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I pause and stare at my nine fingertips,
HA!
Rock climbing is a game of control.
After all this time, I finally realize that these years of training, rehearsing, memorizing—they’re as much, or maybe more, about building belief as they are about getting stronger.
Life is all about risk and reward. Better to have struggled, to have tried, than to not have seized an opportunity at all.
I could see a look in his eye that was a mix of awe and audacity.
How do we build grit in our children? For my dad and me, it was a combination of bribery and exposure to minor traumatic experiences.
“A great adventure without success is far superior to a climb where everything goes as planned.”
Dad always taught me that it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you deal with it.
He talked about controlling as many elements of a climb or other adventure as you could.
Climbing became a cool thing at the school. Because I knew more about climbing than the other students, for the first time in my life kids started looking up to me, even asking me to teach them.
I started thinking that climbing could be my path to what I considered a greater truth—that simplicity, solitude, and natural beauty were the real gems in life.
This new form of climbing—today the most popular type of climbing in the world—became known as sport climbing.
Hard sport climbing felt like a constant battle between self-doubt, precision, and effort, waged over stretches of difficult rock usually only sixty to eighty feet tall.
Later this lean, strong woman, standing only five-foot-one, would use her vast array of skills to become the first person to free climb the Nose, on El Capitan, shattering preconceived notions and making what many still consider the greatest rock climb in history. Afterward, she also dropped one of climbing’s all-time greatest lines, a pointed quip directed at the machismo of the day: “It goes, boys.”
At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate or understand what I was seeing, or even how lucky I was to be in South America and then Europe that summer. My parents didn’t believe in spoiling their kids with material goods, but lavishing them with the opportunity to fully experience life was part of their parenting.
“It was easy,” I said with a shrug. “The route setters botched it.” “No—you’re the only one to finish all the routes.”
If winning the Snowbird competition hadn’t fully alerted me to the fact that I’d arrived as a climber, then having Christian Griffith walk up to me at a gym in Boulder and ask me to climb with him at nearby Flagstaff Mountain certainly did.
Seeing how little money I could spend became a fun game.
Another rocket-propelled grenade exploded nearby on the hillside. The four of them turned toward Mecca, knelt, and began to pray.
I finally came to accept that the violence I so detested was our only way out. And I came to another realization: Nobody else was going to actually do it.
Yet isn’t that what nearly all of us do, often while hurling accusations at others for being selfish? Most of us are just trying to get by, trying to connect with the people, places, and things we love; trying to live with individual purpose and meaning, and if we’re so blessed as to live with a burning passion, then it’s truly a gift.
Beth has risen and is standing alongside the bed. Her expression is stern with resolve. “Fuck that guy,” she says as the door shuts. “How can he have so little faith in you?” My love for her soars.
Beth nursed me back to health. Deep down I had always wondered if she truly loved me, or if she just needed me after Kyrgyzstan. Now I knew. She cared for me when I needed her, and I felt her love.
I could hardly wait. But I also recalled the words of one of my heroes, Tom Hornbein, a renowned physician and climber on the first American team to summit Mount Everest, in 1963, back when it was still wild and remote. His book, Everest, The West Ridge, provided me with endless inspiration. “Maybe we can view risk like we would a drug, beneficial to the organism in the proper dose,” he once wrote. “Too much or too little may be harmful.”
Through the struggle and bone-pulsing exhaustion a profound clarity had emerged, as if I had tapped into a place inside too often forgotten, where you are stripped bare and granted a glimpse into who you truly are. A place where you could look at the impossible and make it real. I’d never been so alive.
But by the end of that day—the first of many—he had become the mentor, and I the student. His clear thinking, his ability to articulate and make sense of ideas that I didn’t even know I had, created order in a world that I viewed as chaotic.
Soon we were hosting dinner parties with three to five women, which was saying something in a mountain town.
When you’ve got nothing to lose, it’s no longer a disaster.
Couldn’t we have a good adventure while bumping safety up to, I don’t know, maybe third?
I went from one extreme to the other. After Patagonia I returned home to Estes for a few weeks, then went on my first-ever full-on vacation—no climbing involved—a surf trip to Costa Rica with Shannon and three female friends. A lot of time in swimsuits and a few too many cocktails. First it was fun, then a little complicated. I ended up dating one but ultimately had crushes on all three. Should have seen that coming.
I’d long stuck to the ethos of “Send first, spray later.”
We spent the night swinging each other around on the dance floor. I’d always been too self-conscious to let loose, but Becca had a magnetic force that overpowered my internal hesitancy.
It was one of those warm Colorado winter days, T-shirt weather with snow on the ground.
I’m like a thirteen-year-old girl when it comes to romance,
By song’s end, we’ve switched on our headlamps and laced up our climbing shoes. The night is not over. Praise be to Rocky Balboa.
Experience and mentors had taught me that if you do it right, failure becomes growth.
When I was a teenager, failure was suffocating. Trying your hardest and coming up short can be psychologically and emotionally exhausting. But each time it happens and you begin anew you become better, inured to the feeling. In more recent years, failure has fostered in me a deep curiosity about the mysteries I have still to unlock.
I wanted to show Fitz how to love and respect others. I believe human relationships can and should follow the mind-set of adventure, defined not by climbing but by its greater meaning: embracing the unknown. In remaining open to others, you gain knowledge, and your perspective of life and of the world expands.
What do you do if your one God-given gift, the thing you seem preordained to do, the thing without which you might become a hollow shell, is something that could kill you?
We analyzed the situations as we encountered them. Start at the beginning; see what happens. And, while we are at it, we might as well have some fun.
And there’s no trick to hard work. You just have to do it.
Flow, that state of optimal experience in which one feels fully engaged, is one of the most magical experiences a person can have.
Embrace the unknown. Push through the difficult moments, work with them.
