Stories

I moved with my family to Moab in the spring of 2018. One last attempt at my life as a Geologist. We lived in a small 1960's Oasis camper, parked on BLM without hookups. Enthusiasts of the art call it “boondocking”. An avid climber, I maintained a mental list of routes I wanted to master. “The Crackhouse”, a sinuous crack across the ceiling of a dusty cave somewhere near Gemini Bridges, was first on my tick-list.

After several weeks of rehearsal, I completed the route from the standard “Birth Canal” start as well as the “Dean variation”. 80 feet of dead horizontal roof. Dangling from hands and feet slotted and jammed like choke stones. Pumped in the inconspicuous muscles of my shins. Lap one hand over the other, one foot over the other. Cultivate a rhythmic breathing. Feet start to feel like hooves. Fists become stubs. I forget there are fingers attached.

Making sense of climbing is like making sense of the stars by drawing lines between them. Constellations are stories, fictional, arbitrary. Only there because we looked for them.

Climbing is similar. By noticing the texture and quality of compaction, climbers follow discontinuity. Fractures, edges, subtle undulations on an otherwise smooth surface. Enticed to draw lines between them. Form a path of imperfections.

“Daddy?” My daughter playing in the dust at the floor of the cave looks up at me. Her dirty face. Not a bath in several days. The desert upended her world and the comforts she knew but she seems unaffected. Sometimes I feel like the modern iteration of a Puritan cult leader exiling my family from unorthodoxy. From a runaway world. The idea frightens me.

“Busy.”

I pause, alternately dangle arms toward the ground, catch breath. Watch the veins swell with blood and drain again. Breathe deeply through my nose and mouth. My desert mouth. Outside the cave, a hush of white blazing sun rays. Her voice a striking antonym. Breeze seems to whisper through me without engagement. Caught up in this challenge. Fixed to the rock.

“Um. Daddy?”

A year before the desert I was camped on a glacier below Mt Huntington. Base camp was a cook tent, a sleep tent and a snow cave that, due to an incessant storm, we converted into a latrine.

Asleep in our tent beneath a perfect arctic dark, something stirs, deep and profound and I wake. The earthquake lasts a few seconds. The ground beneath me shifts and for a moment my brain is gripped in panic as all my certainties sink beneath the shifting crust of the world. Somewhere outside I hear the crash of falling ice.

We lay wrapped and helpless in cocoons of down. Expose my mouth to the dark. “An earthquake?”

“Yeah.”

“Hear that slide?”

“Should we get out of the tent?”

My imagination works involuntarily, provokes images, sensations of being buried alive, crushed and suffocated. Erased from the world.

Fourteen days ago I saw my little girl. Kissed her. Held her.

She was only three years old. But I watched her mature in the weeks before I left. Watched her heart turn from me. Protect herself from an unsettled father.

In the dark inside my bag I lay with memories too singular to speak. Seeing my daughter. I would hold her. Convince her of my affection. Be her daddy.

Thoughts that burn. Splice a new reel of thought. Something inert. Waiting in a storm lasting thirteen days. A stale, caustic span of white haze and periodic rumbling as the mountain shed layers of new snow. Trapped in lonely boredom beneath an immense granite pyramid.

In the morning I promise to work out. Promise not to let all the bacon and pancakes I eat every day make me slow.

Cold, blue dawn reveals thick frost lining the inner wall of the tent.

Worm out of my bag. Flakes of ice fall into my hair and drip down my neck and I don’t remember any promises. Remember only that little girl so many miles away as I stumble out of the tent.

When I come home, my daughter is visibly bigger. Hair longer. I sit with her and together we play with toys I haven’t seen before. My brain gropes through the integrals of my absence for the value of what I missed. Cold calculus that does not explain the sadness abiding my daughter’s eyes. Sadness I recognized.

The story I am writing breaks apart under her regard. Ideas carefully fostered into an ideal no longer worth the effort. I am living a fiction if I believe my absence is harmless.

And it occurs to me that stories keep us from breaking. Prose like nylon threads connecting our brief existence to the permanent. Metaphysical giving context to physical. Fact contextualized by fiction.

Because fiction speaks of reality I am too fragile to accept. Reality disguised for a sensitive pallet. Gives new meaning to #livingthedream.

What happens when you wake to the cost of dreaming?

Repeated hacking with my dull picks. The upper ice field of Mt Huntington extends ever into the skyline, a cracked and frozen valley 4,000 feet below. Heavy swing and kick. Pause, resting knees against the wall of relentless ice, I methodically drive a screw while my calves cramp. Frozen gloves locked in deathgrip to aluminum tools. The steady, downward pull of twin ropes over smooth polish.

Alaskan peaks arrayed like a dispassionate tribunal witness to our ascent. Mountains that speak to me in sleep, that fill up my head with stories. Crowding out the people who belong there.

People, though less permanent, are more important than mountains.

We claw over the cap of turquoise ice. Mind conjures images of tropical warmth. A maddening juxtaposition of fact and fiction. Can’t say which is which.

Cramped and exhausted. This methodical trudge delivers me to the summit where I pause and lean onto my ice tools like ill-fit crutches. Turn my head about in the wind and cloud haze at the apex of this odyssey.

A standing blot, a speck against stirring white madness. Invisible and unnoticed, waiting for the finger of god. Waiting for I know not what. Something real or imagined in this confluence of human wills. My body, a drained vessel await of glory, groans in fading anticipation of what never comes. Of what seems ever absent in this wilderness.

Aching, my heart turns homeward.

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