The '59 Sound
The alarm blared repeatedly until I was jolted awake, not knowing what was a dream and what was real. I had to go to work for a few hours; that was real. The dog was curled up between my legs, patiently waiting to go out and there was a growing desire to get the coffee pot going; that was also real. I turned to my phone at the side of my bed to check how many messages had been sent to me through cyberspace as I slept soundly; seven new, real little red dots lit up the screen. For a moment, as I lay there half in my dreamscape, I forgot about the day before. I forgot about the hours where I presumed what I already knew but had to wait for the confirmation. “Climber dies in Zion National Park” news reports read. I scoured the Internet for any and all information possible, frantic to know the truth and simultaneously resisting the possibility that it could be someone I knew.
Some friends directed to me to the International Mountain Equipment in Salt Lake City, where someone had seen a recent post about a death. I called and spoke with Shingo briefly; the post was not in regards to the fall in Zion but I gave him my sincerest condolences. He said it had been a rough few weeks on the death front and we shared a comfortable silence on the phone before I politely thanked him for his time.
You put all of your emotions on hold until you have the hard facts in front of you, and even when you finally have them, there is still that nagging feeling of utter disbelief. I had never lost anybody in a rock climbing accident and I’ve learned that you can’t measure love and friendship in time. A friendship, a connection, a thread between people doesn’t require years of history; all it needs is a moment of resonance between two souls. That’s part of the beauty of life—you can have many “soulmates”. It isn’t necessarily limited to one (romantic) partner.
As a climber, it remains the number one reason why I do what I do. It isn’t about summits and sends. For me, it’s about feeling as humanly connected to the world and the people who live in it. It’s about feeling shamelessly alive and sharing the joy of those summits and sends with like-minded people.
Eric Klimt and I shook hands for the first time at the campground in Red Rocks, Las Vegas. Gašper Pintar and I were preparing for The Great Roof when he told me about his friend from the Valley coming to meet us: the “man with the mustache”. Eric, his mustache and I had a few great adventures out west before he left for Chattanooga in November. Only a week after his departure, I drove nineteen hours across the country to see him and tie in one last time. A part of me wasn’t ready for our time climbing together to be over, yet. I think I saw something special in him when I met him because he was yearning for a type of otherness, as I was (and as most climbers probably are, too). When we met, I felt that about him immediately; it seemed like traveling filled that desire for him.
Sitting in the Pickle Barrel post-climbing one night in downtown Chatt, guzzling down one whiskey after another (after another), we rambled on about existentialisms and rock climbing. He mused over a climb he and Gašper had tried in the Creek a few weeks earlier. Gašper told him after he’d taken several repeated falls and chuffed his way up some iconic crack: “Your feet were sloppy.”
Eric laughed at Gašper’s honesty and said, “He was right!”
He raised his glass and—maybe it was the whiskey talking—began saying to me, “You’ve got to be bold, Kathy.” He then leaned over and told me, “Bring everything you’ve got with you—bring the goddam kitchen sink.”
We’d talked about climbing Separate Reality and were making plans to spend a summer in Vedauwoo. He was excited about his new job which gave him lots of time off to climb, and I was pretty much happy to meet him anywhere. Whether these trips were going to happen or not isn’t necessarily the point; what was important was understanding that, within those moments we shared, the possibility of anything and everything existed in our words. There’s a sort of magic in that.
People have asked me if I’ll consider not climbing after something like this. Quitting climbing would be doing Eric’s memory a great disservice. If death is what befalls us, it’s because we chose to do something that we love. And Eric loved climbing because he loved freedom; he existed on his own terms and believed in infinite possibilities. I need to believe in infinite possibilities because, for me, it’s what makes life and climbing relevant.
He was a good climber, but more than that, Eric illuminated in a mysterious, visionary, and ultimately, hopeful manner, the constant divisions in our hearts that make us so very human. His words often articulated what all of us are yearning for: a meaningful camaraderie with a preposterous and beautiful world. And for right now, I’m simply grateful to have been a part of it.
