On the Mountains
I
2008
I
Essay
Go East
Why would you move back to small? Aren't we supposed to be trying to go bigger?
I grew up a wimpy kid in Minnesota reading about Everest and the Arctic Circle, and once I decided to get tough I wanted bigger, colder, harder. Anything that spelled absolute difficulty. So I went West for the real mountains: space, height, ice. I skipped the small stuff. I skipped the early chapters of every adventure book, the ones where the heroes are still practicing and dreaming, and went straight for K2 before I even knew what climbing was.
Then I watched the climber in front of me on a route’s body get short-hauled off the Moonflower, I got greedy on routes I no longer wanted, and somewhere in there I lost the desire for frozen mountains of any size. The bigger I chased, the smaller I got.
"Where there is no way you will be able to see what is possible unless you go and look for it yourself."
In 2008 I did the thing Westerners don't do. I packed my van and my poodle and moved East, to New Hampshire, for love, work, and ice. People asked why I'd move back to small. What no one said out loud was the real question: aren't we supposed to be going bigger?
What I found on those small, changeable cliffs was the thing I'd been missing. No fixed objective, just a landscape that makes you bend with the weather and the roads, move sideways to find a way up, and go look for what's possible because you'll never see them otherwise.
I stopped trying to prove something and started paying attention again. To the ice. To the weather. To the people who knew when a route was ready, not just when they were. I was not the same person I'd been ten years before. I didn't want it so badly anymore. Somehow, that gave me room to want it again.
I had gone West believing progress had a direction: bigger, colder, harder. I had to come East to discover my rhythm again.
