He is someone whom I will never be able to access, whose entire life will pass me by, just as mine has passed his, our stories brushing up against each other only occasionally.
3 ALUMINUM’S EROSIONS
After a recent climbing trip to Jackson Falls, in rural Illinois, I sorted through old gear in my apartment. I wanted to collect bail biners—the carabiners that allow a lead climber to bail off a pitch before reaching the route’s anchors, without forfeiting more expensive gear.
As a teenager foraying into lead climbing for the first time, I blundered and made mistakes. As an adult, I’d accumulated wisdom and experience. It felt, in a tiny way, part of the great equilibrium of the universe.
But life is never that linear. A climb that straightforward would be uninteresting—a climb’s unexpected detours and features are what make it worthwhile.
After years in an MFA creative writing program, climbing only sporadically and experiencing a number of personal setbacks, I’d lost my confidence and my ability. I hadn’t led outside in nearly nine months. I didn’t have a guidebook to the area, and so I eyeballed a route that looked like a warm-up from the ground, but climbed several grades harder than expected in the air. I like strenuous, upper-body-intensive routes—this one required precise oppositional body positioning, balanced on the downslopes of bulges, reaching for damp holds I couldn’t find. It required, more importantly, mental strength, of which I had no reserve.
My girlfriend tried the climb, made it a clip higher than I did, and then I took another turn before deciding I didn’t have the nerves to take multiple falls while working out the moves—and so I lowered off a biner I’d retrieved years ago from glowing white, pocketed limestone in Wild Iris, Wyoming.
I remembered the man who’d left it behind. I was leading seventy-five feet of endurance, power, and flow, a classic for the area. A few body lengths below me he worked the neighboring route. His wife belayed him, as their child played nearby. We had chatted before we began. Twenty- to thirty-mile winds buffeted us, but that only added to the convivial spirit of the day. Their child spoke in a mixture of Spanish and English, tiny plastic toys spread in the dirt around her, and so we mimicked that. “Un pájaro,” my ex-girlfriend said playfully, after finding a bird that had disappeared from sight, tucked away in a naturally formed nook.
His fingers were bleeding onto the sharp pocketed holds—later I could see the stains from above, had heard his commentary as he pulled regardless. Because his route was less trafficked, rock crumbled and rained near his wife and child. Neither wore helmets, and so he did the smart thing and bailed.
On my way down I reached over and snatched the biner. Usually bail biners are a shiny prize you spot from the ground and collect on your way up, or something you stumble across. This was the only one I’d cleaned on the way down from a route, rather than picking up more “legitimately.” Usually they’re impossible to return to the original owner. I would’ve handed it back, but the threesome had already retreated to whichever campsite they’d staked for themselves, blending into the landscape around us, filled with blooming purple wild irises. They’d said their goodbyes before disappearing around the corner.
Instead I strung this otherwise unremarkable biner—unpolished silver in color, D in shape—alongside others I’d picked up in different geographies, in Oregon or California, Wyoming or Thailand, each with its own backstory.
On that day in Jackson Falls I didn’t regret quitting—I knew the climb would be waiting for another day, when I understood the area’s style better, after I’d warmed up. I did regret losing this particular biner. I struggle to part ways with old gear. A brand-new one would’ve been generic, unbranded. This I associated with good memories. Memory is funny that way—it imprints itself on whatever’s at hand, whatever’s convenient.
* * *
In sorting old gear, I came across my old set of quickdraws—two carabiners connected by a dogbone, or stitch-reinforced nylon sling. I’d used this set for nearly a decade before retiring them. Nylon degrades from UV exposure and abrasion. Metal itself wears thin. First the coating wears down, the purple varnish or orange paint, and the gloss of aluminum shines through. Then the aluminum itself erodes. I understand the aging process, but this wear on metal is what amazes me the most. It’s not insignificant.
Friction from rubbing against climbing rope does its work, and grit and grime help the process along. On my most worn draws I can see a thick groove on the bottom carabiner’s elbow, developed because this is the snug spot that cradles the rope. I can rest my finger in the concavity formed.
Notching my finger there feels a testament to something—to what, I’m not sure. To the passage of time, I suppose. To the repeated exertion that’s left its tangible mark on the sturdiness of metal.
When these concavities get deep enough, sharp enough, they can slice through rope, in an alarmingly clean fashion. Rope is strong in terms of weight-bearing load, but it isn’t resistant to knife-like edges. Despite that, these grooves amaze me more than they disturb.
I tend to be safety conscious. I follow manufacturer recommendations even if gear is visibly fine. I played around with an old dogbone that I’d never used, one that looked new, and the rubber meant to anchor a bottom biner in place snapped and fell off in my hand. A good reminder that age and deterioration aren’t always visible, that gear needs to be abandoned periodically, preferably before it’s too late.
Fifteen years have passed since I first started climbing. I can track so much of time passing through the rock, even if the chronology is blurred. The timeline is peppered with the sorts of traumatic events that have kept me running away, for most of my life, until another pops up, and then I swerve in another direction.
It’s peppered, too, with a flood of happy images. This has something to do with why I can’t part with old gear. Climbing has been a lifeline, tethering me to this earth. It’s been my way of retreating from failures and events beyond my control, to lick my wounds. Of testing what a romantic relationship is made of. It’s inflicted pain, bruises, injuries, loss, and it’s also healed. It has been the only activity the intensity of which matches the intensity of fear I’ve experienced elsewhere. The difference with climbing is the intensity of joy it also contains.
These other images have recurred at different points in my life. It was really over a decade ago that I struggled with what felt like PTSD: persistent flashbacks of moments in which I was helpless, nightmares that haunted. But I grew up with my parents’ distrust of doctors, suffered the consequences of doctors failing to diagnose my mother with early-onset Alzheimer’s for over a decade. I grew up with their distrust of institutions, of systems, of neighbors, of “Americans,” of people, frankly.
Rather than seeking help, my climbing obsession began—its timing a happy coincidence. I put minimal effort into my schoolwork, spent all my energy instead reveling in the intense body-feel of climbing, the physical act of problem solving, the challenge.
Climbing has been the constant. It’s where I can occupy the best parts of myself, and battle with my worst. There are injuries, there are years I barely climb at all. But whenever I return, I feel free again, temporarily free from burdens. I can battle and fail, and if I walk away safe, laughing with my climbing partner, then it’s been a good day.
I didn’t seek help until my thirties, didn’t receive a PTSD diagnosis until after I’d suffered a breakdown. The terms, the labels, the diagnosis helped me understand what was happening to me. But climbing is what has given me space to be. Climbing is my own.
* * *
Gearheads talk about how the new coatings or the new carabiners themselves aren’t built as they used to be—of how the carabiners wear down more easily than in the glory days of yore. I don’t know if that’s true—although I’ve had some biners inexplicably wear themselves down much faster, right from the get-go. It’s comforting, though, to think that things used to be different, before.
I read recently about how we experience time differently as we age—how we compress experience, so that decades pass in a blur, where once a year was an eternity. The same happens with climbing—there’s a time when every le
ad fall means something, every improvement, every new texture and angle of rock, and then there’s a time when it all blends together, becomes as normal a part of life as routine coffee is in the morning, or the act of reading the paper.
I read, too, about how trauma exists outside of linear time, outside of language, and this, too, feels true. Over the years I’ve read findings from psychology, from neuroscience, from writers and artists, always following this same repetitive path, in hopes of finding a way to construct meaning for myself out of a life that hasn’t made much narrative sense. The biggest relief I find now is reinforcement that when fracturing occurs, there is no continuity. We just make it up to comfort ourselves.
* * *