Ross would have anchored me if I had fallen. He would have felt a sudden tug and I would have felt the springiness and give built into the rope as I dangled like a spider, swinging back and forth in front of the rock, trying not to choke on my own thundering heart. But I didn’t fall. Maybe I was too afraid to fall. I trusted him then, but I trust him even more now, having come closer, metaphorically, to falling in the years since when he was even farther away with the rope. But I’ve still never actually fallen, and the possibility is magnetic and cold at the back of my mind.
Trust does not, however, protect us from the gap in our experiences with climbing. I was inexperienced, afraid, and out of my element; he was not. I was screaming for slack into a wind that swallowed my voice and he was leaning comfortably against a high ledge chatting with our climbing partners, a freakishly talented rescue climber named Russell (whose thumbs stuck out at perfect right angles from his wrists and who had just demonstrated the night before that he could climb the unadorned brick wall of a pub to its roof) and his equally at-home-with-heights girlfriend, Kat. When I finally scrabbled my way onto their ledge, the switch from pure fear coursing through my veins to molten rage was quick.
“Could you not hear me screaming at you for slack?” I tried to ask this slowly, evenly, through gritted teeth, but I think it came out more as a strangled screech.
“What? Oh! No. I couldn’t, sorry! Ready for the next pitch?”
“No, I’m not. I’m going back down, and you can finish. I’m done. I’ll wait for you at the bottom.”
Halfway up an eight-hundred-foot cliff face, on a tiny lip of rock only feet away from another couple, to whom you are literally tied with many complicated knots, is not a convenient place to try to have your first fight. The reality of the situation, which Ross patiently explained, was that I could not go back down, not without everyone else going back down, and that the climb down was actually longer and more difficult than the climb up, and given what time it was, we could either continue on and rappel down the short back side of the rock as planned, or try to complete the complicated downward climb in darkness. Another thing learned: just because there is no other option but to continue on your present course does not mean you continue on happily. At least, not at first.
The counterweight to all of this was the dizzy, stupid-happy, chest-thumping pride of being able to stand on the jagged ridge at the top of the rock face and stare down at the evening unfolding over Boulder, on one side, and the empty blackness of the rock’s hollowed-out back on the other. It took us all day to finish the climb, but there was a sharpness to the feeling of completing it, an aloneness that was not isolating but exhilarating. Not everyone can do this thing we just did. Better than that, though—being out on that high, sharp edge in the dark with someone who loved me, and who said, quietly and completely without irony, “I knew you could do this.”
We rappelled down off the back of the cliff in total darkness, an absolute act of faith. I leaned back, surrendering my center of gravity, and lowered myself gradually into a muffling nothingness, completely unaware of where the ground was until I bumped gently into it. Going up, he went first, setting the rope; going down, it was me first, finding my feet and then preparing to lower him into the black with me. I looked up from the darkness and focused on Ross, on the stars coming out around him, on the edge of the cliff we’d just climbed. A totally unexpected feeling of peace wrapped itself around me and I let the rope slide through my hands, gently controlling the descent. The rope connected us, we trusted it, and neither of us could see what was next.
—
I remember climbing the Flatirons when I think about how the first deployment tested us. I remember rappelling into the dark side of the cliff when I think about how we decided to have a baby. Five months after he got back, we finally agreed that there would never be a “right” time, and that there would always be long stretches where I would be solo parenting. On the horizon for his squadron was another, longer deployment the following winter to Afghanistan, and we knew that meant another cycle of month-long work-ups in advance of the actual leaving. I still had another semester in graduate school. But that winter we had a window.