Up The Road

Ben Staley driving us up the road with Miss Charlotte Ray riding shotgun.

Photo by Blair Speed

I didn't understand what it would cost when I quit but I did it anyway. I had to. The consequences came later. Weighted. Heavy. Sometimes too much to bear. And the weight would swing in when I wasn't expecting it, or when I knew it was coming but couldn't handle it. 

Ten years ago I was working in Paris and had a long weekend break so I headed for the Alps; the mountains that had shaped me, made me, indelibly marked me. I didn't know what to expect. I was returning to an old neighborhood but not to my old home. My destination was not far away from Mont Blanc as the crow flies but it was a world away in years and experience. My point of view and the tool I used to explore the world had irrevocably changed. My history is a lens that affects how and what I see now, and then. I was scared to go back to those mountains because I did not know how the power of the place might affect me, or what I might do because of it. I know I can never truly go back. I can not be the same man I was or ever do the same things again. And I was afraid to finally confront and feel that loss.

I sent a text from the train to tell a friend I was going back to my beloved mountains and it made me cry. I knew it was a homecoming of sorts and those are never easy.

Location matters. And the power of a location may change us. Human beings have done and can do great things when they are influenced by geographic and spiritual sites of power. I used to think only of the climbing done in the Alps, the extreme ski descents, the birth and development of paragliding, speed flying, the pioneering base jumps, and the evolution of ski mountaineering racing, but my heart and eyes changed. When I started using the bike as my vehicle of experience I also understood that the energy and the open-mindedness this place fosters affects all human endeavor. 

I didn't travel back to the high mountains — that part of my life was over — instead I aimed my energy toward the moyenne montagne, the foothills, paved roads that could extract as much effort and commitment from me as those great and difficult climbs I had done in my previous life — as long as I addressed them with my full and open heart. Regardless of the tool or vehicle being used, geographic power feeds the human spirit and unlocks the highest potential within us. And in those years on the downslope of our peak we may still seek and learn lessons that affect us for the rest of our days. I had incredible, transformative experiences on the bike, on those roads, crossing those foothills (that sometimes felt like anything but). The environment we place ourselves in affects how we accept, appreciate, and express our own potential.

And then things change ... 

When the highest potential we have known is reshaped by accumulated years and mileage, when what we could once do becomes what we can no longer do and our identity was tied to the doing, well, we either fight or embrace the inevitability, and the fight leads to the same condition as the embrace, it just takes longer. Acceptance is the path to peace, to imagining new means and ways, to figuring out what we might do and experience as the broken-but-still-standing humans we have become. 

It will not be easy.

I broke. I adapted to those breaks and moved through the world as best I could, trying to remain true to my former self, gritting my teeth, not sleeping at night, always tense and resistant, fighting the decline that could not be beaten. I knew I would lose but maintained hope ... living the human condition, undergoing the surgeries that offered promise, pretending that the outcome would differ from all rational conclusion. In the run-up to the orthopedic operations I deluded myself. I was broken, fucked. Surgical intervention offered hope. Not a return to previous capability, of course, but an expansion of the constantly shrinking map my life had been overlaid upon. 

The surgeons cut me. They broke me. They replaced organic parts with man-made prostheses and told me to live slowly, carefully. I knew that life would never be the same but also spoke to myself in gentle, hopeful language, maintaining the delusional condition necessary to recover and progress. I said that riding a bike would be cool, and hiking awesome. I convinced myself that I might climb again, indoors of course, but also, perhaps outside, on a top-rope, possibly on rock, optimistically ice, and maybe I could even go ski touring. Never at the level that made me but perhaps enough to tickle and inform me ... fuck, who knows? 

I did the time. One hip replacement, then the other, and finally an ankle fusion. I walked on crutches for three months, used a cane and walking boot for another six weeks then eventually returned to "normal" movement without aids or assistance. And the optimism returned ... easy rides on the bike and walking on trails hinted that the future wouldn't be so bad. But the denouement is inevitable for all of us, and swings more weight against those whose ideas or intent are not grounded in reality.  

Some friends walked into the desert and I joined them, believing I had recovered enough to keep up, or at least not be a liability. I stayed close for a few miles, although simple walking required more conscious attention than it ever had and "flow" was a joke. Once we were deep and the terrain got more technical my reality asserted itself and crushed whatever delusions had kept me positive and hopeful. I slowed down. I fell back. I was on my own, confronting my actual abilities instead of what I had imagined I could do. I fought. It was futile. 

When the loss of capacity or capability is brightly lit and unavoidable, when reality overmatches the optimistic and unrealistic, the sense of loss is palpable, heavy. I stepped carefully, moved gently, with reticence I would never accept in my capable past. It was horrible. I wept for my former Self, for the disappearance of who I once was. I felt genuine grief. Heavy and unresolved. The person who helped me to become me is gone. He pushed me to grow, to be a different, better man, and I can barely see him in the rearview mirror now. 

Once I was at my peak and I am still alive to remember it. Perhaps my friends who died upon the mountains that didn't kill me got off easy — they need not ask or live these questions. I remain alive and here to ask, to confront, and to wonder. I will never be who I once was, and I knew that a decade or two ago. Still, losing that Self is a terrible weight to carry into whatever future I may possibly create for the man I am right now. 

Yes there is hope, but my eyes and heart are looking back instead of forward tonight. Perhaps I'll write myself, old Self, former Self a letter, and then send it off as a way of closing this chapter before the sun rises once again. 

Dear friend, old me,

I miss you. I miss what you could and sometimes did do. I ache with want to see those places again; the steep, harsh walls, the too-green, lush valleys, the places where so few had been, and also the stage, the lab, those alpine ranges where we tested and bettered ourselves.

Thank you for carrying me with you, for sharing those views, the triumph and the pain, the love and loss. I’d be a different man if you hadn’t been so capable, and willing. 

I cry with each new loss of ability, each injury or breakdown, the creeping hunger of time. I miss you. I miss seeing you in the mirror. Once upon a time I was you. And I will see you again, further up the road. 

With love,

Mark

___________

I first heard this song on the way home from a self-confrontation I experienced in the desert. Staley was driving thus in control of the soundtrack, while Blair and I nestled together in the back seats and Charlotte, our devoted, consistent and loving hound dog sat in the passenger seat next to Ben. He first heard it while shopping in a Best Buy and it’s a strange thing to hear and feel deep music in a space designed purely for commerce, which seems like the opposite of heart but hell, we take it when and where we get it, and do our own thing from there. The song and the journey married in my head so I wrote this essay that night or the following one, while the feeling was still crushingly fresh. I like the writing on its own, I like it better supported by the song.