If you’re a certain kind of person, you can feel others’ pain exquisitely, and your own, but you lack the ability to vocalize it. You find other ways of expressing it.
“Can she talk?” a private music teacher my mother had hired asked, on our first meeting. I was, from a young age, wordless. The pain I’d frequently felt was that of observation—of witnessing others’ traumas, suffering from their bad behaviors, and of feeling powerless to do anything about it. I didn’t just feel that way—I was powerless. I was young.
To speak requires trust—that someone will listen. It was easier, then and now, to be silent instead. To be a jock. The one who lifted weights until it hurt to move, while men nearby stared, who ran until I landed in a walking boot.
Even now that I can speak, silenced by each new inexplicable event, there’s so little meaning there. Each trauma suffered has pushed me back into that silence. They’ve felt endless, relentless. The cumulative weight has, at times, felt too much. It has broken me—physically, emotionally.
* * *
Climbing can be hard to explain to the uninitiated, hard to visualize: the ways in which rock is bolted every few body lengths with metal hangers, into which a leader clips the top biner of a quickdraw, into the bottom biner of which the leader clips the rope that is their functional lifeline. Below stands the belayer, or the climbing partner who feeds out rope through a belay device, watches for potential hazards, catches falls, and eventually lowers the leader back down to the ground. Of course there are variations: traditional, multi-pitch, aid climbing, bouldering. This is only the language of sport climbing.
More than the mechanics, though, it’s the psychology of climbing that’s always fascinated me. The ways in which how someone climbs reveals much of their character, and the ways in which it reveals our more primal instincts relating to fear, trust, risk, and consequence.
“What do you think we all have in common?” a fellow climber asked me once, someone I met camping, after she eyed the canned corn I was dumping into my pasta and offered to share some item she had, in exchange for some yellow kernels.
I spent the next afternoon climbing with her and her husband. They, like me, were living on the road, sleeping in the back of a minivan, climbing full-time. They, unlike me, were deeply religious, had the innocent glow of a young couple in love. I envied the support they had in each other, that they thrived jointly off of this dirtbag lifestyle. “Why do you think we do it?”
I didn’t answer her then, as was my wont—to stay invisible through silence, even though that silence only meant that people would project what they wanted on me. I couldn’t say with certainty—but my gut instinct was that every serious climber I’d met was acting out something that was beyond words, grappling with past traumas or demons. Or perhaps they were just built for a different time, when adrenaline and physicality mattered in a way that contemporary society doesn’t reward.
This seems a question many of us grapple with, though. Why we’re different in this particular way, in this particular obsession. Another old climbing partner, a strong one, told me, “I wish I didn’t have to climb. I don’t like getting dirty. But I have to do it.”
What compels us to continue in an activity that involves endless amounts of failure, not an insignificant amount of pain, and scrapes and scars and injuries and all the rest? I know only that it makes me feel more present, more alive. And yes, happy, in a way that feels earned.
Just as traumas don’t make for polite dinner conversation, they don’t fit neatly into stories or narratives. But we have to escape somewhere, to grapple with them. For me nature was the answer. Had been since I was a kid. I grew up having seen my father’s faith in nature as a restorative. I spent little time with him in general, but those times involved camping near some national park, hiking some mountain.
As a dirtbagger I marveled at the amount of wasted potential there was, in my fellow dirtbaggers and myself. Strong dirtbaggers are problem solvers primarily, with a high threshold for pain and discomfort. I’ve often marveled at how that energy might be channeled if redirected, even as so many of us want nothing more, perhaps, than to be left alone.
Rather than process or cope, you can fill your head, instead, with all the minutiae that living a dirtbag lifestyle on the road entails. Where meals, rest stops, bathrooms need to be preplanned or figured out on the fly. Where training can be scaffolded. Where what might be junk mail in another setting becomes instead fire starter, or something else equally useful. Where dives can be discovered, adventures had. Where one can disappear from real-world troubles in favor of being off the map, in favor of the next pitch of rock. The meaning lies in what the pursuer can excavate, in self-discovery, in friendship, in healing. It’s not just the climbing that matters, obviously. It’s everything else.
* * *
I remember talking with someone once long ago, someone famous in climbing circles for the pizza shop he owns, which serves as a basecamp of sorts for that region’s crags. Like the dirtbaggers I remember from over a decade ago, the shop seems to have had an evolution of its own, seems to have matured to a different state of being. The shop’s façade and clientele has changed greatly over time, as its popularity has exploded in lockstep with climbing’s popularity, but its soul seems aged rather than altered.
I remember him telling me, about the seemingly driftless dirtbaggers that lived, for $3 a night, in the campground he’d established behind his shop, “They come back in a year, and they’re scientists, engineers, back in school.”
He knew his shop functioned as a rest and recuperation spot for certain lost souls. He knew I was one of those lost souls. He knew the dirtbag lifestyle is, for most of us, temporary. That some needed reprieve, as we ran away or figured out our next steps.
He gave me a fat white winter radish to eat once, as he commented on the spicy mustard greens I’d gotten on discount. Not being from the South, I hadn’t known how aptly mustard greens were named. It was one of those small acts of kindness, of humanity, that made a difference.
* * *
There’ve been very few times when I’ve been numb to the fear of taking a lead fall. I remember sitting next to my oldest sister as red doxorubicin dripped into her blown-out veins. To fight the cold of the drugs, she draped over her the soft furry white blanket I’d gotten her, and on the tiny screen of her chair of that fancy Manhattan chemo ward, we watched the Williams sisters play at the U.S. Open. I remember going to the climbing gym during those months and feeling absolutely nothing as I took big lead falls. Climbing felt unimportant, irrelevant.
Then there’ve been times, too, when I’ve been numb to everything else, and the fear rush of a scary climb has let me feel joy and pain and emotion again, rather than dislocating from myself. When I sort through climbing-related images, they don’t all make sense. So many injuries. So many sends (or successfully completed climbs, sans falls). They flood back with no sort of logic or chronology about them. The act of climbing mirrors trauma. The intensity matches the images I sought to flee.
* * *
Here in the Midwest I first objected to, and then resigned myself to, all the labels by which we’re meant to identify. These labels have, in Trump’s America, become part of the national conversation. I could say I’m bisexual, queer, Korean-Amer
ican, a person of color, fill in the blank with the terms of our time. Terms which I use now only because they’re a way in which I can be understood, because they’re true, and for the sake of others’ comfort.
But none of those labels get to the heart of me. I can love a man, woman, nonbinary person, white person, brown person, black person, Asian person, American, not-American, whatever. Doesn’t matter. But I’ve never had a serious relationship with a non-climber. It’s too essential a part of me.
There is no single narrative, for anyone or anything. The only narrative through lines I’ve been able to find in my work, and in my life, have been climbing and those I’ve loved, because everything else seems fragmented, distorted. Trauma does that—renders life meaningless, unwhole.
Trauma memoirs thrive on the acting out. I re-enacted my trauma mostly through choosing a sport intense enough to mirror the past. Climbing grapples with life and death honestly, at least. Visibly. Climbing is what I chose.
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