There are two things you should know if you’ve never gone rock climbing.
The first: it is a precise dance. It is slow and it is exact, but it is so graceful. Every movement is meticulously thought out, every move matched by every climber. In succession, we each slowly raise our outstretched-arms, the pads of our fingers clinging to the slightest ledge, the weight of our bodies resting on a ridge or stuffed into a crevice. Sometimes we are weightless. We strap ourselves to the stone at night and sleep, suspended in the air. We listen to the silence of the height, the music of the forest out of earshot. We stretch our limbs and flex our fingers and move our bodies as one body, every motion seemingly singular. Pulled together by ropes that weave through our harnesses, we dance our way up the side of Él Capitan as one.
The second: there is a clarity, unlike any other, that one experiences once you reach the top. Muscles sore, body aching, hair greasy, skin and clothes unwashed, you pull yourself over the top of the rockwall and lie on your back. Out of breath, adrenaline filling your veins, you look up at the sky, bright, blue, clear. And then comes the sound, the air is filled with it. On the rockwall, there is nothing, only the wind scraping against the face of the stone. But here, at the top, there are birds and rodents and bushes and insects and the sounds of the surface world come back to you. And there is clapping, we are all clapping. We’ve done it.
***
My mother was only nineteen when she had me. Nineteen and with a baby that took her last name because there was no father. Nineteen and she decided that I would be raised calling her “Julie” instead of “Mom” because she was too young to be a mother. Nineteen and she put the cradle in my grandmother’s room instead of her own so that somebody would hear my cries in the middle of the night. Nineteen. She was only nineteen.
Julie sent me a birthday card when I turned nineteen. She would usually just sign her name at the bottom, but that time she actually wrote something. It said: “Congrats, you’re officially old enough to be a mother, don’t get knocked up.” She meant for it to be a joke. A fucking joke. As if my entire existence was something to chuckle about and shake your head at and say “well, now we know better”.
I remember holding the card in my hand. Don’t get knocked up. The scar on my upper-arm seemingly coming to life, growing hotter under the sleeve of my shirt. My grandmother, looking over my shoulder, sighed as she read the card and wrapped her arms around me.
And then later, a phone call. Julie on the other line, standing in a phonebooth with her longtime boyfriend, Casey, tapping on the glass, telling her “hurry up, hurry up!”
“Hey Lex, happy birthday!” She said, static filling the space between us. “Did you get the card I sent you?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking across the room at the wastebasket in the corner.
“Funny, right?” I could hear the giggle in her voice. Casey, again, tapping insistently on the glass. The static growing louder.
“No,” I said.
I could hear Julie and Casey having a muffled conversation on the other line, the horn of a truck filling the phone line, then more static.
“What’s that? I couldn’t hear you.” Before I could answer, “I’m glad you liked it. Hey, I gotta run. This guy is giving me and Casey a lift to Helena, we’re gonna do some climbing in Montana. Isn’t that awesome?”
Then she hung up.
The hate radiated from inside my body. I could feel it seeping into my blood, congealing on my bones. The stench of sulfur filled my nostrils and I gagged at the stink of my own anger as I remembered my grandmother crying. Hunched over in the kitchen chair, wisps of grey hair clinging to her wet cheeks, she is sobbing into a tissue as her friend stands over her and rubs her back. I remembered plates falling all around me. I am four and, having climbed onto the countertop, knocked them all over, the sound of breaking glass filling the house as the plates plunged towards the ground, exploding around me. I remembered looking down at the gauze wrapped around my arm as my grandmother spoke too loud, saying “Alexis got stitches and Julie wasn’t there. She didn’t come. She didn’t care enough to come.” This is my earliest memory.
But why? Why didn’t she care? Why didn't she come? What was out there? What was she chasing? Why couldn’t I come along?
I pulled from the wastebasket the pieces of her card, frantically rifled through my desk for tape, then carefully aligned the ripped edges and stuck them back together. I needed to know why.
***
I first encountered Ed Gats as he sat, leaning against the base of a tree. A textbook describing the face of Él Capitan and a map were spread out across his lap as he slowly brought a joint to his lips and inhaled. I watched him from a distance as he pushed his shaggy hair behind his ear and murmured the words of the textbook, his eyes running across the pages. Around me, people pitched their tents and organized their gear, coiling rope and refilling chalk bags.
Skin red from the sun, lips chapped from the thirst, dust and dirt permanently clinging to hair, chalk permanently clinging to skin, they were a different kind of people. They strolled through the forest barefoot, washed their bodies only every so often, tied hammocks to the trunks of trees and called it home. They lived at the base of the mountain, milling about on the ground until it was finally time to climb, then effortlessly ascending the sheer rock wall of Él Capitan. Breathlessly reaching the top, already thinking about when they would climb it again. And I was in the middle of all of it, taking them all in. And they paused to look at me, skin clean, hair unknotted, and they nodded their heads and smiled softly, welcome.
“First climb here?” Next to me appeared a lanky woman, tufts of brown hair peaking out from underneath her baseball cap.
“First climb at Yosemite, I did some climbing back in New York.”
She nodded, “Oh, nice.” She paused, following my gaze across the campground. “That’s Ed Gats. Great climber.”
I smiled at her politely then looked back at Ed. He slowly flipped a page in the textbook, took another pull from the joint, then suddenly looked up, meeting my stare. I held his gaze for a moment, then turned away.
“He’s been climbing his whole life. I heard that his parents used to strap him to a harness and his dad would climb with Ed on his back. Climbing’s been his whole life.”
“Really?” I turned to look at her to see if she was kidding.
She shrugged. “It’s a lifestyle, you know?”
“Yeah, sure.” I said, looking back at Ed. But he was gone.
***
The night before my climb, Ed Gats appeared across the campfire from me. Sitting on a log between two too-skinny girls, he leaned towards the speaker of a story, nodding his head along to the cadences of the sentences. Then throwing his head back and laughing wildly, his body shook as the sound of his laughter temporarily filled the woods, then floated away with the smoke of the fire. I was watching him again. He took a joint from one girl, puffed it slowly, letting the smoke fill the cavities of his body, then exhaled smoothly and passed it along. He furtively touched the girls, resting a hand on an arm or leg as he spoke, a coy smile twitching on the tips of his lips. Then, quickly withdrawing, he would shift his body away, turn his head slightly, and focus on the other girl. And still, the girls leaned into him, craving his touch, his attention. It was a game to him.
I looked into the fire, watching the flames consume the dry, rotting wood that had been collected from the forest. Next to me sat the lanky woman from before - Rhonda, she had told me. The joint made its way around the fire, Rhonda taking a hit then passing it to me. I held it awkwardly, pinched between my thumb and pointer-finger. I had never smoked pot before.
I closed my eyes, remembering that when I was eleven, I had been rifling through Julie’s room, searching for something I could no longer recall. Pulling open all her drawers, I came across a Ziploc bag with a colored glass bowl, a lighter, and a smaller bag filled with a green herb. Without being able to name it, I knew what it was and why Julie had it. I had returned the bag to its drawer and never touched it again. Until now, until here.
Surrounded by her people, I took a breath and placed the joint between my lips. I breathed in, feeling the smoke fill my mouth and then my lungs. I coughed as I exhaled, passing the joint along with shaky hands, knowing that Julie would have done it with more grace. But having done it at all was Julie enough.
I coughed into my arm, quickly swiping at my watery eyes as I caught my breath. And looking across the fire, I could see Ed Gats, this time watching me.
***
“You look familiar,” Ed Gats said as he stepped out of the shadows of the trees by my tent. “But I don’t think we’ve met before.” Distant laughter from the campfire wove throughout the tents sporadically planted among the trees.
“Well this is my first time here,” I said as I sat on a log in front of my tent.
“Oh, really?” He said as he came closer, a half-smile on his lips. “I’m guessing you’re going up with that group tomorrow? How long’s it gonna be? Five days?” I nodded. “Wow, let me tell ya, there’s nothing like your first climb up The Cap. It takes your breath away.”
“That’s why I’m here.” He sat down next to me as I pulled off my boots.
“What’s your name?”
“Alexis,” I said, “Alexis Sherman.”
“Sherman… Sherman,” he said. He paused, his eyes looking off into the sky, his lips silently moving. “Now that’s a familiar name. Sherman…” He repeated. “Julie Sherman?” He asked, slowly, the name uncertain in his mouth. I nodded. “Julie Sherman,” he said one more time before it registered. “Julie Sherman! No way, you know Julie?!”
Again, I nodded. He sprung up from his seat next to me. The whiteness of his teeth was eery in the dark as he smiled. “Wow, Julie Sherman,” he said her name again, this time with admiration. “I haven’t seen her in years. How’s she doing? She still climbing?”
“As far as I know. How do you know her?”
“Julie started climbing routes on The Cap when I was, like, twelve. We actually did some climbs together, we were in the same group. She still seeing that guy, uh, what’s his name? Cory?”
“Casey,” I said.
“Right, Casey. She still seeing him?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a shame. Well, it’s not. But, you know, I had such a crush on her back then. She was so hot. And so into climbing, which was really hot, too.” He sat back down next to me. “Every year she’d make her way back to The Cap and I’d be like ‘this is it, this is the year’ and I was convinced that she’d see how much I matured and how great at climbing I was and I figured she’d dump Casey for me.” He looked at me with a nostalgic smile, then shrugged. “Obviously it never happened, but a guy could hope.” He paused and looked down at his hands, still smiling. Then, looking up, asked “You two sisters or something?”
“Something,” I said, vaguely. He looked at me, waiting for a clearer answer. “She’s my mom.”
There was a passing look of shock. “No way,” he said, “she’s so young! She must've been like - what? - twenty, when she had you?”
“Nineteen, actually.”
“No way… She spent so much time here. She always talked about all the climbs she went on. She was all over the place. Wow, she never even mentioned-” He stopped himself before he could finish his sentence, but I knew where it was going.
“Yeah… She wasn’t around much.”
I caught his gaze for a moment, a sad smile twitching on his lips. We looked at each other, the buzzing of insects filling the air. Then, looking away, he cleared his throat, saying casually “But now you’re here. Julie’s old stomping grounds. I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence.” When he looked back at me, his face had resumed its resting position, a perpetual look of amusement; as if life had never handed him the weight that others had to carry, as if the forests and the mountains had protected him all his life, and so his resting face was a look of amusement and tranquility, because he had never known anything else.
I raised my eyebrows then looked down at my boots, my fingers fiddling with the laces.
“Come on,” he said, “you can tell me.” But I didn’t.
Ed was silent, nodding his head once then sitting back down again. We stayed like that for a bit, listening to the night surrounding us. I liked sitting next to him. Ed Gats, the man who had only ever known climbing, who only ever knew Julie as a person and not some absent character. I liked imagining what it was like to know her as he did.
After a while, I said “I’m here to get answers.” He looked at me carefully. I shrugged.
Ed breathed in slowly, turning his chin up and staring at the sky, alive with stars. I followed his gaze, somehow finding the outline of Él Capitan through the darkness. “Well, you came to the right place.” He said.
“Why do you say that?”
He stood up then. “This place is full of answers. You’ll see.” Ed smiled at me the way he had smiled at those girls at the campfire, like he had a secret, like he knew the punchline to a joke someone else was telling. “See you tomorrow, bright and early. It’ll be a hell of a climb.”
Ed Gats left the same way he had arrived, as though materializing out of thin air, so he disappeared.
***
In the early morning light, I lace my rope through my harness and hand the end to Ed, who does the same then passes it on. There are seven of us, all tied together and standing at the base of Él Capitan. I reach out my hand, brushing the stone with my chalky fingertips. The rock is cool against my skin.
We start the climb. It happens so quickly, I barely feel my feet stepping off the ground. Hours pass like minutes, moments of silence stretching and stretching into meditation. That’s what this is, a moving mediation. I listen to the sound of my breathing, labored but also peaceful. I feel my muscles throbbing, but there is a kind of satisfaction that comes with the pain. There is only one thought, one tranquil thought: climb.
On the first night, we drive metal stakes into the rockwall and clip our tents to the side of Él Capitan. Ed and I whisper to each other little sentences about our lives. “You know, I never went to school,” Ed says. I look at him through the darkness as he sits, cross-legged, opposite of me in my tent. “My parents home-schooled me between climbs.”
“Julie never went to a single school function. Not a field trip. Not a parent-teacher conference. Nothing.”
On the second night, I crack ice packs and carefully lay them on my body, the artificial cold numbing my aching limbs. The wind scratches the nylon tent. “Did you ever think that you would die up here?” I ask Ed.
“Once,” he says. “I was thirteen, I think, and we got caught in a storm.” He pauses, rifling through his backpack and pulling out a glass piece and weed. He packs the bowl, takes a hit, then gives it to me. “This’ll help the soreness.”
I take the bowl from his hands, my fingers gently brushing his.
“It was me, my parents, and a couple other climbers,” he says. “Julie and Casey were there, I remember. It was a real bad storm, the rain hitting the tent so hard I really thought the drops could break the tent. And it was so windy and every time there was thunder, the entire rockwall would shudder… I really thought I was gonna die. And I remember, I remember looking around at everybody else and I could see the worry in their eyes. My parents, they smiled and said it was gonna be fine, but I knew that they were just as afraid as I was.”
Ed takes another hit. “But Julie… She was so calm and so completely unconcerned, like this was just another walk in the park.”
“Why?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says.
On the third night, I am too tired to talk.
On the fourth night, Ed asks me “When do you think you’ll start doing things because of yourself and not because of Julie?”
“What?”
“You tell your life through stories about Julie. Can’t you see that? She’s present in your memories but not in your life.” I don’t know how to respond.
The climb comes to an end on the fifth day. One final push, one final breath, one final thought, and I am at the top.
Standing up, I look out across the world. Yosemite Valley stretches out below me. From here, the trees have never looked so green, the waters have never looked so blue. From here, the world is different. The world is majestic and mysterious and powerful and dangerous, but it is conquerable, if you try.
Ed stands next to me near the edge of the cliff. He is smiling, but he isn’t looking out across the valley. My fingers are throbbing, my chest burning. Behind us, the other climbers chat amongst themselves, sprawled out on the ground. I stand at the edge for a bit, Ed, wordlessly, next to me.
“Did you get your answer?” He asks finally, his voice low.
“I remember a story about Julie,” I say. “She was nine, I think, and there was this tree in the backyard. My grandmother kept telling her ‘don’t climb the tree, Julie, you’ll hurt yourself, don’t climb the tree.’ But she did anyway. She climbed the tree, and she even made it to the top, but she fell on her way down and broke her wrist.” I look at Ed. He waits for me to continue. “My grandmother, she was so upset at Julie. ‘Why didn’t you listen to me?’ She had asked after they got home from the hospital. And Julie, with this bulky cast on her wrist, said ‘I needed to know what was at the top.’”
Ed nods.
“She always needed to know what was at the top. She always needed to know what was out there, what was waiting for her.” The sensation of crying rushes through my body, my skin prickling, my nose tingling, my eyes slowly becoming watery until the tears slip past my lashes and down my cheeks. “I get it,” I said, “I get why… I get why she…”
“It’s who she was.”
“Yeah, this,” I say, gesturing to everything, “this is her.” I smile, sadly, Ed matching my expression.
The group sits, exhausted, as we wait for park rangers to pick us up and drive us down the mountain. “You were right,” I say, turning to Ed. “I’ve kept track of my life through Julie, through her absences.” I drag my finger in the dirt. “Not anymore though. Not anymore.”