The Sharp End of Life. Dierdre Wolownick
I didn’t know enough yet. I was the novice. A raw beginner.
It was like being the toddler who asks to help with the dishes or any other chore. It usually leads to “no, dear, you go play now.” Then an adult takes over. It was humbling, refreshing, and an insight into childraising—a little late, but it’s never too late to understand something better.
After everyone else had climbed the wall, each one a bit differently, Mark asked if I wanted to try. I was eager to get on my first real Sierra Nevada rock wall. It started on a series of big blocks and then flowed upward on the sloping face. They’d all taken just a few minutes to climb it. I figured double that for me. Triple, maybe, if I got stuck somewhere.
I tied the rope in a figure eight to my harness, the way I always did at the gym. Mark checked it.
“Doubled back. Check. Attached at two points. Check. My ’biner’s locked. Check. Belay is on. Climb when ready.”
“Climbing,” I replied, using the standard formula.
“Climb on.”
The rock was icy cold as I pressed my bare hands against it. I couldn’t feel my fingers. Leaning in, I stepped up onto the first block. So far, so good. Another step, another block. Easy. A few more chunks of rock, some tipped forward, some cracked apart, all different sizes. I got about ten or twelve feet up, breathing fast, excited as a little kid. I was rock climbing! On real rock!
And then the blocks ended.
I stopped. Looked around. Nothing. No holds to grab, no blocks or cracks or fissures or anything else for my feet. Nothing.
“What did you hold, here?” I shouted down to Mark.
Everyone shouted up advice, none of which made any sense to me. I looked all around me, sliding my hands over the cold rock, but couldn’t find anything to hold or pull on.
How can you climb if there’s nothing to hold? It made no sense. And yet, I’d just watched all of them climb this stupid wall. That had no handholds on it.
I’m not sure how long I stood there, trying and thinking. I slapped or slid my hands all around me to find any little nub I could hold. Caressed the rock. My numb fingers searched above me, to both sides, reached behind me to explore the wall that stuck out next to this route. Everywhere. I tried to step up a little higher, leaned against the cold, hard granite, prayed for weightlessness. My foot slid back down. Tried again, slid again. Over and over. Finally, I settled back down onto the last block where I’d stopped.
More advice floated up from the ground, all of it equally meaningless to me. I couldn’t do anything they were telling me to do. I was a failure. A miserable, abject failure.
Frustration started to pool in my eyes.
I wasn’t prepared for this. I’d had no experience with major failure—except in my marriage. Even when I was smaller than everybody, all my cousins, my brother, everybody—even then, I’d always kept up. How could I not be able to get to the top of this puny, little curving rock? As a scrawny five-year-old girl, I’d climbed, no problem, to the very top of the Mile Rocks in Hazleton, Pennsylvania—huge compared with this! Enormous! Several stories high.
What was going on here?
Mark lowered me, slowly, and as I untied I tried to think it through objectively. The Mile Rocks were rough conglomerate. This little wall was smooth, featureless granite. The Mile Rocks had tons of features—bulges and ledges and gullies, striations to push your toes into, big knobs to hold onto—that made climbing just plain fun. This miserable, empty wall had nothing—but I couldn’t wait to try it again.
“Nice try, D!”
“Good effort.”
“Well done.”
Well done? Their cheers and comments made me think they understood how far outside of my comfort zone this day had pushed me. I knew I’d try this route again. Maybe not today. Today was about learning, about getting ready. They knew that I had learned what real rock is like, and some of the frustration of not being able to conquer it. I’d have to learn to cope with that.
Even more, though, than figuring out the wall, I’d learned I needed these people in my life. Unaware and ignorant, I’d hungered for friendship all my life, only realizing it after more than a decade with Charlie. That hunger was relentless. None of my new climbing friends had any idea how important they were.
In northern California, in my life as wife and mother, tour guide, teacher, musician—I had longed to make connections with people. Lasting connections. But I lived with someone who acknowledged no one. Needed no one. Not even me.
Battling that became my life. Instead of connecting with other people, I had spent my days trying to figure out what was going wrong at home, and whether I could do anything about it.
Home, with Charlie, had been a desert. I’d survived it, like the desert flowers survive from year to year, buried, dormant, waiting for lifesaving rain. And when it finally comes, the resulting super bloom is breathtaking. These new friends were my long-awaited rain.
Wounds needed to heal before I could begin using that part of me again, the emotional part. It still lay buried in that desert, waiting for the life-giving rain of friendship.
Most of my climbing friends were married and young—I was usually the odd one out, the oldest in any group, except for Mark—but still, little by little, they brought water to the desert of my life and began to patch the monumental hole in my existence with the cement of joviality, the warmth of common desires and goals, the love of friendship freely given.
I would learn this climbing stuff. That, I knew. The skills I’d need to get up this wall, and all the others I wanted to climb, were within my reach.
And now, with my new climbing tribe, friendship was, too. I’d work as hard as I needed to, on both.
nine
ONE OF CHARLIE’S MOST frequent complaints at home was that we never had enough money. Each time I put a date on the calendar for us, in the hope that we might reconnect for an evening, I would later find it erased, with another teaching job or convention or some other professional activity written over it. He had to work, he said. We had no money.
I had to believe him. He handled all the finances for our little family and never talked to me about any part of it. I had no idea how much we spent on what—I knew only that Charlie worked full-time, more than full-time, and that I was working part-time, but that we still had no money.
Childcare required money. His parents would occasionally watch our children, but only so we could go to work. Babysitting was costly and out of the question, so we were never alone together.
Professional help also required money. My suggestions that we talk to someone about how to manage our life a little better were met with derision. Charlie’s view of anyone in the mental health professions was simple: they had gone into that discipline to figure out their own problems, so they were more screwed up than the people they were trying to help. Clearly, we couldn’t give someone like that our hard-earned, scarce money.
So instead of trying to discover why Charlie was so angry, so distant, I worked. I wrote, for whoever would pay me. I taught part-time, a class here and there, like him, but near home so I’d be there for the kids. I guided multilingual tours of the Sacramento region for groups from other countries, as I had done in southern California. Work dulled some of the pain.
We both ran from job to job. Charlie taught, at one college or at several. Or read essays for international English as a Second Language (ESL) testing. He became an integral part of the administration at the college district and traveled to conventions all over California, and later, the country.
So he wasn’t home when I discovered that our new baby had learned to walk.
By ten months, Alex had already decided that sleeping was a waste of time that he could spend instead on his favorite activity, climbing. He