineer’s bible, I went online and found women sharing their insights (http://andrewskurka.com/2013/female-hygiene-guide-tips). And sure enough one commenter said, “I can’t say enough about post-menopausal backpacking.”
JANE: So it’s not just us who feel this way.
E.D.: No, it’s not. My sister Lou says of our mountaineering pursuits, “So there’s the bleeding and there’s the papoose aspect [of carrying a backpack] to this life phase. Is it symbolic that you transitioned from being bound to your children, to binding yourself by choice with harness and rope to a mountain? I wonder.”
JANE: I wonder too. I wonder if women in all kinds of different pursuits, sports or otherwise, would have a similar conversation. I bet they would. I wish we had received those kinds of submissions.
E.D.: It gets me thinking about women who are confronting poverty and how they feel about entering menopause. I’ve heard about women whose only access to a lavatory is a public facility, and how every time they need to use the toilet they fear being attacked. That’s an entirely different realm of safety compared to the backcountry. I wish we had been able to solicit submissions from them. I wonder, do they see the end of bleeding as a blessing? Or maybe fear and anxiety never end. Maybe they transfer these fears to their daughters and nieces and granddaughters.
JANE: Of course, there are so many other topics we hoped to get submissions about, sports-related or otherwise. There is much more to be said and many more women to speak.
E.D.: Somehow we have to make space for ourselves. There is no reason why mountaineering, or any physical pursuit, can’t be a space where women feel secure and invested. Where we put on a harness, tie onto a rope, and feel tethered.
JANE: Making this book together feels like that, like tying into a rope, tethering together.