Climbing and Love

Hi Steph, just finished reading (twice) High Infatuation, thanks for the great time. I mean it. So much to tell and comment, but I must remember that the simplicity we both seek also means economy in words and computer time. I’m not a native speaker (Brasil) and I had to go looking for the meaning of ‘Infatuation’, and so I run into definitions that sugested passion, and not the solid love I found in your book. Just a remark. Watching your videos, I felt that your hometown is rattlesnake territory, so watch your step carefully and don’t let Fletcher barking unassisted for too long. I’ve been working with snakes for ages (bushmasters, please check my blog) and can guarantee that these misunderstood beings are a threat to only those who do not understand their permanent and necessary survival mode turned on. Dear Steph, here is a song for you and one of these days there will be a litle package from Brasil in your PO Box.
Love always,
Rodrigo C.G de Souza, M.D

http://lachesisbrasil.blogspot.com/

Dear Rodrigo,
Thanks for writing! It’s funny to get your letter, because I have been thinking about this exact thing recently–love and infatuation, that is (not rattlesnakes: little Fletch passed away 3 years ago, but now I have a new dog from the Navajo res. Her name is Cajun, and we’ve been working on snake training her when we see snakes–we scare her and yell at her to make her run away from them.) I am a literalist, to a fault, and I spend a lot of time just thinking about words and what they mean. And so recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between passion and love, and about climbing. Passion, infatuation and love are all really different. You are right.

I think about love all the time, obviously. I think it’s the most important thing in life. Climbers spend almost every waking hour in a bubble made of climbing: if we’re not actually climbing, we’re wishing we were climbing, thinking about climbing, talking about climbing, reading about climbing, planning to go climbing or on our way to go climbing. We really, really love climbing; it’s our passion.

Climbing is a way to feel strong, simple love, in a way that radiates out to other people, animals, landscapes and elements. I was talking about this recently with a friend who doesn’t climb, and I was trying (semi-successfully) to explain how I feel love for rock itself when I’m climbing. He didn’t find it strange at all, because he understands things like that. But I kept thinking about that conversation. And it made me think about climbers and love.

I can’t help but think that passion and love are two entirely different things, and often when we write and talk about climbing, we are talking about passion. Passion is intense, and intensity is exciting—the thing that makes for great feature films or dramatic stories of dramatic ascents. It can flame itself out. But passion can also gradually evolve and mature into love. Love is a little less sensational, I believe, but at the same time more powerful. It’s not going to make headlines, and in fact, it doesn’t want to. It’s the quietest, strongest thing in the world. Love is like a tree: it becomes more wonderful, stronger and more beautiful over time.

Thinking about these things makes me think about two friends, two climbers who taught me a lot about this simply by being themselves. I am lucky in the time I have spent with them.

I met Charlie Fowler at Indian Creek in 1995. We drove around the White Rim, climbed towers, cragged at the creek, and spent two winters together in Patagonia. I can’t think of anyone who was more devoted to climbing than Charlie.

Patagonia is a place that seems to inflame the soul and most people never quite recover from the crazy passion you need to climb there.

But not Charlie—he loved and climbed those peaks just like he loved and climbed everything else in the world, with a steady, enduring emotion that carried him steadily forward until the day he died on a mountain in China.

Charlie and I spent months in leaky forest huts in Chile and Argentina, in wet tents and snow scrapes, schlepping gear up and down glaciers, and battling up and down walls in snowstorms. He never seemed to feel the yoyo emotions I did, the burning need to be there as opposed to here, depending on where here or there happened to be at the moment.

Charlie never got caught up in the crazy Patagonia passion that can make perfectly reasonable people turn into lunatics.

He simply climbed and lived, sometimes standing on the summit, sometimes huddled in a snow cave that needed to be shoveled out all night long. Wherever Charlie was in the mountains was where he wanted to be.

I met Ron Kauk in the Camp 4 boulders many years ago, perhaps the most awe-inspiring climber you could ever hope to meet in Yosemite.

For several years, I lived first in Camp 4, then semi-stealthily in vehicles parked in various locations, and then in a rented shack in Foresta. In the winter, only the locals are climbing in the Valley, and even in a good winter, just a few spots are sunny and warm enough for free climbing. It also gets pretty quiet, with not much opportunity for socializing. One winter, Ron and I got into a habit of meeting at the Cookie Cliff, to climb on a thin crack called the Stigma. Ron had climbed it millions of times, but to him, spending a sunny winter afternoon climbing a beautiful hard route never lost its appeal. I’d walk down the old road from Foresta with Fletch and a thermos of tea, and Ron would come up from El Portal. We’d meet there at the Stigma, and chat and belay each other until the sun moved and it got too cold.

Working on a Yosemite route with a Yosemite master is a unique experience. I learned how to use my feet like Ron did and how to make deviously odd moves that I would never have thought of doing through the cruxes. The winter days we spent together at the Cookie stand out in my memory as some of my best times in Yosemite. Going there wasn’t about completing the route, and it never occurred to us not to go and climb again the next day even when we could both climb it consistently. We just loved being there, climbing the Stigma in the winter sun. Ron, I know, will be climbing with quiet love in the Valley for the rest of his life. Writing this right now, I realize I don’t have any pictures from those days. I wish I did, but I can still see them in my mind’s eye, some of my very happiest memories of the Valley. When I think of those days at the Cookie with Ron, I have a simple, peaceful feeling of contentment.

Both Charlie and Ron showed me something important about climbing and about love, and as time goes by I understand it better. Climbing can be about a lot of things, mainly because people want it to be or need it to be. It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Climbing, I believe, is simply about love, and this kind of love grows. It becomes stronger, quieter, more simple and more enduring. It’s almost hard to believe, but it just keeps getting better…