ANOTHER SUMMER, ANOTHER SATURDAY IN a sweaty tuxedo, watching people drink to celebrate a wedding. This time it was my brother’s.
After graduation from UM, I had moved to Arizona to get back together with Amy, patching things up after a couple years of clarity, and missing each other. We were living together in her apartment in Scottsdale, both of us having fun but neither of us quite feeling at home in the sprawling desert city, especially during the summer, when it can hit one hundred degrees at nine thirty every morning. She was working as an aesthetician at a day spa, and I was spending most of my time applying for newspaper jobs, only recently picking up a couple of part-time gigs. But we were together, and not lonely. Chad’s wedding in Wisconsin was hot, but a welcome break from the oven-like Arizona desert.
I was three weeks shy of two and a half years sober, leaving another wedding reception early. On the walk to our hotel room, I passed by a window that looked out on the pool just in time to see Chad jump into the deep end with his tuxedo on, having a blast with his college buddies. I think my mother would have preferred him to drink six fewer beers than he did that night. Even two and a half years later, I would have gladly drunk them for him, especially in the nervous hour leading up to my best man speech at the reception.
My brother’s not an alcoholic. He’s never been through any sort of treatment. No one’s ever mentioned that he might have some sort of problem with booze. He can drink two beers every night for the rest of his life if he wants to.
We have the same genetics and pretty much the same upbringing, yet he was working a good job, raising a family, buying a house, and living a contented life in a Midwest town. Meanwhile, I was a tortured recovering alcoholic trying to figure it all out in the backcountry out West.
Chad had a hell of a time quitting smoking. He took his drinking too far at least a few times, too, and got arrested for drunk driving once in Minnesota. What makes me the certified alcoholic and not him? Is there some sort of drinks-per-week average that I exceeded? How close was he to that average?
I’m sure Chad drank too much during his college years, as most of my friends did. Hell, before he and Meg had kids, Chad still cut loose every once in a while and had to call Meg to pick him up at the bar.
But maybe he could put it down. Maybe he didn’t feel like he had to finish the bottle, or the night. Maybe he could drink too much without being an asshole and wrecking everyone’s lives around him.
We had never been that alike, as brothers go. He was good at video games, while I dove into books. Every once in a while, he would skillfully work his way through the levels on games like Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! or The Legend of Zelda, then hand me the controller and let me try to finish off the game. Sometimes I did okay, but mostly I sucked. Classes, especially reading and writing, were easy for me, and football and basketball were easy for him. He had a steady girlfriend, and his social schedule mostly revolved around her, while I struggled through high school relationships and mostly hung out with my troublemaking friends.
After college, our paths diverged even further. He got married, got a job with a big company, bought a house, and started having kids. He built things in his spare time and started house remodeling. I kept searching, never finding the right “good job” my sensible upbringing and education should have led me to. I never saved much money, never drove a decent car. The only “nice” things I had were photos and stories from the places I’d been and the things I’d done.
So what makes people so different when they grow up in the exact same environment? Sometimes I think that the shock of having to quit drinking when I was twenty-three might have been the most formative thing that ever happened to me. It forced reinvention right when I should have had the beginning of my life figured out: I am a guy with a marketing degree. I live in northeast Iowa. I like to drink beer. This is my path in life. I know who I am. This is what I do. But then all of a sudden it wasn’t who I was. Maybe if you find yourself questioning all those things at twenty-three, you never stop questioning them, and never settle on an answer. Or maybe I’m just really bad at growing up and that’s my pretentious way of rationalizing it.
Back in Phoenix, I tried to get a handle on my new job as a sales floor associate at REI, the best gig I could land with my new master’s degree in journalism. For three months, I had applied to every newspaper in the metro area, finally applying at REI after hearing nothing back. And on the sales floor, you can get lucky and avoid hard questions from customers for only so long.
I stood there looking at a dozen sleeping bags hanging from the ceiling, some guy asking me what the difference was in the insulation between this one and that one. I didn’t know. I felt around for the tags and hoped that some information would pop into my head. Or that the guy would just decide he liked the blue one because it was blue, and it would do just fine for his upcoming backpacking trip to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Sweat drenched the armpits of my T-shirt under my green vest.
I didn’t feel like I exactly belonged on the staff at the Phoenix REI store, with its thirty-foot climbing wall, huge inventory of mountain bikes, racks of sleeping bags, and tents and backpacks made of space-age ultralightweight, ultratough, and ultrawaterproof materials. All I knew about outdoor gear was that I needed to acquire some.
My first six weeks, I was scared to death. I thought it was only a matter of time before someone outed me for the poseur I was. I learned quickly about sleeping bags, tents, sleeping pads, backpacks, stoves, and water filtration systems—partly because I was nervous about talking to customers and partly because I was excited to buy a bunch of gear as soon as I had enough money.
My direct opposite at the shop was a guy named Brian who knew everything about outdoor gear and could so authoritatively tell you which tent was the best that you wanted to buy two of them. Brian had two jobs, one at REI and one at a web hosting company, so his free time was scarce and well utilized. He was fond of driving two hours up I-17 to Flagstaff at ten at night and hiking by headlamp to the top of 12,633-foot Humphreys Peak, just so he could get some altitude training for his upcoming Mount Rainier trip. He was a hard-ass. It was with some trepidation that I mentioned to him that we had the same Saturday off. He suggested we climb Humphreys.
Our jaunt up Humphreys would be Brian’s sixth or seventh in the past two months. Two nights prior, it had snowed on the San Francisco Peaks for the first time that season. We heard it was “a light dusting,” but the trail was piled with white slush, warming in the morning sun. Brian set a quick pace, slightly uncomfortable for me, and before long, we were nearly above tree line. The few remaining trees at that altitude were crusted with clumps of snow, more white than green.
At the saddle between Agassiz Peak and Humphreys, the wind started drilling us. On the east side of the peaks, the plains were a dry green and brown. We had emerged from the trees into a polar landscape sculpted by wind. A trail sign had foot-long icicles growing at ninety-degree angles from its sides. This was going to be cold.
I was sucking air. On the ridgeline to the summit, Brian got a couple hundred feet ahead of me, and my head started to thump with a thick, blunt pain. Altitude sickness—again. I tried to breathe deep and force oxygen into my lungs. I slowed down, and Brian went farther ahead, maybe a couple hundred feet. I knew I should turn around and go back down.
What could happen to me, this high, in conditions this bad? Was my body shutting down, or just getting sick? My hands were going numb, my pant legs frozen to my boots. Vomit sat just below my throat, ready to rise.
I plodded on, stopping every ten steps to take three deep breaths, then stopping every five steps. The wind blew harder, knocking me off balance. I was angry at the wind; I wanted to put my fist through it. I counted off ten more shuffling steps. If I could just throw up, I’d feel better. Then ten more steps.
I was at the top. Brian squatted in a makeshift windbreak, a couchsize hole dug out of the snow. He took a quick photo of me with my disposable camera, and we started down.
Back in Scottsdale that evening, it was seventy-five degrees as I smoked cigarettes on the deck in sandals.
I got my first newspaper job in the fall, at a tiny suburban twice-weekly paper. I wore business casual clothes, even though I hated them, and wrote small stories, collected event calendar listings, and laid out pages of newsprint.
Amy continued at the day spa, helping the women of Scottsdale feel a little more beautiful. It was a shock to live in Scottsdale after I’d spent the past two years in Missoula, where every street seemed to end at a mountain or a river instead of a golf course.
I kept the part-time job at REI, pouring my paychecks from the store into discounted outdoor gear. I gradually stockpiled everything I’d need for backpacking and peak bagging.
I had never considered rock climbing, but once in a while, I would glance over at the climbing gear and ropes. One day at the store, a coworker told me he was headed to Mount Whitney in the spring to do the Mountaineers Route. I asked him what the point was of doing a technical route when there was a perfectly good trail up the back. I just wanted to be in the mountains, not haul all that metal stuff around to climb vertically.
Back in Iowa for the holidays, I pulled a microwave-size box out from under the Christmas tree: To Brendan, From Chad. Inside was a climbing rope, sixty meters long, blue, black, and green weave, BlueWater Enduro, designed to stretch and absorb the fall of a climber. It wasn’t neatly coiled or shrink-wrapped, like the ones we sold at REI; it was just piled into the box. Standard fare for Christmas gifts between brothers—we care, but let’s not get too mushy about it.
What the hell am I going to do with this? Might as well be a sweater.
“It’s a good rope,” Chad said. He had bought it a year ago, before deciding he wasn’t going to be a rock climber, at least not outside a climbing gym. It had never been used.
I didn’t think I needed it either. I was starting to fall in love with the exhilaration of the high-altitude environment—the wind blowing across rocky ridges, the exposure to the elements, and the grit it took to keep pushing forward and up despite exhaustion. Yet I felt content to stay on terrain that my hiking boots could stick to.
To me, the rope seemed like a regift, like, Hey, I was cleaning out my garage, and I found this rope. I’m not using it, so here’s your Christmas present. I had never climbed with a rope before and didn’t think I was interested in trying it anytime soon. I’m from Iowa. We’re sensible people. We don’t go looking for new, crazy things in our late twenties. We settle down into good jobs and start getting the pieces in place to raise a family—reliable car, decent house, 401(k). We don’t become adrenaline junkies or whatever the hell you call people who go rock climbing. Still, I wasn’t going to not take the rope back to Phoenix with me. It was, after all, a $200 rope.
I mumbled thanks, like you do, and we moved on, watching my mom open her gift from my dad, a pair of jeans with a hundred dollars in the pocket.
When you talk about things that change your life, you think about having kids, finding Jesus, getting a job opportunity that skyrocketed your career, stuff like that. You don’t think about some crap your brother threw in a box three days before Christmas. But I suppose I should have known by then not to expect the predictable.
I could have stayed in Cedar Falls, Iowa, after college, drinking four or five nights a week at Toads and Berk’s, watching my belly get bigger. I could have made excuses about my two DUI convictions, about how the cops had it out for me or how I was unlucky. I could have hit on college girls until my mid-thirties, maybe convinced one of them to marry me. Maybe that would have been okay.
But I couldn’t help but think about this one saying that people like. Part of it is attributed to Henry David Thoreau, but the second half is likely a paraphrasing of something Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
I heard that and I wondered if I was one of those people who was headed to the grave with the song still in them. I think I was on my way there at twenty-three. There was passion inside, but I didn’t know where to direct it, so I just poured whiskey on it. Now I was bouncing off the walls, pacing around a tiny room.
Still, I thought I was pretty happy. I was about to turn twenty-six, I lived with Amy, and I could pay my rent, if not my student loan payments, with my first newspaper job. I hadn’t had a drink in almost three years. I felt strong.
But I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t solid, or confident. Sobriety was like an itchy sweater I had been forced to wear to some formal event. I was treading water in life, rudderless, coasting. I didn’t know what I was or what I was about. I knew only two things: I couldn’t drink anymore, and I wanted to write.
And then I opened that box. That rope would change my life.
Most of the guys who worked in my department at REI climbed. They talked about it a lot, and I learned that the “rock” in “rock climbing” is silent if you know what you’re talking about. They all climbed a couple of times a week at AZ on the Rocks, the climbing gym in Scottsdale, and went to Flagstaff or Queen Creek for real rock whenever they got a chance.
They knew the difference between the ropes we sold, not to mention the shoes and the carabiners and all the other hardware. The sixty-dollar Black Diamond cams had value, but to me, they might as well have been fishing tackle.
My coworkers John, Trevor, and Dustin had said to me, “You should go climbing with us,” like guys at the golf course wanting me to join a threesome for a round. Golf wasn’t scary. But climbing?
I took my Christmas gift rope back to Phoenix, and when I mentioned it to Dustin, he said it was a really good rope. With that big expense out of the way, he said, I might as well get the rest of the gear and he’d teach me to climb. So I bought climbing shoes, which looked like ballet slippers with supersticky rubber on the bottom, a harness, and a belay device, as well as ten carabiners I didn’t know how to use.
Dustin and I met after work at Camelback Mountain, which was right in Phoenix and happened to have a few easy climbing routes. He taught me the basics—how to rappel down a rope, how to belay someone who was climbing, and how to communicate with my partner.
After a few weeks of climbing with Dustin, I tried my first lead climb—clipping the rope to the rock as I went up. The stakes are raised when leading climbs: If the leader falls, he falls below the last place he clipped the rope to the wall, and most of the time farther, sometimes as far as twenty or thirty feet before the rope catches him.
This beginner 5.8 route wasn’t difficult until I was almost at the top. After climbing up to the second-to-last bolt, thirty feet off the ground, I couldn’t work up the nerve to attempt the final move. I hung there, staring at the rock above me, knowing my arms couldn’t pull me up and over the lip to the top. And if I fell trying it, I’d whip in a ten-foot arc and slam into the wall.
I was scared. I sat right next to the safety of the bolt, where I couldn’t fall more than a foot or so, and talked myself out of it. I yelled to Dustin to let me down.
Back on the ground, I knew I wasn’t good enough. I had climbed, and led, even, but quit when it got scary. I hadn’t risked anything.
My third anniversary of getting sober arrived. I didn’t plan to celebrate, but Amy baked me a cake in the shape of a giant beer. We ate it and laughed. I felt good, and kind of proud. Three years ago, I was still reeling from waking up in jail. Three years before that, I had probably put another hundred-dollar bar tab on my credit card and missed my Friday morning class.
Three years sober and I was a little more solid, but I still wasn’t quite sure what to do when people asked me if I wanted to go get a beer and I often divulged too much of my personal history when turning down their invitation. I decided to go climbing again, determined to push myself a little more.
It was my idea to go, but I knew I wanted to have climbed more than I actually wanted to go climbing. I was nervous on the drive out with Nate, a coworker from REI, and then on the hike up to Pinnacle Peak. I secretly hoped we wouldn’t find the routes we were looking for.
But we found a route, and Nate offered me the lead. I said sure.
Getting to the first bolt took all the self-control I had. The rock seemed featureless; all that held me was my fingertips and the friction from the toes of my shoes, which felt ready to slip at any second. I clipped the first bolt, assuring that I at least wouldn’t plummet all the way to the ground if I did slip.
Above the bolt, where if I slipped I’d fall until the rope ran out and stopped me, I started to panic. I hyperventilated quietly. I couldn’t go up, and I couldn’t see any holds to try to climb down. I wanted to cling to something secure, anything, but there was nothing.
“Breathe,” Nate said from the ground. Because I wasn’t breathing.
When my legs began to shake, I instantly wanted to be in bed spooning my girlfriend or sitting out on my deck smoking cigarettes, anywhere but on that goddamn featureless rock, about to fall who knows how far. My hands were soaked, but I couldn’t move either of them to dip into the bag of chalk hanging from my waist.
This is insane. If I can get down, I never want to climb again. It’s not for me. I don’t have the balls for it.
Then I fell.
I slid down the face of the rock, clawing at it, trying to stop myself, breaking my fingernails as all the air disappeared from my lungs.
The rope caught me after about ten feet, and I finally followed Nate’s advice and breathed. My shoulders unclenched as Nate lowered me the rest of the way to the ground, maybe eight or ten feet. I untied from the rope, he tied in, and I belayed him as he led the pitch. He made it look easy, gracefully finding tiny holds and moving up the rock. He wasn’t scared.
He set up the belay at the top, and I followed. From his top belay, I wouldn’t fall more than a foot if I fell. The climbing was difficult, but not that hard. I was a little embarrassed about my freak-out. I was still happy it was over. I still didn’t want to go climbing again. We drove to a restaurant and ate cheeseburgers.
While shopping for groceries with Amy a few days later, I bought some off-brand orange juice in a one-gallon jug. By the time we got it home in the trunk of the car, the jug had started to swell up. By the time I got it inside the kitchen, the jug was so swollen it almost wouldn’t stand up on its now-round bottom.
I unscrewed the lid to let some of the pressure out and poured myself a glass. I began drinking in large gulps. I didn’t notice a funny smell, although there probably was one, because it turned out the orange juice tasted like it was full of alcohol. It must have been fermenting somehow, there in the store cooler. My heart jumped when I tasted it.
“Holy shit!” I yelled, dropping the glass on the kitchen table.
“What?” Amy asked.
“This orange juice has alcohol in it,” I said. “It tastes exactly like a fucking screwdriver.”
My heart pounded, way too fast for someone innocently trying to get his recommended daily allowance of vitamin C.
My freshman year in college, my brother had given me a recipe for home-brewed hard apple cider. I had skipped the part in the directions that had said to periodically relieve the pressure in the cider jug, and it had exploded in my closet, waking my roommate and me in the middle of the night.
I had somehow failed to see the parallel here, or notice that the orange juice was three days past its expiration date.
I explained this to Amy.
“Did you just fall off the wagon?” she asked.
I don’t know, did I? Jesus.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m pretty sure it doesn’t count if it’s accidental.”
They’d never covered anything like this in treatment, and I never went to AA meetings to ask other people what they thought. I didn’t have any friends in recovery. But even accidental exposure to alcohol scared me.
I avoided beer cheese soup, Jack Daniels barbecue sauce, beer brats and tiramisu, which I had tasted for the first time while eating dinner with my brother during my first year of sobriety.
Not eating tiramisu made sense, because it actually contains and tastes like liquor. Those little liquor candies, too. The Jack Daniels barbecue sauce thing made me feel a little ridiculous, but I still couldn’t bring myself to buy it, or even hold the bottle in my hand in the supermarket.
After eleven months in Phoenix, Amy and I left for Denver to be closer to the mountains. Nick, my old roommate, had left his first office job in Iowa and moved to Colorado to work as a ski lift operator at Breckenridge in the winters, then settled in Denver and convinced me it was the place to be with a pitch about the three hundred annual days of sunshine the Front Range supposedly had. On our way to Colorado, Amy and I spent a week in Moab, Utah, in the heart of desert canyon country. We rented a cheap cabin at the Lazy Lizard, a hostel at the south end of town, spending our days in Canyonlands National Park and our evenings in Arches. I remembered Edward Abbey’s words, from his book Desert Solitaire, about the stark beauty of the desert, and tried to capture in my camera lens the sun and the long shadows on the rock formations at Park Avenue, Courthouse Towers, the Organ, Balanced Rock, the Windows, and Chesler Park.
On our last day in Moab, we hiked around the Fisher Towers. We watched three climbers slowly make their way up Ancient Art, a route famous for a twenty-foot walk across a narrow ledge hundreds of feet off the deck, and up to the summit tower, a twisted glob of muddy red sandstone with hardly enough room to seat one person on top.
On the drive back to the cabin, I remembered that I had signed up for a rock-climbing class the first semester of my freshman year in college. I had missed the first class because it didn’t meet at the indoor rock wall in the rec center, where I’d thought it would. I had called the instructor to ask him where I should go for the second session, and he explained that I couldn’t take the class after missing the first—they had covered too much for me to catch up.
I dropped the climbing class and took weight training instead. Then I spent the next four years getting drunk and the next two years after that in Montana trying to figure out who I was without booze, and didn’t discover climbing until I was twenty-six, nearly eight years after I missed that first rock-climbing class at the University of Northern Iowa.
I wondered out loud in the car, if things had been just a little different my first year of college, would I have seen Moab earlier in my life, fallen in love with its rafting-mountain-biking-climbing-four-wheel-drive soul, its red rock desert backdrop, and its dirtbag ethics, and perhaps moved there and become a climbing guide or a rafting guide?
Amy and I took showers at the Lazy Lizard and split a plate of nachos at the Moab Brewery. And as the sun dropped over the Moab Fault, I was proud and grateful that I had ever made it to Moab at all. After all, if things had been just a little different, I could have still been drinking beer and nursing impotent daydreams from a barstool in Iowa, or serving a mandatory prison sentence for my third drunk-driving arrest. Now, we were moving to Denver.
My first summer in Colorado was straight out of the lyrics from “Rocky Mountain High.” Just like the guy in John Denver’s song, I moved there in the summer of my twenty-seventh year, comin’ home to a place I’d never been before. I went as high as I could as often as I could.
For our first hike in Colorado, Amy and I picked a seven-mile loop that summited three fourteen-thousand-foot peaks: Mount Democrat, Mount Lincoln, and Mount Bross. I was near vomiting almost the entire time thanks to another bout of altitude sickness. It finally subsided in the last half mile back to the car.
By the end of the year, I’d climbed—mostly with Nick—ten mountains. I’d put almost three hundred miles on my hiking boots, hiking, climbing, and scrambling fifty-four thousand feet of elevation. I had slept on mountainsides and had drunk from mountain lakes full of melted alpine snow that had been filtered through rocks. I’d seen moose, elk, and, once, a porcupine, and gotten close enough to touch mountain goats and marmots.
I was a mountain man, as far as I knew. I’d become the person on top of a rocky peak as the camera zooms out to show infinite waves of mountains, strong, courageous, wild.