I solo climbed a 12,000 ft peak and all I got was a metaphor

“You better not do it,” she says.

“I’m going to,” I say.

Wait maybe that was a little too combative.

“I mean, I really want to.”

“It’s foolhardy.”

Foolhardy. I’ve never heard her use that word before. Disarming.

We're driving back to Boise on this, her last day in Idaho. She's flying home to Tennessee.

“It’s important to go to the high places from time to time,” I say. "It’s biblical. It’s Native American. Moses. Sitting Bull.”

“Oh your two favorite things, God and Indians. Classic.”

I don’t know how it is when you argue with your person, but there's an unspoken rule in our family that whoever who feels strongest, wins. It works because it presumes sanity on the part of both parties. After all a so-called rational argument is usually just the scaffolding erected around an essentially emotional position. 

We are silent for a moment. Because it's my turn to speak and I choose not to.

Finally she says:

“Don’t climb any of the pointy ones.”

---

Choosing a mountain in Idaho is like deciding on BBQ in Nashville. An embarrassment of riches, especially if you have a thing for altitude. I don’t have a thing for altitude but I do have a nagging burning animating desire to do something meaningful with my one and only life. And in this particular case I have a single precious day to myself in this place which I feel has more to do with my spiritual and emotional composition than any other. It will be a kind of honoring. An odd nod to the soil that made me. Also, difficult, which is its own compelling metric. 

There are two criteria: One, that whatever mountain it is, it has to be doable in one day, and two, out of respect to my wife, not too pointy. 

“Ryan Peak, that’s your man,” says my friend Bart, throwing his finger at a little paragraph in the climbing guide before us. Bart was my pediatrician years one through twelve and, though retired, still commands my respect as a trusted authority.

I look at the page: Ryan Peak. Not to be confused with Ryan Peake, rhythm guitarist for Nickelback. The highest peak in the Boulder mountains, sixteenth tallest in Idaho. 11,714 feet.

“That’s a big number,” I say, looking up from the book. The truth is I have nothing to compare it to. Is twelve thousand feet high? Nosebleed high?

“Eh. I wouldn’t worry,” says the doctor. “Just sign the registry at the parking lot so we know which trail you’re on if Search and Rescue has to go looking.”

Then he launches into a story about how two weeks ago an eighty year old man from Sawtooth City went out hiking and didn’t come back. How a search party was unsuccessful in finding him. How then a second party failed. Finally some friends and family went out ten days later, and at midnight — somehow it was significant to the story that it happened at midnight — they found him. 

“He was alive too,” says Bart, “pretty dehydrated was all. See? You’ll be fine.” 

—

Planning isn’t my thing. I come from the John Muir school of outdoorsmanship. I may be making this up but if memory serves the great naturalist of Yosemite and defender of the Hetch-hetchy valley would set off for the woods with nothing more than a heavy coat and a bag of torn bread. As I type this it seems a little suspect but the point is that John Muir was old, and that hiker they found exposed to the elements for ten days was old, and I’m not. Case closed and let’s go. 

I wake up, make a breakfast of three eggs and two slices of toast, and into a borrowed backpack I throw a few protein bars and a gatorade bottle retrieved from the recycling bin and refilled with water. I put on my only pair of shorts and a long sleeve shirt and I'm out the door. In three hours I’ll realize I’d forgotten sunscreen, but at this moment I am full of — what is it? Not exactly determination. More like a curiosity to see what it would be like to try. 

Also people who live in their heads need to get outside more often. 

By mid morning I’ve parked the borrowed car at the trailhead. The mountain air is cold and clean and smells like my childhood. Another climber is just getting on the trail. He looks back at me before disappearing into of a grove of white birch trees. Did he just scowl? I forgive. You don’t go into the wilderness to meet strangers. 

The first three miles follow the north fork of the Big Wood River along a valley bottom blessed with an almost imperceptible grade. The hike is easy and conducive to daydreaming. I take full advantage. 

It feels good to be a body in the world and to allow the mind to make all the noise it usually does but instead of following along or opening a new tab, you just keep walking. The thoughts come but the legs go go go and as long as that’s happening you’re doing fine. 

When I pass the sign on the trail letting me know I'm crossing an invisible boundary into a place officially designated Wilderness by none other than the folks at the US Government I feel a zing of thrill and think of that bit in the Hamlet soliloquy the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns and nevermind Shakespeare was talking about a death none of us yet knows this side the mortal coil I still feel a brimming hope and a freshness of mind and a freedom and of course the kind of alert vitality due the appreciation of one’s aloneness in a wild and potentially dangerous land.

Bears. Of course I had seen them before, and in this area too, the Boulder Mountains. But that was thirty years ago when I was not even a teenager and the bear was way over on the other side of a large field of broken rocks the size of basketballs and it wasn’t like she could sprint over and get me and just to make sure I kept my distance from both her and the two cubs lolling on the scree. 

Here along the river which kicks with an irreverence born of youth the air is wet and smells like pine needles and sagebrush and the sound of rushing water is the only sound available in the whole world. A splashing sound, the sound of obstacles out-maneuvered. Of children playing. There is no effort in the play of children, it is natural and necessary, as this is. Water tumbling and laughing, at home in itself as an ancient thing made alive in the once and forever now and meanwhile me going up up up against the way of ancient things that is natural and necessary too. It’s what people do and are supposed to do which is to exert themselves against some present difficulty and see what can be done to make life a little nicer for someone. 

I come out of the shadow of the canopy of forest into a wide green meadow with tall plants broad at the leaf and thick at the stalk. And the sun now floating in the sky at a height appropriate to late morning. Shadows still long but not to. The sun pricks the skin on the back of my neck and the heat is instant and with it comes the sweat. It's no trouble, really, walking along this lively river in the gradual incline of a gentle valley. I am confident the bear in my mind will not come and tear off my hands before disembowling me which is my particular version of the death-by-bear fantasy.

___ 

I left the car almost four hours ago. Awhile back the trail forked and I remembered then that I should take the spur to the right. You may ask why I do not now have the trail guide with me and the answer to that is, it seemed like deadweight and how difficult could this alpine navigation be? As decisions go it wasn’t my soundest but I was born to the slopes and fissures of this rough country and though I haven’t for years been at play in these particular fields of the lord I know I will find my way. 

The going is steep now and steady and the sun is really applying itself to the task of extracting sweat from pore. I have no additional clothes with me but a long sleeve shirt and hat, both of which I removed a mile ago. My strategy for minimizing the sunburn which must now come is to choose a tall tree at some point above me on the visible trail, move toward it at a brisk pace and then rest in the shadow for a few minutes while my skin cools.

So now four hours in and barely flirting with the treeline. There are a few peaks looming as peaks do, but they seem so far away it can’t be one of those I'm climbing, right? The guidebook had said eleven miles in and back. So, maybe so.

I start to feel a new feeling. Something one might describe as a wavering spirit, and meanwhile all the stuff inside me swirling around in my personal tornado. 

I’m not sure how much control we have over thoughts, or what chemical mechanism causes some to appear over and over again. But, repetition is maybe one way our heart asks for attention. Look at this thing. This thing right here. Oh you missed it let me show you once more.

On this, my private trek through a public wilderness several things have been waving their little hands for attention. This is the one that waves most:

What does courage look like? What does it mean to be courageous in this, our age of physical convenience and spiritual torpor? 

Down there in the lowlands I see tired people and bored people and, whatever it is eating away at them, I feel it in me too. I share in the great temptation, to whip out your whittler and pare the universe down into a thing you can deal with, even if you know it’s kind of a lie. I too fatten myself with the delicious foods and plenty of times I have worn my mind soft and smooth with a trusted fluid. Don’t think I think I’m better than you. If try to exercise a little self-governance l freely admit my reasons for doing so have more to do with vanity than anything else. 

I misjudge a gnarled bicep of root flexing on the trail. Picture the hard stumble. I should probably pay more attention. I haven’t seen anyone for hours and I doubt there’s another peak seeker somewhere lower on the trail. Which means I'm one severe sprain from spending the night out here. 

But what does it mean to be courageous? 

Climbing a mountain isn’t. It’s just a metaphor at best, a sweaty metaphor but still, escape more than anything, and if I think about it for one second all my favorite pastimes have some kind of essential austerity built into them. 

I don’t know even know how to write about this. I’m feeling my way forward. I’m trying to understand. 

Something is gravely wrong in the world. I’m not talking about the wars and rumors of wars that my mom likes to point to on the TV as evidence for why Jesus is coming back tomorrow. 

What’s wrong is that — put as simply as I can think of to do it — the world is out of balance. Obviously I don’t expect you to write that delightful piece of banality down, but that’s what it is. A question of balance. 

I’ll say more. 

Balance is a living thing. A dynamic process. The ability to stand on one foot is predicated on a consistent effort of the muscles of your ankle leg and torso to correct for gravity’s annoying desire to topple you. Forgive me for spelling it out but if you lean too far left you’ll fall. So you pull right to steady yourself, but you overcorrect and start to fall that direction and the process begins all over again.

People with really good balance are still constantly falling, they just do it on a smaller scale.

I think about how that idea applies to my own life. I notice what I have is a predilection for abject laziness. I am an expert idler. I like to look out the window and imagine what might be possible and I tend to do it in a fuzzy sort of feelings-forward way. Which is fine, maybe even basic to the enterprise. But if I stare out the window for too long I never finish anything I start. Inspiration might be the foundation of any creative journey, but it’s a shitty strategy for getting stuff done. 

Years ago I noticed that while I lacked the raw talent of some of the people around me, there was something I could do to even the field: finish whatever I started. So I started finishing things. I became an inveterate finisher. If you agree that an essential aspect of the artistic process is to consistently arrive at completed works, then you might agree that a balanced approach to art involves a certain interplay between time spent looking out the window and time spent forcing yourself to punch a keyboard in a fit of philistine will  (or writing a bridge to finish that song, or doing that last agonizing edit to your movie). If you don’t think balance means those things, then we may agree to shake hands and part now and I’ll see if I see you at the top of the mountain. 

But society, culture, groups, whatever you want to call it, needs balance too. Can we talk about that? Can we though? 

And this is the part where we’re just getting above the treeline and the air is thinning out and if you say I’m not thinking clearly maybe you're right. But I’m climbing still, because when you’re on the trail you don’t have to think about it. Your heart starts pumping like a two stroke engine and you keep going. 

All rebels need an enemy. Maybe everyone needs an enemy but I don’t think so. Most people prefer to put their heads down and do whatever is necessary to make the most money or win the approval of their peer group or be a star on their own tv show or just get through the day. 

But there are some people who find it basic to their personalities to go against the grain. Or at least, to go their own way, no matter what other people say. 

I’ve always loved those people. Rebels, contrarians, artists.

Where are they? 

Where are they indeed. Also five hours in I realize that the peak which was once so far away seems no nearer, or, only a little. The front of my shirt is damp, useless for the task of wiping my forehead and somehow I’m hot and cold at the same time. The wind has picked up considerably.

I start to wonder if a trip two thirds to the top is enough. I mean, I’m not an experienced climber. I’m not one of those guys who has to bag peaks to sleep well at night. The last time I climbed a mountain was in college twenty years ago. Why not recast this as a steep hike and turn around while I’m still healthy and sprain-free?

Meanwhile the clouds have doubled. I look northwest, the direction from which the wind is blowing. The sky seems darker. How fast does the weather change around here? 

I finally reach the top of the steep gulley through which I've been climbing for the last several hours, flanking a narrowing creek— more rivulet than river. And finally the trail flattens out into a mile-wide bowl of high mountain meadow, green as your thumb, speckled with delicate flowers so innumerable they merge into a seamless yellow carpet in the distance. 

Above, great sloping walls of greybrown talus lay at their angles of repose. I pause a moment and look. I’m the only person around for miles, up here at 9,000 ft above sea level with my fuzzy thoughts and my waning determination and heaving lungs. Still, a beautiful thing to see. I appreciate it more for the burning in my body. 

The trail is fading, but see how it squirrels off to the left? I follow the switchbacks with my eyes and watch it disappear over the crest of an alpine saddle. Just above the saddle the jagged top of Ryan Peak rests on its haunches like an old Buddha, truly fearsome from this near vantage. I think: the saddle. I’ll go that far. I’m tired and I haven’t been drinking enough of the water I’m almost out of and the wind is blowing like to kill me but I can get up there. That'll be enough. 

I was a lifelong liberal. What does that mean? It means: I tend to take an empathetic position with those whose circumstances seem less fortunate. There but for the grace of God go I. And I like original thinking. New ideas. Or at least, new ways of thinking about old ideas. I don’t like country clubs or golfing and I don’t give a shit about fancy cars. I don’t like being told what to do, and I have a prickly distrust of organized structures. Because they remind me of armies.

What this has to with courage I’m getting at, but we’re not to the saddle yet and I have more trail to climb. Meanwhile the temperature keeps dropping. I pull my long sleeve shirt back on and since it’s all I have, I hope my legs are up to the task of keeping the rest of my body warm. 

I still am a liberal in that sense, at heart. I like weirdos and fringe dwellers and misfits and hedonists and ascetics and anyone, really, who does their own thing. 

But, people aren’t doing their own thing anymore. Or let me try to put it more clearly. Remember if I fall short there’s not a lot of oxygen up here. 

The camp from which the rebels once came now cranks out conformers like gumballs from a candy machine. Conformers! The very people we spent our lives running from. We look around and see: they are us.

Do you know how you can tell conformity is at play? Because you’re afraid to speak up. Something is intimidating you. Something is causing you to defy the whispered murmur of your heart, of your sense of right and wrong. We who used to be free thinkers and trend-buckers now line up to throw stones.

The hippies turned into cops.

Ugh I don’t want to enter the fray. Contemporary political conversation is as coarse as rock salt, and I’m up here in the land of the pikas with my big books and and my little thoughts.

But those clouds out of the northwest are getting darker.

Permit me to speak as one of you, if I may be so bold. I was never a big fan of chasing money or power. I am soft at heart, and I hope I always am. I like being creative, for its own sake. I don’t have a religion to convert you to and most of what makes me feel okay about the world has to do with making up songs and figuring out cool licks on guitar.

But in England you can go to jail for a tweet. And in America, the list of subjects that cannot be questioned in polite society grows and grows, with the net result that our collective thinking has become impoverished with deadwords and abject lies. What’s worse, those who dare to raise their hands are called names, even sometimes finding themselves divested of that pesky career they were so attached to. Because they said something someone didn’t like.

Free speech, that central tenant of our cultural heritage, the mechanism best suited for the development of new ideas and innovation, is under attack. And not by the dorks, the accountants, the bible thumpers. It’s under attack by us. What is going on?

This is not balance, it’s not rocknroll, and it’s sure as hell not courage. 

I am not courageous if I call someone a name, a racist or a transphobe. And conversely, I am not courageous if, feeling something is not right about what I am being asked to do or believe, I fail to speak up. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll lose my job. Maybe I’m afraid I won’t get picked up by that booking agent or manager or songwriting festival. Or maybe I think if I start speaking out, if I raise my hand and wonder aloud if we’ve gone off the rails, all hopes for that TV show I made will go up in smoke.

My legs are so damn tired but somehow I get to the saddle. There are no trees to protect me from a wind that’s doing its best to pull the clothes from my body. 

But in terms of stopping to eat my lunch, this is probably the place. I look around for shelter. 

There it is, fifty feet up. A little wall of rocks shooting straight up from the mountainside, about my height. I can sit up there and get out of the wind for a second. 

The clouds by now have fused like those mountain flowers I saw a thousand feet below. The grey is seamless. I look up at the peak and, okay, it’s not disappearing into a lead-colored ceiling at least, but it’s cold and windy and conditions are clearly deteriorating. I decide: yes, the saddle is good enough. After lunch I’m turning around.

I fish from the borrowed backpack the bits of food purchased the night before in Ketchum: a small package of thinly-sliced salami, a protein bar, and two bananas, one of which is too smashed for eating.

I wolf down the banana and the bar. Wash them down with a swallow from the recycled gatorade bottle. 

I’m about to eat the salami. But I hesitate.

Is this really how far I’m going to go? I can spin it however I want and no one will be the wiser but, didn’t I set out to climb a mountain? That mountain right there? 

I look at my watch. 2pm. Even if it takes me three hours to get up there I can still shoot back to my car before the sun goes down. Right? 

I stick my head out from the behind the corner of my little rock fort, and look. The trail is gone. There’s nothing but a broad slope of crushed rock, steepening on its approach to the summit. How far away? Impossible to tell this high. Everything looks tiny and huge at the same time. 

I see, a hundred feet up, another big rock I could probably crouch behind. Maybe I could try. Just get up to that rock. 

Below me the trail wanders like a lost dog, down into the valley it came from. I think about the IPAs chilling in the fridge. I close my eyes. 

When I open them, something happens. 

Maybe it’s an omen, or maybe people tipping into that secret reserve tank where grit lives are prone to interpreting natural phenomena as signs from heaven. 

The cloud bank splits and the sun explodes and it's like a bucket of paint falls out of the sky, throwing gold onto the meadow and the talus and onto that damn peak now glowing like a lantern against the black sky behind.

Such is the effect that I find myself speaking aloud for the first time in six hours. 

“Goddamit. Fine.”

The going is as hard as I’d imagined. Of the two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back variety. But the sunlight is encouraging and, I notice, the wind is down. 

These tennis shoes I just got from amazon aren’t really doing much to keep the scree from getting under my socks, but I keep going, slow as the oldest man in the world. My eyes start to water from the dry temps and the lack of oxygen and I definitely am not thinking straight. But feeling? I am feeling straighter than I have ever in my life. 

I’m not perfect and I don’t know what’s best for everyone, but I do know what’s right and wrong, at least a few things. And if in response to my nagging heart I choose to do nothing, to say nothing in the face of what is now a bold and egregious infringement on the free speech I have enjoyed and cherished and benefitted from my whole intellectual life than, my friend, I am a worse coward than all of them. Because I knew what was right and I failed to do it. 

Take the long view. Honor the sense of compassion you feel for the young and confused, and give them not indulgence, but the guidance they so badly want. Say: it is the irrecoverable plight of mankind to feel lonely and afraid, to feel uncertain before the great mysteries of life and death. But there is sin in this world, and that old gulag prisoner got it right: The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart.

I am no different from you.

I appeal to whatever shred of the doubt remains inside you, that like a shaft of sunlight breaking through a dark cloud, you consider the limitations of your own perspective. And when encountering the rude or the obtuse or the alien or even the stupid, you consider that they may have a perspective worth listening to. Because they do. 

We are entering a time when the powerful have closed ranks, congealed into a monolith of rigid opinion. Are you the powerful? If everyone around you thinks the same way as you, beware, for your thoughts are not your own, and your motivations less pure than you proclaim them to be. Ask yourself what you have to gain when you call someone a terrible name or savage his reputation to folks who are happy to agree with you. Maybe there is a better solution than imprisoning your citizens for heterodox thinking. And maybe not all criticism is hate speech. Maybe you need to listen to what someone else has to say before you end up setting your house on fire and find yourself with nowhere to live.

I somehow reach the ridge on what feels like the ceiling of the world. The wind, blasting away with a sound like a banshee scream, is doing something new. It keeps shifting directions, instantly.  I lower myself to a crouching position and do my best to scoot forward. 

No longer a loose slope of rocks and dust, the terrain along the ridge is a motley assemblage of sharp stone with little granite parapets and a wonderful death fall on the north side, three inches from my right foot. I’m above eleven thousand feet now, and my hands are so cold the fingers are visibly swollen and glowing red as a drunk’s nose. Noses. I feel woozy. I can see the summit half a mile ahead. 

They say that a mountain gets hardest at the top. I think they say that. If they don’t they should.

People talk too much about reality on mediums that aren’t real. Reality isn’t in your phone, or on YouTube, or your favorite tv show, or in the mouth of someone more powerful than you who has a vested interest in your quick capitulation. 

Reality is in your heart, somewhere up around 12,000 feet, with the temperature dropping and the wind blowing hard enough to strip paint. 

Just under the summit there’s a little section that requires actual climbing. A crack and a few ample handholds. Well within my abilities I think, shoving my fat hands into the gash, heaving the weight of my body onto a snug foothold. A short sequence of moves is all that separates me from winning this bet with myself. 

But then something happens. 

The wind shifts suddenly, and in the same instant, the foothold gives. I lunge to catch myself. The weight of my body shifts and suddenly I lose balance. I swing out like a barn door, on one hand and one foot, over the windswept abyss and the valley below. I watch the rock from the broken handhold tumble down and down, the sound ricocheting off the far valley and the yellow flowers below. 

It’s a quick ride. I swing out and then back, grabbing a new hold and lifting myself with a desperation I haven’t felt in twenty years. Up over the lip, to safety. 

I’m still breathing hard when I reach the summit. I don’t yell veni vidi vici or yeehaw I just plop down next to the geological survey marker and wait for my heart to stop jumping around like a scared kid. .

I’m in a place I’ve never been before. 

The world at its ceiling is more than beautiful; it is ancient. The only thing in view are rocky peaks and tawny valleys and ridges one after the other, falling back until they’re silhouettes swallowed in a soft blue haze. Everything I see is like it was a thousand years ago. Ten thousand years ago. It will be here when tonight I’m sleeping in my bed. It will be here when I’m dead and a long time after that. It will be here in the days ahead when I’m writing about it, this place, this mountaintop, sacred as a temple, available to anyone, seen by none. 

I don’t pretend to understand myself. Why I do what I do.

I want to live, I want to think thoughts that are my own, and I want the world to be better for me bumbling around inside it. I guess I know three things.

It’s a start.