Learning to Fly Read online

  Praise for

  Learning to Fly

  “I recommend this book only for those who are already of sound mind and constitution, because having just read this, I find that my adrenaline is flowing, my endorphins are thumping, and I am possessed with a weird desire to hurl myself off a cliff, possibly with a parachute or, God forbid, one of those winged batsuit contraptions. Buyer beware.”

  —J. Maarten Troost, author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals

  “Alive, passionate, intense … about everything, Steph Davis climbs vertical slopes, drops out of planes, leaps off cliffs, and in the process teaches us all how to deal with the devastations, the fears, the challenges, and the joyous moments of life. Steph takes the reader on an emotional roller coaster full of highs, lows, and love, and it’s contagious. You won’t walk away unaffected.”

  —Rita Golden Gelman, author of Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  1. Falling

  2. Going Up

  3. Brave New World

  4. Cutting the Cord

  5. The Edge

  6. Base Simulator

  7. Emptiness

  8. Home

  9. Learning to Fall

  10. Jumping the Gun

  11. Leaving the Nest

  12. The Ceiling Lifts

  13. Hit Me One More Time

  14. Half-Empty

  15. Learning to Fly

  16. In the Air

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Steph Davis

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  for Mario Richard

  “Quand tu regarderas le ciel, la nuit, puisque j’habiterai dans l’une d’elles, puisque je rirai dans l’une d’elles, alors ce sera pour toi comme si riaient toutes les étoiles. Tu auras, toi, des étoiles qui savent rire.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  je t’aime eperdument

  I want to push myself to my limits, and if things don’t work out, then I can give up. But I will do everything I can until the bitter end. That is how I live.

  —HARUKI MURAKAMI

  So I’ve started out for God knows where

  I guess I’ll know when I get there.

  —TOM PETTY

  The Roan Plateau of Colorado

  Falling into dead air felt nothing like I thought it would. I’d spent much of my life trying not to think about it. It was my worst nightmare. After twenty years of going up rock faces and mountains, the idea of freefalling through the air was essentially x-ed out in my brain. Because you can’t think about falling when you’re climbing, or you won’t go climbing anymore. In the few instances during my climbing career when my mind had flicked there, I’d yanked it right back. I figured if the big fall ever came, it would all be over, wham, just like that. I’d slip off. I’d start falling. A stab of panic. Then somehow I would just disappear or everything would go black or something. And that would be it. The end.

  As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. You know you’re falling for every millisecond of time your body is dropping through the air. You see the wall rushing past, the colors of the rock streak by, the ground coming at you. You see trees getting bigger, small rocks grow into giant boulders. Your brain knows exactly what’s happening and where you’re going: directly to the ground, faster and faster as you fall until you reach terminal speed, 120 miles per hour. And each of those milliseconds feels as long and full as some years.

  Between my feet, a small runnel trickled toward the edge and scattered into clear, round droplets that cascaded into the air. The edge was square, like the front of a counter. I looked at my boots, coming right up to the end of the flat limestone, and then down past them. The wall dropped six hundred feet to meet a gray talus slope. The small rocks poured down to steep, rugged gullies and ravines, a thousand more feet rendered tiny by distance. The shift between the big view and the closeup view was disorienting, like refocusing a camera lens. I felt almost mesmerized and slightly vertiginous, watching the sparkling water balls drop out in space. I jumped.

  Chapter One

  Falling

  The Perrine Bridge, Twin Falls, Idaho

  I’ve been a rock climber for twenty years. So for two decades, I’ve been motivated by fear or pride, or both, not to fall. I would have picked myself as the second-least-likely person I know to ever go skydiving. The first being my mom.

  First of all, I’m not a thrill seeker. Second, like any serious climber, I’m inherently cheap, and skydiving is expensive. Third, I don’t prefer being scared. Falling, loud wind, cold air, hitting the ground hard … these are all things I also don’t usually go out looking for. In the few years before the summer of 2007, I had become friends with several skydivers and base jumpers, and we all knew it would be a cold day in hell before I’d be sitting in a jump plane or standing at the edge of a cliff with them.

  It’s funny, though, how many times the thing you are least likely to do is what you find yourself doing. Or at least that’s how it is for me. I grew up a studious, aspiring concert pianist with a master’s degree in literature, then subsequently dropped out of law school to live in a truck and become a professional climber, so I’ve learned not to rule anything out.

  Salt flats of the Great Salt Lake, Utah John Evans

  My husband and I met in our early twenties, when we were both living out of cars and climbing as much as possible, waiting tables sporadically to sustain the traditional spartan, road-tripping existence of the climbing bum. Over the next twelve years, we traveled together, split up, reunited, climbed huge walls and mountains with ropes and without ropes, lived in vehicles, tents, and snow caves, and finally got married. We grew up together wildly and freely, challenging each other all along the way. Our life was pure adventure and self-invention, and nothing about it was safe.

  I grew up in various suburbias in Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey with one older brother and a cat, and my parents could never get their heads around my transformation from a model student into an itinerant climber. Though my ascents had quickly blossomed from basic outings into major ascents of big walls and peaks in Yosemite, Baffin Island, Pakistan, Patagonia, and Kyrgyzstan, they couldn’t get comfortable with my non-usual lifestyle and nontraditional choices, even as climbing began to develop into a career. At the end of the day, I was still usually eating out of a camping pot, pulling a paycheck that must have seemed like a joke to someone who’d had every reason to bank on a lawyer daughter to match the doctor son.

  To a climber, it looked like the dream life—married to my longtime partner, climbing big routes around the world, sponsored by a major outdoor-clothing company and a few other equipment manufacturers. And then, in 2006, my husband climbed a famous sandstone arch in a Utah National Park and a media uproar erupted in the outdoor world. It was just a hunk of sandy, crumbly sandstone, less than a hundred feet tall, surrounded by hundreds of miles of other, better rocks to climb, hardly a five-star route. But its shape made it a tourist attraction, and the Park Service had even glued and cemented it to hold it together and chiseled out steps in the slabs leading up to it. The Park Service was first annoyed by the climb and the media focus, then out for blood, and the media whipped up as much controversy as could be invented out of the situation.

  The timing was unique. Climbers had just started to become active on the Internet thro
ugh chat boards, populated by a prolific handful who used pseudonyms like tradman and rokjock rather than their names. Internet discussions on climbing forums, which started about climbing topics but regularly culminated in profanity, personal insults, and pornographic references, were a dominant form of communication. Both the real media and the chat-board addicts had a love/hate attraction to my husband, since his rebellious, mind-blowing ascents were characterized by a huge degree of daring and obvious unconcern for anyone else’s opinion.

  At first, somebody climbing up the iconic rock on the Utah license plate was a fun local-interest tidbit after the daily crimes, environmental disasters, and political feuds. But given an unusual lack of real news in the world just then, this story soon got legs. A professional climber climbing a rock that wasn’t technically illegal to climb but was famous and in a national park provided an opportunity to rile up the Park Service. Voilà: an angle! The arch story catapulted from local Utah news channels to the Associated Press, CNN, NPR, and national magazines.

  The media-driven “controversy” became progressively more elaborate in the following months. Incredibly, it just didn’t seem to end, and everything we did or didn’t do in response to the uproar only made it worse. The ensuing circus provided forum fodder for months. The chat boards recycled wildly embroidered versions of the story, mostly perpetuated by the same few Internet junkies, but which appeared far more concrete to onlookers than a group of scruffy guys shooting their mouths off around a campfire as in the good old days of the recent past. Before too long, the rock had ballooned into Utah’s most cherished treasure, and the climbing of it was not only illegal but had caused untold damage. The publicity triggered the National Park Service, who already had a longstanding and habitual grudge against Yosemite climbers and my husband in particular, to mount a federal investigation of the climb and of him, apparently in hopes of finding some way to prosecute him for something now that they had been so publicly annoyed.

  Ultimately, the NPS sent federal subpoenas to his, and my, sponsors, for no reason I could discern other than to inconvenience and possibly intimidate them, and months later they held investigative hearings before a judge in Salt Lake City. They seemed determined to find some way that a climber climbing a rock could be a prosecutable offense. In an immediate reaction that moved me deeply, our two smallest sponsors called to make sure we knew about the NPS’s bizarre action and to express their indignation and offers of support. Much later, a third sponsor casually asked if things had settled down with all the arch nonsense, and that was the only thing they ever said.

  In reality, there wasn’t much of a controversy at all. The climb was not against any rules and didn’t cause any harm to anyone or anything (except us), and much later the NPS finally gave up on the “investigation.”

  Their reactions stood in striking contrast to those of the two larger companies I had imagined to be true partners and even family, upon whose contracts we depended for our income—and who had not contacted us at all in the first few weeks after receiving the NPS subpoenas. The gear company that sponsored both of us was the first to bail. About a month after my contract had expired, my suspicions were confirmed by an awkward return call to the many messages I had left with the people I had known for years at the company. I was rather abashedly told that neither of our contracts would automatically be renewed as usual, for reasons that were impossible to explain, but which most assuredly had nothing to do with the arch thing. I had been with that company for twelve years, and the phone call was like a punch in the stomach. Financially, the loss of that contract wasn’t life-altering, especially for climbers who were used to a no-frills existence, but it wasn’t ideal. It was the big clothing company we truly depended on financially.

  Even in the midst of the turmoil, I sensed that this time of my life was a rare opportunity I might otherwise never have, to see things for what they really were, professionally and personally. Years later, when my life wasn’t exploding around me, I would be able to see it as the most valuable learning experience of my life, and I would even find myself giggling occasionally when I reflected that I had never even climbed that crumbly little rock.

  The arch debacle, as I called it, reached its height of strangeness when both of us were dumped by our main clothing sponsor in the early spring of 2007, not long after the federal subpoenas went out, in a single phone call.

  My marriage, never a place of safety, was not a refuge in this unpredictable time and was unraveling as fast as my career. We were both shell-shocked and had no resources or experience in dealing with an escalating PR disaster. We were just a couple of climbers who were far more comfortable on the side of a rock, and every reaction we had seemed to be wrong. Abruptly losing our jobs and our surrogate family for something that didn’t make sense to us was almost impossible to wrap our heads around. It seemed like solid rock had turned to water beneath our feet without explanation.

  To top it all off, I was scheduled to travel across the country and to Europe for a book tour, which started just three weeks after I was terminated by my main sponsor. Over the last year, I’d got the idea of collecting the eclectic stories and essays I’d written about climbing and living the climbing life and putting them together into a book. The Mountaineers, a well-established climbing club and publishing group in Seattle, had taken me under their wing, coaching me through my first stab at making a book. In between days spent on El Cap and travel to South America, I’d written a few more stories and compiled them all into a book I titled High Infatuation: A Climber’s Guide to Love and Gravity. Now I was anxious and grieving, and the feelings I’d written about so naturally of living a simple, pure climbing life, seemed almost alien to me, as if they’d been written by someone else. The bottom had dropped out.

  Traveling around the country, trying to recapture that simple infatuation for audiences of devoted climbers, seemed nearly impossible. But I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I felt that since I had all my arms and legs, I had no acceptable reason not to honor my commitments. Though I’d been left high and dry, in no way was I going to do that to someone else. It was against my principles. Canceling wasn’t an option. I was going to go through with the tour and do a great job, if only because that was what I had agreed to do and people were depending on me to be there. But making a string of public appearances before my community, being on display just as my professional life had come unglued, was guaranteed to be on the list of hardest things I’d ever done. Endurance mode was something I knew well, from long alpine routes and big-wall climbs, perhaps the thing I was best at. I moved doggedly forward, all emotions on standby. When I allowed myself to feel at all, I felt sad that on the debut of my first book, something every writer dreams about, I was struggling just to keep myself together. Several of the prescheduled book readings were in the stores of the company that had just terminated me, which made the experience excruciatingly surreal.

  Halfway through, in a Hampton Inn on the second day of a three-day tour through the Northwest, I sat at a mahogany-veneer desk feeling worn-out and hopeless and isolated. I didn’t know if I could do this anymore. I called my older brother, Virgil, an ER doctor, and broke down. My husband had been unreachable for weeks. He didn’t pick up his cell phone and wasn’t answering e-mails. Somewhere between Seattle and New York, he disappeared into the backcountry of the Sierras, leaving me a message that he didn’t want to communicate, maybe ever. While I’d been traveling through cities, steeling myself to stay strong in public, he had sequestered himself in Yosemite, refusing to deal with any of the external world, which was his way of circumventing the anger and frustration he was struggling with. A highly independent individual with elemental views of right and wrong, he couldn’t tolerate the situation.

  By the time I figured out that the silence was a severance, I was flying from Boston to Denver and then to Italy. Fletcher, the Heeler-mix dog from a Navajo reservation I’d had for ten years, was also in California with my husband during the six weeks
of my nonstop travel.

  Normally, Fletch and I were nearly inseparable. On top of everything else, living without her was unbearable. Until I was finished with my book tour, I had no way to physically address any of it.

  Messing with Fletch in Hueco Tanks, Texas

  As a climber, I’d never had much spare meat on my bones, and by now I’d lost ten pounds and was relying on coffee for energy. When my travel was finally over, I dropped everything and went to California to track down my husband, get my dog back, and fix this mess. Reuniting with Fletch was an enormous relief, but my husband proved to be a little harder to find. If I hadn’t lost my mind yet, the weeks of virtually stalking him, asking sympathetic but uncomfortable friends for sightings, and sitting at trailheads or in parking lots for hours, in hopes of just finding him, finished the job.

  Driving into Tuolumne out of Yosemite Valley

  The marriage was obviously in its death throes, but I wasn’t ready to give up. As ethereal as the relationship had become, I didn’t think I could handle any more loss. I’d never been unable to fix something in the past, but lately I’d been finding myself unable to fix anything. Beyond that, purely out of principle, if this was really the end of our marriage, after all this, I felt entitled to at least a conversation. Finally, a few days before my fifth wedding anniversary, I sat in El Cap meadow before the person I’d considered the other half of myself for so many years, trembling and sobbing in sorrow and defeat as he repeated forcefully, with no room for doubt, that he didn’t want to deal with anything, including me. Even I could see there wasn’t any glue in the world that could fix it. It was done.

  In a short time, I was without a marriage, without a paycheck, and pretty much without a career. In a life defined by risk and uncertainty, almost all of my anchors were gone. I’d never had a linear concept of time or even seen the point of one. But June 2007 became a temporal landmark. On June 22, two days before my wedding anniversary, I understood at last no more pieces were left to pick up. I drove out of the valley with tears smearing the insides of my sunglasses and Fletch lying quietly beside me, and with nothing else I used to think I had.