The Sharp End of Life. Dierdre Wolownick
many times, with and without rope. Standing in its shadow, I can’t force my mind to comprehend what those words mean. I know he’s done it. I’ve seen pictures. But now, as I cower at the foot of this monster, the thought of someone up there without a rope, clinging to the wall without any protection, makes my innards clench and my heart race. To go up there with rope is still unimaginable to me. And yet, here we are.
To be fair, I’m not actually going to climb the granite. I will climb the wall, but mostly with my feet, not my hands; they’ll be pushing the jumars up the rope. Alex will lead, putting in protection as he goes, the way he always does when we climb together. But this time, I’ll ascend the rope he carries up.
I’ll use jumars, daisy chains, a Grigri, specialized gear I’ve been learning about all year, to keep me safely attached to the rope as I battle my way up it. And it will be a battle. I’ll push one set of hand gear up the rope, stand on its attached foot strap, and then thrust the other hand and foot gear up to meet it, essentially pushing and stepping my way up the rope. At sixty-six, I won’t exactly be climbing rock. A fine distinction, as I stand here debating whether to run out into the woods one more time before we start and throw up.
Something deep inside me insists on that distinction, needs it. Climbing the rock of El Cap—there are over a hundred routes—is what the young studs do. Alex and his friends, they run up routes that are impossibly hard the way I run to the store: a few hours or so, and they’re on their way back down.
Most climbers take a few days to inch their way up El Capitan, the most impressive, iconic rock wall in Yosemite. I can almost make out some of the climbers on the routes near ours. They’ll sleep on a portaledge hanging from a few pieces of gear stuck in the rock. They’ll eat and make coffee hanging on the wall, raving about the incredible vistas with their legs dangling over Yosemite Valley a thousand or so feet below. They’ll take a dump up there, into a little plastic poop tube. They’ll probably talk to their girlfriend or boyfriend, or maybe their grandmother, because the higher you get on the walls here in Yosemite, the better the cell reception is. Maybe they don’t know they’re just a tiny speck that we can’t quite see. Or maybe that’s comforting to them.
To me, not so much. Alex and I plan to do it all, up and down, in one day. That means we have to work harder, or at least faster, than the portaledge folks. We’ll probably come down in the dark. Here on the ground, my breathing comes in short spurts, although I draw it in as calmly and evenly as I can. I try to swallow, but whatever it is that’s stuck in my throat feels like it could easily come back up.
I wonder if those specks up there ever throw up. Do they do that in the poop tube?
He did try to warn me. And months ago I’d heard him muttering to his friends at other crags where I’d tagged along to practice: “I don’t think she’ll do it.” Climb El Cap, he meant. At my age. For Alex, it’s an advanced age he can’t even imagine. He probably didn’t think my old ears could hear him. He doubted I’d be strong enough. Capable enough. Brave enough. Whatever it was he thought I’d need enough of, he didn’t think I’d have it by now.
I hope he’s wrong. No, he has to be wrong. Because once we launch, once we’re off the ground and become two tiny specks on the wall, we can’t change our minds. Once we’ve gone up a few pitches, or rope lengths, the only way back down is to top out three thousand feet up.
Or by helicopter.
Breathe.
I’ve trained for this for seven months. Longer than I’d trained for my first marathon, back in my fifties. Almost as long as I’d carried each of my babies.
By the time I finish this ascent, the past will have been sloughed off against the rock, left in a valley that I will have put behind me, forever. It’s been a monumentally long struggle that could have had many different endings.
But this isn’t an ending. It’s a beginning.
two
POLISH WAS THE SECRET language of grown-ups in my extended family as I grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, in the 1950s. They could talk about us kids even when we were right in front of them, confident we wouldn’t understand. The mumblings in the kitchen, the overheard pillow talk in bed, the whisperings in the front seat of the car—all the important, not-for-kid conversations were in Polish.
Which, of course, just made me eavesdrop even more intently. If I really listened closely to the grown-ups around me, whether I was playing or drawing or reading, I could pick out verbs, action words. Descriptions. I could tell if they were talking about a girl or a boy, if it was present or past, good or bad. By four or five, I could usually pick out the gist of what they were saying about us.
I never let on to anyone that I understood them. That part was easy, since none of the adults talked to me, or to any of us kids. They talked about us. Conversation was something that happened between adults; kids just played, preferably out of sight or quietly. Those were the rules.
But the rules in our house were different than at other kids’ houses. My mother needed me to be her legs, and sometimes her arms. The great polio epidemic of the twentieth century had claimed her as a baby. She couldn’t run, couldn’t walk on an uneven surface, couldn’t carry anything heavy that might throw her off balance. She’d beaten all the odds just by having my brother and me—that was her conquest. When she called, we came running, even as very small children, knowing she couldn’t run after us. Carrying us or lifting us was a task left to my father, at least when he wasn’t away at work.
I was the girl, so chores were my domain (boys did only minimal chores; boys were king). As soon as I was old enough to understand her directions—four years old? five?—I did all the dusting, the vacuuming, reaching things in the cupboard, running up or down the cellar stairs for whatever she needed. I rarely spent time at anyone else’s house. Instead I read, or played the piano, or painted where I could hear her call, and listened.
Listening became what I did best, whether for a melody, a chord, my mother’s call, or a new verb I’d never heard. So I became more and more privy to the secret language of adults as I grew, and no one knew. My brother never got to the point of understanding Polish. But then, I couldn’t memorize baseball scores like he did. Everyone had their particular skill. I knew that even then.
When I was five, two burly men carried the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen up our front stoop and into our living room. My mother said it was a Baldwin piano. The rich brown wood gleamed golden in the sun as they labored to get it up the twelve cement and slate steps. I’d never seen anything quite so large, or beautiful. As they placed it in the front corner of our living room, I touched some of the keys. They looked the same as the keys on my mother’s little accordion, but the sound that came from them was much more impressive. That day began the love affair that would save my life so many times over the next few decades.
Soon after we got the piano, my mother started showing me how to play the same old Polish melodies she played on her accordion, teaching me to listen and figure out how it should go. I used the same skills I used as a language learner: listen, discern some of the sounds, make sense of them, use them.
From my mother, I learned to play by ear, and from the nuns at school, I learned to read notes—a magic, secret code—and follow the instructions written by people long dead in places far from New York. After a few years, though, the nuns had no more to teach me: I was on my own. It would turn out that I was a far more demanding teacher than they had been.
IN HIGH SCHOOL, AT least at the beginning, I’d bring a new friend home now and then. The kids in my classes came from all over New York City, even as far away as Staten Island. What an adventure, taking a ferryboat to school every day! When I started high school, at thirteen, it was challenging enough just to take the subway from Queens into Manhattan, to the High School of Art & Design on Fifty-Seventh Street.
Even walking to and from school was an education. I saw people