Alone on a Wall
I felt my knees buckling beneath me as the sun began to sink below the ridgeline. It was Thursday and I’d jugged the first two fixed pitches and climbed, cleaned, and hauled to the fourth. The party of climbers I’d been sharing a small ledge with decided to descend before it got too dark. They hollered a goodbye as they rapped beneath me, leaving me alone at the Halfway Ledge. It was almost completely dark.
I turned on my headlamp, determined to make it to the bivy ledge. With Angel’s Landing looming across the canyon, stars started appearing in the night sky and I kept chugging along, falling into a rhythmic flow. I placed a piece, yanked hard on it to test before stepping into my etrier, and repeated. Despite the diminishing natural light, I moved fast, feeling much more confident than I had the first day. On Wednesday when I started, I was immediately feeling discouraged, having only done two pitches. Initially, I’d anticipated fixing the first three pitches, but the aid pitches proved to be much harder than I’d thought. At least I’d remembered a makeshift stick clip—a branch and some small tabs of tape stuck to it, to help me clip above my head. With some trickery involved, I made it work and fixed first two pitches, but hauling ate up more time than I’d realized or wanted.
I took my first unexpected fall on a gold BD stopper. Top-stepping in order to place as high as I could, I poked what I thought was a decent nut in and gently weighted it before transferring full weight onto it. When I stepped into my etrier, it popped out of the crack without any warning and I sailed downward. In surprise, I let out a quick shout before catching my breath. Having fallen, even a short distance, was a peculiar thing—no cheers, no yip yap yells, no fanfare or “Are you ok?”s. The silence that came afterward left me with a spooky feeling, and realizing that I was truly all alone started sinking in.
After the nut had popped on me, I kept a closer eye on my gear placements. Beyond exhausted, I rallied to the ledge and set up my haul in the dark. I cleaned the gear by headlamp, excited to get back to the top and heat up an Indian curry and rice package and crash for the evening. I gave the pot a stir and lamented over how quickly things got botched and how much time was wasted over horrifyingly stupid decisions. The fact that there was nobody there to blame my problems on meant that there was nobody there to fix them, either.
The Greek poet and playwright, Sophocles, said, “It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made it.”
I could count hours of my life spent blaming everything or everyone for things that haven’t gone right: why I couldn’t accomplish something, why I wasn’t healthier, why I failed, why I didn’t feel fulfilled—it could almost always be somebody else’s fault. I wasn’t necessarily placing the blame on others but I also wasn’t taking responsibility, either. I was alone on a wall and out of excuses. Every decision made would be the cause of reward or consequence, and only I would be responsible for making it to the summit or not. It was an incredibly intimidating and somewhat lonely thought, more than halfway up the route. In the morning, I forced myself to eat as much oatmeal as I could for calorie purposes only. After a cup of coffee, I racked up and continued on, becoming more comfortable leapfrogging my gear and back cleaning. At a certain point, I thought breathlessly to myself, “I’m going to make it to the top!” It was both a wild and strange thought. Sure, I had summited multi-pitch climbs before (taller than this one) but free climbing and with a partner. Just like my fall on the second pitch, which seemed miles ago—I would be alone. There would be no one there to congratulate me, nobody to high-five or shout victory cries or hug at the top. In a way, having somebody with me on all of my climbs prior to this one felt validating. Would I feel that same validation?
I reached the summit by noon. Heinous rope drag threatened to pull me off, but I grimaced my way through to the anchor. After setting up a rappel, I took my harness off and let out a deep sigh, and then sat at the summit for nearly half an hour. There weren’t any high-fives—no summit beers, no victory cries but my own. I cried for probably less than thirty seconds, but thirty seconds was enough to taste the salt of my tears dribbling down my face. My now gloveless hands were dirty and darkened from handling the rope. I don’t know if I was expecting to have some sort of profound thought at the top and doing my first aid solo wall did not erase the failure of my last one in Africa—but that failure a year prior was important because I used it to get me to the top. I had been told before I left for Africa in 2016 that big objectives have a tendency of making you realize what’s truly important in your life. So, I finally did a big wall. I had questions before going up and many of them have gone unanswered since having come back down. I didn’t have any epiphanies or catalytic life changes to follow, but I carried with me a new knowledge. It’s a simple one, but it told me: I can.
Adulthood, on the one hand, can be full of insignificant things—like paying bills and dealing with all types of bullshit people around you bring on, or having the strength not to drop your hands and cry when things feel like they’re falling apart around you. Failure is just one more part of being ushered into adulthood. But the great thing is that with all of the bad, there really does seem to come with it a balance of good. It can be in long stretches or is sometimes fewer and farther between than you’d like it to be, but when it’s good, it’s oh so good.
Before my year-long road trip when I left New York, people often told me, “I hope that you find what you are looking for.” I don’t know what I was looking for atop that big old stone. I don’t know what any of us climbers are searching for. Maybe that day, I needed redemption or validation or both. And I didn’t want to admit it, but maybe I was still searching for a missing piece of myself. That day, it suddenly occurred to me that in order to start searching, in a way, you already have to be found.