When I was in my middle 20s, I moved to Salt Lake City for a job as a therapeutic childcare worker. That’s a fancy way of saying I cared for young children institutionalized for significant mental health problems. That was work; I lived for the mountains and the desert.
In the winter, I skied, but not at the famous Utah resorts, which I could not afford. I joined the then-new subculture of backcountry mountain skiers. We skied mountains without lifts, groomed trails, restaurants, or chalets, but with deep untracked snow, thick pine forests, and dark granite couloirs. I’d drive to a mountain’s base, strap on my touring skis, climb to a peak or high pass, and fly down through the powder. Sometimes with a friend or small group, but often alone.
Any time but high summer, we would trek through the extraordinary wind- and water-carved sandstone of the Southern Utah desert, camping in the bottoms of river canyons. We’d find petroglyphs and pottery shards from the vanished peoples who made homes there a millennium ago. In summer, we climbed the near-vertical granite walls in the canyons east of the City.
My possessions were a jeep, a tent, a pair of skis, a climbing rope, ninja fitness, and a deep tan. I didn’t have a mortgage or a career. But I could traverse many kilometres of rock and snow above the treeline at 30 degrees below zero in February. Two decades later, I was in the triathlon subculture. Training with my buddies was glorious: we’d form a peloton and crank across 100 km of flat, straight, rural Ohio roads. Or we’d find a big reservoir and swim 2 km of open water. In my 60s, I lived on a fjord on the Nova Scotian coast, opening to the North Atlantic. When I’d finished writing in the afternoons, I paddled my kayak through the offshore islands. My companions were our neighbours: the otters, seals, dolphins, and ospreys.
I felt at home above the treeline and in a small boat in cold ocean water, but I never thought I had mastered these settings. The mountain and ocean can kill you instantly and thoughtlessly; more than once, they nearly did. These are places where you must be present if you are going to be there. That’s the opportunity. To get above the treeline or on the water, you must open yourself to the immense, harsh, and beautiful world, and by opening, you can become part of it.
I am now 70 and, I am told, incurably ill. My fitness comes from light morning yoga and an occasional session on an exercise bike. I can no longer measure myself against the challenges of mountains and seas. But mortality is an immense, harsh truth. You can see a mountain from a distance or in a photograph and think, “that is sublime.” It’s something else to be at the base, to look up in fear at the endless challenges. What was merely picturesque becomes existential. To start the climb, you have to focus on the first problem posed by the rock. Then do the next one.
Death is a mountain; I will get up and through by solving one problem at a time. I can open myself to it and flourish in adversity. The proximity of death is my last opportunity to live above the tree line or in open water.
Wow… just wow
Bill this is an exquisitely beautiful piece that merges pain and the wonders of nature into a single life force. Thank You