In Anticipation of a Climbing Trip

There are plane tickets to buy, and a pickup truck with a topper, and new climbing equipment. How much will you have saved by the time you get back to Colorado? What about insurance, and taxes, and nights out? Get a job and it’ll be okay. Then you can afford car payments and rent, and student loans and micro-brews and fine salamis and cheeses. A job will sort you out. Then how fat you can grow. How comfortable you can get. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll pay all your worries away and you can be bored. Just work and never stop working and you’ll be just fine stupid.

That would be a good way to go back to America. Good American culture, right? Debt and food and a shiny four wheel drive pickup. Yeehaw Amurica! Here I come!

Or I could not work. Technically I have a job. It just doesn’t start until July. That gives me three months to do what I need to do. And there’s really only one thing that I’ll need to do—figure out why I left Japan.

That still won’t be enough time though. Who am I kidding. There’s too much. There’s tatami mats and shouji screen walls. There’s the countryside life of salutations from smiling children and scowls and stares from old men. There’s the kerosene heater in my living room in the winter, the sweltering loft in the summer, and the open windows and cool breezes in the seasons in between. There’s the feeling of leaving my friends who I speak Japanese with and who I understand like reading in the dark with a strobe light on. There are ramen shops, and sushi, and grilled clams on the half shell in Matsushima. There are long drives with climbing partners through country I’ve never seen. There are kindergarten and elementary school kids that think whatever I do is superhuman. Sugoiiiiiiii! they yell. Joshua-sensei jozu da ne…

There’s also Eriko—a woman who I love, and that knows me and loves me enough to say, “Go ahead. Go where you need to. It’s okay.” That's the kind of woman that is impossible to leave. With a broken heart and the guilt of breaking another I will be sitting in a big apartment with a shiny pickup outside and I’ll be drinking a six dollar bottle of microbrew. Yeehaw.

 

There’s therapy for that kind of thing, son. Get into God’s country and you’ll be sorted out.

The American desert cleanses. Look at the white bone of a cow carcass if you need an example. That’s what it’ll do. You’ll spend weeks there and the earth will drink in your tears and pour unforgiving sun on your depression. On soaring desert towers and thousand foot sandstone walls you’ll remember that you are he who climbs, who struggles and bleeds and sweats. Your struggle will become something physical, and therefore manageable. Get stronger and smarter and you’ll be able to climb what you thought was impossible. You’ll either end up better for it, or you’ll be beat by it. Both are good for you. And you will have dirtied and banged up the truck, and the beers will have run out and all you’ll have is a tent to go back to at night. And you’ll sit by the campfire with good friends, under an open sky with living and dying stars. And that’ll get you through.

 

My whole life has been spent trying to know what I ought to do-- what's the right choice for good living. I, like everyone else, have been the winner and the loser to such decisions. But there is a resoundingly clear lesson that has come from those experiences that guides me in when I don't know either way—spending more time in the wilderness is always good. I don’t know whether I should go back to America, but I do know that once there, the best thing to do is to get out into that big, healing American West. Once there, I’ll know if I made the right decision. Nature will simplify and clarify doubt, and it’ll make me confront myself, and it will give it to me straight. Either I messed up big time, or America is where I need to be. Either way, the message will come from the wilderness and I need to get there in order to hear it.