Category: mountains

Still Beating

Amanda KellyLeave a comment

You can make of yourself a blade, slice the top off the world spinning, gain speed by traveling light or become axe, hack your way out of whatever it is you need to be free of. It is the extremities that return us to ourselves, which is why we hunger for them. To fill up on that is which is molecular, discover the elemental, taste something new, thoroughly. In focus lies the full power of the human mind and body united, what we were literally born for.

In 2009 I nearly died of descending necrotizing media stinitis- basically, flesh eating bacteria on my chest wall. That was ten years ago this summer. I am fifty now. I remember lying in ICU, wishing for the strength to get out of bed by myself, run the dog, take a shower. Wanting again what I had taken so easily for granted, motor control of my own body, how easily we can lose it, the power of knowing that. This is how I find myself with a migraine in Vantage, Washington, in a van full of women I barely know on our way to basalt towers, a good place to discover something new. The only things that get me out of my head right now are climbing lessons and this year’s lover, all eyes and spine, who takes up more than returned mind share, and who would be perhaps startled to know that.  The body is extraordinary in its demands, what it requires for satisfaction, relentless. This is true of all climbers I have known, that pushing. It is easy to get lost in it. I am grateful to have a new way to move in full concentration, something to learn, that gets me out of my head and moves me the way his body against mine does, that shuts down news cycle, email and social media. Requires and meets whatever I bring it, returns me to my breath and cells.

When I moved to Washington State, my now ex-husband was already friends with some well-known climbers, one of whom we lost at a high altitude on an early May day. I had delivered triplets that November, was told while pregnant that a mother-to-be’s metabolism revved as much as a high altitude climber, and in this way and because I was carrying three babies, an extreme, and being around the expedition’s prep work and travel plans, the submerged hurt feelings of the wives staying home, the resentments and difficulty with permits, I felt ancillary to the climb, tied in to it. When calls came from that high place to Seattle, we watched someone we love not make it back. The babies kept nursing.

Him dying up there, part of a story that soon after that evening (and still) seems to fascinate the world was the first time I had lost a person close in age to me, older yes but not so much older. And it is because of almost dying, and not having the chance to climb those many years home with five children, and because I am afraid of heights and my heart is aching, I am here on this late September morning.

The road from Tacoma where we meet at the climbing gym climbs through the I-90 pass and into Vantage, “Frenchman Coulee,” a basin just north of Echo, to climb on the basalt columns of desert rimrock.  Our guides (friendly, professional AF), keep us engaged on the bus. I have borrowed a helmet, wearing yoga pants in lieu of climbing gear, feeling half cliché, half badass. My arms are strong but I’m tired, tossed all night, listening to coyotes, playing Jeff Buckley. It feels like the right time to tie my own climbing shoes on, having borne witness to the climbing community for so long. My job requires me to be on Instagram, my feed is filled with climbers, names of faces and ranges I have heard of over the years. It is a different thing, though, to find myself roped and off the ground.  The air here is different than the marine air around Seattle. Sage is in every memory of these Western places to me, how it flavors the air, the dry dust and red dirt.

The past few years have been difficult, and beautiful, the way everything is. A suicidal family member who finds his way back every day. Salmon returning to spawn in some rivers. What is happening in Zimbabwe, Chile, at US borders. My mother lonely for her husband, father who died on my birthday. People marching for justice. Children growing up and moving on. The world on fire. Reknowing how hot I too can burn. Running my hands through my first chalk bag, clipping the harness, casting the incantation “belay on,” fingers plunged into rock. A place of deep and physical joy, how good and how privileged it is to be here. There are a thousand ways to flex that joy muscle, the one that brings you back into your heart rate, back into to the simplicity of grip, weight, feet, stretch, reach, push, repeat.

In one of the last videos shot of my friend who died up high all those years ago, which I watch sometimes on YouTube because it is good to see his smile, he says, “…my mission statement would be to turn people onto the mountains.” Taking what I have been learning in the bouldering gym onto the rock and into the wind, the fear and the rising above it, all breath and pull, the canyon from a fresh angle,  torn hands and shaking arms I send him a nod in thanks, turned on to the mountains in a new way, all heartbeat, discovering something in myself again, pushing further, this human mystery of seeking, how strong it runs, how it keeps beating.

(Thank you, SF. We know where your body lies as it returns to earth, your spirit remains in all of the places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeZ9-IhPE-8&t=1s see .47 secs in : )

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Return to Cooper Lake

Amanda KellyLeave a comment

Cooper Lake sits in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest near Salmon La Sac, Washington. Not particularly high for the Pacific Northwest, seated at the base of the Alpine Lakes, offering views of snow capped Chikamin Peak and Lemah Mountain. The mountains around here feel endless, though this spot is not true wilderness, defined in one dictionary as simply a pathless area, a wild or uncultivated state, a bewildering situation. I am waking here alone this July morning for the first time since starting to camp here in ’92, when I was a rising poet, Kurt Cobain was still alive and Washington was only DC, wanting to touch base with what I know these mountains teach.

I have spent many slow hours here watching the forest wake, first beside a boyfriend who became my husband, then my husband and children, then with my children as we divorced and they grew, and now me, alone and a dog, a white shepherd like the one I traveled across country with, when it all still felt like adventure. There is a wide openness to my life now that is in some ways bewildering, how I came to be by myself under these trees, circling back through seasons and years, a girl and a book, dog, same camping shirt. Sun rises with a specific slow gravity, hitting the still-snowy range across the cold water first, then the tips of the Douglas Firs around our site, trees tall enough to be warmed by that sun while exhalations near earth stay visible. I know no other mornings like these.

This forest is vast, western, stretching 180 miles from the Canadian border to the Goat Rocks Wilderness. We leave early on a Saturday, make the 5:20 ferry off our island, cross the Salish Sea, grab dog, food, water. We park, we set up camp, the dog is happy. The tent I have brought is unfamiliar,  cannot find my old LL Bean four-man, right now need to travel light for I am in love with someone who is not, and who would be the best company here of all the company I can think of. Have come today to outrun what desire I can, force freedom into my cells, get out of my head on this whole thing and the state of the world. Turned a half century last year, and the only certainty I have about lessons is that they repeat and return until learned.

Smaller backpack, the run to Pete Lake, the hikers we pass who ask how much further. We keep running, fording narrow creeks, waving insects away, establishing a rhythm. After the first flat green half mile, through cedar and fir, the glacial lake to the left, the landscape suns up. That is the only word I can think of for it, when you are one minute deep in forest and then moving higher, boulders bigger, the way you feel the heat on the back of your neck, the way the smells change and the borders of alpine blooms appear-lupine, paintbrush, fireweed . High ice clouds cast sun dogs. Path keeps rising, to the right, the first real climbing rock, the dog scrambling to top first. I sit to try and just feel it, the sun warmed rock, hands on moss, not think about the rest, shut it down to raise it up. There is a different kind of need to be fulfilled, oxygen, getting the body to the place in movement that is immediate and necessary, stripping us down.  Already that which I could not let go of is leaving me, washed away by the wind in trees and my own breath.

By the time we make Pete Lake, the day has warmed, and we wade into the water, cold enough to take breath away but welcome. The dog stays on shore, watches me float on my back, staring up at clouds and sky, then warming on a fallen log. We eat our lunch, rinse one more time, run down the mountain the way we came, build our fire, stare at stars you cannot see from the city through tree boughs, watch the sky turn, rest our bodies. There is a freedom in waking there, every muscle cold against the ground, dog curled into herself and my legs. The sunlight touching the start of the day, the highest trees first. Turned fifty-one this year, how everything in life has changed and yet here I lie, curled up next to a dog in a tent because to be here, all trees and rock, cold water and slow light, is the one sure way out, every time.

It is this we have come for, the teaching the mountain always shares. Submerge in what is elemental, move your animal body, keep things fluid, take only what you need. The days and seasons will take care of the rest.  What I have come to be relearn, complications fading when offered peak and river. Rushing water and fir scented air washing everything clear. Again and again.